Perhaps you saw from the beginning that as much as some urged that we all follow “the” science, their response to Covid-19 was driven more by fear rather than reason, more by political tribalism than objectivity. Perhaps you saw that the lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine requirements would harm more than help. You knew, but people wouldn’t listen.
In this piece, we will be focusing on the school lockdowns and see that “the” science actually says that…
you were right all along!
Armed with this piece, you can prove you were right and get to say I TOLD you so!
C O N T E N T S
Damage to Education from School Lockdowns
Racial Inequality Generated by School Lockdowns
Mental & Physical Damage to Students From Lockdowns
Choosing a Political Side Over Children’s Well-Being
They Did Know Better
Damage to Education from School Lockdowns
According to the numerous studies and reports we’ll see below, because of school lockdowns, we are facing…
there is no shortage of articles and studies documenting the harm caused by COVID-19 school policies over the past two and a half years…
…and…
The available numbers tell a worrying story of educational slippage that is likely to keep large numbers of kids from acquiring the basic skills, both intellectual and social, that they will need to hold decent jobs.
Online learning left children, on average, four months behind in mathematics and reading before this school year…but children of the pandemic also are missing a more basic tool kit of behaviors, life skills and strategies, including tying their shoelaces, taking turns on the playground slide and sitting still in their chairs for hours at a time.
What The Washington Post articledid not mention was that the study says that there has been a “substantial toll” on student’s mental health as well. Though titled How COVID-19 caused a global learning crisis, the study looked at the impact of the lockdowns on student’s well-being as well as their education. We’ll return to that subject below. By the way, it should have been titled How Lockdowns caused a global learning crisis, but it’s still such a touchy subject, so they tread lightly so as to not upset the herd too much.
…and that in the first 23 months of the lockdowns…
On average, students globally are eight months behind where they would have been absent the pandemic,
Also…
Some students may never return to formal schooling at all. Even in high-income systems, levels of chronic absenteeism are rising, and some students have not reengaged in school. In the United States, 1.7 million to 3.3 million eighth to 12th graders may drop out of school because of the pandemic. In low- and middle-income countries, the situation could be far worse.
Rather than lockdowns, the McKinsey and Company study recommends “building resilience” to better deal with “future crises.” Also, rather than being political and dogmatic, schools…
can also benefit by creating the flexibility to change policies and procedures as new data and circumstances arise.
…that reading and mathematics pass rates declined from pre-pandemic years, with declines larger in school districts with less in-person instruction…
They report furthermore…
…Another study found a 16 percent decline in students going from high school to two-year colleges and a 6 percent decline in those going to four-year colleges, especially widespread for colleges serving large numbers of minority students.
Harvard’s Kane forecasts a gloomy result for young people: “If the achievement losses become permanent, there will be major implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality, especially in states where remote instruction was common.”
There can be little question that closures permanently altered the relationship of many students to school. One survey found that the rate of chronically absent students nationwide is now 22%, 2.7 times what it was before school closures. In New York City, 4 out of 10 students are now chronically absent; in Los Angeles nearly half of all students are chronically absent. These statistics indicate an instructional system that in many cases has simply ceased to function…
Much of the dialogue around school systems focuses on educational achievement, but schools offer more than academic instruction. A school system’s contributions may include social interaction; an opportunity for students to build relationships with caring adults; a base for extracurricular activities, from the arts to athletics; an access point for physical- and mental-health services; and a guarantee of balanced meals on a regular basis. The school year may also enable students to track their progress and celebrate milestones. When schools had to close for extended periods of time or move to hybrid learning, students were deprived of many of these benefits.
Racial Inequality Generated by School Lockdowns
For those out there who scoff at this because their reason is handicapped by politics and emotions, know that according to the study, the lockdowns…
also increased inequalities within systems. For example, it widened gaps between majority Black and majority White schools in the United States…
…and this racial inequality would carry over to the…
lower future earnings potential for students and lower economic productivity for nations.
They state that studies...
suggest widening gaps in both opportunity and achievement. Historically vulnerable and marginalized students are at an increased risk of falling further behind.
