Yes, the idiocy of COVID school closures yanked down test scores. But a new analysis of the education performance of grade school children by Hoover Institute education expert Eric Hanushek shows the great American education crisis began years before COVID.

Here’s what Hanushek told the Senate in testimony last month:

It’s time to look past pandemic remedies to more fundamental problems. The pre-pandemic school system was in steady decline, and building on it was never likely to be a viable recovery strategy. A half century of experience indicates that improving schools to be globally competitive and narrowing the existing achievement gaps require deeper changes in the incentives that drive achievement.

…scores for eighth graders rose in the beginning of the century but started falling in 2013. The fall was more precipitous during the pandemic period (2019-22) but continued in the “recovery period” (2022-24). The average math and reading decline from 2013 to 2024 was 0.28 standard deviations. Just half of this occurred in 2019-22.

The decline in scores has also been accompanied by a widening of the achievement distribution: lower-achieving students have suffered greater declines than those at the top of the achievement distribution. And, again, while the pandemic led to public concerns about disparate impacts on disadvantaged students, this increased spread in learning actually began in 2013 and continued through 2024.

A lot has to change, but one obvious first step would be to stop allowing members of one of the most radical political organizations in America – the teacher unions – to mis-educate our kids.