This is part of a series on intelligence and the decline of society. See this index.

In part 1 of the series, we discovered how falling intelligence results in an education system that cannot adequately educate kids. In this part, we will now look at the loss of learning that most kids experienced as a direct result of the interventions of early 2020.

Learning Loss

Not too long ago, the ACT released is 2023 results report, showing that the test scores have continued to plummet, as they have since 2020:

These are historic losses that began—as predicted—precisely when we shut down schools in a misguided attempt to avoid covid infections. But over on Twitter, Arijit Chakravarty is claiming that the massive learning loss that children have experienced since early 2020 was the result of cognitive damage from covid infections and not the official responses of governments and schools:

Feel free to click that photo and read the information he is citing. You can see where he says:

“Cognitive damage after Covid can happen to anyone, and is equivalent to about ten points off an IQ score for severe cases”

Wow, that sounds very serious. And it would be, if it were both true and applicable to the falling scores of the majority of children. As we will see, that isn’t likely.

Covid Interventions

“The important point is this- there is nothing in the concept of learning loss that can explain continued learning loss once in-person learning resumes. Learning loss is measured against what students would have learned if they were in person.” — Arijit Chakravarty, Twitter

In 2020 and 2021, many schools closed down for lengthy periods of time, fully and/or partially through remote learning. So when learning resumed, students returned defective—as much a full year behind—to schools where 90% of the teachers were barely qualified to do their duties even under ideal circumstances.

Many students with an IQ less than 100 (a majority of certain student groups, for example, minority children) needed to be held back a year, to repeat the previous year. But, no school curriculum changed. Students were not held back to repeat a year. Instead, they were dumped onto teachers who can barely do their jobs in ideal circumstances, let alone a school full of, now, special needs kids. What happens when you put kids into classrooms that are teaching materials that are above their abilities? They will fall further behind. Tada!

Now here is where it gets tricky. Very smart kids (IQ > 110) will be able to learn regardless of how good or bad the teachers or schools are. They may struggle for a bit, but quickly adapt to the loss of learning. But average and especially below-average kids will largely be unable to do this. So what we are going to find in future testing data is a bimodal split or a stretching out of a unimodal distribution, as the gap widens. Note that normalizing data will—by definition of what normalization is—hide this. This will make it trickier to spot, so in the next few years, look for media reports on the widening “equity gap” in school performance.

I’m going to guess that either Arijit does not have kids or he does, but they are all above-average IQ. Considering he is a biologist, mathematician, and works in pharma R&D (woah!), he is likely very smart and so are his *adaptable* children who relatively easily bounced back:

“So, once in-person learning resumed -by that definition- learning loss should have ended. Only it didn’t. Many different datasets from middle and high schoolers worldwide have shown that the rate at which children are falling behind is the same.” — Arijit Chakravarty, Twitter

Learning loss should not have ended, because the loss was never recognized in the first place. The underqualified bureaucratic drones cannot creatively adapt to changing situations. What we did is just widen the number of “underserved”—underperforming—communities.

The ACT is an achievement test. Falling ACT scores indicate falling achievement. The first-order cause of falling achievement is failing to learn a topic. Long covid is, at best, a second-order effect. Kids—especially those with lower intelligence—are failing to learn because they can’t make up the gap, which only widens. It will eventually bottom out and start going back up (as younger, less damaged kids replace the older, more damaged kids who age out of the system).

Long Covid didn’t cause entire Baltimore and Chicago schools to fail to graduate a single student student proficient in math. Extremely high per-student spending didn’t improve the situation, nor did black-only teachers. The first-order cause of poor student performance is the IQ of the students, which is very low in most inner city schools.

If the underqualified teachers of Chicago and Baltimore can’t fix their students, despite massive school budgets, how can other teachers fix the kids who were broken by lockdowns? It’s absurd to think that all kids—regardless of intelligence—would be resilient enough to recover from cancelled school and that going back to school would magically fix the error of closing schools in the first place. But this is what blankslatists believe.