In the United States, students in majority Black schools were half a year behind in mathematics and reading by fall 2021, while students in majority White schools were just two months behind.
…and that…
parents of Black and Hispanic students, the segments most affected by academic unfinished learning, also reported higher rates of concern about their student’s mental health and engagement with school.
Also…
In Bangladesh, a cross-sectional study revealed that 19.3 percent of children suffered moderate mental-health impacts, while 7.2 percent suffered from extreme mental-health effects…In Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 80 million children stopped receiving hot meals. In Uganda, a record number of monthly teenage pregnancies—more than 32,000—were recorded from March 2020 to September 2021.
In their discussion of increased numbers of students dropping out of school, they report that…
Up to one-third of Ugandan students may not return to the classroom.
for students of color, the pandemic has taken on another dimension because it hit harder in Black and Hispanic communities.
They don’t directly blame the school lockdowns. However, in the body of the article, it is made clear that they are talking about the effects of the school lockdowns. In this sense, they are much like every other mainstream source.
But this piece is unique - as far as I have seen - in that they seek to place some blame for racially disproportionate fallback in education on the George Floyd incident. To this end, they cite Erlanger Turner, a psychologist and assistant professor at Pepperdine University.
Then they suggest that what happened at the Capitol on January 6 and the disparity between how the police responded to that compared to how they respond to Black Lives Matter protests was a factor in the setbacks in education.
Really. Well, we can imagine that a lot of time that should have been spent education children was instead spent dwelling on George Floyd, BLM protests and January 6th, not to mention lessons on social justice, gender pronouns and so on, and that naturally this would result in setbacks in their education.
Since the pandemic started in March 2020, multiple reports have highlighted large declines in students’ math and reading achievement as well as widening gaps by race and school poverty. If allowed to become permanent, such losses will have major impacts on future earnings and intergenerational mobility.
Also, they found that…
most of the widening by race/ethnicity occurred because the schools attended by Black and Hispanic students were more negatively impacted, rather than because they fell behind classmates attending the same school. Put another way: the widening racial gap happened because of negative shocks to schools attended by disadvantaged students, not because of differential impacts within schools.
One might imagine that this would be due to disparities in school funding between schools in poor areas and schools in areas with more money. Indeed, according to a Harvard study The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic, they found that with regard to…
widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty…remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps.
…remote learning due to lockdowns…
was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps by race/ethnicity and by school poverty status.
Reporting for The New York Times, David Leonhardt calls the study’s findings “alarming” and writes (May 5, 2022)…
In Monday’s newsletter, I told you about how much progress K-12 education had made in the U.S. during the 1990s and early 2000s: Math and reading skills improved, especially for Black and Latino students.
The Covid closures have reversed much of that progress, at least for now.
Low-income students, as well as Black and Latino students, fell further behind over the past two years, relative to students who are high-income, white or Asian. “This will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,” Thomas Kane, an author of the Harvard study, told me.
There are two main reasons. First, schools with large numbers of poor students were more likely to go remote.
Why? Many of these schools are in major cities, which tend to be run by Democratic officials, and Republicans were generally quicker to reopen schools. High-poverty schools are also more likely to have unionized teachers, and some unions lobbied for remote schooling.
Second, low-income students tended to fare even worse when schools went remote. They may not have had reliable internet access, a quiet room in which to work or a parent who could take time off from work to help solve problems.
Together, these factors mean that school closures were what economists call a regressive policy, widening inequality by doing the most harm to groups that were already vulnerable.
This report notes that despite readily available info, such as the example of…
a district in Colorado where schools reopened quickly
…where…
no children were hospitalized and many thrived…hundreds of other districts, especially in liberal communities, instead kept schools closed for a year or more. Officials said they were doing so to protect children and especially the most vulnerable children. The effect, however, was often the opposite.
With all this racial and economic disparity resulting from school lockdowns, you have to care or you’re racist according to the “rules”. Ya care now, don’t ya?
