The New York Times is Johnny-on-the-spot with this breaking news:

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Wait, do you mean to tell me that when schools sent kids home for months, tried to teach them virtually for more than a year, then forced them to muzzle when they finally returned, that all this somehow affected their learning????

I am shocked. Shocked, I say!

From the article:

The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year's reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

Let's take a second to appreciate, or rather freak out, at the phrase "as the pandemic enters its THIRD YEAR."

The article, of course, still blames "the pandemic" for these issues, whereas everyone with any common sense knows this has nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with government and teachers' unions' decisions to not teach.

We can see this by the examples given in the article:

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as "alarming."

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Wow, you mean the most left-wing and masked-up regions of the country where teacher unions kept kids from school the longest are having the worst problems?

I wonder why that could be?

Children spent months out of the classroom, where they were supposed to learn the basics of reading — the ABCs, what sound a "b" or "ch" makes. Many first and second graders returned to classrooms needing to review parts of the kindergarten curriculum. But nearly half of public schools have teaching vacancies, especially in special education and the elementary grades, according to a federal survey conducted in December and January.

Even students with well-trained teachers have had far fewer hands-on hours with them than before the pandemic, which has been defined by closures, uneven access to online instruction, quarantine periods and — even on the best days — virus-related interruptions to regular classroom routines. Now, schools are under pressure to boost literacy as quickly as possible so students gain the reading skills they need to learn the rest of the curriculum, from math word problems to civics lessons. Billions of federal stimulus dollars are flowing to districts for tutoring and other supports, but their effect may be limited if schools cannot find quality staff members to hire.

It's not like half the country told these people all along that schools needed to remain open, with no masks and no restrictions since the beginning of the pandemic.

Oh, wait. Yeah, we did.

It's only now, as midterms loom, that the Left is finally coming to terms with the indescribable damage these shutdowns have done to children.

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