It's Thursday, September 8, 2022.

I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

We're told now that America's school children are on average between one and two years behind

where they should be academically and in terms of educational progress and that's blamed on the

school shutdowns in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Multiple avenues of research and authorities underline the reality that a significant setback has

occurred and then there's a lot of conflict and controversy about how this might

be overcome. That's going to be a very interesting conversation to follow.

But there's something else we need to observe, and that is the fact that many parents are now looking back to the behavior of the schools, in many cases during the pandemic,

government authorities, school boards, and in many

cases school teacher unions where you had opposition to reopening the schools.

And there is no question that it is largely children who have paid the price for the decisions that were made then.

But it's also clear, and you have to dig a little bit deeper than the headlines to see this underlined, It's also true that the effect on students

is disproportionate and that's actually predictable. It's predictable that

where parents remained very much engaged with their children in the educational

process they did better. Where parents were unable or unwilling to be

actively engaged with their children in making academic progress during the shutdown of the

schools. Well those children got particularly behind. Again that is entirely

predictable and it just gets down to the fact that family structure matters, it matters hugely, and in so many ways, Christians

understand this, it matters much more than the structure of the schools.

But school structure does matter, the context of schooling, the understanding, the worldview of that schooling.

And that takes us to a very big issue in the United States, and we come to it again.

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