You don’t need to be an education professional to know that if you tell students they can no longer attend in-person classes for about three years they will face unprecedented challenges during their lifetime of education.

Statistics are just coming out now that prove our forecast that COVID lockdowns will lead to a degeneration of young minds in the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal, citing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reported last week that math and reading performances among 13-year-olds in the country hit their lowest levels in decades. The report said 1990 was the last time math scores were so low, and 2004 for reading.

The report said 13-year-olds who took the NAEP exam last fall scored an average of 256 out of 500 in reading and 271 out of 500 in math. 

“This is a very serious matter,” Peggy Carr, head of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the tests, told USA Today. “The big message here is it is a long road ahead of us.”

Carr said it is unclear what the long-term issues will be because intervention does not seem to be helping the issue. 

“There are signs of risk for a generation,” she said.

Miguel Cardona, the U.S. education secretary, told the paper that the latest data is further evidence of what the Biden-Harris administration “recognized from Day One: that the pandemic would have a devastating impact on students’ learning across the country and that it would take years of effort and investment to reverse the damage as well as address the 11-year decline that preceded it.”

Chalkbeat, an education news website, noted that standardized tests are only one measure of academic achievement, but the scores do have some weight because they “are predictive of students’—and the country’s—success.” 

“One recent study found that state scores on a separate NAEP eighth-grade math test predicted high school graduation, adult income, and incarceration rates,” the report said.

The fourth and fifth grades are generally seen as foundational when it comes to acquiring reading and math skills—and these children would have been forced into a yearslong intellectual hibernation because of politicians like California Governor Gavin Newsom. 

Sean Reardon, a Stanford professor who studies education, told The New York Times that his research from 41 states found that schools are generally ill-equipped to deal with the issue that has, on average, left students in the U.S. a half a year behind in math studies and one-third a year lagging in reading. The problem is most pronounced in schools in dense locations. 

“The worry,” he said, is that this “pandemic” exacerbated “educational inequality.”

TRENDPOST: It is discouraging to read articles like the one presented in The Wall Street Journal that continue to place blame on the “coronavirus pandemic” for wreaking such havoc and the country’s education system. 

As Gerald Celente has long said, it was not the “pandemic” that forced your child to stay home, it was power-hungry politicians and the Silicon Valley tech bros. (See “ZUCKERBERG SAYS ‘ESTABLISHMENT’ ASKED FACEBOOK TO CENSOR COVID-19 INFO THAT PROVED TO BE ACCURATE” 13 Jun 2023, “RESEARCHERS SAY GLOBAL MORTALITY RATE IN 2020 WAS ‘UNREMARKABLE,’ UNDERCUTTING KEY PREMISE OF THE COVID WAR” 13 Jun 2023, “NO HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS UNDER 50 DIED FROM COVID-19 IN ISRAEL: DATA” 30 May 2023, and “COVID-19 FALLOUT: KIDS HAVING TROUBLE SPEAKING THANKS TO LOCKDOWNS” 23 May 2023.)

Our 15 September 2020 issue’s Trend Forecast read:

“Under the New ABnormal, working parents must stay home as millions of children are being forced to learn online from home. The economic stress on parents in the world of the New ABnormal will prove costly.

“Furthermore, the added mental stress being imposed on children, who are, by the data, not victims of the virus, will instill them with fear while sapping their creativity.”

Since the beginning of summer 2020, political leaders in the U.S., backed by their health experts and amplified by a mainstream media glad to accommodate, have been putting forth the notion that schools are “super-spreader” environments requiring the need to be extremely cautious about reopening.

On 14 December 2021, when most students in the U.S. were returning to in-person classes, we published an article titled, “SCHOOLS: THE NEW ‘Abnormal.’”

We noted that schools around the U.S. reported experiencing increases in unruly behaviors such as talking in class, treating adults and one another disrespectfully, and strewing trash about, to more serious issues.

Peter Faustino, on the board of the National Association of School Psychologists, says that a normal full academic year’s worth of mental health and behavioral incidents have occurred in just the first three months of the current school year; “I think the pandemic was like an earthquake and I think we are seeing that tidal wave hit shore,” he said.

Stanford University, in collaboration with the Associated Press, found that the public school enrollment from kindergarten to twelfth grade has declined by 1.2 million students in the first two years of the outbreak, with home-schooling up by 30 percent. The Wall Street Journal said the study noted three possible explanations, including truancy, the jump in home-schooling, and a jump in toddlers skipping kindergarten. 

The paper said it is “more worrisome” if children “decided that going to school is a waste, perhaps because they weren’t learning much.”

“If many stopped going to school altogether, then the pandemic learning loss may be even greater than has been reported and may never be made up.”