It’s been more than four years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and, in some ways, life has never been the same. Take, for instance, the students who have yet to catch up from falling behind during school closures.
While officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and teacher’s union boss Randi Weingarten have tried to claim that learning loss is not a problem among America’s school kids, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is dealing with the effects firsthand in his state.
On Wednesday’s show, he joined Megyn to push back on those who say children didn’t fall behind in school as a result of COVID protocols and discuss what he has done in the Old Dominion State to reverse the trends.
The Problem
Youngkin was elected as a Republican governor in an increasingly blue state in 2022 in part due to his promise to fight back against COVID restrictions. “One of the reasons that you were elected was that you said you would fight back on the COVID madness and on trans insanity policies in the Virginia schools,” Megyn noted. “And you have lived up to your word.”
Back in January, Dr. Fauci appeared for a closed-door interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic during which he told lawmakers he was “not convinced” children suffered learning loss as a result of the COVID policies he advocated for. Meanwhile, Weingarten “was featured at the DNC like she was some sort of a heroine, even though she pushed these closures to go on indefinitely,” Megyn added.
The governor begged to differ. “There has not been any more detrimental and misguided policy decisions that were made during the pandemic – and there were a lot – then closing our schools and telling our students that watching a 12-inch screen every day is a quality education,” Youngkin said.
Under the direction of his predecessor, former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, Youngkin said Virginia “was bottom 10 in the nation in getting our schools back open.” That was one of the first problems he tackled as governor. “The first thing I did when I came into office was make sure that not only were our schools open, but to give parents the ability to decide whether their child wears a mask or not,” he explained.
And then there was the issue of learning loss, which was a two-pronged problem. First off, as Youngkin noted, there was a “systematic degradation of expectations” in Virginia schools that resulted in students being told “that they’re proficient reading and math” when “they’re not really proficient in reading and math” because “of expectations that had been lowered on what it took to be proficient.”
That was compounded, he said, by school closures. “Virginia, one of the top education systems in America, was number one in the nation in learning loss in reading and math in fourth grade,” Youngkin shared.
The Solution
The governor said educators are not to blame for the troubling statistics. “This is not an indictment of teachers,” he noted. “I will say, teachers worked hard to try to do the impossible.”
Instead, Youngkin said the stats presented an opportunity to do more for Virginia’s youth. “That is why, when we saw this persistent learning loss, we took immediate action and worked on a bipartisan basis with our General Assembly and said, ‘We need to fund – particularly in our youngest Virginians – intense tutoring,'” he explained. “And so third through eighth graders now get intense tutoring if they failed or were at risk of failing… their Standards of Learning tests.”
According to Youngkin, that accounted for over 60 percent of students and the results, at least so far, have shown progress. “We’re seeing the test results improve,” he said. “But I need them to improve a lot faster because we are still behind where we were pre-pandemic.”
In order for students to make up the ground that was lost, Youngkin said there was another issue to address: absenteeism. “The other area that I have been incredibly concerned about is that when policymakers and administrators… told families that it wasn’t important for their students to be in school, the result has been huge increases in chronic absenteeism,” he noted. “Students just aren’t in the classroom, and if they’re not in the classroom, they can’t catch up.”
So far, his “statewide effort to tackle chronic absenteeism” has seen a 16 percent reduction in the issue, which Youngkin said is not enough. “We have to get the kids back in the classroom,” he admitted. “And we have to make sure that they are getting the kinds of support and intensive tutoring that they need.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Gov. Youngkin by tuning in to episode 872 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.