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PODCAST | “Freedom to Learn:” 15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures

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Natalya Murakhver on the Truth About School Closures, Its Harm to Students, & Union Responsibility

Natalya Murakhver joined Freedom to Learn this week to talk about her new documentary, 15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures, and the importance of preserving the true narrative of America’s disastrous and prolonged school closures.

We discussed:

• Teachers unions’ outsized role in shaping the Covid-era policy and narrative;
• The significant impacts on children’s academic outcomes, engagement with school, future opportunities, mental health, and social development; and
• Why we must prevent this harmful chapter in our nation’s history from being rewritten.

Natalya Murakhver’s personal experiences as an immigrant and mother fueled her commitment to advocating for children’s education. She was a leader in the Open Schools movement, the founder of Urgency of Normal, and, as she explains during our conversation, she convened esteemed medical experts from across the country to create and communicate a toolkit that convinced school districts to reopen schools.

15 Days has been released on X — view it here. Please watch the film and consider attending or hosting a screening in your community.

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Below is an edited and abridged transcript from our conversation. Watch or listen to our full conversation to learn more about the 15 Days film.

Make sure to follow or subscribe to Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Thursday.

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Why is it important to document what happened during the COVID era?

Natalya Murakhver: It’s incredibly important to keep the history and the records available to everyone and to make sure that the story is not rewritten and that the people who did this to our kids don’t get to set the narrative because that would be handing a victory to them. And realistically, this is our children’s stories. I have not seen anyone really portray the voices of the children and the parents, and the people who experienced this. I mean, there are a lot of people who spoke for them, but here they speak for themselves.

So when you say people are rewriting what happened, rewriting history, are there particular entities, particular individuals, or groups who you see doing that more than others?

Natalya Murakhver: Based on what we’ve uncovered, it does seem like the narrative was being set by the teachers unions who saw it as an opportunity. They saw COVID, the pandemic, as an opportunity for a reset for societal change. And Randi Weingarten, pretty much said that in March 2020, we just weren’t listening.

I think some people might push back on folks like us who are still talking about this, still wanting to document it, still wanting to ensure that people understand the results of what happened during COVID closures. What would you say to them as to why this is so essential that we keep the conversation going?

Natalya Murakhver: Well, I mean, No King’s Day just happened. Randi Weingarten was one of the chief organizers of that. When we watched hours and hours of interviews with her and podcasts, she talked about the fact that all of the social justice initiatives were all the same thing. There was a podcast in which she said ‘environmental justice is racial justice, is social justice, is gender justice.’ It’s a very contemporary story. It’s not the past. COVID was just one stage.

One thing that I’ve noticed in my years working in K-12 education policy is that the system just generally waits for the troublesome or vocal parents to move on through. And so that’s something that could have happened as a result of the COVID-era kids graduating, moving on. And then the parents who fought to get schools open again, who fought to expose the harm, would be moving on.

I feel really strongly that we can’t just let the parents graduate and the system continue as is without consequence for what happened. And so I’m so thankful that you’ve created this documentary, 15 Days, The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures. 15 days, as far as the closures, that was not the case in the areas where you and I live, and in many areas across the country. 15 days became like a year, sometimes close to two years, when you’re talking about going back to “normal.”

Natalya Murakhver: You heard Bill Gates talking about reimagining education. It was an opportunity and a real confluence of factors. Ed tech really saw this as an opportunity to usher in technology that had never been seen before in a classroom. Kids were pushed onto phones. We had the schools closed to kids for a while, and parents were fighting to get the kids back inside.

But my whole thing is, hold on a second. When we got the kids back inside, suddenly, parents were the ones who were being locked out. We couldn’t both go back into the building together. In New York, for instance, which is where I live, we had vaccine mandates for parents. Every obstacle was put into place to make sure that these kids, when they went back into those classrooms, when they went back into those buildings, those parent-teacher associations, they were kind of ruptured. Parents who tried to speak at school board meetings were silenced and worse. They were called domestic terrorists, as actual terrorism is happening in this country.

Kids were being indoctrinated. I mean, I used to hate that term. But I don’t know what other term fits it better when parents are separated from kids, or when the National Education Association, which is the largest teachers union in the country, run by Becky Pringle, says, ‘they are our kids, they’re not your kids.’ When President Biden says ‘they’re all our children,’ and the doors of the school buildings are closed to parents, and parents are being treated like criminals instead of their children’s best allies.

This is a real re-imagining of education. This has been the greatest rupture to family life and education in this country, and schools never truly reopened. Our public schools in New York City are decrepit. They spend more money than any other school district. They have terrible results. People are fleeing to charters, private, parochials out of the city… So the 15 days are still going.

