Elementary school students' test scores plummet

"Experts" to blame, not covid

In what might be the least surprising news of the year, the test scores of elementary school students in math and reading have plummeted to levels not seen for many years. That’s the finding of the first nationally representative report comparing student achievement from before the pandemic to performance two years later.

The average math score — 234 — hasn’t been that low since 1999. The math score has been declining since 2010, but the two-year drop since 2020 was at least twice the size of the decline during the entire previous decade.

The average reading score — 215 — was the lowest since 2004. Reading scores were flat throughout the previous decade.

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, calls these results “sobering.” “It’s clear,” she adds, that “covid-19 shocked American education and stunted the academic growth of this age group.”

But it wasn’t covid-19 that stunted academic growth. It was the overreaction to the virus by the policymakers who closed America’s schools and forced students to rely on “remote learning.”

Some covid-related decisions were difficult because they involved genuine tradeoffs. Shutting down restaurants and other crowded places was bound to hurt the economy, but was likely to slow the spread of the disease and thereby prevent some deaths while pharmaceutical companies developed reasonably effective means of combatting covid. In my view, the shutdown decisions were mostly wrong, but at least they were understandable.

Schools were a different matter. I can understand closing them in the spring of 2020 when the virus first popped up and not much was known about it. However, I see no justification for keeping them closed at the start of the 2020-2021 school year.

It was clear by then, if not before, that covid posed no serous health risk to school children. Indeed, it posed virtually no risk to the vast majority of parents of elementary school students — people in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s. Thus, there was no genuine tradeoff to consider. Virtually all of the risk was to education, not to health.

I hope the low-scoring elementary school students will make up some of the ground they lost due to the malpractice of the bureaucrats who forced them into “remote learning.” They should be able to. Children are resilient, or used to be. If their scores don’t bounce back to some extent, they will be partially to blame.

In any case, there’s an obvious lesson to be learned from the way America’s experts mishandled education during the pandemic. The lesson isn’t just that experts don’t consistently make the right decision — anyone who had been paying attention already knew that. The lesson is that we can’t even be fully confident that experts will get easy calls right.

The lesson applies, of course, to experts in all areas, not just health and education. It applies to the experts who opine and influence decisions about environmental policy, foreign policy, you name it.

George Will takes up this topic here. Much of his column pertains to the mistakes of “the best and the brightest” during the Vietnam war era, but Will ties this discussion to the nation’s expert-driven response to covid. (It seems to me that the ”mandarins” who failed America during the Vietnam era had a better claim to “best and brightest” status than do the experts who failed America’s school children during the pandemic. Anthony Fauci, a career bureaucrat in his very late 70s, was no McGeorge Bundy or Walt Rostow.)

Will agrees that the covid response inflicted great damage in the form of “learning loss [and] blighted lives. . .” However, his main concern seems to be with the backlash — populist rejection of expert opinion. He concludes that “the best and the brightest can be tiresome, but the alternative is worse.”

That’s true if the alternative is banishment of experts or reflexive rejection of their opinion. But it’s not true if the alternative is an unwillingness reflexively to accept or defer to the opinions and dictates of “the best and the brightest,” the defects of whom run deeper than just tiresomeness.