Mental & Physical Damage to Students From Lockdowns
has had broader social and emotional impacts on students globally—with rising mental-health concerns, reports of violence against children, rising obesity, increases in teenage pregnancy…
…and…
The pandemic’s impact on the social-emotional and mental and physical health of students has been measured even less than its impact on academic achievement, but early indications are concerning. Save the Children reports that 83 percent of children and 89 percent of parents globally have reported an increase in negative feelings since the pandemic began. In the United States, one in three parents said they were very or extremely worried about their child’s mental health in spring 2021, with rising reported levels of student anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, and lethargy.
Additionally…
A UK survey found 53 percent of girls and 44 percent of boys aged 13 to 18 had experienced symptoms or trauma related to COVID-19…Reports of violence against children rose in many countries.
While they should directly attribute it to lockdowns, they write…
The pandemic affected physical health as well. Studies from the United States and the United Kingdom show rising rates of childhood obesity.
While swerving to avoid a direct blame of the school lockdowns, The Hill reported June 28, 2022…
The pandemic also affected mental health in young people. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a 53-page public advisory that includes troubling information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Mental health visits for children ages 5-11 increased 24 percent compared to 2019, and visits for 12- to 17-year-olds rose almost 31 percent.
The National Center for Education Statistics also reports that since the start of the pandemic, 70 percent of public schools experienced an increase in the number of children seeking school mental health services, and 76 percent of school staff voiced concerns about students showing signs of depression, anxiety and trauma.
In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12–17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7%.
…and…
Skyrocketing violence statistics involving young men, including a spate of shootings, may also be traceable to mental illnesses exacerbated by the enforced isolation of COVID-19.
Who could ever imagine that forcefully restricting children socially and physically and deprive them of daily physical exercise could have serious negative effects? Well, pretty much anyone who can think.
Choosing a Political Side Over Children’s Well-Being
According to these reports, the damage to students’ educations, physical and mental health and their increased exposure violence and the racial disparity thereof was more serious in blue areas than red areas, in part due to the fact that there is more unionization of teachers in blue areas and these unions tended to push for school lockdowns, but probably mostly due to the more direct political partisanship seen in the tribal reaction to Covid-19. In other words, as usual, the Democrats pretend to be against racial disparity while generating it. Also, as we’ve seen, the info was always available and they knew better. They did it anyway.
What happened to the United States’ kids was not the result of an innocent mistake. It was the product of a concerted campaign of censorship and demonization of dissenting voices in support of premises that turned out to be wildly harmful to children. Scientists, doctors, and parents who urged schools to reopen based on available evidence were systematically ignored and silenced by politicians, public health bureaucrats, and legions of dedicated online COVID-19 activists, while the most vulnerable children in U.S. society suffered the consequences. Only by telling the story of how that betrayal happened is it possible to start understanding the why.
Malone confirmed his Twitter ban on his Substack Wednesday, saying "We all knew it would happen eventually."
"Today it did. Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye. That means I must have been on the mark, so to speak. Over the target. It also means we lost a critical component in our fight to stop these vaccines being mandated for children and to stop the corruption in our governments, as well as the medical-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries," Malone wrote.
Americans who identify as “very liberal” are much more worried about Covid than Americans who identify as “somewhat liberal” or “liberal.”
The point here is that much of the response to the virus was tribal1 rather than rational and that this ignorance and selfishness helped to damage the education and well-being of students. In The COVID Cult Did Lasting Damage to Our Kids, Gutentag wrote for The Tablet…
…many scientists critical of school closures faced disparagement and attacks that were often overly driven by partisan passions. Some commentators and institutions claimed that school-reopening efforts were a product of far-right Trumpism, scummy ulterior motives, and racism. “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny,” the Chicago Teachers Union’s Twitter account tweeted in December 2020.
“It’s fairly obvious that it became a tribal political affiliation, and amplifying the risks of COVID appeared to be wedded with a political identity and a social identity,” Dr. Ram Duriseti, a physician-scientist and clinical associate professor of emergency medicine at Stanford, told me…
They Did Know Better
Though the The Guardian has recently reported that “new research” finds that students suffered rather than benefited from the lockdowns and that younger children suffered the most, almost 2 years ago, they had already published Youngest pupils in England worst affected by Covid learning loss. What do they call that? Pot-boiling? No, gaslighting. These people are gaslighting and that’s, like, marginalizing or something.
