Just after President-elect Donald Trump asked Jay Bhattacharya to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), information about U.S. student performance on international tests in math and science became available. The report provides strong evidence that school closures, masking, and social distancing had a devastating impact on schoolchildren during the pandemic, just as Bhattacharya had foreseen.
When schools closed, Dr. Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, opposed prolonged lockdowns and took the lead in preparing the Great Barrington Declaration, which said school closures and other restrictions would do more harm than good. Governments should focus instead on the medical well-being of the elderly and those with co-morbidities, the declaration argued.
Neither Bhattacharya’s prophecy nor the Declaration were well received. Not even Cassandra’s forecast of Troy’s fate evoked attacks more vicious than those directed toward Bhattacharya. The government’s chief infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, condemned the Declaration as “dangerous.” The NIH director said the signers of the Declaration were a “fringe component of epidemiology” outside the scientific “mainstream.” University experts across the country besmirched the professor’s reputation; Twitter banished both Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration. Apart from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the mainstream media ignored him.
Bhattacharya nonetheless made his case through outlets available to him. In 2021, I interviewed him on my podcast, the Education Exchange. He told listeners that there was “overwhelming evidence schools should open immediately, everywhere.” Schools had remained open in Sweden. Yet “no children died,” and they proved to be “inefficient spreaders” of the disease, he said. Teachers had lower Covid rates than adults in comparable professions. Ongoing closures would cause “incredible harm to children from not having school.” He also identified inequities. “Rich people can hire tutors to “augment learning” while “poor people cannot afford that.”
At the time Bhattacharya was still but a voice crying in the wilderness of vacant classrooms and barren streets. But the new survey, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey, or TIMSS, confirms the truth of his prophetic vision. Learning in the United States and Sweden shifted in opposite directions during the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2023 U.S. math performance nose-dived 18 points in 4th grade and 17 points in 8th grade. In Sweden, scores went up by nine points in 4th grade and by 14 points in 8th grade. In 2019, the United States led Sweden in math performance for both cohorts, but by 2023 it had fallen behind. Comparing the two countries, the total swing amounted to 27 points for the younger age group and 31 points for the older one—roughly a full year’s worth of learning. The price paid for the switch from in-person to online instruction turned out to be as dreadful as Bhattacharya had suggested.
The size of the leap off the math cliff by U.S. students exceeds that in nearly every other industrialized country. Only in Israel, Portugal, and Chile does the 8th grade drop exceed that of the United States. Across all industrialized countries in the survey, the average decline was just one point among 4th graders and five points among those in 8th grade. The U.S. drop was many times greater than those averages.
These declines were not inevitable. The wide disparities between learning trends in Sweden and the United States underline the education cost our country paid when elected officials succumbed to the dictates of Dr. Fauci and his fellow public health officers.
