'Generation COVID' bears witness to devastating toll of school closings



Jennifer Sey is an ex-gymnast, but she spent years swimming against the tide.

The former national champion once blew the whistle on abuse within the sport, a position she says drew plenty of internal fire. Powerful gymnastic voices dubbed her a “grifter and a liar,” Sey recalls to Align, long before the general public learned of horrifying cases like convicted predator Larry Nassar.

'I think there are a lot of young people who look at that time and see the course of their lives were altered forever. Democrats did that.'

She recalls receiving threatening voicemails at work from the head of USA Gymnastics, too.

“The sporting community really attacked me, teammates [did, too] … even the head of Gymnastics Australia tried to take me down,” Sey recalls of abuses chronicled in her memoir, “Chalked Up.”

The experience “strengthened my resolve,” she says.

From Levis exec to 'radical'

  Jennifer Sey

Years later, Sey sat in a comfortable position as a Levi’s executive when another injustice forced her to speak out. She watched with alarm as leaders kept kids locked out of school during the COVID-19 pandemic.

That stance eventually forced her exit from Levi’s corporate team and branded her a radical in the eyes of some pandemic hardliners. Years later, Sey’s position has been more than vindicated. Legacy media outlets confirm the damage done to students who couldn’t participate in school during the pandemic.

The cost of quarantine

Except she’s not willing to forgive and forget. She’s the driving force behind an upcoming documentary “Generation COVID,” focused on the innocents caught in the bureaucratic crossfire.

The film lets children share what they endured during the pandemic. Suicide attempts. Lost collegiate scholarships. Drug overdoses. Scholastic declines. Weight gain. Loneliness.

“It’s heartbreaking and devastating,” she says of those on-camera revelations. “I can’t tell you how many of the interviews I ended up crying and needed to collect myself.”

Sey’s children suffered, too.

“It’s why we moved to Colorado from San Francisco,” she says, recalling how one of her children went from being a boisterous kid to one who was “distant and lethargic.”

“I want him to establish a love of learning ... it broke my heart,” she says.

Rewriting history

She’s furious to see some who helped shutter schools attempt to rewrite history on the subject, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

“They’re such liars ... it’s all so well-documented,” she says. “How do they have the gall to lie about their role?”

“Nobody was fighting for the children,” she adds.

“Generation COVID” features sizable input from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, now the Director of the National Institutes of Health. The film also eschews partisan politics, featuring voices across the political spectrum with a focus on the facts.

“It’s not at all meant to be political but document what happened and hear from the kids directly,” he says.

Distributor wanted

The film still needs a distributor, a complication that plays into our political divide.

“Right-wing conservative platforms talked about COVID for a while, but it’s played out. Mainstream left-leaning platforms aren’t ready for this ... it puts us in a difficult spot,” she says.

The film’s message may be more relevant than many realize. She name-checks bird flu woes and housing “migrants” in public schools as examples of modern-day school concerns.

“The ‘Closed Schools’ [approach] is now a tool in the tool box. We close them at the bat of an eye,” she says. “There’s a portion of the left and the community that says if we just did it better and locked down harder, it would have worked out better.”

Sey acknowledges one political fallout from the lockdowns — a higher number of young voters flocked to President Donald Trump in the last election. She says one of the young men featured in “Generation COVID” “will not forgive and forget” how the lockdowns impacted his life, including extreme weight gain and the possible loss of a football scholarship.

He's not alone.

“I think there are a lot of young people who look at that time and see the course of their lives were altered forever. Democrats did that,” she says.

Built for the fight

Sey isn’t done fighting. Last year, she created the XX-XY Athletics brand, dedicated to defending women’s sports. The case of trans swimmer Lia Thomas versus Riley Gaines made national headlines in recent years and epitomizes Sey's battle.

She’s pleased by President Trump’s executive orders protecting women’s sports but understands more work needs to be done. Consider the recent case of Natalie Daniels, a five-time marathon winner and mom who got kicked out of her running club on the dawn of the Boston Marathon for speaking out against trans women in women’s sports.

“She’s the kindest, sweetest, most gentle human,” Sey says of Daniels, who was targeted by activists who Sey says tried to track her whereabouts during the imbroglio. “It’s a reminder of how far we have to go … she was bullied to the point of almost retracting her comments.”

“That’s what we’re up against. I’m not gonna let an unhinged, screaming minority intimidate me,” she says. “Eighty percent of Americans agree [with me].”

Few fights are harder than what Sey already endured as a young athlete.

“The physical pain and suffering inflicted on me, eating 300 calories and working out eight hours a day ... call me any names you want, I can take it,” she says. “Nothing will ever be that hard.”

