the school I worked in during the pandemic was only fully remote for the first half of 2020 (after covid hit), so a little less than one semester. 2020-2021 remote was optional, and many kids, except for the winter delta wave, chose to be in person - I'd say there were at most 3 kids remote in a class of like 20, during delta it was more of a 50-50 split. By at least spring 2021, the vast majority of kids were in person - having even one kid remote in a class of 20 was rare. 2021-2022 there was no remote option. So, at most, there was 1 1/2 years of remote learning, but really most kids had much less remote learning than this. And this is, by the way, in an epicenter of "woke liberalism," an extremely blue area, so I assume most other schools and areas were doing less than this.

But also, as someone points out, the problems they are seeing stretch further back from the pandemic. If there really were 2 years of lost learning, an 11th grader, for example, would be at a 9th grade level. Or, if they fell behind during the pandemic and were unable to catch back up at all, a 7th grade level. But what people are seeing is these kids are at an elementary school level. Clearly the education system started failing them before the pandemic.

I'd also love to know what sort of schools these people were teaching at. I was at a very low-income school right before the pandemic hit, and this absolutely tracks with what I experienced. I'd be trying to help a fifth-grader with their homework, and they could not figure out how to sound out a word. You'd end up having to re-teach basic letter sounds, or basic math or something. The education system in the United States has been failing these kids for a while, all the pandemic did was to put those problems on full display for parents and the public.