America's Talking - Episode 62: Pandemic-era school shutdowns caused decades of student learning loss, federal report shows

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Join The Center Square's Executive Editor Dan McCaleb & D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper as they discuss: Pandemic-era school shutdowns caused decades of student learning loss, federal report shows. Biden calls Trump and 'Maga Republicans' a threat to democracy. Union deletes document after report shows taxpayer-funded collusion with Biden administration. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello everyone and welcome to the America in Focus podcast, powered by the Center Square. American Focus is a production of America's Talking Network. I'm Dan McAulip, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Our mission is to fund high-quality public interest journalism that promotes accountability and fiscal responsibility in government. To support great podcasts like this one, please donate by clicking the link in the show description. Joining me again today is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief,

How are you, Casey? Doing good, Dan. How are you? Doing all right. September already. We are recording this podcast on Friday, September 2nd. Casey, I don't want to spend too much time with it because there's really not much news there. But last night, President Joe Biden gave a politically charged speech where he said former President Donald Trump and his supporters are a threat to American democracy. What did you make of the speech?

Yeah, it was just a really interesting speech all around. It's definitely going to me in the news for days to come. I don't know if you've seen just some of the imagery. The photographs of the speech have already become really iconic, especially the ones where Biden looks particularly angry. And there's this red, you know, like Star Wars Emperor background behind him, the black and the red glowing lights. And then there's like two, what appears to be like two distant soldiers behind it.

It's kind of like a movie said. It's, you know, for the press team, I'm not sure really if that was the best optics for them to put together. But as far as the language of the speech, this echoes what Biden has said in recent days about ultra MAGA. That's his quote, ultra MAGA Republicans. He's really doubling down on attacking them. I think, you know, this may, I think it's in a way this feels kind of out of the blue, but just to quickly hit on the political angle, what I think this is is Democrats were losing big economy politically. If the conversation kept being about the economy, they were in trouble.

But now with this raid of, you know, the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, the conversation is shifted. And some ways it rallies Trump's base, but at the same time it can be good for Democrats because it changes the conversation off the economy. So Biden, I think, is doubling down on this. It's the soul of the nation versus the fascist Trump. That's kind of the way he would probably summarize it in one Senate. So, you know, it's America versus fascism. That's what he wants it to be. And you're right.

It is a political speech. This was geared 100% towards the minimum. midterm elections because of the economy, because of 40-year high inflation, because of gas prices, you're right. Pemic rats are trying to change the message just two months out from the midterms, where Republicans very well could retake control of Congress. There was no policy messages discussed last night. It was all about pointing his finger at Trump and Trump supporters.

and trying to change the conversation. Yeah, I think you're right. And it's kind of a lot of backlash already. It has unified a lot of Republicans saying you went way too far. The glowing red background and the angry looks don't help. But it just seemed, it did feel to a lot of people like a really divisive speech. You know, you can call, you know, MAGA Trump supporters. But I think it was 74 million Americans voted for Trump in the last election.

So why don't we move on and talk about some real news? Sure. Casey, this week yesterday, as a matter of fact, Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education released a report about learning loss. We talked about learning loss during the pandemic when schools were shut down. Kids were forced to go to remote learning for months and months on end. Of course, some students didn't participate in remote learning. What does this new data from the Department of Education tell us? Yeah, it really gives us some hard data into what a lot of people suspected what happened with what was really like an untested experiment of just shutting down schools for, especially for young kids because of COVID. And there's a lot of controversy about the way the media that covered this, you know, blaming the pandemic itself versus blaming the shutdowns.

