AS USUAL, IT'S ALL OUR FAULT (EVEN THOUGH IT ISN'T)

Jake Tapper is righteously indignant:

Jake Tapper: "I have to say I'm surprised that there hasn't been a national conversation about the damage done to kids because of these school closures" pic.twitter.com/JHdrIQElbY

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) October 22, 2022

Tapper adds, "and not with a blame game" -- but you know a blame game is precisely what he wants. Politically, he's a moderate, but his sociocultural cohort is upscale whites who lean more or less liberal. He wants to blame them, because years of ref-working by conservatives has taught liberal media journalists to hate their own kind.

Tapper is responding, of course, to today's headlines. From The New York Times:

Math Scores Fell in Nearly Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam

The results, from what is known as the nation’s report card, offer the most definitive picture yet of the pandemic’s devastating impact on students.

U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic’s impact on millions of schoolchildren.

There's something shocking about the word "indictment" in this context. This was a virus, for crissake. But it's obvious that elitist semi-liberals don't want to be told that something terrible emerged from amoral nature and severely damaged us. That's not good enough. Someone ought to be indicted. Someone must be to blame.

This would be justified if the elected officials who have smugly told us for the past two years that they handled the pandemic correctly, by choosing FREEDOM!!!, turned out to be right and had the least educational disruption. But that wasn't the case:

The picture was mixed, and performance varied by grade level and subject matter in ways that were not always clear cut.

For example, Texas, where many schools opened sooner, held steady in reading but posted declines similar to national averages in math.

In California, which stood out for its caution in reopening schools, scores declined slightly less than national averages in several categories — about in line with Florida, which was a leader in opening schools sooner. Los Angeles stayed closed longer than almost anywhere else in the country, according to data by Burbio, a school tracking site, yet it was the only place to show significant gains in eighth-grade reading....

In one bright spot, most big city school districts, including New York City, Dallas and Miami-Dade, held steady in reading.

Regarding Los Angeles, The Wall Street Journal adds:

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said factors including strong attendance for online courses and summer classes contributed to improved reading scores there.

But we all know the preferred narrative of the mainstream media (which is all but indistinguishable from the preferred narrative of the right-wing media): Liberals obsessed with social engineering did severe damage to children. But the damage was in places with long periods of remote learning and short periods of remote learning. The damge to reading scores looked a lot like a pre-pandemic decline:

... reading was not spared, and in both grades, more than half the states saw significant declines. In 2019, reading scores had also declined in many states.

Much easier to boil the story down to the headline: It's all our fault, as usual.