The New York Times Finally Acknowledges School-Lockdown Learning Loss, Three Years After the Fact

Working for The New York Times might be exhausting, having to study the world like an army of Captain Renaults, suddenly “shocked, shocked!” to discover a truth everyone already knows.

“The startling evidence on learning loss is in,” claims a recent Times editorial, though there’s nothing new or startling about it.

Terrified parents were sounding the alarm during COVID, when Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions kept students locked out of schools for months.

Absenteeism skyrocketed, test scores plummeted, and even the kids who barely learned suffered developmental problems from being plopped in front of a screen all day. 

And what did parents get for their warnings? “Fact checked” by online censors. Labeled “terrorists” by the Justice Department. Screamed at in school-board meetings.

Now, long after it matters, the Times realizes, “The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.”

You don’t say.

As Kayla Bartsch expertly notes at National Review, the Times told us the exact opposite during the COVID lockdowns. “Parents, stop talking about the ‘Lost Year,’ ” the paper lectured in April 2021.

That was the denial stage, followed by anger, then bargaining, as when Weingarten ludicrously claimed that she “worked . . . to get our kids back to in-person schooling,” a blatant lie.

Now we’ve finally reached acceptance, but it’s one still steeped in the mistakes of the past.

Though The Times acknowledges that $190 billion was sent to schools during the pandemic to help, its solution is . . . more money.

The Citizens Budget Commission notes per-student spending in New York City will top $38,000 this year, the most of any school district in the country — which has had no impact on our academic performance.

We’re spending plenty. We’re just not spending it smartly.

The main issue The Times highlights, for instance, is one that in-school spending cannot fix: absent students.

The pandemic taught a generation that skipping school was perfectly acceptable. In Oakland, chronic absenteeism topped a shocking 61%. Even affluent New Trier, Ill., had a 38% rate among its senior class.

How are more smartboards going to help that? Hire more Officer Krupkes to round up truants. 

But one of The Times’ spending suggestions flags a study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University that says “extraordinary” teachers — charismatic and engaging — can have a big impact.

“The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes,” The Times says.

Except the teachers unions oppose larger classes and merit pay.

They oppose ranking teachers in any way, including rewarding good ones and getting rid of bad ones.

In short: The unions caused the problem, and they oppose a way to fix it.

Of course, The Times doesn’t mention this. Maybe in a couple of years, it’ll discover another epiphany of the obvious — the “startling evidence” that teachers unions are standing in the way of making our schools better.