US schools locked down for two months in in 2020. There was remote teaching after that. By fall of 2021 many schools were already back to in-school teaching. And by fall 2022 they were back to in-class teaching. So it is a high bar to show that varying levels of 'lockdowns' alone was such a major disruption that caused years of damage to children's ability to learn.
Even the Washington Post article that you posted does not cite lockdowns as the cause. You cannot attribute the cause to something just because you don't like it. You have to actually show that it was lockdowns that were the cause. Pointing to lower standardized test scores years after there have any lockdowns or restrictions is not evidence. It is a complex issue.
Or you post trash like Reason. Which claims that lockdowns caused harms, but cite a study that did not mention lockdowns a single time, or mention school closures.
What the evidence shows is that there is mixed results. Some students did better and some did worse. These articles don't even make an attempt to correlate places that had poor test results with places that had longer or shorter lockdowns.
The Washington Post article cites chronic absenteeism as a problem with school test scores.
This article shows that there was little difference in absenteeism in long lockdown locations and short lockdown locations (a difference of 28% vs. 25%):
A Crisis of School Absences
Even the length of school closures during the pandemic was not a particularly useful predictor of absenteeism. On average, districts that were closed longest have experienced similar increases as those that opened sooner.
Denmark, often cited for a place that didn't lockdown schools, also saw large increases in school absences after re-opening
Sweden reading skills fell in 2021 despite decision to keep schools open
Ontario saw some schools with improvements in scores and some schools decline in scores, but overall more improvements than losses
In the UK: https://labourhub.org.uk/2024/08/27/how-damaging-were-covid-lockdowns-to-childrens-education/
Last week’s GCSE results and A-level results the week before were higher than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic began.
And it makes the most important point:
It seems implausible that any study can isolate and quantify the direct cause and effect of a single measure such as lockdown from this melting pot of problems. The harm caused directly by Covid measures does not have much evidence to support the catastrophic headlines we’ve seen over the years. However, the evidence is steadily accumulating that Covid in children is not as benign as many implied. Several other recent studies have linked Covid to cognitive impairment and mental health conditions. Yale in the US has published a detailed paper on the mechanisms by which Covid can interfere with the immune system.
It is foolish to suggest that lockdowns alone caused devastating harm, while ignoring the impacts of living through a global pandemic, being sick regularly, the impacts of infection and long COVID, the loss of caregivers, etc. And it doesn't take into account the alternative. The harms that would have been caused without mitigations. Even in US states that proclaimed they kept schools open, they had to close schools, not because of oppressive governments and selfish teachers unions, but because the virus forced them to close schools.