Good point. I was just thinking that the ‘15 days to slow the spread’ as in ‘we’ll close the schools for a couple of weeks, then we’ll open back up,’ became a longer, significantly longer period until the school doors opened again. But I hear what you’re saying. They opened, but things did not go back to “normal” by any stretch of the imagination.

People who live in more rational parts of the country, so Florida, for example, a state where things opened back up, would be shocked to hear you saying that parent-teacher meetings did not resume, that there were these restrictions put on parents to even enter the building, to interact directly, to see what’s going on in their classroom. So that is another reason that a documentary like this is important, because there were such discrepancies across the country. Everybody needs to know what happened, and everybody needs to be vigilant to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Natalya Murakhver: They used safetyism, you’re clean, you’re dirty, you’re vaccinated, you’re not.

When they didn’t vaccinate their kids, those kids could no longer compete in sports. And you know what that meant? That they couldn’t be scouted for sports scholarships. They lost their interest in school.

You talk about ‘out of an abundance of caution’ in the trailer. David Zweig has written An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, The Virus, and A Story of Bad Decisions. He’s got the book version, and then you’ve got the documentary version that lays out the fact that there wasn’t a lot of real scientific evidence for the closures in the first place. Can you talk a little bit about your work during the closures to expose that fact?

Natalya Murakhver: It was pretty clear early on in Europe and even in Asia, the kids were not in danger; that mostly, you know, it was a mild virus that would pass. And so by September 2020, in New York City, we were being promised that schools were going to reopen. And we had arguably the worst mayor in New York City history, Bill de Blasio, a terrible, terrible mayor, I think universally hated by the left and the right. And to his credit, he did make good on his promise. And by the end of September, a few weeks late, he did manage to open schools in New York City, which was a huge triumph. But there was this looming 5% transmission threshold that was over us, which the unions of course demanded because they wanted to re-close schools. So he was up against the unions. And so we knew that it was just a matter of time before things closed again, and also knew that it was looking like it was a political stunt.

This was no longer a question of safety. We knew that teachers were young. They were largely the safest demographic outside of kids to be in classrooms. So what gives? So we started organizing rallies and petitions. November 2020, we had our very first rally and then a few more after that.

But they didn’t really work, and schools closed again anyway. They closed I think at the end of November. I found that peaceful protests, talking to the media doesn’t really work. And by the way, the only media outlets that showed up after, you know, a few rallies were the conservative ones.

As time progressed and the middle and high schools did not reopen, and you could see how much these kids were suffering, I decided to organize a lawsuit. And so I begged a lawyer named Jim Mermigis, who was known as the anti-lockdown lawyer at that point. He had sued Cuomo to reopen bars, strip clubs, and gyms and was incredibly successful. And I begged him to take the case because lawyers across the country wouldn’t take these school reopening cases. And what triggered him finally was when I texted him and said, ‘by the way, kids are doing Zoom in a room.’ And he was like, ‘what’s Zoom in a room?’ And I said, ‘Zoom in a room means that these middle and high schoolers are sitting in a classroom separated by six to eight feet apart with masks on staring into screens while their teachers are teaching them from other rooms.’ And he was like, ‘how could this be? This can’t be true.’ And I sent him some articles.

And he said, ‘I’ll take the case.’

That’s not a fully-functioning reopened school. So there was a lawsuit. Any success with that?

Natalya Murakhver: Well, we filed it. Jim had assured me that once we filed it, it would be heard within two weeks. So this was April 2021. Of course, the courts were all virtual at the time. There was no real response, and there was no court date, nothing. They stalled the hearing until July 2021 after the schools had closed.

Although schools had reopened for elementary school kids, but kids had to sit in one line at lunchtime, stare at the wall and pull down their masks and take bites, and not talk to each other.

Didn’t kids have to sit outside in New York winters?

Natalya Murakhver: Yeah, my kids sat outside, but you know what? They preferred to sit outside than sitting in a lineup in the lunch room with their masks on and being treated like, you know, worse than Rikers Island. My kids had to go outside the classroom to take a sip of water. And if there was more than one child, they had to stand three or four feet apart. Think about what that teaches that child about connectedness and community and their peers. They’re viral. They’re viral vectors. That’s what Andy Slavitt, who was an Obama appointee, said. And that’s exactly how the union portrayed them in the narrative to the teachers, to everyone, and to the kids themselves.

Your trailer features a quote from union boss Randi Weingarten, ‘use this for the society we want to see.’ And we saw that not just from Randi, sometimes we pay too much attention to her. We saw that from the local union leaders, too. Do you expose any of those kinds of examples?

