Yet again comes evidence that the goals liberals proclaim are hindered by the policies they pursue.
In the summer of 2020, liberals went on the cultural warpath about racism, examining every issue through the lens of racial equity, hollowing out institutions, and forcing a cultural shift in pursuit of this mission.
Then, for the next year and a half, liberals closed down schools in defiance of the science showing they should remain open. In the process, they harmed minority children the most.
A joint study from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and other researchers found that learning gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students “will widen sharply for the first time in a generation” nationally, “especially in states where schools remained remote,” according to economist Thomas Kane.
“We found that districts that spent more weeks in remote instruction lost more ground than districts that returned to in-person instruction sooner,” Kane told the Harvard Gazette. “The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote, and their students lost more when they did so.”
While liberals were accusing states such as Texas and Florida of putting children in danger despite children not being at increased risk of serious cases of COVID, those states were busy making sure that there was no learning loss. “Gaps in math achievement by race and school poverty did not widen” in Florida and Texas, where students remained almost entirely in person. Elsewhere, students lost “half a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth.”
It was obvious early in the pandemic that schools must remain open and in person because children were never at serious risk from COVID but were at serious risk of learning loss and mental health problems if they were forced into virtual “learning.” Health officials and (predominantly liberal) politicians who forced schools to go virtual were unwittingly promoting the very kind of systemic racism that liberals claimed to oppose while chanting “Black lives matter.”
The politicians and bureaucrats who shut down schools should never be allowed to wield that kind of political power again. Liberals who pushed school closures in defiance of data must be forced to reconcile their failures with their push for racial equity. Those who don’t will only remind everyone that they are the divisive opportunists we know them to be.
