Roy Cooper will reportedly make some headlines next month. I have no idea whether he’ll announce a run for the U.S. Senate in 2026. If he does, the former governor will present a formidable challenge to incumbent Sen. Thom Tillis. If he doesn’t run, it will be at least partly because Cooper believes he’ll win — and the prospect of spending the next six years in Washington may fill him with more dread than delight.
There’s one thing I know for certain, however. If Roy Cooper runs, Republicans will make sure voters remember the worst policy decision the Nash County Democrat ever made during his decades-long tenure in public service: keeping North Carolina’s public schools closed for far too long during the pandemic.
When the National Assessment of Educational Progress conducted its last pre-COVID battery of reading and math exams in 2019, North Carolina’s public schools performed comparatively well. Indeed, adjusted for student background, we ranked 7th in the nation in performance, behind only Massachusetts, Florida, New Jersey, Indiana, Mississippi, and Georgia.
Then disaster struck. COVID-19 was a deadly plague, killing some 1.2 million Americans — including tens of thousands of North Carolinians. I counted some of them as friends. Perhaps you did, too.
Some of the policy responses to it, including decisions made by then-Gov. Cooper, were prudent and reflected the best-available evidence at the time. But closing day care centers and educational institutions for more than a few weeks wasn’t one of them. It was already evident that the risks of serious illness and death were strongly correlated with age, and that young people weren’t a major driver of infection.
Lengthy school closures were ill-advised. Some of us argued as much at the time. Most policymakers in the United States — and in other countries — fully reopened their schools either in late spring or during the first few months of the ensuing 2020-21 academic year.
North Carolina didn’t. Even as late as May 2021, most of our school districts were operating in hybrid mode. In neighboring South Carolina and Georgia, most had returned fully to in-person instruction months earlier.
When NAEP administered its next exams, in 2022, North Carolina suffered a significant drop in performance. Other states with lengthy school closures did, too. Two years later, some bounced back a fair amount. Alas, North Carolina’s recovery from COVID-era learning loss looks more lackluster, especially in reading. The NAEP scores of our fourth-graders ranked 32nd in the nation in 2024, after adjusting for student background. South Carolina ranked 8th, Georgia 12th. Among eighth-graders, Georgia ranked 3rd, South Carolina 14th, and North Carolina 32nd.
Harvard University’s Education Recovery Scorecard project puts the matter starkly: “Average student achievement in North Carolina remains almost half of a grade level below 2019 levels in math and three quarters of a grade level below in reading.”
By comparison, South Carolina students are about a quarter of a grade level lower in math than they were in 2019, and a third of a grade level in reading. That’s still bad news. Unfortunately, our news is much worse.
Did our lengthy closures at least provide offsetting health benefits? Nah. Some COVID-era mandates do appear to have moved the needle on excess deaths but school (and business) closures aren’t among them.
The likes of South Carolina and Georgia did experience higher death rates than we did during the pandemic, but that’s largely explained by lower vaccination rates.
Yes, vaccination was strongly associated with reductions in serious illness and death. The evidence for vaccine efficacy is at least as solid as the evidence for COVID-era learning loss. I’ve read it. Don’t bother writing me unless you’ve done the same.
North Carolina educators and policymakers recognize the gravity of our learning losses and are working hard to remedy them. That’s the right approach. We can’t just accept learning losses as a fait accompli. But we also need to hold policymakers accountable for past decisions. On this issue, Cooper blew it.

Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).