Natalya Murakhver: The Chicago Teachers Union famously tweeted and deleted, but there are records anyway, that school reopening was rooted in misogyny and bigotry. And all the while, one of the union leaders was in Puerto Rico sunbathing and saying, ‘we have to stay remote for safety.’

Stephanie Edmonds, who was my partner on this film from the very beginning, was a teacher in the Bronx public schools. She refused to get vaccinated when they had the vaccine mandate for teachers. She talks about the fact that most of the teachers felt okay going back, but they were being told that they’re not safe. And so they ended up going on vacations and teaching remotely in their pajamas from Curacao.

The other thing is that in an article back in 2021, and I quote this daily, Cecily Myart-Cruz, the head of UTLA, the LA Teachers Union, just brushed off the fact that there was lost learning and that kids were going to fall behind. And she said something to the effect of, ‘It doesn’t matter that our babies don’t know their timetables; they know the difference between a riot and a coup.’ That’s the important thing to learn in school, I guess.

Natalya, it makes me so angry remembering that people were saying that, and then the closures continued, or the semi-opening continued. How could we not all be outraged and motivated to act? It wasn’t just the unions in my area. Our local superintendent was saying at school board meetings, ‘we need to get away from that concept of learning loss.’ Remember when that became a talking point in the education system?

How insane, how absolutely insane that instead of being incredibly concerned about the outcomes of these closures and everything that was happening to kids, we’re going to tell people not to worry that students are no longer learning, that we have to get away from that.

Natalya Murakhver: And meanwhile, they were abusing open schools parents and calling us white supremacists and saying that we just wanted babysitters.

And these unions had this whole playbook. And what they did was, and it was brilliant. They said to the black community, you’re not safe. Your kids are not safe. They’re going to die in the schools as though the virus discriminates based on color. I mean, it’s the definition of racism. They told the black and brown community, ‘they’re not gonna be able to keep you safe.’ By the way, they are the unions, right? Like, ‘we’re not gonna keep you safe or your kids are gonna die, so don’t go back.’

Then they went to the teachers. As Scott Atlas in our film says, teachers are the youngest demographic. If anything, schools were safer than the rest of society. And they said to the teachers, ‘You are not safe. We cannot keep you safe, don’t go back.’

And then they had the spokespeople on teacher side and the spokespeople on the black people’s side because they had all been manipulated by the same nefarious entities and the teachers were like ‘we don’t want to go back we don’t want to die for the DOE’ and the black communities were like ‘you’re not going to keep our children safe so you’re racist if you want to send our kids to die.’ You had the teachers unions go ‘Well, it’s not us. We have to be equitable; our members don’t want to go back, and neither does the black community. So we’re just the messengers. We’re just trying to be equitable.’

And now we have achievement gaps that are historically heartbreaking. The lowest performing, the lowest income students were hit hard by this, so absolute inequity when it came to school closures. Let’s talk a little bit about the consequences. That’s something that you are definitely exposing with this film by telling the parents’ and the students’ stories. There’s a quote from a student saying teachers just didn’t care. So we’ve talked about how online schooling did not provide a real education. It sounds like it really did deeply impact students and break that connection that they would have had, that trust that they would have had of teachers and of school.

Natalya Murakhver: Or the amount of abuse that went on — teachers are mandated reporters. That’s the person that the student comes to if there’s abuse in the home. Think about all those children who didn’t have anyone to turn to. There are so many kids who were just left behind and completely abandoned.

In our film, Garrett Morgan, who lost an opportunity at a football scholarship. He is now in LaGuardia Community College and is student body president. He’s doing pretty well. I mean, he’s a very successful, smart, self-driven kid, but he talks about what it was like to be abandoned by the schools. And he said, ‘You could feel the disconnect. I could leave the room, go get a sandwich, come back, and nothing, I was never missed.’ These kids were out of sight. They were never missed. There was nobody watching them. And that is horrible.

Monica Gandhi, who is an infectious disease expert at UCSF in San Francisco, was one of the early open schools advocates. And she talks about the contrast between how the progressive cities handled the Spanish flu, which was more dangerous for kids back in 1917, 18, and the progressive cities were the ones that kept the schools open because they knew that these millions of kids in these big cities depended on the schools for everything, for their lifeline.

The progressive cities also closed the playgrounds. You’re talking about just a community-wide abandonment of children, of children’s needs. I wonder if we’re forgetting already just how much emergency room visits spiked. I mean, this was real harm.

