Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci has finally conceded that it was a mistake to keep schools closed as long as they were during the coronavirus pandemic.
“How long you kept it was the problem, because there was a disparity throughout the country,” he told CBS News in a recent interview promoting his new book. “If you go back and look at the YouTube, I kept on saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools. Open the schools as quickly and as safely as you possibly can.’ But initially to close it down was correct. Keeping it for a year was not a good idea.”
As was clear at the time and as has been confirmed through academic research, school closures were generally associated with the power of teachers unions above all else.
As noted by Anthony Lynch at National Review, “Lengthy school closures contributed to generational learning loss, reflected in the generational declines in reading and math test scores observed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s report card. The learning losses particularly impacted minority and lower-income students unable to afford tutors and other online educational resources. Academic rebounding from the lost learning could take as long as five years.”
Who could forget, for example, the lengthy school closures in the Los Angeles Unified school district, which is effectively run by the United Teachers Los Angeles union. The union used the pandemic to issue a series of “demands” that a charter school moratorium be imposed, that law enforcement be defunded and that Proposition 13 be gutted.
Ultimately, it was the students who suffered the consequences. And, naturally, the union leaders learned nothing.
“Our kids didn’t lose anything,” UTLA leader Cecily Myart-Cruz said in a 2021 interview with Los Angeles magazine. “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”
We can only hope that the nation has learned something from the pandemic years. Alas, the same unions who kept schools closed continue to call the shots in California.