A Belated Vindication for School Reopeners The Stolen Year acknowledges public school COVID failures but refuses to hold anyone responsible.

• Author: Ham, Mary Katharine
• Position: Anya Kamenetz's "The Stolen Year"

TWELVE YEARS AFTER he was acquitted of murder, O.J. Simpson and a ghostwriter penned a book called If I Did It. I was reminded of that when The Stolen Year arrived on my doorstep. A chronicling of the horrors wrought by COVID-19 policies that kept American kids from their school buildings and childhood milestones for more than a year, this book was written by someone at the scene of the crime, intimate with the gory details, and ultimately uninterested in reckoning with who was responsible for it. This is a whodunnit without a culprit.

As The Stolen Year's title implies, a crime was perpetrated on U.S. children during the pandemic--one that "increase[d] inequality and destroy[ed] individual hopes and dreams," one whose "impact can be measured for a generation," in author Anya Kamenetz's words.

Kamenetz, an NPR education reporter, is highly credentialed and well-informed. But if the pandemic taught us anything, it's that degrees and area expertise don't necessarily lead people to good decisions or sound interpretations of data. Knowing the facts was not synonymous with having the courage to buck the pressure to padlock playgrounds.

There were signs in Kamenetz's reporting that she understood that the risks of opening schools were being exaggerated and the harms of closures downplayed. (I frequently shared her early reporting on YMCAs safely opening for children of essential workers.) Despite that, she admits that she and her colleagues largely missed the biggest story in the modern education beat's history.

"It was all easy to predict," she told The Grade. "So we could have been a lot louder."

They could have been louder. NPR and other national news outlets were not chock-full of stories about the ways remote learning exacerbated existing inequities. Public radio didn't send warnings in its sonorous tones commensurate with what Kamenetz knew was generational damage, hitting poor and minority students hardest. It didn't extensively profile the politically and ethnically diverse coalition of parents who fought for a year to open urban and suburban schools' doors. It didn't press large districts and teachers union leaders about their insistence on staying closed while the rest of the world opened safely. (COVID policies closed many American schools for 58 weeks, compared with 33 in Finland, 27 in China and the U.K., 11 in Japan, and even fewer in Denmark and Sweden.)

Kamenetz's reporting on the pain families endured in 2020 and 2021 in remote...