WTH Did We Do to Our Kids? Nat Malkus On The Consequences of Pandemic School Closures Four Years After COVID
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, students, parents, and teachers were told they have to stay home from school in order to stop the spread of disease. Anyone who questioned that advice was labeled a conspiracy theorist who does not "trust the science." Now, the public is waking up to the real effects of “long COVID” -- the longer students stayed away from school, the more they are choosing to stay home today, with all the learning and social loss that implies. Who suffers the most? Minorities and the poor. Who cares? Not the teachers' unions or the government that caused this disaster.
Nat Malkus is a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in empirical research on K–12 schooling. He is a national expert on a range of educational issues that affect students across the country—including Career and Technical Education, school choice, Advanced Placement, standardized testing, and how the nation’s schools responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on. |
| 0:01.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:28.9 | Hi, I'm Daniel Pledka. |
| 0:30.6 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.0 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.2 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.5 | Mark, what the hell is going on? |
| 0:37.3 | Well, we are talking today about new evidence about the damage done by pandemic school closures. |
| 0:44.0 | The New York Times had a big story, which was based in large part on data from our own Nat Malchus at AEI and our scholars here, about what the data says about pandemic school closures four years later. |
| 0:55.2 | And I just want to read a couple lines from this so people know what we're talking about. |
| 0:58.7 | This is the New York Times. Today, there is broad acknowledgement among many public health |
| 1:02.8 | and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of COVID, |
| 1:08.0 | while the academic harms for children have been large and longstanding. |
| 1:12.2 | Remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic research shows. |
| 1:17.4 | A growing body of evidence shows that pandemic school closures came at steep cost to students. |
| 1:23.1 | More time spent in remote and hybrid instruction in 2020, 21 school year was associated with |
| 1:28.8 | larger drops and test scores, the New York Times analysis of school disclosure data, I should add |
| 1:33.2 | from AEI, and results of the National Assessment of Education Progress show. Recent test scores from |
| 1:38.6 | spring of 2023 show that students overall are not caught up from their pandemic losses. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid longest still had almost double the ground |
| 1:48.3 | to make up compared to students with districts that allowed students back for most of the year. |
| 1:52.5 | I could go on, but the evidence is clear. |
... |
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