But what the data shows from the Department of Education, they released it this week, showed that because of these pandemic era shutdowns of schools of this remote learning, that average scores for nine-year-old students declined five points in 2022 and seven points in mathematics compared to 2020, which is really significant. It's actually the largest average score decline in reading since 1990. So over two decades, and it's the first time ever the mass scores have gone down. And, you know, the other thing is interesting is this hit,

minority students particularly hard. There's a 13 point decrease among black students compared to five point decrease among white students resulting in a widening of the what, this is me quoting, widening of the white black score gap from 25 points in 2020 to 33 points in 2022. That's from the Department of Education report. So this set, you know, set national learning standards back at historic levels and definitely disproportionately hit young black students. And, you know, I, there's a, I've given this, shared this example before, but there's a couple of young guys, young boys in D.C. that I've

talked to a lot and kind of friendship and even mentored. And I just remember talking to them during the pandemic about school. I'm always asking about school. And they just said that, you know, it's all online. And half the time their laptop is broken or they lost their charger or they, you know, they just kind of lay in bed and they set the computer. up and they lay on their pillow and like watch class and of course fall asleep. So because they can sleep in class, they stay up all night playing video games. And all of this is like very normal 10 or 12 year old boy behavior. Right. I mean, anyone who's known a 10 year old boy knows this is what they're like. So it shouldn't be a surprise that remote learning was really hard for little kids. But now

all these, you know, what was always hypothesis has now been shown in this hard data and it's not good. Most students across the country are either back in school or will be back in school. next week. It's Labor Day weekend, by the way. Everybody enjoy the three-day holiday. All signs are that this is going to be a much more normal school year than the last two and a half years were. So is it possible that schools and students can make up that learning loss this school year? I don't think it's possible. Yeah, not in this school year. I don't think they, I think they will make it up eventually. But what you see from the scores is there's a steady improvement year over year. And so education improvements are built to the incremental gradual level year over year and students improve that way.

But when you see such a big drop like this, I mean, it's going to take, I think, years to recover from this. And then, you know, while future students may kind of future nine-year-olds may do much better and kind of replace these scores somewhat quickly, what about this batch of nine-year-olds who are going to become, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, are we going to have this strata, you know, two or three year strata of kids who are just really developmentally behind? In all developmental years, you know, a 15-year-old who has had to work remote, you know, for two years might do okay. But, you know, a six-year-old, those are really fundamental developmental years. And a lot of studies show, like, if you don't learn to read by a certain age, you're probably not going to learn to read. Or if you don't

get a certain level of proficiency in certain skills by a certain age, it's probably not going to happen. So those are the kids probably who are going to see the most difficulty, even if the test scores in a few years show that nine-year-olds are doing much better in a couple years. It's really sad. This is just further confirmation, excuse me, that COVID-19 related shutdowns, particularly when it comes to schools, were an abject failure. Unfortunately, Not everywhere, but in many cases, teachers' unions were pushing hard against returning to normal at schools. And it just failed, it failed our nation's students. Yeah.

And I wrote about, I mean, just a quick shout out, you know, we wrote about at the Sinus Square.com, how teachers unions, which gave millions of dollars to Democrats, actually had a lot of influence within the federal agencies that made school guidance, which was really controversial when that news broke at the time, that these teacher unions, I donated millions and millions of dollars were in the decision-making process for when kids went back to school and teachers' unions, by and large, especially earlier in the pandemic, pushed for keeping schools closed. So I guess those millions paid off. Sticking with the subject of unions, Casey, you broke a story last month, how the Biden administration was working with federal public unions to help them meet their roles. you broke that story by finding a news release on a large federal public employee union's website

where they were praising and thanking President Biden and his administration for helping them recruit new members, which of course means that beefs up their finances because union members have to pay union news. Well, this week you discovered that that news release that you found that helped you break that story was taken down off the website. That's right. That's right. I think we got in some people's heads a little bit and maybe exposed something that people didn't want to be exposed. But, you know, it's no secret that Biden has been really friendly to unions.

