The New York Times admitted in an article Monday that lockdowns and school closures were deeply detrimental to children during the COVID-19 pandemic, which launched four years ago this month.
Over the course of the pandemic, media outlets like The New York Times championed school closures despite evidence they were eroding children’s learning and well-being.
In 2021 the Times cited evidence that children were suffering from remote learning but defended the decision anyway, saying that it was not as harmful as other aspects of the pandemic.
“It is not yet clear from research to what extent school closures have driven learning deficits during the pandemic, as opposed to the other upheavals families have endured, from job loss and housing instability to illness and lack of reliable child care. Many families continue to choose remote learning even where schools are open,” the Times wrote in April 2021.
The paper went so far as to suggest that authorities should not try to assess the damage done to children by school closures because doing so would be racist and traumatic.
In 2020 the Times acknowledged that children were not transmitting the virus to adults at significant levels but still tried to advocate for school closures.
“In Israel, crowded high school classrooms seeded outbreaks, prompting the health ministry to release a report this week calling children superspreaders. And in the United States, some high school reopenings have been disastrous, like those of a Georgia school shamed for unmasked students in its hallways and a high school in Utah where infections flared to 90 cases within two weeks,” the paper wrote.
On Monday the New York Times admitted that remote learning benefitted children little while causing them much harm from which they have yet to recover:
Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
According to an analysis of test scores, students between third and eighth grade who spent most of the year learning remotely fell behind in math by over half a grade on average.
“The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with,” The New York Times reported. “Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.”
Research conducted as early as 2021 found that virtual learning has a substantial negative impact on children’s mental health, while other studies discovered that learning in person did not increase the risk of transmission overall. Even the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which found that remote learning was beneficial in slowing the spread of COVID-19, was compelled to acknowledge that the psychological and emotional toll exceeded this advantage.
“The negative physical, mental and educational impacts of proactive school closures on children, as well as the economic impact on society more broadly, would likely outweigh the benefits,” the ECDC said in 2020.
These conclusions were later proven correct. The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner reported that 60% of youth suicides between the ages of 12 and 17 were related to distant learning.
According to a Hoover Institute study, children are expected to suffer large lifetime wage losses as a result of school closures.
“The pandemic has had devastating effects in many areas, but none are as potentially severe as those on education,” wrote the study’s authors. “There is overwhelming evidence that students in school during the closure period and during the subsequent adjustments to the pandemic are achieving at significantly lower levels than would have been expected without the pandemic.”
“Efforts to date have not been sufficient to arrest the losses,” added the researchers.
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