Natalya Murakhver: And I think they had closed 12 children’s hospitals, like the mental wards for children, which are very different than adults. And I remember there was a huge backlog, like parents with kids with mental health issues. They had nowhere to go.

And no hope. In an area like mine, Northern Virginia, or my district specifically, there were closures for a full year. And then at the end of the 2020-21 school year, some students could come back two days a week. That’s not a real reopening, that’s not a real school experience. And then we haven’t even talked about the disruptions that quarantine policies caused. So this dragged on as students were continued to be viewed as viral vectors. And if there was any whiff of ‘you sat next to somebody who tested positive for COVID,’ you’re out for two weeks. I mean, that kind of disruption of learning that continued on for another year or so was incredibly harmful.

Natalya Murakhver: You know what was open at the time? Those online communities, the trans community was very, very open while the schools were closed. And I sat in a room with parents yesterday talking about some of the issues that their kids have encountered over the course of the past few years. It was an event that was talking about gender and kids who are transitioning. I personally don’t have such a story. I’m very fortunate, but I know way too many parents who are just lost, still trying to rescue their kids from gender ideology. And without exception, every single parent who spoke about what happened to their kids who are now like 20 or high teens said that they found community online when schools were closed, and they were welcomed in, and they haven’t been able to extricate them. So, what were the unions doing? Where were they pushing the kids? I do lay this at the feet of the unions because they’re still pushing all of this stuff. So this is very much not the past.

Not the past, consequences continue and will continue for these students their whole lives, whether you’re talking about embracing an identity that leads to lifelong harm and irreversible damage, whether you’re talking about academic fallout. 22% of 12th graders are proficient in math according to the most recent Nation’s Report Card results. 35% are proficient in reading. And when you look at the math scores, 45% of students who were tested, these were 12th graders, don’t even reach the basic level. We have robbed them of basic math skills. And there’s a high percentage of students who don’t have basic reading skills. We’ve robbed them of the ability to read as they should be able to. So that’s going to impact them for life. I can’t understand why there would be apathy about what happened during the closures and why there wouldn’t be an interest or a passion for ensuring that it never happens again. And that’s why your film is so important, because we do get caught up in whatever the outrage is of the day. We get caught up in whatever it is on our to-do list of the day, but we have to take a look at what happened, who caused it, and make sure we’re not going to do it again. Are there any other stories that you featured in this film that you’d want to share?

Natalya Murakhver: Yeah, I think many of your listeners are probably familiar with what happened to Jay Bhattacharya and Scott Atlas and doctors who spoke out and tried to challenge the narrative. In our film, those doctors kind of go through the same trajectory as the parents. Like they’re also often parents. Jay had three children who were suffering as well during the pandemic. And as a doctor and a researcher, he said, ‘I’m just going to look at the research and see if the infection fatality rate (which is what they were pushing) is really as high as they say it is. Is it really that dangerous of a virus?’ And he did the research and found that, in fact, it was far lower. Scott Atlas found the same. They were at Stanford University at the time. Jay got death threats. There was censure of Scott Atlas. They were treated like criminals. The Biden administration ordered the social media companies to censor them.

Instead of listening to these commonsense world-class researchers, we had the federal government calling them fringe epidemiologists to completely discredit their views. Why? Why was ideology pushed like that?

It seemed like there was a narrative that they were struggling to keep hold of. And if it hadn’t been for people like Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, Houman Hemmati, the doctors that I worked with at Urgency of Normal, we may still be in a school closure and a partial lockdown. They just would not rest. These people refused to back down because they knew that whatever personal comforts they were sacrificing, it was worth it for society because the forces on the other side were the ones writing the book.

Can you talk a little bit more about your efforts with Urgency of Normal?

Natalya Murakhver: I think probably at some point in early 2021, Randi Weingarten did an AFT roundtable with Eric Hartman and Michelle [Walker] from Open Schools USA. And Randi brought several of her experts. And Eric and Michelle brought Jay Bhattacharya and Tracy Beth Hoeg to talk about Covid closures. They thought, we’re going to come here in good faith and we’re going to have a real open discussion and we’re going to show them, we’re going to prove to them we have all the data, we’ve done the research that actually opening schools and getting rid of all these restrictions makes perfect sense and other countries are doing it without any ill effects.

It was a very frustrating conversation because the two doctors that the teachers union brought were not researchers. They had no concept of the research. They really just had their idea, their ideology, and their talking points from the unions. Jay and Tracy tried really hard. I mean, if you know researchers, you know they don’t have a lot of hubris. They’re really just trying to understand what does the data say. And they’re presenting the data being completely dismissed out of hand.

