Nearly Insurmountable Learning Loss

Normally I do not take the United Nations very seriously. I do not wait breathlessly to read the latest from UNICEF, the children’s fund sponsored by the UN. I have lived within a half a block of the UN headquarters for decades now, and have not stepped foot in the building. Evidently, this qualifies me to comment on the latest UNICEF report on school closures.

Now, UNICEF has reported on the cost of school closures around the world. I have been reporting on this story for some time now. Unfortunately, it seems that the more pessimistic analyses of learning loss in children are true.

Fair enough, the scum that calls itself teachers’ unions have insisted that children will be able to make up what they have lost during the school closings, but all the evidence that I have found, reported scrupulously on this blog, has pointed in the opposite direction.

Inner city children in particular, those who do not have internet access or who do not have parents who can fill in as teachers, are the most negatively affected.

UNICEF has found the same story around the world. The author of the report takes a somewhat optimistic tone by saying that the learning loss is “nearly insurmountable,” but how would you like it if your physician told you that your chances of surviving an illness were “nearly insurmountable.”

Of course, we can always blame it on the virus, but obviously the fault lies with the government officials who went all hysterical and all apocalyptic-- shutting down business, shutting down society, shutting down schools. As the evidence has shown clearly, a child’s risk of catching Covid or getting very sick from Covid was miniscule-- research has shown that children were safest in school.

So, here is some more evidence, consistent with the evidence from America’s inner cities, reported by the New York Times. Credit to the Times for reporting the story:

Almost two years into the coronavirus pandemic, more than 635 million children globally remain affected by full or partial school closures, the United Nations said Monday in a report that called the setbacks to education “nearly insurmountable.”

The report from the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said that many of these children had lost basic numeracy and literacy skills from the prolonged loss of classroom learning.

Consider that for a minute. Losing basic numeracy and literacy skills is catastrophic for children. If, as we suppose, they do not make up the loss, however will they make a living. One suspects that they will eventually head to the United States where the Biden administration and the do-gooder caucus and even the United Nations is conspiring to flood the nation with illegal migrants who are merely capable of living off the government dole-- when they are not looting and stealing.

It is happening in foreign countries, and not merely in the poorest foreign countries:

In low- and middle-income countries, UNICEF said up to 70 percent of 10-year-olds could not read or comprehend a simple text, up from 53 percent before the coronavirus became a pandemic in March 2020.

Notable data points in the report included Brazil, where 75 percent of second graders in some states are behind in reading, compared with 50 percent prepandemic; and South Africa, where schoolchildren are up to a full year behind where they should be.

And, rather than show how badly the school closures have hurt inner city children in places like New York, the UN offers the evidence of other states where learning loss has been marked. Of course, this assumes that all states have tested for learning loss, which is far from obvious.

In the United States, the report said, states including California, Colorado, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia have reported that two-thirds of their third graders scored below grade level in mathematics last year, compared with half in 2019.

UNICEF prescribes intensive support. It is obviously smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes. As it happens, the Biden administration has already started trying to overcome this insurmountable loss. And yet, given that the program is run by bureaucrats, with help from the teachers’ unions, the means of transmission is Zoom calls. The children who could not learn in front of a computer, and thus who suffered learning loss that is most likely unsurmountable, will be subjected to more remote learning.

“Quite simply, we are looking at a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling,” Robert Jenkins, the chief of education at UNICEF, said in the report. “While the disruptions to learning must end, just reopening schools is not enough. Students need intensive support to recover lost education.”

The UNICEF report tells the sad story:

Globally, the report said, “disruption to education has meant millions of children have significantly missed out on the academic learning they would have acquired if they had been in the classroom, with younger and more marginalized children facing the greatest loss.”

Despite efforts to mitigate the effects of school closures with remote learning, that solution is impractical or impossible where families lack internet access and home computers. And many students in low-income countries are not returning to class even when schools reopen.

Of course, more and more American children are not returning to class. The reason is, they are being homeschooled or enrolled in private or charter schools. In poor countries the children go to work.

Earlier this month in Uganda, where schools reopened for the first time since the pandemic began, educators estimated that up to one-third of students, who had taken jobs to help support their struggling families, might not return.

Education is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, benchmarks established by the United Nations to help measure basic improvements in people’s lives. According to the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which monitors each goal on its website, the coronavirus has “wiped out 20 years of education gains.”

In fairness, it was not the virus, in and of itself, that wiped out two decades of education progress. The blame falls on political leaders in a diverse collection of countries who decided to shut down society and to close schools. We will all be paying for their policies for decades to come. At a time when the world needs more capable tech savvy employees, political leaders have figured out a way to make this impossible. 

One assumes that Asian countries, our international competitors, did not implement the same policies and did not sacrifice their children to the gods of pseudoscience.