The Wall Street Journal slammed Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) for her handling of education during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The outlet’s editorial board penned a piece titled, “Michigan’s Education Failure.”
In the opening of the piece, the editorial board called Whitmer “one of the country’s most aggressive pandemic lockdown enforcers.”
The Journal noted Republican challenger Tudor Dixon is “making it a campaign issue.”
The op-ed explained, “School closures were a particular disaster, as national test scores show how much closed classrooms damaged learning.”
During a debate last week, Whitmer defended her record on education, as the Journal pointed out.
“Kids were out for three months,” she said.
The governor continued, “The fact of the matter is education is what levels the playing field for people, and we’ve under-invested in it for decades.”
Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, with a smile, says Michigan kids were only out of school "for three months."
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 25, 2022
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According to the Journal, this was not the best way for Whitmer to change the subject.
“Last week’s release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals a drop in fourth and eighth grade test scores in Michigan, especially among minority students,” the op-ed stated.
It went on to cite statistics supporting the claim that Whitmer’s policies had negatively impacted minority students.
“Ms. Whitmer says children were out of classrooms only three months, but she may be suffering from her own math deficit. Many of the districts that stayed closed the longest, including Ann Arbor, Lansing, Kalamazoo and Detroit, have large minority populations,” the editorial board wrote.
Additionally, the op-ed noted schools in Michigan did not reopen for longer than many other places.
Concluding the piece, the editorial board wrote, “Hybrid learning was brutal on young children, who struggled to maintain the attention required to absorb information while staring at a screen for hours. Ms. Whitmer is right that education ‘levels the playing field,’ but few did more to unlevel it than she did.”
FiveThirtyEight shows Whitmer currently holds a 5.6 point lead over Dixon in Michigan’s governor’s race.
