Guess Who is Gaslighting COVID School Closures

Those moves in 2020 to keep kids away from their schools and their friends wasn't that bad, really. Right wingers are to blame for the "moral panic." Unbelievable.

Photo by yěyè yēyé on Unsplash

Remember those school closings that took place in 2020 across America that lasted deep into 2021—some continuing into 2022? Do you recall how awful those school closures were for our children’s mental health and academic progress?

If you are still reading SLATE—a very blue-pilled Covidian news source owned by the Graham Media Group, which happens to be controlled by BlackRock through their “large unspecified” shareholdings of GMG—you might be doubting your recall on how bad those days were for kids.

SLATE—the digital magazine that played a big role in disseminating Covid fear porn in the earliest days of the pandemic, is now trying to gaslight its readers (all 15 of them?) into concluding that the school closures were NOT a crisis. The school closures are “an important tool to keep kids safe.”

The schools are to blame, says Slate—because “schools are magnets for moral panics.”

The article cites The Nation’s Report Card, which came out in October of 2022, showing dramatic drops in student test scores in reading and math. Even outlets like NPR reported that “the kids are not alright.”

But Slate wants you to forget all that.

They blame the “right-wing” for creating panic among parents about their kid’s well-being during the pandemic.

The drop in test scores was really not that bad, Slate says. This was not a crisis, according to this Slate article. And the school closings are not only to blame for the plunge in test scores.

Children getting COVID was a huge factor. Come on! 2,300 children died from COVID, says Slate! They don’t point out there are approximately 72 million children in the U.S. Statistically, this means only 0.0031944444444444% of U.S. children died of COVID. Yet, Slate wants to blame the coronavirus on the nation’s educational decline since COVID.

Those right-wing parents are to blame for this mess!

Many on the right were undoubtedly sincerely concerned about the teen mental health crisis, the decline in test scores, and the growth of the gap in academic skills between Black and white students. But whether cynically or sincerely, the chorus of “never again” served their long-term ideological and partisan goals as well. The school-crisis mantra served to promote long-standing right-wing demands for “school choice”: for parents being able to choose among public, private, and religious schools, traditional schools or charter schools, or to home school their children. Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups, joined by Republican allies in Congress and in state legislatures, promised that “parents’ rights”—the rights of individual parents to determine curriculum at the expense of public decision-making and accountability—would counter the malign influence of teachers’ unions.

The public school panic and chaos in 2020 were caused by “Republican-leaning nonparents (adults with no kids)!!! Don’t you get it?!

What needs emphasis is that the panic was not an expression of outrage among parents—at least not until they were persuaded by the media that they ought to panic. In fall 2022, just as the school-closings panic was getting rolling, 80 percent of parents of K–12 children told the Gallup poll that they were satisfied with their own children’s education—about the same as before the pandemic and about the same as every year since 2000. But among American adults— nonparents as well as parents—satisfaction with schools in general had dropped. The decline was entirely among Republican and Republican-leaning nonparents. Since nonparents don’t generally have any direct experience of the schools, the decline in their approval must have been shaped by what they heard and read in the media and social media or heard from politicians.

Rejecting public health measures absolves our fellow citizens, disproportionately on the right, whose refusal to cooperate with mask and vaccine mandates may have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. It is a politics that sees demands that we take care of each other, not just look out for ourselves as, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

You are a bad person for questioning pandemic measures imposed by your government—no matter how intrusive and draconian those measures may be.

If you participated in these moral panics at your kid’s school—you are an enemy to democracy. And you are trying to gain power by showing up at school board meetings to voice your views. Shame on you, fascist bigot.

Moral panics, note a group of scholars and human rights activists assembled by the Century Foundation, are “about power—more policing of the marginalized; stifling social and economic change that would cost the elite; fighting democratic reforms; and redirecting grievances toward scapegoats.” The idea of government-run public schools, publicly accountable and open to children of all social origins, is central to our idea of democracy. It stands in sharp contrast to the idea that children should attend nonpublic schools based on their parents’ religious beliefs, racial identity, ideological concerns, or individual demands. To use the pandemic measures that created a safer learning experience for all children as the virus spread as a way of attacking public schools and teachers’ unions is a direct effort at grabbing control.

John Ehrenreich, the writer behind this Slate article, closes out by accusing school closure critics of “exaggerating the impact” and “separating the effects of closings from the impact of the pandemic as a whole and ignoring the interactions between the pandemic and the structure of daily life for American children was your way of pushing the problem out of your mind, you moron. Calling the pandemic school closures a “crisis” makes you someone who dishonors American children, according to Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich (80) is an Ivy leaguer, clinical psychologist, professor, and social critic.