Most people outside of the government and the education establishment in this country understood that the year of learning via Zoom classes for kids was going to be a disaster. The receipts of that awful decision are finally starting to be seen. The scores of American 13-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) this year were the lowest that they have been in decades. Reading scores have not been this low since 2004, and math scores have not been this low since 1990.
Scores have been falling for years, but the 2019-2020 school year was particularly drastic. Math scores this year dropped to 271 out of 500, compared to 280 out of 500 just three years ago. Reading scores were down to 256 from 260 three years ago. Kids in their bare feet who go to one-room schoolhouses in Communist Vietnam consistently have higher test scores than their American contemporaries. That probably has something to do with Vietnam teaching kids to read and write and do math rather than talking about their weird personal sex lives in front of the kids in some narcissistic social experiment.
The 13-year-olds who took the NAEP this year were 10-year-olds when Anthony Fauci’s stupid and tyrannical lockdowns were in effect. As most parents could tell you, that is a critical time in a child’s educational development. It’s when they master foundational skills like multiplication and reading comprehension. Sticking these kids in front of a screen for several hours a day was catastrophically stupid.
The National Center for Education Statistics administers the NAEP test each year. Its commissioner, Peggy Carr, says, “The bottom line — these results show that there are troubling gaps in the basic skills of these students. This is a huge-scale challenge that faces the nation.”
No kidding. It is also a challenge that was completely, 100% avoidable. COVID-19 was never a danger to children. To this day, not a single healthy child under 18 has died from COVID-19 anywhere in the world. The only deaths among children were among those who had serious, life-threatening comorbidities. Locking kids out of the classroom for a year and sticking them in front of computer screens was one of the dumbest and most monstrous stunts that the teacher unions and the CDC did to Americans.
The lockdowns were also catastrophic to the mental health of children. The suicide rate among teenage girls went up 50% during the pandemic. But at least the teachers didn’t have to head into the office every day and put in a full day’s work.
Yet instead of saying, “Let’s not do that again, and in the meantime, let’s knuckle down to try to help kids advance in their educations,” things are being dumbed down across the board.
Campus Reform reports that there are now 1,900 colleges and universities across the US that have eliminated SAT and ACT test scores for admissions. That accounts for 83% of all the colleges and universities in the entire country. There are multiple reasons for this, but one of the biggest ones is that students being educated in blue states lack the basic knowledge and skills to take these tests after 12 years of public education.
If you doubt this, watch any video of college students trying to answer basic questions from people on YouTube. There are literally hundreds of videos like this on YouTube today, which illustrate just how catastrophically bad public education is in America today. Every one of these college kids could probably tell you what every letter in LGTBQIA2S+ stands for but can’t tell you what ocean is on the eastern side of America.
