On Monday, the Bidens visited a Washington, D.C. middle school, where they spent the day grabbing photo ops with students and posturing about education. Meanwhile, academic proficiency levels are still underwater after two years of Democratic-driven learning disruption.
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden met with seventh graders during lunch and then spoke to an eighth-grade math class at Eliot-Hine Middle School on Capitol Hill. When the president asked the students what subject they found the most challenging, they answered: “Math.”
Between 2019 and 2022 during the pandemic, D.C. public school students suffered major drops in math scores, with Black, Hispanic, and other minorities showing disproportionate losses. In 2022, only 19% of kids were proficient in math, down from 31% in 2019, Axios reported. Math aptitudes tanked, by more than ten percentage points, across most race/ethnicity groups.
Academic assessment results for D.C. public schools in 2023 showed an improvement in math proficiency of 2.6%, and 2.9% in English Language Arts, from 2022. However, math achievement is still 8.9 percentage points down from 2022.
These depressing statistics are a microcosm of the performance deficits paralyzing the nation’s public schools after the learning freeze ushered in by the Biden administration. While Biden makes staged appearances at public schools to pretend to care about education, the public remembers how his administration conspired with teachers’ unions to impose and extend school shutdowns and mask restrictions during Covid. Biden embraced the anti-child dictates of Randi Weingarten, the president of the monster teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers, who beat the drum on keeping kids out of class.
Weingarten has been dabbling in revisionist history lately, trying to erase her role in the current education crisis. She’s suggested that it’s a “myth” that school closures caused learning loss and mental health decline. Her latest cope has been declaring on Twitter that cleaner air in schools could have been a “game changer” during the pandemic, even though children always bore the lowest risk for developing severe complications from the virus.
Biden, like Weingarten, opposes education freedom programs that empower parents to redirect the taxpayer dollars allocated to each child for education to the education option of their choice, whether private, microschool, hybrid, etc. Families are flocking to these alternatives and evacuating government-run schools in the hopes of finding better educational opportunities for their children.
“The administration remains committed to supporting schools and the communities they serve,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday following the Bidens’ visit to the middle school.
Supporting schools in union-controlled systems, sure. But what about the students?