Just when it seemed those in power no longer cared about the nation’s K–12 education system, schools are generating earthquakes. Classrooms and playgrounds are not shaking—yet. Instead, the epicenters are located below public health departments and university research centers.

Yet schools must take credit—or blame, if you prefer—for November’s earth-rattling events. Had school closures not been so prolonged from 2020 to 2022, President-elect Donald Trump would not be able convince the Senate to confirm Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary to be the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be his director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

When Covid struck in March 2020, public health bureaucrats ordered schools to close, teachers and children to wear masks, and everyone to sit six feet apart. No one complained at first. Indeed, Makary had urged these measures even prior to the declaration of a public emergency by President Trump on the advice of NIH coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

When the disruptions continued until the end of the school year, the more sensitive seismic sensors began to detect tremors hinting at what was to come. It soon became apparent that only a tiny percentage of children required hospitalization, that children were safer at school than at home, and that children were inefficient spreaders of the diseases. Further, previous school closures (induced by storms, strikes, and wars) left children socially isolated, emotionally distraught, and academically behind. When many schools did not open the following fall, a growing group of public health experts, led by Bhattacharya, signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which warned that “[c]urrent lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health . . . leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.”

Fauci attacked the Declaration, saying, “Quite frankly that is nonsense, and anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous.” Similarly, Francis Collins, director of the NIH at the time of the Declaration, also called it “dangerous” and its signers a “fringe component of epidemiology” who were outside the scientific “mainstream.” Shifting from lockdowns to a focus on the ill and aged would cause unnecessary illnesses and deaths, he insisted. At the behest of public health authorities, Twitter banned Bhattacharya and promotions of the Declaration from its social media platform.

It was the great German sociologist Max Weber who said Americans “prefer having people in office whom we can spit upon, rather than a caste of officials who spit upon us.” A high caste of public health bureaucrats had forgotten America’s commitment to liberty. It was only a matter of time before elites would begin to feel the ground opening beneath them.

Elections provide Americans with the opportunity to expectorate. They cast ballots based less upon promises about the future than what has happened in the past. When voters have been sprayed with bureaucratic spittle, they reply with the enthusiasm of a tobacco-chewer seated by a spittoon.

Ironically, Trump was the first victim. His early embrace of Fauci in daily press briefings proved politically fatal. As the lockdown continued, he turned to Stanford’s Dr. Scott Atlas, an ally of those who would sign the Great Barrington Declaration. But his switch was not in time, as the political campaign had already begun. Joe Biden accused him of not taking the spread of Covid-19 seriously enough. The vaccine in which Trump had invested so much presidential energy was not approved by the FDA until after Election Day. Although early approval would have prevented thousands of hospitalizations and deaths, standard FDA protocols demanded the completion of a large-scale clinical trial. With Covid still on the loose, Fauci forecast disaster ahead: “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season . . . You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

For Trump, Fauci’s words were prophetic. The public rejected a president who could not contain a pandemic. But the election outcome also suggested an abyss would open if bureaucrats persisted in their coercive strategy. Instead of attending to signs of political unrest, public health officials doubled down, even though a vaccine had become available. In the summer of 2021, the public health police warned that the delta variant of Covid-19 was spreading rapidly and may not be protected by the vaccine. Masks should be worn, social distancing remain, school closures continue.

No one paid attention when Makary told me on my Education Exchange podcast that masking was harmful to children and of little use slowing the spread of Covid.

As lockdowns and closures continued through 2022, Trump’s missteps faded into the past, and the Democratic party assumed responsibility for resolving the Covid pandemic. President Biden faithfully wore his mask whenever he appeared in public. At the state level, Democratic governors proved to be the most reluctant to open schools. When schools finally returned to normal, teachers and parents encountered a more emotionally distressed, socially awkward, academically struggling generation of young people, just as the Great Barrington Declaration had anticipated.

To maintain an even keel, the American Rescue Plan poured nearly two trillion dollars into the economy. When the law stimulated more demand than supply, persistent, record-breaking inflation ensued.

The voters spat. Democrats felt the sting. Now Trump is recruiting the most disruptive health policy team the country has ever seen. School closures turned into political earthquakes. It remains to be seen how large they will register on the Richter scale and just how close to the schoolhouse the fissures will reach.

Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He welcomes your reactions to this post by email at paul.peterson@educationnext.org; responses will be curated and shared periodically. His Education Exchange podcast is available with a new episode each Monday.