Grades are—and have been—being inflated. Massive numbers of students should be held back a year (or two), but are not. Instead, they are all getting grades that are much higher than they should be and allowed to graduate with their higher IQ peers. But they fail the ACTs, because those can’t be faked. Knowing this full well, colleges and universities are aggressively reducing their reliance on SAT and ACT scores. This further hides the widening performance gap. The gap is hidden, not corrected, so it widens.

Covid and IQ

I didn’t expect scores to drop and then quickly recover, nor even for scores to plateau at new lows. This is true regardless of whether a child is in public, private, or a special needs school. My own experiences in each of these situations gave me some anecdotal insight into the learning process that I suspect others lack. In fact, the main reason private schools are so successful is because they select for high IQ (as we will see in part 3).

IQ and achievement scores correlate about 60-70%, so if Arijit is correct, then there will be a corresponding severe drop off on intelligence scores—which measure ability—that corresponds to the severe drop off in achievement—which measures learned skills—scores.  If cognitive function is impaired due to physical damages, IQ will fall.

The problem for Arijit is that IQ isn’t falling. If anything, a quick google search shows that it is rising slightly. Students retain the same inherent ability that they had before COVID. They are falling behind on *achievement*: the system—the environment—is failing them. They are not cognitively damaged.

Brain damage would necessarily show up in IQ results, and moreover because it would affect *everyone* (not just students), its effects should be stronger in adult IQ tests because Long Covid—like Covid itself—is more damaging to adults. If IQ scores do drop, but they don’t most strongly effect adults, then something is monkeying with the results.

Arijit’s hypothesis is falsified:

• SAT/ACT scores fall, but IQ scores rise, indicating that the failure is not cognitive, but one of achievement.
• Continuing falling scores were predicted from lack of reteaching the learning lost from lack of in-person school.

The Achievement Data

Now let’s look at the achievement data itself. The NWEA reports that:

“Significant achievement gaps persist at the end of 2022–23, and the average student will need the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.5 months in math. “

It has been years since the last lockdown, and students are still lagging months behind in achievement, even as damaged graduating students have been replaced by undamaged new students.

Notice that the lockdowns did not affect every cohort equally. New students are biasing the results positively, especially in reading. Notice how the older kids fell the farthest behind, as much as 9 months behind in math!

“ACT scores keep falling and I didn’t predict that, so it must be Long Covid”

The data is not scaled like you would expect if it was caused by cognitive damage. The achievement gap is significantly stratified by age, as you would expect if it was caused by lockdowns.

Remember above when I said that if it was caused by IQ, you’d see a widening of the achievement gap? Well, here you go. Notice that the Asian/White and Hispanic/Black gap in math has widened in correspondence with underlying population IQ.

“There is an obvious stairstep pattern across groups in the lighter magenta bars) and this continues to be true in 2022–23, which reinforces the widened disparities across groups.”

Yeah, no kidding. Who would have seen that coming?

“Those inequities were stark before the pandemic and have only widened dramatically over the last three years.”

But, you know, it’s definitely Long Covid causing those racial gaps to widen, definitely not IQ differences caused by truly terrible teaching.

Also, notice also how math scores (the most pure intelligence-based achievement) are exactly as predicted, but language development fell across all races, especially in the youngest cohort. Guess what also happened to stunt language development: masking and social isolation!

Covid infections follow illness curves, featuring multiple oscillating high and low periods, but the supposed cognitive decline caused by Long Covid is somehow completely lacking an inflection point that reflects when infections occurred over time?

The inflection point in the data was 2020, when lockdowns, masking, and social distancing occurred. Most kids did not get covid until much later with Omicron, and yet the drop-off in achievement was instantaneous with the loss of learning. There is simply no correlation with actual COVID infections in children in the ACT data. There is no reason to think that children would be, as a whole group, instantly and globally changed by covid irrespective of incidence of the disease.

In part three we will discuss some more random points in detail.