I mean, that's not breaking news at all. And it's not a surprise either that he's tried to help unions in some kind of general way. He's promised to do that on the campaign trail. But what's interesting here is that the Office of Personal Management, which is a wholly taxpayer-funded federal agency that is kind of like the HR of the federal government in a way. They have been at the specific request of public labor unions. They have altered federal databases of employees to make them much easier for unions to access and target individuals to know, like, their names. And if they're in a union and to be able to search that, you know, just to give you a perspective on how significant this is, there's a little over 100,000 unions or union members in the union that's referenced here.

that it's like a national federation of federal employees. That's, you know, the relevant union. They have about 100,000 members a little more than that. And they were boasting on their website that what the Biden administration had done to change this database could open up another 300,000 workers for them. So theoretically, they could, you know, triple or, you know, be 400,000 if they got all these people from 100,000. So this is not just a marginal increase and they didn't open up a few hundred people for them

to reach out to. This is like a order, you know, this is hundreds of thousands more workers that they could target, that they could aggressively recruit. And as you said, you know, we, we published this. And then a few days later, I was looking into it again. And they took the website down. You go to the link. It says 404. And so, you know, you could make a lot of speculations. Did they get in trouble? Was this something? Did they go too far? Did the Biden? You know, I reached out to the union group and asked them to the Biden administration. should ask you to take this down. They didn't respond to me.

I think they felt like they had already said too much. I don't know. But I'll read this quote from Max Nelson from the Freedom Foundation, which is a labor group. He kind of, he puts it well as to what may have happened here. He said, it's interesting that neither the federal government nor the other major federal employee unions boasted about how the Office of Personnel Management was working with him to increase the unionization of federal employees.

He said the fact that NFFE, which is a union, pulled down its pressure. release on the subject after it started getting attention suggests they spoke out of turn and exposed behind the scenes coordination that those involved thought best left out of the public eye. So, you know, we don't know for sure. And I want to make clear, we don't actually know for sure. They haven't been talking to us. But I think that Max has a really good hypothesis here that maybe they went a little too far and got caught with their hand in the federal cookie jar on this one. Yeah, you use the term aggressively recruit. And that's what unions do. You could even go farther that in some instances, unions use bullying tactics to try and get

to beef up their ranks, to beef up their membership, to beef up the amount of the number of people paying dues to the unions. Unions then use that money politically, as you mentioned, on the school remote learning subject and teachers unions. Teachers unions donated. millions of dollars to President Biden's campaign. They generally support Democrats, and they'll do anything they can to grow their ranks. Yeah, it's definitely a political issue, too. And that raises even more of the conflict of interest. I mean, not to say that this particular NFFA union gave, you know, a bunch of money to Biden.

But just as a general way, like these unions do give a lot of money to Democrats. And for example, just to, you know, put a finer point on it, unions, labor organizations, gave over $27 million in support of Biden's reelection effort in 2020. And they gave less than $1 million to Trump's reelection. So it's 27 to 1 in support of Biden. And so then when you see that, and then you see Biden turnaround and using, and this is the other thing is this taxpayer funded. This isn't just him giving a speech or rallying unions or rallying his base.

Like there are, there are federal employees working, being paid salaries by the taxpayer to change this database with the explicit stated purpose of helping unions grow their membership. And as a result, grow their budgets. So, I mean, it's a very good job. A lot of money they have to donate to politicians. Right. Exactly.

So pretty interesting story. I think we're following up, seeing what lawmakers have to say on this in the next week or two. Also, still in the news, President Biden's decision. to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt for millions of Americans, up to $20,000 per individual for those who received Pell grants, but also pausing again the timeframe when student loan borrowers need to start repaying the rest of their debt that hasn't been canceled by President Biden. New news this week from you about the cost of that. Talk to us about that. That's right. Dan, I just want to personally thank you again for helping pay off my wife's student loans. It's incredibly, incredibly generous of you. It's one of the nicest things you've ever done for me, Dan.

You're welcome, Casey. Yeah, yeah. Kind of tongue and cheek about something a lot of people are actually kind of mad about, which is we work a blue collar job or couldn't afford to go to college or couldn't afford to send your kids to college or anything like that. You're still on the hook for paying a philosophy major student loan debt off. But the other part of this has been less talked about this is just the cost of the delay. So in 2020, former President Trump during COVID did a federal delay on repaying student loans. And he said, hey, COVID's out of control. People, you know, aren't able to work.

