COVID-19 did not make students’ test scores drop. Our COVID policies did

Many of us are lamenting the national decline in public school students’ reading and math test scores over the past two years. Many seem to find it self-evident that this drop in test scores, which is most pronounced among socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students, was caused by “COVID-19.”

But while test scores did plummet alarmingly, COVID itself is not to blame.

COVID is a condition to which we chose how to react. In many places, we made the wrong choice, nonsensically closing schools, inexplicably masking children and lazily cutting activities and extracurriculars.

So, let’s not kid ourselves. The potentially lifelong deficiencies in academics now disproportionately affecting socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority children are the entirely foreseeable results of our unconscionable choices.

These choices to close schools, mask kids and cut activities were not unconscionable simply because they were incorrect. Everyone makes mistakes. We used to bleed people when they were sick. Doctors thought blood-letting helped; they didn’t know any better.

The extraordinary thing about our choices surrounding COVID was that we did know better, but we apparently didn’t care to do better.

How do we know that we knew better? Because in private and parochial schools in the same cities where public schools closed (including the Philadelphia Catholic school that my own children attend), the doors reopened in fall 2020, the masks stayed on much too long but did eventually go away, and activities continued apace.

Sure, the doors never should have closed at all. But in spring 2020, reasonable people disagreed on exactly what we were dealing with, and we can allow some grace for good faith wrong decisions. And, sure, having teachers and kids wear masks that muffled their ability to speak and listen during lessons while taking them off to eat snacks and lunch was always illogical to the point of parody.

Still, these measures – reopening schools in fall 2020 after spring 2020 closures and treating masks like amulets – represented our best-faith efforts. This is what we did for the kids whose parents were able to find private solutions (i.e., private and parochial schools) to this public problem (i.e., a pandemic).

For less advantaged kids, we did the wrong things and called them the right ones. The emperor was clearly wearing no clothes, and most of us knew it but apparently did not care enough to say so.

Now, the entirely predictable result has come to pass: The kids who could least afford to have their already far less than ideal academic opportunities diminished have suffered the consequences of their elders’ dishonestly, irrationality and carelessness. And those elders now want to act like our kids’ test scores dropped because of something beyond our control. As though the dog ate our homework when, really, we chose not to do it —or, in this case, to assign it.

The dishonest way in which cities like mine treated public school families during the pandemic (closing their schools and saying it was to protect them when, right under their noses, wealthier and whiter school populations that surely would have accepted no less protection suffered exponentially less disruption) was insupportable.

Then again, our treatment of these families, of these children, is always insupportable.

COVID was an extraordinary situation, to be sure. But trapping predominantly disadvantaged, minority constituencies in schools that fail to educate their children –while manipulating the conversation to claim that this failure to educate is in fact for the students’ benefit – is the norm. After all, if you get rid of tests, the test scores won’t drop. After all, if you’re not in school, you won’t catch COVID there.

Meanwhile, in schools where students have better-resourced parents, the tests continue, and the doors stay open. So, let’s stop lying to ourselves about the societal failure we perpetrate (not just during COVID, but every day) against those least able to absorb it.

In Philadelphia, as in many cities where the public schools were failing long before COVID, there are thousands of families waiting for scholarships that would enable them to attend private and parochial schools.

We all know well enough what education and protection look like — before, during and after COVID. If we want to assist families that need help to educate and protect their children like we educate and protect our own, we should support the vouchers that would create school choice for those socioeconomically disadvantaged families, and we should give whatever we can to those scholarship programs until such vouchers level the playing field.

Facilitating the attendance of under-resourced kids in educational institutions that will in fact educate them is not just a pandemic-era problem. It is an everyday problem that was exacerbated by our choices during the pandemic, and that we should redouble our resolve to solve in its wake.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.