BFFs Randi and Rochelle Proved to be Our Children’s Worst Enemies; A New Study on Test Scores Sheds Light on ‘substantial’ Pandemic Learning Loss. Here’s What Parents Need to Know, and other C-Virus related stories

By admin On Jun 11, 2023

BFFs Randi and Rochelle proved to be our children’s worst enemies:

Every month brings new revelations about just how deep the COVID conspiracy against America’s children ran.

The latest? February 2021 texts (obtained by the tireless efforts of a group of concerned parents) showing how completely then-Centers for Disease Control chief Rochelle Walensky was in American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten’s pocket.

We already knew the pair had been thick as thieves in kneecapping plans to reopen the nation’s schools. Turns out they were text buddies too.

Weingarten, thrown into a tizzy by news suggesting the CDC might be (gasp!) about to give a strong OK for schools to teach in-person, immediately texted Walensky to complain that this was “at odds” with what she’d been promised.

Walensky then texted back a cringing reply.

As the White House had ordered, the CDC then gave the teachers unions what they wanted: guidelines that guaranteed few schools would reopen unless they ignored Walensky’s “advice.”

She put politics ahead of science, in other words, issuing a guidance that Weingarten’s union promptly cheered.

In a grimly “cute” follow-up exchange, Walensky gushingly texted that the AFT’s imprimatur “gave me the biggest smile of my week, Thank YOU, Friend!” —>READ MORE HERE

A new study on test scores sheds light on ‘substantial’ pandemic learning loss. Here’s what parents need to know:

A big concern with school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic was the potential impact it could have on learning. Data has trickled in that has shown those fears have been realized — and new research adds to that.

A study published in the journal American Economic Review: Insights analyzed test score data for grades three through eight across 11 states from school districts during the 2020-2021 school year, along with district-level state standardized assessment data from spring 2016 through 2019, and 2021. The researchers found that pass rates for standardized tests dropped from 2019 to 2021, with an average of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 percentage points in English language arts.

Worth noting: School districts with in-person learning had smaller declines than those with remote or hybrid learning models.

“It’s clear from national data that there was a large decline in student learning during the COVID-19 pandemic,” study co-author Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University and author of The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years, tells Yahoo Life. “Our goal in this paper was to evaluate this in state-level testing data, where we could look carefully at correlates of the decline, in the hopes of better understanding how to implement recovery, and how to avoid these effects in the future.”

But Oster’s study is far from the only one to show the negative impact the pandemic had on learning. Here’s what the research shows — and how parents can move forward.