Americans likely assumed that the height of Democrat hypocrisy would be their affinity for attending maskless indoor parties or taking useless trips of leisure while demanding the U.S. live under strict allegiance to pandemic safety procedures.
But as the joke Democrats played on Americans distracted the masses during the pandemic, something more sinister was brewing under the surface.
Wealthy Democrats quietly paid for private schools and tutors or even moved out of the country to educate their children during the pandemic. At the same time, American children suffered drastic learning loss in mathematics and reading due to pandemic policies like school closures, social distancing, masking, and remote learning, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who seems to be eyeing a 2024 presidential run, was one of several Democratic officials to disregard their own coronavirus restrictions. Newsom angered parents in Oct. 2020 when he sent his four school-aged children to a Sacramento County private school open for in-person learning while public schools in the same county were closed due to his strict Covid-19 lockdowns.
This came after Newsom was sued by the Center for American Liberty over including private schools in his coronavirus mandates that ordered all public or private schools to close their doors to in-person learning in April 2020.
Havard nutritionist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, who ran for Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District as a Democratic candidate in 2018, was one of the loudest voices supporting school closures, masking children, and social distancing in the name of pandemic safety. In an effort to push pandemic restrictions on children in America and globally, Feigl-Ding composed several Twitter threads in March 2021 in which he narrated the threat of death if schools re-opened.
“Indeed, studies after studies show kids are well-known drivers of transmission. And hence kids all need to mask in school (even if most teachers are soon vaccinated in the U.S.),” Feigl-Ding tweeted Mar. 9. He stated that he was “pro *safe* school reopenings” but believes in order to reopen safely, all children must be masked and the school should have “good ventilation and air exchange.”
13) And kids being the virus home to adults in the house. How do we know? A 3 million person study in Denmark via data from Danish CDC. https://t.co/1OwufCtCzx
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 9, 2021
Despite Feigl-Ding supporting school lockdowns, he and his wife moved their family to Austria so that their son could avoid the very policies his father was actively pushing on Americans who had no choice but to send their children to public school. In fact, in a now-deleted (but archived) Twitter exchange, Feigl-Ding’s wife, Dr. Andrea Feigl, told Twitter user Tanja Maier that their family’s only reason for moving to Austria was to facilitate in-person socialization and learning for their son– the exact luxury her husband advocated against giving to other children.
“We moved here from the U.S. since schools have been closed since Mar. 17 in our district,” Feigl tweeted. “Despite being an epidemiologist, let me tell you the downside of abhorrent/non-existent distance learning and social isolation for [primary] school kids far outweighs impact by covid via open schools.” (RELATED: Hide Yo’ Kids, Hide Yo’ Wife – The Dem-Fueled Crime Wave Is About To Get Worse)
“After 3 months of not seeing friends, my son literally didn’t know how to socialize. We moved to a mountain retreat where he could play outdoors. Saved him and us,” Feigl admitted. “AND had we stayed, he would be in front of screens 7 hours per day minimum. So grateful he can [go to] school here. But that’s my bias ;),” she added.
Feigl also praised Austria’s pandemic response and assured Maier that lockdowns in Austria wouldn’t be nearly as severe as in America. “Austria seems more organized than U.S. and lockdown in Austria was and would be more shortlived,” she tweeted.
The Feigl-Dings: CLOSE YOUR SCHOOLS! (We’ve escaped to Austria with our son in an open one…)https://t.co/cB68SPV8RQ pic.twitter.com/3FXeX5nONk
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) March 10, 2021
The policies, pushed by Democrats and their supporters (especially most major teachers unions), were responsible for the first-ever score drop in mathematics in NAEP history and reading scores dropping to their lowest since 1990, according to the Nation’s Report Card’s long-term trend assessment.
The NAEP started tracking learning at ages 9, 13, and 17 in the 1970s to gauge the academic performance of these students. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted this assessment for the NAEP to focus on the long-term trend for reading and mathematics among 9-year-old students who were typically in 4th grade during the 2020 and 2022 school years.
The five selected percentile levels are separated into three categories – the 10th and 25th percentiles are considered lower-performing, students in the 50th percentile are considered middle-performing, and the 75th and 90th percentiles are higher-performing. (RELATED: ANALYSIS: What Is It About Trump World’s 2024 Plans That Has The Left So Freaked Out?)
The study found that the reading and math scores among all percentile levels compared to 2020 were noticeably different, but the steepest drop came among the lowest performing students. A 9-year-old reading student in the 90th percentile in 2020 received a 267 reading score which declined by just two points in 2022, according to the study. Comparatively, students in the 10th percentile (the lowest level learner) received a score of 164 in 2020, which dropped drastically to 155 in 2022.
The math scores were worse.
The results underscore the widespread educational disruptions that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, lower-performing students were already experiencing declines. Since 2020, students at all levels are moving backward. https://t.co/xGFcxQmeDL
3/10 pic.twitter.com/4oeelPs4mD
— NAEP, The Nation’s Report Card (@NAEP_NCES) September 1, 2022
In 2020, the highest percentile learners received a 286 on the mathematics portion of the assessment, but in 2022 that score was down by a modest three points to 283, according to the NAEP. The Nation’s Report Card showed that the math scores for students in the lowest percentile were dismal, suffering a 12-point drop from 191 in 2021 to 178 in 2022.
The gap between higher and lower performers studied in the assessment was linked to greater access to resources for students considered to be higher performers. “Of the 70 percent of 9-year-olds who learned remotely during the 2020-21 school year, higher performers (those at or above the 75th percentile) had greater access to a desktop computer, laptop, or tablet all the time; a quiet place to work available some of the time; and a teacher available to help with mathematics or reading schoolwork every day or almost every day compared lower performers (those below the 25th percentile),” the NAEP reported.
American children whose parents couldn’t afford to move them out of Democrat-area schools that mandated coronavirus restrictions experienced the most significant learning loss in U.S. history.