Most Of The $190 Billion In Covid ‘Aid’ To Schools Was Wasted At Kids’ Expense; ‘GENERATIONAL LEARNING LOSS’: Experts Reveal the Full Extent of COVID-19 School Closures, and other C-Virus related stories

Most Of The $190 Billion In Covid ‘Aid’ To Schools Was Wasted At Kids’ Expense:

Billions of wasted taxpayer dollars bought a demoralized workforce that lacks high standards for itself and its students.

A series of government reports have documented how much of the trillions of dollars purportedly spent on “Covid relief” went to waste — ranging from the hundreds of billions in fraud (i.e., the “Great Grift”) to extravagant local government expenditures (e.g., renovating a minor league baseball stadium and replacing irrigation systems at golf courses).

But out of all that waste, most Americans would consider money spent on countering pandemic learning loss a legitimate use of government resources. (Mind you, many Americans, including this one, would question why public school unions insisted on keeping schools closed for endless periods of time, but that’s a separate story.)

Now several new data points suggest that much of this money has likewise been frittered away, leaving a generation of American students far worse off.

Wasteful School Spending

An in-depth investigation by the education organization The 74 demonstrated that much of the $190 billion in federal funds has gone to projects that often will not directly help students learn. A series of public records requests discovered just some of the ways districts spent their federal relief dollars.

To begin, in Colorado, a charter school network “spent about $70,000 for an exterior fence at its Aurora campus so students and staff could eat outside despite concerns about proximity to the community’s rising homeless population.” While this expenditure says much about social policy in Colorado, it has practically nothing to do with reversing learning losses.

In California, Oakland’s school district used $1.6 million for a payment on a $100 million loan the district took out from the state of California in 2003 — well before the coronavirus hit. What’s more, the district in Stockton, California, “spent over $2 million on high-level central office positions, like a facilities director.”

Youngstown, Ohio, frittered away $5 million on equipment and supplies to provide free WiFi from utility poles — a project the district could never implement because the city didn’t own all of the utility poles in question. —>READ MORE HERE

‘GENERATIONAL LEARNING LOSS’: Experts Reveal the Full Extent of COVID-19 School Closures:

A generation of American students has fallen behind academically in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the forced school closures that took place during that time.

A subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce addressed the problems created by school closures Wednesday in a panel called “Generational Learning Loss: How Pandemic School Closures Hurt Students.”

The subcommittee chair, Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., spoke about how bad COVID-19 policies snowballed into a catastrophe that many parents saw coming:

In only a matter of two years, a generation of progress was lost. The great irony of COVID was how the majority of parents so easily predicted online education and school closures would be detrimental to students and how so many bureaucratic education experts with all the research power in the world took years to reach the same conclusion.

Bean said that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, assessed students across the country and found in 2022 that math, reading, and civics scores had plummeted to their lowest point in two decades.

“The mass shuttering of schools throughout the pandemic is one of our greatest education policy failures in our nation’s history,” he said.

Teachers unions in particular prolonged school closures, according to Bean.

“A Brookings Institute study found that school districts with lengthier collective bargaining agreements were less likely to start the fall 2020 semester with in-person instruction,” he said, and further explained that data shows that longer shutdowns were not “predicated on pandemic severity.” —>READ MORE HERE

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