Newsom Rewrites Pandemic History
Authored by Leighton Woodhouse and Alex Gutentag via Public Substack,
This week California Governor Gavin Newsom blatantly lied about his record on Covid-19.
“I’m not consumed by what we did wrong,” Newsom said to Fox Los Angeles’ Elex Michaelson.
“I’m consumed a little bit more by what we did right… There’s no large state that outperformed California, one of the top performing states, in terms of health, wealth, and education.”
Newsom went on to say that California’s per capita Covid mortality was “substantially lower than places like Texas and Florida,” that the state’s economy fared better than that of other states, and that we saw less learning loss than Florida. All these statements are misleading at best. Newsom’s claims about California’s economy have already been debunked, and in age-adjusted Covid mortality, as many have pointed out, California and Florida fared about the same. What’s more, cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths have been higher in California than Florida since early 2020.
As for why schools were closed for so long, Newsom said it was because he gave school districts “local control.” Evidently, Newsom wants to claim both that he is not responsible for his own school policies, and that these policies were effective. Yet both of these claims are completely untrue, and Newsom’s failure on schools is a scandal of colossal proportions.
In 2020, Newsom’s Department of Health created color coded tiers that effectively prevented California schools from reopening. In 2021, statewide guidelines continued to shape restrictions. These guidelines were based on pseudoscience like a six foot rule that created a major barrier to reopening and was not proven to prevent Covid transmission.
While allowing private and charter schools to open and sending his own kids to in-person private school, Newsom never challenged the California teacher’s union to push for full public reopening. Only in March 2021, when the state was facing a lawsuit, and after basically every other state had reopened, did Newsom call for public schools to resume limited in-person classes.
To this day, Newsom insists that school closures and the state’s catastrophic learning loss were no big deal. Florida, he told Michaelson, “had more learning loss in every single category… These are facts.” But are they really?
Newsom appears to be relying on a single 2022 test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to make this assertion, despite a mountain of evidence that contradicts it. Only a small sample of students in the country take the NAEP. In contrast, all students in grades 3 through 8 and 11 take California’s official state test, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).
While the 2022 NAEP, which only about 4,000 kids in the state took, made it appear that California’s learning loss was not so bad, the dismally low SBAC scores from 2022 showed that school closures had likely wiped out years of educational progress. This disparity strongly suggests there may have been a significant sampling bias in the NAEP, which is probable given that California’s chronic absence rate tripled statewide in the 2021-2022 school year.
Although the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) touted its supposed success on the NAEP, the district’s test results were essentially manipulated. In 2019, high-performing charter schools did not participate in LAUSD’s test, but in 2022 they did. Additionally, demographic changes between 2019 and 2022 may have been a factor, since the district’s enrollment fell by an alarming 10%.
Newsom and other California officials are cherry-picking the data and intentionally neglecting to analyze and address the complete picture of student learning loss. To avoid political repercussions, they are deliberately ignoring the majority of testing results as well as the many studies which show that remote instruction had a severe impact on learning.
Andrew Dean Ho, psychometrician and professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, reviewed California’s test results as an expert witness in an ongoing lawsuit against the state.
Wrote Ho in his testimony, “In my review of transcripts from depositions of state officials, I find numerous responses that indicate to me a lack of awareness of or interest in data that could enable accurate estimates of academic learning loss.”
The state has abandoned its duty to assess all relevant data and may be concealing it.
“Data currently exist in state repositories to answer questions about the magnitude of academic learning loss for jurisdictions and subgroups in the state of California, untapped,” wrote Ho.
Ho’s revealing testimony is corroborated by the fact that the Department of Education threatened to muzzle and retaliate against California researchers who planned to testify against the state.
As Newsom increasingly seems to be pursuing presidential ambitions, his Covid mistakes should come under greater scrutiny, especially as he remains intent on never admitting to them.
In Newsom’s view, the only reason he’s had any criticism at all is because hindsight is 20/20.
“We should acknowledge at the time we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” he told Michaelson.
“And we’re experts, we’re geniuses in hindsight.”
But California’s education failure is not just about 2020 and 2021 - it’s about the state’s refusal to examine the learning loss data to this day, and Newsom’s clear choice to prioritize his own political ambitions over his accountability to the children and families of his state.