American kids' worsening reading skills signal continued fallout from school closures



The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of American students' knowledge and capability in math, reading, science, and writing — released its 2024 assessment, also called the "Nation's Report Card," on Wednesday. The results were bleak.

Last year, the average reading score for both fourth- and eighth-grade students nationwide was two points lower than in 2022 and five points lower than the score for 2019.

According to the NAEP report card that relies on an assessment of hundreds of thousands of kids, the 2024 reading scores for fourth-grade students were lower at four of the five selected percentiles — namely the 10th, 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles — compared to 2022 percentile scores. When it came to eighth-grade students, their grades were lower at the 10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles compared to scores in 2022.

Only 38% of eighth-grade students demonstrated "solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter." When factoring in grade eight students who also scored at a basic reading level, the number was 67%, which the Wall Street Journal indicated is the lowest share since testing began in 1992.

Chalkbeat noted that all of the kids who took the exam last year had some of their education impacted by the pandemic — a period during which students were kept out of classrooms at the urging of teachers' unions in what became the longest interruption in schooling since formal education became the norm.

The National Education Union, one of the guilty parties, called for all schools to be shut down in spring of 2020, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had exempted them. The union's president, Becky Pringle, reportedly made over $500,000 while fighting to keep schools closed between September 2020 and August 2021.

Blaze News previously reported that American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten, also instrumental in keeping kids out of the classroom, called the first Trump administration's proposal to reopen in-person learning in 2020 "reckless" and "cruel." While the AFT resisted a return to working in schools, which had altogether received $190 billion in COVID-19 relief money, union affiliates joined in, staging sick-outs, which were in some cases illegal.

'This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.'

It was clear early on in the pandemic that the school closures were going to adversely impact generations of kids.

The University of Toronto released a report in July 2021 acknowledging that "available evidence shows that school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic could have lasting effects on educational outcomes and widen achievement gaps."

German researchers determined in a 2021 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that student achievement was negatively impacted by school closures, especially among younger students and students from poor families.

In addition to derailing young Americans' academics, the school closures also prompted spikes in mental illness, suicide, obesity, and diminished immune systems.

"The news is not good," Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said Tuesday. "Student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, reading scores continue to decline, and our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels."

'This is clearly a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies.'

Carr suggested that the decline in average reading ability could not "be blamed solely on the pandemic" but admitted that there has been a "widening achievement gap in this country, and it has worsened since the pandemic."

"Student joy for reading is declining. We know that teachers are not asking as much for essay responses to questions," Carr reportedly said when identifying other contributing factors, which included absenteeism. "Students are also reading on devices. They're not reading the kind of passages on devices that maybe you and I did years ago."

Martin West, vice chair of the NAEP governing board and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Chalkbeat, "We have a larger-than-in-recent-memory share of American students who are failing to demonstrate even partial mastery of the types of skills educators have defined as important."

"That doesn't bode well for their futures or for our collective futures," said West.

"I don't know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they're bad," Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research, told the Washington Post. "I don't think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine."

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement, "When we fail our children, we fail our nation's future. Today's NAEP scores continue the concerning trend of declining performance nationwide. This is clearly a reflection of the education bureaucracy continuing to focus on woke policies rather than helping students learn and grow."

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New York Times admits the truth about COVID school closures and the long-term harms of fear-based decision-making



The New York Times is admitting to the extensive, long-term damage of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns on schoolchildren and their learning.

Four years after politicians shut down schools, the New York Times published a new analysis on Monday admitting there is "broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts" that school closures significantly harmed children despite not stopping the spread of COVID-19.

Relying on the most recent data about pandemic learning loss, the Times drew several conclusions about why school closures were bad policy.

First, the Times found that students who were kept out of school longer — relegated to remote or hybrid "learning" — fell behind further academically than students who returned to the classroom earlier. Those academic losses have been near-impossible to overcome.

From the Times:

The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.

Second, the so-called "newspaper of record" found that students in lower socio-economic situations experienced steeper learning losses than students from more affluent backgrounds.

"That is notable because poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer," the Times reported, explaining that the country's largest poor school districts are located in Democrat-controlled cities that used heavy-handed approaches to the pandemic.

Third, the Times found that short-term school closures did not exempt students from learning loss — and other significant problems.

"Many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups," the Times reported. "These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education."

The kicker is that politicians subjected students to these harms despite a clear lack of evidence proving that school closures slowed the spread of COVID-19.

Unfortunately, the Times only danced around the correct retrospective conclusion about school lockdowns.

"Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year," the newspaper stated.

Given the data presented in the article, what that really means is: Republican-controlled states generally handled the pandemic correctly by limiting closures, while Democrat-controlled states — influenced by the "experts," teachers unions, and corporate media — dropped the ball.

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