"We are actively dealing with problems remote learning caused. A whole generation of kids is further behind than they were tracking to be behaviorally, mathematically, and in reading scores."
Gee I wonder what would do that, is it three+ years of unmitigated exposure to a virus that causes brain damage? No, the problem is they stayed home, which makes you developmentally challenged, as we all know. Oh, you don't want to get COVID? Then stay home.
I wonder how students in China are doing? If the lockdowns caused all these problems, surely the place that did the strictest lockdowns would have the most problems
I had to keep teaching online (kindergarten) during the lockdown in Shanghai. The online teaching tools provided were a little rough at the start but got better over the course of the lockdown (and after I set up dozens of macros to manage the class, and eventually some OBS gimmicks). Major difference between what I saw and what American teachers saw was supervision during class time. Almost everyone lives with their grandparents. I had to constantly beg grandma and grandpa to stop answering for students, stop hand feeding students during class so they could answer, to wear clothes during class, to tell their grandchild to wear clothes during class. My students all met academic goals pretty close to their normal ones. The only thing that was really hard to teach was tracing and copying for the computer kids, but the tablet kids did okay.
It's not the lockdowns in a bottle, it's how they were implemented. Lockdowns in US education had virtually no support and rules changed so frequently teachers couldn't keep up.
There were also so many people who were "essential workers" who were mostly poor service workers. So many parents had to go to work while their children were mostly unsupervised at online school. I have no doubt China had different plans and implementations.
It isn't the concept of lockdown that is the issue but how it was implemented
I'm certain China handled lockdown significantly better than the west