Apologists for the nation’s teacher unions have been busy rewriting history on school closures. Now, in some places, they’re opposing efforts to bring struggling students up to speed.

The disaster of remote schooling during the pandemic has been well-documented. The Nation’s Report Card recently revealed that eighth-grade reading and math test results hit their lowest levels in decades. Kids from disadvantaged backgrounds suffered the most.

It is against this backdrop that national teacher union leaders have embarked on a shameful effort to sanitize the indefensible.

Despite their aggressive crusade to keep schools closed far longer than necessary, despite outrageous rhetoric warning of mass deaths and body bags, they now claim no responsibility for shuttered classrooms and the calamity that followed.

It’s a crock. But it gets worse.

In its June 26 edition, The New Yorker features an essay revealing the hurdles that the education establishment in Richmond, Virginia, erected to plans for extra instruction time. The proposal would have implemented year-round schooling — cutting summer break to six weeks — in an effort to erase the learning deficit created by the disaster of remote classwork.

One member of the Richmond teachers union executive board summed up the mind-numbing indifference to the plight of those in their charge: “The whole thing about learning loss I find funny is that, if everyone was out of school, and everyone had equal learning loss, then aren’t we all equal?” Melvin Hostman told the magazine. “We all have a deficit.”

This is progressive “equity” at work. Never mind that Mr. Hostman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The remote learning tragedy was hardly spread equally among students and will weigh down underprivileged kids the most.

But that didn’t bother one school board member, who was more concerned about minority kids falling behind in leisure time. “It’s not right that Black and Brown students in our district are chained to their desks essentially further into the school year,” she said in opposition to adding instructional time, “while their counterparts in the counties get to play and have a summer.”

Another board member shrugged at the academic setbacks brought on by school closures. “So we experienced this pandemic,” she said, “and some of our students aren’t performing as well from a standardized perspective. Characterizing it as learning loss looks at it from a deficit perspective. We should be looking at it as where we are now, and where we go from there.”

In the end, the district, after two years, approved the extended learning plan for one — one! — of its 54 schools. But the exercise served a vital purpose by revealing that, for too many adults in the system, children and their academic well-being are deep down on the priority list.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service