Just after President-elect Donald Trump asked Jay Bhattacharya to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), information about U.S. student performance on international tests in math and science became available. The report provides strong evidence that school closures, masking, and social distancing had a devastating impact on schoolchildren during the pandemic, just as Bhattacharya had foreseen.

When schools closed, Dr. Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, opposed  prolonged lockdowns and took the lead in preparing the Great Barrington Declaration, which said school closures and other restrictions would do more harm than good. Governments should focus instead on the medical well-being of the elderly and those with co-morbidities, the declaration argued.

Neither Bhattacharya’s prophecy nor the Declaration were well received. Not even Cassandra’s forecast of Troy’s fate evoked attacks more vicious than those directed toward Bhattacharya. The government’s chief infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, condemned the Declaration as “dangerous.” The NIH director said the signers of the Declaration were a “fringe component of epidemiology” outside the scientific “mainstream.” University experts across the country besmirched the professor’s reputation; Twitter banished both Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration. Apart from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the mainstream media ignored him.

Bhattacharya nonetheless made his case through outlets available to him. In 2021, I interviewed him on my podcast, the Education Exchange. He told listeners that there was “overwhelming evidence schools should open immediately, everywhere.” Schools had remained open in Sweden. Yet “no children died,” and they proved to be “inefficient spreaders” of the disease, he said. Teachers had lower Covid rates than adults in comparable professions. Ongoing closures would cause “incredible harm to children from not having school.”  He also identified inequities. “Rich people can hire tutors to “augment learning” while “poor people cannot afford that.”

At the time Bhattacharya was still but a voice crying in the wilderness of vacant classrooms and barren streets. But the new survey, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey, or TIMSS, confirms the truth of his prophetic vision. Learning in the United States and Sweden shifted in opposite directions during the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2023 U.S. math performance nose-dived 18 points in 4th grade and 17 points in 8th grade. In Sweden, scores went up by nine points in 4th grade and by 14 points in 8th grade. In 2019, the United States led Sweden in math performance for both cohorts, but by 2023 it had fallen behind. Comparing the two countries, the total swing amounted to 27 points for the younger age group and 31 points for the older one—roughly a full year’s worth of learning. The price paid for the switch from in-person to online instruction turned out to be as dreadful as Bhattacharya had suggested.

The size of the leap off the math cliff by U.S. students exceeds that in nearly every other industrialized country. Only in Israel, Portugal, and Chile does the 8th grade drop exceed that of the United States. Across all industrialized countries in the survey, the average decline was just one point among 4th graders and five points among those in 8th grade. The U.S. drop was many times greater than those averages.

These declines were not inevitable. The wide disparities between learning trends in Sweden and the United States underline the education cost our country paid when elected officials succumbed to the dictates of Dr. Fauci and his fellow public health officers.

TIMSS is only the latest study to document the decline in student learning in the United States. Many states are reporting large downward shifts in passing rates on their statewide math tests. NWEA estimates that the students in their survey “would now need, on average, an additional 4.5 months of mathematics instruction” to reach levels attained by pre-Covid students. Analyses of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicates that “by the spring of 2022, the average student was lagging by approximately one-half year in math” behind the level attained by students pre-pandemic.

I have focused on math rather than science, because math testing is more reliable and yields more valid results. Math is taught mainly in school, whereas other subjects are more likely to be also taught at home, within museums, and via mass communication systems. Math tests have been honed for reliability by psychometricians for a century or more, whereas science test design is still a work in progress. Student math scores ordinarily do a better job of predicting future life outcomes, such as college completion and adult earnings.

Even so, the TIMSS science results point in the same direction, though to a lesser extent. In science, U.S. scores declined by seven points in 4th grade and nine points in 8th grade. By comparison, Swedish scores remained steady in 8th grade and slipped by only four points in 4th grade. Among all industrial nations, scores rose by two points in 4th grade but declined by six points in 8th grade. In other words, U.S. student performance in science also declined by a larger amount than among students in Sweden and across the industrialized world.

There is no single explanation for Covid’s extraordinarily negative impact on math learning in the United States. But it is worth noting that most U.S. schools are governed by lay boards chosen either by voters or by an elected mayor. Lay school board members may have felt they had to comply with public health demands that school doors be shuttered and other restrictions. Over 35 states require school boards to bargain collectively with teachers about their working conditions, giving teacher unions privileged access to boards throughout the pandemic. The head of the largest union, the National Education Association, opposed school openings unless vaccinations were complete, Covid spread was minimal, and air distribution systems were adequate, among other demands.

We do not know for sure if these were the key factors to the learning losses of millions of American children. We do know, however, that Bhattacharya had a better grasp of the likely consequences of lockdowns, school closures, and re-opening procedures than those who had located him on the fringe of respectable opinion.

When the Senate confirms Dr. Bhattacharya as the next NIH director, hopefully with strong bipartisan support, it will not merely be a vindication of his foresight. It will also tell educators never again to surrender to others their responsibility for caring for the educational well-being of the next generation.

Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He welcomes your reactions to this post by email at paul.peterson@educationnext.org; responses will be curated and shared periodically. His Education Exchange podcast is available with a new episode each Monday.