“Teachers’ unions fought to keep too many American schools closed long after we began to see overwhelming evidence of the damage it inflicted on our children in learning loss and mental and emotional well-being,” said Freedom Foundation CEO Aaron Withe.

“Their cheap, political gamesmanship caused more harm than any perceived threat from COVID and came at a great cost to our children’s future and everyone, from union bosses, to medical bureaucrats, to school board members across the country, need to be held responsible.”

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, regarded as the gold standard of testing throughout the K-12 system, released results revealing that reading and math performance among 9-year-olds dropped to levels not seen in 20 and 30 years.

“When the New York Times admits COVID school shutdowns resulted in decades of learning loss among American school children, it’s even worse than we thought,” continued Withe.

“Teachers’ unions held America’s children hostage so they could extract benefits they couldn’t get at a regular bargaining table.”

“Skipping to the front of the COVID vaccine line, increasing taxpayer spending for school infrastructure improvements and scrapping testing may have made the union bosses look pretty good to some of their members, but it came at a devastating cost to our nation’s school children.” “Now we can see why some teachers’ union leaders wanted to end testing during and after the pandemic. They overplayed their hand and America’s parents aren’t going to forget,” concluded Withe.