Back to School, Back to Sanity?

A return to pre-COVID policies in public schools

Signs calling for schools to reopen are displayed by people in passing vehicles during an "Open Schools Now" rally in Los Angeles, Calif., on Feb. 15, 2021. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

What a difference three years makes in public education policy. In 2020, public educators were concerned about the safety and wellbeing of teachers and staff seemingly with little regard for the effects of masking, social distancing, and prolonged remote learning on their students. The schools were closed, and teachers’ unions appeared to be in no hurry to return to the classrooms. The pandemic-related disruptions that were manifested in the 2020 public education policies took a terrible toll on students’ routines, family and social support, and mental health.

Some sanity seems to have been restored in school guidance for the 2023–2024 school year, even in large school districts in blue states.

Let’s examine the topic.

Public Education Policy in 2020

In early 2020, orders from public health bureaucracies closed schools around the country to in-person instruction. As noted by the National Conference of State Legislators at the time, “In-person [school] operation without significant new investment and safety measures is opposed by many educators and public health advocates due to the risk that gathering indoors poses to teachers, staff, and students.“

The National Education Association (NEA) used the pandemic to further politicize public education in their guidance for the 2020–2021 school year titled “All Hands on Deck: Initial Guidance Regarding Reopening School Buildings.” The document (pdf) was framed around four principles: health expertise, educator voice, access to protection, and leading with equity.

As we now know, the public health bureaucracy got it all wrong regarding the efficacy of masks, social distancing, and other recommended measures to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (aka COVID) while suppressing over-the-counter antiviral medications. Masks and respirators don’t work, as a survey of studies elucidated. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that masks are “not really effective” in an email. Children under 10 have been found to be unlikely to spread the coronavirus at school. Natural immunity is superior to vaccinated immunity. And as Dr. Yoav Yehezkelli wrote in The Epoch Times, “Most of those who were counted as having died from COVID-19 were, in fact, adults who died from the aggravation of their chronic preexisting conditions and not from the virus itself.”

But exploiting the fears associated with the pandemic by inserting Marxist equity concepts into the re-opening of schools’ discussion is a reflection of the NEA’s continuing focus on leftwing indoctrination of students in the public education system, not on raising math, reading, and science proficiency test scores.

This Marxist grooming isn’t new. In 2015, Intellectual Takeout noted the shift in public education terminology away from equal opportunity toward “equity.” Providing equal opportunity to students doesn’t guarantee equal outcomes, hence the shift to equity, which is solely focused on obtaining equal outcomes across all races and classes of students. The organization points out that “equal outcomes (equity) are likely to be impossible ... because of the same complexities of the human person that make equal opportunity impossible.” In short, basic human nature thwarts Marxist claptrap once again!

Nevertheless, the goal seems to be flooding society with functionally illiterate high school graduates in the interest of ensuring equal outcomes. This is a recipe made to order for societal decline, and the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 would appear to confirm that thesis. Incorporating Marxist ideology into the public education bureaucracy’s response to the pandemic furthered the cause.

The Damage Done

Student proficiency levels declined during the pandemic, with the primary variable having been the change in public education policy to masking, social distancing, and remote learning. In October 2022, Stanford’s Graduate School of Education published its “Education Recovery Scorecard,” which was the result of extensive research into student performance in school districts across the country from 2019 through the end of the 2021–2022 school year. This comprehensive analysis “showed, on average, a drop in math and reading scores,” as well as “that test scores declined more, on average, in school districts where students were learning remotely than where learning took place in person.”

It gets worse. USA Today reported in February 2023 that “half of the nation’s students began this school year a full year behind grade level in at least one subject because of COVID-19 pandemic disruptions” due to the long-term effects of school closures and lockdowns. Furthermore, “survey data suggests many of America’s students fared worse than students in several other countries.”

Mental health issues in students spiked during the pandemic due to a “loss of connectedness” in remote learning situations and concerns about the future from the constant bombardment of negative news about the pandemic and its effects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in March 2022 that “more than a third (37%) of high school students reported they experienced poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 44% reported they persistently felt sad or hopeless during the past year.”

A Return to Sanity?

The revelations that public health bureaucracies got the pandemic horribly wrong have apparently not been completely lost on public education administrators and medical directors, even in blue states. In preparation for the new school year this fall, various school districts are promulgating commonsense policies to parents.

Buried in the heart of deep blue California, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) was previously all-in on lockdowns, mask mandates, remote learning, and other recommended (but failed) public health responses to the COVID pandemic. On Aug. 12, LAUSD’s chief medical director, Smita Malhotra, sent a “welcome back to school” email to parents and others in the district. A few excerpts mark the complete reversal regarding COVID-19 measures.

Regarding concerns about the virus: “[S]chools are some of the safest places for children to be.”

The virus’s effects on children: “What’s even more reassuring is that healthy children have been largely spared by the COVID-19 virus. They are less likely to become infected or hospitalized than adults. And when they are infected, the virus is usually mild or asymptomatic. While severe illness is possible in children, this is less common in healthy children.”

On keeping children home from school: “It is not practical for working parents to keep children home from school for every runny nose, nor is it in the best interest of children to continue to miss school after pandemic school closures.”

The pandemic’s bottom line for children: “The greatest effect from the pandemic that I have seen in children has been the emotional trauma from missing school.”

Concluding Thoughts

Public education’s policy response during the COVID pandemic wrought havoc on students everywhere. The public health presumptions underlying those policies were misguided, and the adverse results on students are only now being understood. That the LAUSD has given a major course correction in COVID-related guidance to parents and students is a great sign that America is on the road to recovery. Let us pray that other school districts are following in LAUSD’s footsteps.

Now if only the LAUSD would pull out the equity nonsense by its roots...

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.