When they report as if these are new revelations, they are being dishonest. It’s lying by omission of the fact that we already knew. Here’s the pattern you’ll see in the mainstream media; rather than honest admissions of dishonesty or at least incompetency, their headlines suggest that “new” info suggests they were wrong (so how could they have known back then?) but buried in the report or in some other report by the same source, it is shown that the information has always been available.
The evidence suggests that they were. Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020.
In places where schools reopened that summer and fall, the spread of Covid was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed. Schools also reopened in parts of Europe without seeming to spark outbreaks.
In October 2020, Oster wrote a piece in The Atlantic headlined “Schools Aren’t Superspreaders,” and she told me this week that the evidence was pretty clear even earlier. By the fall of 2020, many people were no longer staying isolated in their homes, which meant that reopened schools did not create major new risks.
Many assumed that school infections would balloon and spread outward to the broader community, triggering new waves. On social media, people shared pictures of high schools with crowded hallways and no masking as if to say I told you so.
It would be impertinent if I did not pause here to gloat over this, for, who told who so?They continue…
Fear and bad press slowed down or canceled school reopenings elsewhere…It’s now October. We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19.
researchers are now learning that the closures came at a stiff price—a large decline in children’s achievement overall and a historic widening in achievement gaps by race and economic status.
Anyone who was paying attention and who can think about these things objectively instead of politically/emotionally knew that it made no sense to lockdown schools.
It was clear already in the spring of 2020 that the risk of severe COVID-19 for children was far lower than the risk posed by long-term school closures
…according to The Tablet. But politics drove the media to emotionally manipulate people into fearing instead of thinking. This was…
…craven fear-mongering from the beginning.
…says Dr. Victory (BS from Duke University, MD from the University of North Carolina, and decades of experience in the ER) on a recent episode of Ask Dr. Drew. As both Dr. Victory and Dr. Drew Pinsky (Board Certified Internist, Addiction Medicine Specialist, TV Host and Podcaster) say in that episode, in the medical world, the ratio of good vs. bad must always be weighed when making decisions about lockdowns, masks, vaccines and so on, and, as they say, the way things have been handled from the beginning failed to consider that ratio. Damage was done in many areas of life but again, in this piece, we focus on the damage done to children by locking down schools.
…in the spring of 2020…Children were shown to be less efficient spreaders of COVID-19 than adults, negating the argument that they would become unique vectors of disease and endanger their teachers or the adults with whom they lived…
we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Among the 1.95 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.
…and, in the end…
No child with Covid-19 died.
In These schools did less to contain covid. Their students flourished published March 14, 2022 by The New York Times reported that thousands of schools in the USA remained open or reopened, did not enforce mask mandates for elementary students. They give an example of the Lewis-Palmer district in Monument, Colorado, where…
no child was hospitalized with the virus
They report that..
Like most of the nation’s school districts, Lewis-Palmer 38 abruptly closed its school buildings and sent students home on March 13, 2020. They learned online for the remainder of the academic year, and teachers quickly saw many students’ progress slow. Children struggled with the coursework and felt depressed and anxious, educators say.
Most parents wanted the schools to reopen.
So Lewis-Palmer 38 decided to reopen. To craft its plan, local officials used health guidance put forth by the local health department in El Paso County. Case numbers there were far lower than the national averages in August 2020
…and…
overall, results from standardized tests show that the average student in Lewis-Palmer made gains in reading. While they lost ground in math, they performed better than the average Coloradan. SAT scores remained steady.
Indeed…
“We didn’t just exist through the pandemic,” said Mark Belcher, director of communications for the school district. “We made progress through the pandemic.”
Additionally…
In Lewis-Palmer, elementary students with special education plans made improvements in English and math, showing greater growth than the average special education student in Colorado.
Therefore…
the experience of systems like Lewis-Palmer offers evidence for those who say schools could have avoided some of the prolonged closures — and the serious academic and social impacts that came from them.
