The leader of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which represents more than 30,000 employees in the nation’s second largest public school district, said in a recently published interview that learning losses during the pandemic are a myth. “There’s no such thing as learning loss,” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz told Los Angeles in what the magazine described as a rare sit-down interview, which took place in May. Many parents at that time were criticizing the teachers’ union for pushing back the city’s school reopening plan and for insisting on terms that they said would prevent the return of an in-person, five-day-per-week schooling schedule. When asked how her insistence on keeping schools closed for more than a year might have affected 600,000 students of the Los Angles Unified School District, Myart-Cruz argued that the experience of living through such a turbulent period would make up for the loss, if any. “Our kids …