Test scores show how teacher union-driven lockdowns devastated kids

Most of America’s kids aren’t regaining the ground lost to school shutdowns during the pandemic: That’s the main bottom line of the “nation’s report card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for 2024.

Indeed, reading scores dropped from 2022 to 2024, for the worst results since NAEP testing began in 1992.

NAEP exams, given to a large sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students across the nation every two years, show that a full third of kids couldn’t show “basic” reading skills expected for their age group.

Only top-performing students seem to be regaining ground lost during COVID lockdowns, so the “achievement gap” with low-performing kids is growing.

This, despite nearly $200 billion in federal funds these last few years that was supposed to help public schools compensate for the damage.

The numbers are basically as grim for math, where eighth-grade scores dropped these last two years; fourth-graders posted small gains above 2022 — but are still below the pre-pandemic level (and the gains were mainly among high-achievers).

Two relevant facts:

• Catholic schools nationwide did not see significant learning loss during COVID, likely because they overwhelming reopened as rapidly as possible.

• The length of time that public schools stayed closed correlated directly with the political strength of the area’s teacher unions.

Oh, and this: Truancy is up nationwide post-COVID, apparently because too many kids broke the habit of actually going to school.

In New York, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli sounded the alarm last year about how nearly a third of Empire State students are now chronically truant.

The usual suspects will insist all this is nothing that more money for public education can’t fix.

Ha! New York state now spends over $36,000 per public-school student, vastly more than any other state, yet those kids perform strictly middle-of-the-pack on the NAEP and other national exams.

The problem isn’t how much we spend, but how we spend it.

In New York, that’s under the direction of a State Education Department whose response to the truancy crisis is to stop reporting chronic absenteeism.

We believe in public education; that’s why we now routinely slam SED for undermining it and the local teachers unions for exploiting the kids to service the adults — and why we’re huge fans of charters, public schools that mostly operate outside teacher-union control.

Team Trump, and Republicans nationally, are pushing school choice as the best answer to America’s education crisis. 

We have to agree, because it seems to be the only way to wrest our children’s education from the hands of the forces that are running it into the ground.