Gretchen Whitmer, during the Michigan Gubernatorial debate with Tudor Dixon, uttered a preposterous claim. According to her, Michigan schools were only shut down for three months.

Moderator Chuck Stokes of WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) challenged Whitmer directly on declining performance on standardized tests, saying the buck stops with her as governor and she has had four years to move the needle but has not done it.

“We’ve also had some historic challenges over the last four years,” Whitmer countered, referencing the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020, adding: “Kids were out for three months.” For those who say children were kept out of classrooms for too long, “as a mom, all I was thinking about was saving the lives of our kids.”

What a boatload of gaslighting horseshit.

It didn’t take me long to find out that the vast majority of Michigan schools stayed with remote learning well into 2021, Detroit especially. Heck, we even wrote about Whitmer keeping the state locked down several times! But I ALSO found out that at least one district in particular stayed remote WELL into 2022! Yes, you read that correctly. At least one major Michigan school district stayed remote into this year. 

Public schools in Flint, Michigan, will stick with remote learning indefinitely, Flint Community Schools announced on Wednesday. The decision reverses last week’s announcement that Flint schools would reopen on January 24. The promised reopening would’ve marked the end of three weeks of remote learning that have followed the district’s holiday break, which also ran three weeks.

In his first at-home learning announcement to parents on January 9, Flint Superintendent Kevelin Jones cited the level of community transmission of the omicron variant of COVID-19 as the reason to continue remote learning.

How many times have we written about the mental and societal costs plus the learning loss children all across the country have experienced due to their being shoved into remote learning while the adults panic all around them? Too many times. 

As Deanna wrote just the other day, the new data on student test scores is out and the learning loss is even greater than we thought it would be. What was Whitmer’s response to test scores last night?

“It’s only been a couple of years” of her four-year term since initiatives such as reduced class sizes, improved mental health services, and tutoring have taken effect, Whitmer said, “and we’ve had a pandemic to navigate.”

That’s…a spin. It’s the fault of the pandemic that there was so much learning loss for kids in Michigan? But didn’t Gretchen just claim schools were ONLY closed for three months? Which is it? What’s to blame for the learning loss? School closures or that darned pandemic? 

The Burbio tracker shows MI had under 50% of kids in physical school for the vast majority of the 20-21 school year, putting it firmly in the bottom half of states. Another MI study says only 23% were in school by Jan 2021. GTFO with this 3 mos crap.https://t.co/Fi5Gu0tBKE https://t.co/OMWLEfwg9q

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) October 26, 2022

Exactly. I truly hope that Michigan parents are paying attention right now. Especially the ones who’ve had to scramble for over two years now to try and keep their kids focused, engaged, and learning remotely. 

Per a chart from the testing results published in the New York Post, we find the following nationwide scores in reading and math. 

4th Math Proficiency:

2019 – 32%

2022 – 29%

4th Reading Proficiency:

2019 – 26%

2022 – 24%

8th Math Proficiency:

2019 – 24%

2022 – 20%

8th Reading Proficiency

2019 – 29%

2022 – 27%

That’s the national score average. Quite frankly, even the 2019 scores were bad, but the overall drop off into 2022 makes things worse. What about the Michigan scores? Well…

Michigan’s scores include some students from Detroit, which participates in NAEP’s study of the largest urban districts in the country. As it has in the past, Detroit’s students scored the lowest in reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades and recorded some of the largest declines among urban districts.

Detroit, the state’s largest district, is also one of the poorest big cities and poverty has long been an important predictor of poor academic performance.

Yes, Detroit has long been horrible about academic performance for the kids they are responsible for, but here its worth noting that Detroit schools along with those in Ann Arbor and Flint stayed remote for MOST of the 2020 year, into 2021, and as noted above some into 2022. 

Yet we aren’t supposed to see a correlation between remote learning and poor test scores. We are also supposed to take Gretchen Whitmer at her word and believe Michigan schools only stayed closed for three months. However, her attempt at gaslighting during last night’s debate is full of holes. Including one of her own making. 

And people cannot Google. https://t.co/9iTrAsOMTu

— ☃️ Cold Ginger ❄️ (@mchastain81) October 26, 2022

Yes, there it is. She moved schools back to remote learning in December 2020. So don’t tell me that Michigan schools were “only closed” for three months. They weren’t and Michigan voters should be paying attention to reality instead of listening to Gretchen’s gaslighting. 

UPDATE: Folks at the Michigan Freedom Fund were paying attention and have been keeping receipts. This is one helluva powerful ad that showcases Whitmer’s two years of egregious and capricious work on school closures. 

New Ad: Whitmer’s Gaslighting of Parents Exposed! pic.twitter.com/95b7whaPZZ

— MichiganFreedomFund (@MichiganFreedom) October 27, 2022

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