NY Mag: Progressives ‘quietly’ starting to accept closing schools was ‘historic blunder’

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Media top headlines January 17

In media news today, a Utah newspaper calls for the National Guard to prevent the unvaccinated from going anywhere, lawmakers call on NBC to cover human rights protests during the Winter Olympics in China, and CNN frets about Biden's press treatment.

The progressive left might be catching on to the possibility that prolonged school closings amid the coronavirus pandemic was a "catastrophic mistake" that hurt America’s kids, one writer argues.

"Many liberals are complaining that the recent debates over short-term closings are creating a hysterical overreaction from people still angry about the 2020-21 school shutdown," liberal New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait wrote. "Perhaps a first step to building trust that we are not planning to repeat a catastrophic mistake is to admit the mistake in the first place."

Even though Democrats continue to dub those against closing schools as "neoliberal ghouls carrying out the bidding of the billionaire class," Chait said, he hinted that progressives may be ready to surrender without a sound.

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"Most progressives aren’t insisting on refighting the school closing wars," he said. "They just want to quietly move on without anybody admitting anybody did anything wrong."

Chait reacted to statistician Nate Silver’s tweet suggesting that keeping kids out of school was a historic blunder on par with invading Iraq, infuriating liberals who decried reopening schools as reckless.

"The furnace-hot backlash seemed to be triggered by Silver’s assumption that school closings were not only a mistake — a possibility many progressives have quietly begun to accept — but an error of judgment that was sufficiently consequential and foreseeable that we can’t just shrug it off as a bad dice roll," he wrote. "It was a historic blunder that reveals some deeper flaw in the methods that produced it and which demands corrective action."

Chait made clear that it is "indisputable and almost undisputed" that virtual schooling had grave consequences on students. According to Chait and various studies, students on average were left six months behind pace and nearly a million kids dropped out altogether. School closings had a particularly negative effect on poorer children and minorities.

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Perhaps the most significant consequence of socially isolating kids, he mentioned, has been the developing mental health crisis, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

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"The damage to a generation of children’s social development and educational attainment, and particularly to the social mobility prospects of its most marginalized members, will be irrecoverable," he said.

The writer flagged how pulling kids from classrooms did not have much of an effect on containing coronavirus spread, being that children face little risk to their health upon contracting the virus and there’s "almost no evidence" of increased community spread in towns that kept schools open.

But despite this evidence, even at the very beginning of the pandemic, Chait shared the "truly disturbing" reality that the left rejected the truth and were instead swayed by a zero-COVID policy and loyalty to teachers unions.

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"Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed," he said. "The Democratic Party’s internal debate on school closings was making room at the table for some truly unhinged ideas."

As an example of the left’s "transparently irrational" thinking on the topic, Chait mentioned how the head of Los Angeles’ most powerful teachers union, Cecily Myart-Cruz, insisted "there is no such thing as learning loss" and called plans to reopen schools "a recipe for propagating structural racism."

UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz at a press conference at Panorama High School on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 in Panorama City, CA. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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