SCHOOL'S OUT

During the first few weeks of eighth-grade, our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Nuccetelli, announced it was time to select our class’s Student Council representative. Many of the same kids in our eighth-grade homeroom had been in our seventh-grade homeroom, which I had represented.

The monthly Student Council meetings had been boring. Plus, they held the meetings during lunchtime, when I normally got to hang out, lightly supervised, with my pals and play basketball or keep-away in the schoolyard. Thus, I wasn’t motivated to seek another term.

But several of my fellow, boisterous, jock friends who sat near me in the classroom’s back corner, said, “Come on, you gotta be the rep again!”

Despite this back corner groundswell, I demurred.

“Nah,” I said, “I’m done with that.”

They pestered me. “Come on, you’re the best one to do it!”

“Yeah, we’ll get everyone to vote for you.”

Flattered by my peers’ persistence, I gave in. “OK,” I said, “I’ll run.”

I raised my hand. Mrs. Nuccetelli wrote my name on the chalkboard as my friends cheered.

Then she said, “OK, who else wants to run?”

No one raised his or her hand.

Noodles, as some called our teacher outside of class, scanned the room. Her eyes landed on Linda, the most bashful girl in the class; Linda seemed almost never to speak. She had short, straight, light blonde hair and wore black plastic-framed glasses. (I Net-searched Linda as I wrote this story. Unsurprisingly, she became an accountant).

Noodles said to Linda, “Linda, would you like to run for representative?”

Ever compliant, Linda quietly agreed. I don’t recall if she meekly said she would, or just nodded.

Mrs. Nuccetelli wrote Linda’s name on the other side of the blackboard and said, “OK, Linda and Mark, go out in the hallway.”

We did, and Noodles closed the heavy, natural-toned wooden door, with its inset, small glass panel, behind us. We hadn’t even been asked to deliver a 30-second speech setting forth our positions on such pressing middle school issues as whether girls could wear pants to school or if we could hire a band for a year-end “dance.”

The time in the hallway was awkward. Surely, Linda knew I was more popular than she was and that my loud and also popular friends would convince any fence-sitters to vote for me. I felt sorry that Linda was being put through this Soviet-style sham election. I clumsily tried to make some small talk to make our brief electoral vigil seem less awkward. She said little or nothing in response.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Nuccetelli opened the door and called us back into the room.

As we entered, she calmly announced, “Congratulations, Linda, you’re our new Student Council representative.”

Reflexively, I called out, “Ha! That’s a good one!”

There was a momentary silence.

Then, everyone—especially my back corner buddies—burst into loud, derisive laughter. I’d been had.

I had to hand it to my “friends.” By flattering me and faking me out they allowed me to make myself look stupid and conceited.

Hey, maybe there were some mail-in ballots...

—

Most people now want to pretend that the Covid overreaction never happened. Or that any damage done was unintentional. Or that all of the disruption and money spent was ultimately “worth it, because it saved millions of lives.”

Caucasian, please!

But the overreaction did happen. And it didn’t save lives, it cost them. Yet, unlike a Student Council election, the Scamdemic can’t simply be shrugged off and moved on from. There’s tremendous residual damage.

—

This week, while channel surfing, I saw a PBS News Hour segment in which the TV correspondent questioned a Washington Post reporter who was researching the research recently done regarding the “The Pandemic’s” effects on learning.

The “expert” class sells the notion that research is enlightening and essential. But principally, they support research because it justifies their existence and because research grants pay their wages. The “soft money” generated by research grants is an important revenue source for many universities and is a central qualification for tenure. Not only must a professor publish or perish; s/he also needs to reel in research dollars.

Much research reaches some tentative, though unsurprising conclusion, which is, in the study’s summary, qualified by the statement “but more research is necessary.”

So, implicitly, “Stay tuned for my next research grant proposal.”

Those, like Tony Fauci, who control stacks of research grant money, wield institutional and fiscal power that they often use to ill effect. They implement their agendas by encouraging some inquiries and nixing others. Research funding also sways analyses because research grantees know that, in order to get future grants, they must play to their funders’ biases. As a student, it’s typically clear what the teacher or professor wants you to say. You’re rewarded for repeating the ideas/biases of an instructor. You’re marginalized for challenging or questioning such notions. Same with grant seeking and research design and analysis.

—

According to the Washington Post reporter’s meta-research, the federal government gave schools $190 billion in Covid school aid. It put few limits on how that money could be used. Some was spent on ventilation, some on Covid testing, some on plastic barriers and much else on other futile and unnecessary efforts to manage viral transmission among young people, who were, as historically, at functionally zero risk from a respiratory virus. February, 2020 data from Italy and Spain confirmed the foregoing familiar trend, as it pertained to the purportedly “novel” virus.

The unspecified studies that the Post reporter referenced concluded, unsurprisingly, that locking kids out of schools has caused students to score lower, in 2020-22, on standardized tests than did their pre-Scamdemic peers. She said that students lost a half year in math learning and a quarter year in reading during 18 months of closures. One might ask questions about these studies’ designs and analyses to see if the researchers might be understating the damage done.

She optimistically noted that scores had rebounded partially, 3%, in 2023. But, of course, she asserted that more study was needed to assess longer term effects.

