Biden Rewrites the History of Covid School Closings The President takes credit for reopening he did nothing to help.
President Biden welcomed students at Eliot-Hine Middle School in Washington, D.C., back to class on Monday. He also gave them a lesson in irony as he lamented pandemic learning loss caused by his teachers union allies.
“The hardest thing is to come back after three months of not doing any work, not doing any homework, and all of a sudden you got a lot to make—everybody has a lot to catch up on from the end of the last year,” Mr. Biden told students. Imagine how much harder it is for them to catch up after “learning”—i.e., staring at screens—at home for a year.
Perhaps sensing parents’ continued anger over the Covid school shutdowns, the Administration is trying to claim credit for reopening them. “When President Biden took office, less than half of K-12 students were going to school in person,” the White House said. “Today, thanks to the President’s swift actions and historic investments, every school in America is open safely for in-person instruction.”
What an achievement—three and a half years after the start of the pandemic, all schools are open. The Administration omits that its own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took dictation from union chief Randi Weingarten for its reopening guidelines. Those guidelines gave unions in urban school districts like Chicago cover to delay the return to full in-person learning.
Schools would have opened much sooner had Mr. Biden used his bully pulpit and leveraged federal money. The Administration could have conditioned the nearly $200 billion in Covid funds that Congress appropriated for schools on their reopening. Instead, schools were showered with more money than they could usefully spend.
Many went on hiring sprees. According to the Administration, the number of public school social workers and nurses have increased by 39% and 30%, respectively, from before the pandemic. Students don’t seem to be benefiting. The share of students reporting five or more days of missed school in the last month has doubled since 2020.
Nor has the Covid money done much to make up for learning loss. Eighth grade U.S. history test scores this year hit an all-time low. Average reading scores for 13-year-olds were the worst since the 1970s. It will take years for students to dig out of the pandemic hole, but the truth that honest Joe won’t acknowledge is it didn’t have to be so deep.
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