Sweden showed us the way during the covid-19 pandemic
OPINION:
Sweden’s youngest children – who unmasked and carefree never missed a day at school during the height of the covid-19 pandemic – did not suffer any learning loss during the academic year 2020-2021. Not all of their teachers died as a result of being in the classroom.
In a study published last Friday in the International Journal of Educational Research, a team of researchers at Stockholm’s Karolinska University analyzed data from 97,073 primary school students, grades one to three, across the Scandinavian country. It found that there was no “covid-19-related loss in reading”; that “the proportion of students with poor reading ability did not increase during the pandemic”; and that “students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds were not particularly affected.”
Not so in the United States, where schools were closed and teachers’ unions worked as hard as they could to delay openings in most states. The proportion of students at high risk of learning not to read rose from 8% in the academic year 2019-2020 to 37% in the academic year 2021-2011, according to a report published by Amplify, a curriculum and test company, in February.
The University of Virginia found that approximately 35% of Virginia’s school children in kindergarten through second grade received points below their expected literacy levels in the fall of 2021 – a historically high figure. The May study showed that “the score below the benchmark was disproportionately higher for students who are black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, English students and those with disabilities.”
My three boys were in first and second grade when the pandemic struck (I have twins). Virginia’s public schools in Fairfax County, where my children went, were slow to get their online learning started, and when they did, the teachers were too busy shouting at the young students to “turn off” their screens to focus on full-time reading, writing and arithmetic lessons.
I tried to find a private school that would guarantee personal tuition this fall. When my youngest tried to test in second grade, he failed – from only three months of lost learning time. His reading ability was simply not level and he would have to retake first grade.
I am happy. I can afford private school. But what I’ve seen over the last two years from our public school officials and teachers’ unions is turning my stomach. I will never forget, I will never forgive, and I will never vote for a teacher’s union – supported candidate who will run again.
“Keeping schools and preschools open when other countries closed them was an extremely difficult decision,” Anna Ekström, Sweden’s Minister of Education, acknowledged on Twitter on Sunday, in a reaction to the International Journal of Educational Research study. “In March 2020, the criticism against me was harsh for me not to close schools and preschools, but I was – and still am – convinced that it was the right decision.”
When I was obsessed with the potential loss of learning and the growing educational and economic inequality gap in the summer of 2020, our national media bodies were preoccupied with covid-19 death-trackers and amplifying teachers ‘unions’ concerns. Doctors, academics and pundits who warned of the devastation that the locks had on our nation’s youth became smeared and silenced, called “grandmother killers” or worse.
We were considered heartless and inhuman. We have repeatedly heard from those who fight to keep schools closed that children are “resilient”, and that it is the lives of teachers that matter.
“Teachers are so worried about returning to school that they are preparing wills,” a CNN headline read on July 16, 2020. The same month, The Washington Post told us that not only would teachers die if schools reopened, but it was also racist . to consider personal learning.
“The racist effects of the school reopening during the pandemic – by a teacher”, read the headline of the alarmist Post. Why racist? Well, “Black, domestic, and Latin students would be more likely to see covid-19 deaths in their schools than white students.”
In August 2020, Vice reported that “teachers make their own tombstones and coffins to protest their return to school.”
“Children can not focus on schoolwork if their family members or teachers are in the hospital or dying,” a kindergarten teacher told the Liberal news site.
We can not forget how, once the vaccines became available, teachers pushed forward in the line to get their stick – and then refused to go back into the classroom. Or how the American Federation of Teachers worked with the Biden administration’s CDC to move the goalposts for reopening the school further forward. Or how some unions placed the extreme left’s social law political changes, such as defining the police, Medicare for all, wealth taxes and bans on charter schools, on their list of demands to get back into the classroom.
And school closures did not just mean academic loss. There has been an increased loss of life among our young people during the pandemic due to indirect boredom or despair, according to a recently released working document from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Drugs, homicides, traffic deaths and alcohol-related causes killed tens of thousands more young adults than they had done before,” the study said. “Deaths from various circulatory diseases and diabetes were also increased. “Suicide did not increase, although alcohol-related deaths and overdoses can also be considered as consequences of self-destructive behavior.”
The study concluded, “All of this suggests that major and lasting changes in lifestyles designed to avoid a single virus not only had” economic “alternative costs, but also cost a shockingly large number of young lives.”
Our children are not feeling well. Our national media, teachers’ unions and democratic legislators prioritize all adults over the health and well-being of our next generation during the height of the pandemic.
I will not forgive. I will not forget. And I will never let my family be locked up again.
• Kelly Sadler is a commentator on The Washington Times.