We're just going to delay for a few months when people have to repay their student loans. A few months went by, COVID was still around, said delayed it again. And they actually, you know, kept delaying it through the end of, Trump's administration, the beginning of Biden, it's been delayed six or seven times now, just a few months at a time. And when Biden announced this latest student loan, $10,000 cancellation, $20,000 for Pell Grants, he called, he said there would be, quote, like one final, he called it like the final delay through the end of this year.

So January 1st, on those students who are repaying, we'll have to start actually making payments at the beginning of the next year, assuming it doesn't delay it again. And I don't think he will because he did call it one final delay. But the thing that's the election is in November. So there's no answer. Well, yes, that's one way to look at it for sure. But the committee for responsible federal budget, which is a really good budget group, they looked at the cost of these extensions in particular.

I said this latest one cost $20 billion, added $20 billion to the deficit. And overall, all these delays and repayment have cost to federal government. $155 billion. I'll just read this quote from the group. It said the repayment pause has now been extended seven times lasting 33 months, bringing the total cost $155 billion. Nearly every borough has benefited from interest cancellation during the current repayment moratorium. But it causes the benefits uneven and extremely regressive. So basically the lost interest on this is a big cost. And what's What's been really interesting about this is that actually people like doctors and dentists have been the ones to benefit the most. It's those who have the highest amount of student

loan debt but aren't quite making a lot of money yet. So you can imagine like a doctor who's only been out for like one year or in residency or something has a lot of debt but not making enough to not qualify and is still getting all the delays. So doctors, Dennis, they are the ones benefiting the most from these deferments, kind of a little known fact. about the cost and who's benefiting from what has become kind of a normal federal delay policy. Right. A lot of people think, too, that this student loan debt cancellation, the timing of it, and the pausing of repayment plans coming so close to the November midterm was also political. It seems like Biden is getting accused of doing a lot of political stuff to try and turn the tide

heading into the November midterms. Yeah, I think he fills that pressure. You're right. Also this week, Casey, you wrote a story about the more pressure on the FBI and its inspector general, which is supposed to be an independent agency from the FBI, sort of an oversight agency of the FBI. but yes, U.S. representative Jim Dojorn of Ohio called the inspector general's office out. What was that about? Yeah, this is interesting. You gave a good explanation of what an inspector general is.

I mean, all these federal agencies are doing so much. But to help oversee him, Congress created inspector generals for all these different agencies. So there is an agency whose only job is to monitor, oversee, and hold accountable the agency they're assigned to. So, of course, Department of Justice has their own Inspector General Office. It's run by Michael Horowitz, which may be a familiar name to some people. But it seems that there may have been a kind of crossing of boundaries. And it's bad timing for the FBI, of course. They've been under a lot of fire.

They upset a lot of people with how they handled the Clinton investigation and right before the election. And then, of course, these latest Trump raids and the questions over politicization there. This is a couple of examples. So this is bad timing. But Jordan sent a letter to the, you know, pointing out that the IG may have crossed lines because they actually have now helped the FBI in the investigation of a Republican congressman. So Rep. Scott Perry is a Republican from Pennsylvania, you know, reportedly had his phone seized by the FBI. And according to this letter, the inspector general helped the FBI do a forensic examination of the phone.

which may seem like a kind of, okay, you know, what's the big deal? But I think it just has to stress how unusual this is for an IG to get involved in the affairs of the agency they're overseeing. I mean, this would be like the inspector general for the EPA helping the EPA, you know, do some kind of like help them get a regulation push through that they're trying to, that's really important to me. It would just be odd. It's, you know, it's just not the role of the IG.

