Add one more grim figure to the toll exacted by disastrous COVID-era school closures: a huge penalty to the lifetime earnings of students forced to suffer through remote schooling, totaling possibly as much as $28 trillion (more than the nation’s entire GDP) over the remainder of the 21st century.
Those figures come from a new study by Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist and expert on education, following on his own 2020 study, as well as work published by professors at Harvard and Dartmouth in October.
The new study analyzes the hideous nationwide decline in 8th-grade math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a k a the nation’s report card. The average drop in math scores amounted to eight points — the largest ever recorded, erasing all gains since 2000, equal to as much as 0.8 missed years of school and a likely lifetime penalty of 5.6% to earnings.
But that’s only for the average, eight-point decline. The worst states saw drops of more than 10 points, implying even bigger future penalties. The size of a state’s economy also plays a role in the eventual catastrophe, so — per Hanushek’s models — California, which saw a six-point score drop, will nonetheless see the biggest absolute state-level economic loss (amounting to $1.3 trillion).
It’s not only earnings that take a hit. Lower NAEP math scores are, per a Harvard study, correlated with higher likelihoods of incarceration, teen pregnancy and the use of food-stamp benefits and lower odds of owning a home, marriage and full-time employment. In other words, they are a good predictor of overall success or misery.
The tragedy is that the learning losses were avoidable. Schools were never vectors of COVID transmission. Yet the United Federation of Teachers, working hand in glove with the federal government and blue-state pols, conspired to close them during the pandemic anyway. That forced students and parents to accept less-effective remote education.
UFT head Randi Weingarten’s justification for the closures? The cruel, heartless claim that “kids are resilient.” Yet the new study suggests they’ll pay a big price. But don’t expect Weingarten or any of her co-conspirators to seriously apologize — let alone take responsibility.
Yes, learning losses can be recovered — if schools return to and surpass their pre-pandemic levels of achievement in the medium term. But given their current crusade to jettison all academic standards in favor of woke indoctrination (done in the name of equity, of course) remediation seems far-fetched.
It’s more ugly evidence that on education — as on every other social issue — kids come dead last for US progressives.