HOW SHUTDOWNS DEVASTATED YOUNG PEOPLE, CONTINUED

HOW SHUTDOWNS DEVASTATED YOUNG PEOPLE, CONTINUED

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CORONAVIRUS, EDUCATION

This comes from Britain, not the U.S., but the similarities to the U.S. are obvious:

According to a study from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), over a fifth of all children have been “missing” from schoolrooms since the government began implementing lockdown measures. The report found that 2 million of the nation’s nine million students are not attending class regularly.

The figure includes 1.67 million kids who were deemed “persistently absent” by the Department for Education (DfE) during the second term of 2021, representing an 82 per cent increase over 2020.

No doubt we have millions of “missing” kids in the U.S., as well. Across the country, when schools went remote something like 30% of students–more in some schools–checked out. They never logged on, never completed an assignment, never took a test. How many of those kids have come back, or ever will come back, to school? Lockdowns in general were a disastrous policy, but closing down the schools was probably the worst of all.

Home schooling seems to be unusual in the U.K.:

The CSJ went on to state that there has been an “alarming” 34 per cent increase in students being educated at home, with 81,000 home schooled children.

That represents only 4% of the two million who are “not attending class regularly.” So the issue isn’t a trend toward home schooling, the problem is a large number of students who have simply dropped out. The price of this devastation of kids’ education, borne most heavily by the least privileged, will be paid for a generation in the U.S., as well as in Britain.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/11/how-shutdowns-devastated-young-people-continued.php