Also…
The school district supported many early decisions with a July 2020 academic study that found that children under 10 didn’t transmit the virus at high rates, according to Superintendent K.C. Somers. The superintendent also saw early evidence emerging from Europe that showed it was possible to reopen schools with relatively few outbreaks.
Meanwhile…
In the country’s largest school systems, such as those in New York City, Los Angeles, D.C. and Chicago, teacher unions and concerned parents fought plans to reopen. Public health officials warned that social distancing would save lives, and schools responded by devising hybrid programs or simply sticking with virtual learning. But, over time, these measures also imposed costs: Today, students are contending with significant learning loss and mental health issues.
Way back in September of 2020, The Washington Post published Europe stays committed to in-person classes as school outbreaks remain rare. The headline says it all, but they give a number of specifics if the reader is interested. The point here is that Europe did not exactly keep this a secret from the USA. Yet, many act as if there was no way to know that it was unwise to lockdown schools. Wrong. We told ya so!
Back in January of 2021, The Washington Post reported that…
an early body of research
…warned of a mental health crisis for students. They cite a study from November of 2020 from the CDC about worsened mental health in children under 18 years of age, and a number of professionals including Sharon Hoover, co-director of the Center for School Mental Health and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at University of Maryland School of Medicine who reportedly said that…
A growing number of studies examining the impact of covid-19 show mental health problems on the rise in children and adolescents
As the severity of these repercussions comes to light, some outlets—notably those that most aggressively advocated for lockdowns and masking—have been eager to suggest that we are now aware of the overwhelmingly negative consequences of these policies thanks to “new research” that has only just become available to fair-minded people, who can therefore be forgiven for having adopted the course they did. But to many doctors and scientists, the damage to kids caused by COVID-19 panic was neither inevitable nor surprising. Rather, it was the result of the public health establishment’s conscious choice to eschew rational cost-benefit analysis in favor of pet cultural theories and political gamesmanship. For those who applied the scientific method to the available evidence, the consequences were already clear just a few weeks into the pandemic. “It was not at all true that people in healthcare and public health were unaware of what was going on with children,” Dr. Noble told me. “They were not ignorant.”
..All of these supposed mitigation measures are ultimately justified through the idea that schools were fundamentally dangerous in 2020, when in reality they remained among the safest places for children and teachers to be throughout the pandemic.
The pretense that no one could have known the impact school closures would have erases the courageous scientists and doctors who began sounding the alarm as early as March and April 2020, often at great personal and professional risk. Worse, it deprives the victims of these policies—children and teens—of an accurate account of what was done to them and why. To pretend that the ramifications of school closures were unknowable is to excuse the inexcusable by rewriting history. The media’s recent discovery of the self-evident harms done to kids, is, for Dr. Duriseti, “the height of gaslighting.” It’s not enough just to document these harms, he said. “Apologies are in order. Accountability is in order.” What this accountability might look like is still an open question.
Yes, well, at any rate, we are well within reason, and indeed exercising restraint and showing mercy when we merely say…
TOLD YA SO!
Thanks for reading
~ Justin Trouble
Also see my other reports in this area which, so far, are…
To further illustrate that the divide on response to Covid-19 was politically tribal, citing the Morning Consult poll, the N.Y. Times reported furthermore…
Nearly 50 percent of very liberal Americans say that they believe Covid presents a “great risk” to their personal health. Other liberals, moderates and conservatives tend to be less worried.
They then blame the divide on Trump even though they admit that Democrats…
came to equate any loosening of Covid restrictions with Trumpism.
They also write…
When it comes to Covid, there is abundant evidence that the most liberal Americans are exaggerating the risks to the vaccinated and to children.
Consider that Democrats younger than 45 are more likely to say the virus poses a great risk to them than those older than 65 are — which is inconsistent with scientific reality but consistent with younger Democrats’ more intense liberalism. Or consider that many liberals (including Sonia Sotomayor) feel deep anxiety about Covid’s effects on children — even though the flu kills more children in a typical year and car crashes kill about five times as many.
