John Littel, Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources
by James C. Sherlock
To justify her insistence on keeping schools closed, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in February of 2021, “kids are resilient and kids will recover.”
She brought that same message to Virginia.
In one of the strangest choices in Virginia political history, Terry McAuliffe brought Weingarten to Virginia to campaign with him on the last weekend of his losing gubernatorial campaign.
Thus sealing his defeat.
It turns out, as it was always going to, that you can’t keep kids out of school for up to a year and a quarter, homebound, and expect all of them to “recover.”
I will call here those in K-12 during COVID school shutdowns Generation COVID (Gen C).
I wrote the other day of an estimate by a renowned educational economist that the 1.2 million Gen C kids in Virginia public schools would lose several hundred billion dollars in lifetime earnings because of un-repaired damages to their learning of all types.
His critics here argued into the night about study methodology, but none denied costs at some level would be there. They did not offer their own estimates.
John Littel, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, has the job of preparing his agencies for the lifetime social costs of those children. Continue reading
