EDITORIAL: Study: Lost year will hamper many young children

Numbers are rolling in regarding the disastrous decision to keep schools closed last academic year. A New York Times analysis reveals that thousands of kids — particularly in the lower grades — dropped out and now return to campus a full year behind, primed for failure.

The problem was particularly acute in kindergarten. The Times’ review, conducted with Stanford University, found that 10,000 local public schools across 33 states — including Nevada — lost at least 20 percent of their expected kindergartners in 2020.

Overall, the public school enrollment drop was 9.3 percent for kindergarten, 3.4 percent for first grade, 3 percent for second grade and 3.7 percent for third grade.

Kindergarten is often a student’s introduction to school when he or she begins to learn basic academic and social skills necessary to advance. As the new school year starts, many of these students will return and enter first grade without that vital grounding, the Times noted. Kids in lower-income households were most likely to be left behind.

“Districts that went strictly remote,” the Stanford research paper found, “experienced 42 percent more decline than those that offered full-time in-person learning.”

In Clark County, pre-pandemic test results from 2019 were already dismal, with barely one-quarter of those entering high school considered proficient in reading and math. What are the chances the district can bring up to speed hundreds or thousands of students who made no academic gains last year? Gimmicks such as dumbed-down grading standards can do only so much to conceal reality.

Not surprisingly, the Times glosses over the primary villain in this sad tale. Powerful teachers unions drove last year’s school closures. Even when it became apparent a year ago that schools could safely reopen with precautions — and many public health experts urged precisely that — union activists refused to budge in order to spite then-President Donald Trump, who had demanded that schools open.

Writing for New York magazine in October, Jonathan Chait recounted the union highlight reel.

“In Detroit, union activists stood outside one of the district’s bus terminals beginning at 5 a.m., blocking buses from leaving to pick up students to take them to school,” he wrote. “The Los Angeles teachers union insisted going back to normal is not an option, and packaged their opposition to reopening with a host of other demands, including police-free schools and a moratorium on new charters.”

The union COVID power play drove many parents to home-school or to explore private alternatives. But for thousands of children, the union school closures meant a one-year vacation — and now there’s a good chance they’ll never fully recover.