While the COVID era is now, thankfully, in the past, the damage it caused is becoming more and more apparent by the day. Perhaps nowhere do we see this as much as in education: Even a half decade later, the aftershocks of learning loss and decreased socialization are being felt in schools around the country, as children whose schools were shuttered continue to lag both academically and socially.
To understand how we got there, I spoke with David Zweig, a journalist who has written extensively on how mainstream American institutions failed during the COVID era. His new book, “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions,” gets into how the ill-informed decision to close schools was made and what that decision says about American institutions and America more broadly.
Neeraja Deshpande: I went to college during the COVID years and I think, generationally, there are so many maladaptive trends in my cohort that I have personally seen that were the direct result of school and college closures. And then I taught middle school and high school after college—kids who were about 6-12 years younger than me—and saw upfront how much those closures impacted my students’ learning and development.
Now that we’re five years out from 2020, it’s very clear that everyone who spoke out against school closures was proven correct. What do you think that vindication reveals about America?
David Zweig: So the most important thing that I try to do in my book is arm readers with an understanding of how the gears of society turn behind the scenes. My book is not a cataloging of harms to children, although I certainly cover that. And it’s not about a sort of retrospective look. Almost every small thing that I talk about was known in real time.
And the reason why that’s important is because I’m establishing for the reader that the things we were being told were untrue. And not untrue because we learned that they were untrue later—they were untrue in the moment. Stark empirical evidence was being waved away. And that much of this had to do with the tribalism in our country and the homogenous political leaning of the public health establishment and the legacy media.
There is nothing in particular about a “progressive” political leaning that equates with keeping schools closed for a long time. Other countries, as everyone knows, in Western Europe and Scandinavia and elsewhere—countries more progressive than the U.S.—opened their schools. Conversely, there were other countries with more conservative governments that had a stronger lockdown. So there’s nothing intrinsic that made sense about the political polarization.
The only thing that explains the COVID response was that it was a reaction to Trump, and that he said, “Open the schools.”
Neeraja Deshpande: So would you call that “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”
David Zweig: It’s not exclusively Trump Derangement Syndrome. There’s a political uniformity within these institutions, so that’s one of the big lessons. It’s so dangerous. And I don’t think it would be resolved if it was all the way on the right either. You need a heterogeneous political environment within these different important institutions in our country.
Most people, whether on the right or the left, don’t do well with being in part of the out group, so when you have this uniformity, it created a circumstance where people were afraid to speak out when they thought that what was happening was wrong, or they were explicitly told that they weren’t allowed to speak out and I’ve lots of examples of that in the book.
One of the important things that I talk about in the book a lot is how parents were really kept out of the decision-making process. My book documents the way parents and families were treated by school administrators. At one point, someone said to me, “We pay taxes, right? Why don’t we have a say in this at all?”
Instead people were led into this sort of Kafkaesque thing where you would just try and try to speak with a superintendent or school board and you would just get run around. They were impervious to evidence. It didn’t matter to them. So you ended up with a circumstance where you had a little girl who’s quarantined in her bedroom month after month after month, while her best friend down the street who’s in private school without any fancy mitigation measures or anything is in school every day.
Neeraja Deshpande: I feel like we’re in this moment of institutional collapse, especially given the Trump administration’s crackdown on schools that have become ideologically poisoned and universities that have not been complying with federal law. But then there’s also the mainstream media and opinion-making elites who don’t really have the same hold on people that they used to five years ago. What do you make of that?
David Zweig: One of the things that I’m concerned about is that although legacy media has seen its audience influence erode to some degree, it still carries an enormous amount of influence among the decision makers in our society in many regards. When something is printed in the New York Times, it matters to a significant portion of the country, not because they’re all reading the Times, but because that’s what the various political staffers read. That’s what matters to those cultural leaders and others within cosmopolitan parts of America.
I just keep touching on this point, but unfortunately, these institutions, whether you’re thinking about public health or legacy media or medicine, they tend to self-select for people who are oftentimes very bright, very diligent workers—which are wonderful and important qualities—but not for people who are independent thinkers. When you’re a resident, you answer to the attending, you’re memorizing enormous amounts of information and decision trees when you’re presented with, you know, a patient with a set of symptoms and you just run through it. So in some regards, the skills and talents and personality traits are really important and beneficial for these institutions, but they also cause problems.