and especially with the way a lot of Republicans are saying they're being unfairly targeted by the FBI. It's just not a good look right now. And this is a quote from the letter. It says, your decision to assist the FBI relating to the seizure of a member of Congress's phone creates a serious conflict of interest for the OIG, that's the Inspector General, in reviewing the department's actions. And it goes on just to say that basically, how can you know, how can you help an agency with their investigations when you're supposed to be holding them? accountable. So that's be an interesting story to follow, but yeah, go ahead. As you said, Republicans are accusing FBI of becoming a political law enforcement agency

and only targeting Republicans in these investigations. Of course, the rate of Trump's home in Mara Lago, the search warrant there, the seizure of this Pennsylvania congressman's cell phone. The Inspector General is supposed to take those complaints and look in to and see if, in fact, there's any truth to that. But now that it's involved in itself in one of those investigations, that's a serious conflict of interest. Yeah. And it's just really odd. I mean, I can't stress just how this is like just very odd thing to do. I've never seen anything like this. And the other question at which Jordan raises is why can't the FBI do its own like forensic? The FBI is more than capable of examining cell phones. I mean, it's kind of what they do. So why did they bring the IG in? It just seems a little

buddy-buddy for the guy that's supposed to be overseeing you. Speaking of how politics seems to be getting involved in everything, Casey, you wrote a story this week about a new poll that shows that more Americans expect the beefed-up IRS. Remember, part of the Inflation Reduction Act gave billions, tens of billions of dollars of the FBI to hire something like 85,000, or excuse me, the IRS to hire something like 85,000 more auditors to go after tax cheats. More Americans, this poll showed, expect the beef up IRS to target their political opponents. Tell us all this.

Yeah, that's right, Dan. I think it's 87,000 new IRS agents is really weighing lines on the minds of a lot of Americans. Just as a preface to this, we've talked about this multiple times. But you may say, I didn't cheat on my taxes, I have nothing to worry about. But as we said, if you get audited, even if you're innocent, it's a huge headache. Even if you're innocent, you didn't keep all the right documents. You could be in trouble for that. You might have to hire a lawyer.

There's a lot of administrative costs getting audited, even if you are innocent. But this new poll from Convention of States Action, along with the Trafalgar Group, found that 52% of voters say that all these new IRS agents will be used to audit middle class Americans, low-income earners and small businesses, or just to target the political opponents of those in power. And so that's pretty interesting. When over half the country doesn't buy the whole, we're just going to audit the rich argument.

Although I don't hear Democrats really making that argument too much anymore. They're just trying to move on. Overall, 33% of those surveyed said that the IRS will be used to audit middle-class Americans and small businesses, while only 31% said that we used to audit wealthy Americans of large corporations, and then 15.9% said it would be to target the political opponents of those in power. So you might hear target the political opponents to those in power. It's said, oh, here we go with these conspiracies again.

But, you know, this happened and not to say that some of it maybe isn't a conspiracy, but this did happen with the lowest learner scandal just, you know, about a decade ago during the Obama administration, when it was shown that the IRS was using keyword searches to identify conservative groups and disproportionately, you know, kind of enforce tax laws against them. So it's happened before, you know, even in just the last few years. And so I think some of the distrust of the IRS

is not ill-placed when you consider what has recently happened. And it's just, all the experts I've talked to say that when it comes to auditing and really raising money, the small businesses is going to be a big target because that's where the IRS sees so much of the money is to be had. It's by going after small businesses. It's not just, you know, a handful of billionaires who actually have whole legal teams to very well hide their taxes in all kinds of accounts and do things like that.

It's just the regular small businesses that are going to be in the crosshairs of this new policy. Everything's become politicized nowadays. Casey and America's Americans are seeing that. I think that's what this poll shows. But that is all the time we have this week. A reminder to our listeners. You can find all of the Center Squares. Great podcast in America's Talking.com. Take a look. Please subscribe. There is no cost. This has been the America in Focus podcast. Happy Labor Day weekend to everybody for Casey Harper. I'm Dan McAulve. We'll talk to you next week.