Predictably, more learning was lost in low-income areas, where students often lack online access or parental exhortation/supervision. “Progressives” and teachers’ unions and teachers have long professed to care deeply about educational equality and opportunity and said that they were “all about the kids.” Their Scamdemic actions showed these had been self-congratulatory lies.

After the short segment ended, PBS displayed a graphic that said 80% of teachers reported that students had lasting emotional or behavioral problems after returning to school after a year-and-a-half off. Multiply this 80% by all of the public-school kids in the US.

PBS didn’t mention that many kids locked out of schools never returned. In some urban areas, up to 30% didn’t come back. Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled, to 26%, since the post-lockdown reopening.

One should consider that those who pushed the hardest for the Covid overreaction—including, but not limited to, school closures--had college and grad school degrees. Given that closing schools was such a poor, yet widely supported, idea one might reasonably wonder if those who supported lockdowns of America’s K-12 schools and the colleges that awarded their degrees are overrated. This support showed that these institutions reward conformity more than they value critical thinking and applied intelligence. And that few “educators” dissent from their peers.

—

Learning losses weren’t school closures’ worst effect. The loss of social interaction and development and the chance to make friends and memories were, and will be, much more harmful over the long term. The opening, popularity contest story is one of many examples of the social lessons one learns while surrounded five days/week by peers and non-parental authority figures.

Much social development also occurs apart from specifically-remembered events. The everyday routine of getting up, arriving on time and managing workloads and personal relationships builds a general expectational, situational and interpersonal awareness. While “The Hidden Curriculum,” coined in 1968, connotes stealthy oppression, some of this meta-curriculum is worthwhile. Masking and hiding young people from each other in 2020-21 were much oppressive and damaging than The Hidden Curriculum could ever have been.

Longitudinally, I’m sure that the friendships and memories not made in closed schools: the lost chances to play sports, perform in plays and talent shows, speak in front of others, engage in lunch-table banter, et al., will cause great harm. Though how, and when, would researchers measure such harm? Many of the most important effects of any public policy are clear but can’t be quantified.

—

The Post reporter and the PBS host blamed the Boogie Man “Pandemic for the academic and social development losses. They couldn’t bring themselves to say that “school closures,” not The Virus, caused harm. They wouldn’t acknowledge that they’re really discussing the effect of the affirmative, senseless, disruptive decision to lock kids out of public schools for 18 months.

In college, a professor told me not to write in the passive voice. Doing so adds words and makes it unclear who caused a given effect. Many people now belatedly acknowledge that from March, 2020 forward, “mistakes were made” during the Covid response and that closing schools was the biggest error. But those who say this seek to hide their strong support for school closures. This sneaky refusal to take personal responsibility for this “mistake” is despicable. Though any such admission of agency would come too late to matter.

—

After causing the problems that school closures caused, those who supported these closures now want to research the problems caused thereby. But schools should never have closed over a virus; this had never been done before. Kids were at higher risk during flu seasons than during “The Pandemic.” Those who supported school closures throughout 2020 and much of 2021, argued, with great emotion and misplaced self-assurance, that kids were “superspreaders” who would infect teachers. This was untrue: young people didn’t significantly spread this virus.

In addition to pretending that schools were infection hotbeds, as with all things Covid, lockdown supporters invoked imagined exceptions in order to dysfunctionally, opportunistically justify one-size-fits-all rules. School closure advocates said, e.g., that old teachers would die. But there are very few old teachers. The average teacher is 41. Eighty-percent of teachers are under 55. The infection fatality stats show that people under 65 were at very low risk. Very few teachers are over 65. The few remaining old teachers could have retired and been replaced, just as are other workers who wear out in other occupations.

They also said that some kids lived with their grandmas. True, but very uncommon. And how many live-in grandmas were under 65? Should we sacrifice an entire student population over a tiny subset of students?

Most American private schools, and private and public schools in Europe were reopened by August, 2020. Swedish schools never closed; no problems were caused by open schools there. Most African schools closed only briefly, or not at all, also without attendant harm.

—

If public schools had never closed, or if they’d reopened by September, 2020, instead of September, 2021, the whole Scamdemic would have been much shorter and far less damaging. Education is America’s biggest enterprise. There are 49 million K-12 students, four million teachers, plus millions more school staff, such as bus drivers, crossing guards, janitors and kitchen workers. There are, in addition, 18.5 million college students and 1.5 million professors and millions more support staff. With these 75-plus-million living normally in open schools, fearful people would have seen that the vaunted virus wasn’t nearly as bad as the media had hyped it to be. But the teachers’ unions knew that keeping schools closed would hand elections to the Democrat Party, which they influentially fund and for whom they overwhelmingly vote. Therefore, teachers and their unions pretended the sky was falling.

If the public schools had never closed, no research regarding school closures’ effects would need to be done. And the $190 billion spent on landfilled stuff like Plexiglass and goofy masks could have been saved. Most importantly, kids would be better-adjusted and would have more memories and more friends.

Neither K-12, nor college, students should have missed a day of school. The entire Covid response was a Scam. School closures were the Scam’s most obvious and consequential element.