My daughters at the time were suffering quite a bit with mask mandates because they were in elementary school and their school had somewhat reopened. And I had asked Open Schools people, ‘how did you get Randi Weingarten to do this with you?’ And they said, ‘we DMed her on Twitter.’ So I was like, I can do that. So I did. And to her credit, she accepted my invitation, and she and I went out for a drinks date on Marathon Sunday in November 2021 here in New York City. And I brought her a little bracelet that my six-year-old then had made and a little picture that said, ‘I’m happier unmasked than I am masked.’ And I said to her, ‘I read the papers. It looks like you have a hand in CDC guidance. I’m asking you as a mother who’s seen how much the kids are suffering, will you please talk to the CDC and get them to drop all this mask guidance, all the vaccine mandates and stuff?’ And she said, ‘if you give me a proposal, I will present it to the CDC. Just send me a proposal.’

My proposal was to get the kids back to normal.

And I went home and called Tracy Hoeg, and she said there’s no evidence to support any of these [masking] policies. She’s a dual national of the US and Denmark. And she said in Denmark, kids are just back to normal. The proposal is to take the masks off, put them back into normal school. Ultimately, it was a toolkit that a Bay Area virologist named Scott Balsitis had designed for his own school district in the Bay Area to try to get the schools to get the kids back to normal. It was a great toolkit. Tracy got behind it, she brought it to me.

We brought on all these incredible experts, including people like Vinay Prasad, Eliza Holland. They were from all over the country. Carol Vidal in Maryland at Johns Hopkins, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. And they all co-signed. And we did a Zoom, we released a toolkit with press releases. The toolkit was very successful because parents from all over the country emailed us and said, ‘thank you so much for finally collecting all of the data into something digestible that I could reproduce and share with my school board and really use evidence to argue for restoration of normalcy.’ We had thousands of doctors who co-signed around the country. It was a success. It was very stressful because there were also lots of hits on those doctors. They were being threatened. Lucy McBride, one of the doctors in the Virginia area, was doxxed. I mean, they did everything they could to silence them, but I think these doctors really knew that they had to speak out because there was nobody else.

People might not remember just how hard it was to speak up. particularly if you’re thinking about protecting your children, your children’s relationships, your children’s opportunities. It was kind of a lonely and hard time to speak up. So I’m thankful that you were out there leading the charge. What fueled that for you? I know you said that your children were suffering, but was there something else?

Natalya Murakhver: First of all, as an immigrant, came here when I was six from the Soviet Union, from Odessa, Ukraine. And if schools had shut down when I came here and when I was acquiring the language when my parents were struggling, my father was a plumber and was working in incinerators and was out of the house all day. My mother is a bookkeeper commuting to Manhattan and that’s what we needed. That was our livelihood and it was just me. Like in our tiny apartment, if I had been shut in that apartment for months and months and months and not been able to go to first grade, I don’t think I’d be here speaking to you right now.

So, I mean, that personal experience is one thing. But also just watching the kids, like seeing how important it was for them to see each other, to see each other’s faces and understanding child development. Parents spend a lot of time reading about child development. It was very clear that we were disrupting developmental milestones, and those things are not recoverable. You cannot recover them. You can maybe acquire those skills, but you’re meant to develop those skills at certain windows. And I was deeply, deeply concerned that we were disrupting those developmental milestones and we’d have a generation of kids who couldn’t cope. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now.

Scott Atlas just released an article with research about this generation, Gen Z, and the blank stare, the low academic performance, they’re all relying on AI, like it’s terrifying, it’s terrifying, and no sense of objective reality. Those were things that really deeply concerned me. And every time people said, ‘my kid’s okay in remote.’ And I’m like, ‘but over how long? When will you know if your kid is okay?’ To me, that was a ridiculous statement. My kids could be okay for a week, for two weeks, but over time…

Also, what was the message we were sending to them? That they weren’t important, that outside was dangerous, that other people were vectors. These are all the wrong messages for a productive society and this was destroying and continues to destroy American society.

Natalya, how can people watch this very important movie, 15 Days, the Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures?

Natalya Murakhver: It will be available for a small fee to watch on Vimeo. And then in a few weeks, it will be on streaming channels, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Apple TV. It’s also available for screenings. If you go to our website, 15daysfilm.com, you can sign up to host a screening. I think the best way to watch it is with other people. Honestly, this should be watched communally and discussed, and we’re going to be doing screenings around the country as well.

Fantastic. How can people follow your work outside of the 15 Days film?

Natalya Murakhver: On Twitter: @RStore Childhood. We have a Substack, Restore Childhood Substack, or restorechildhood.com.

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Listen to our full Freedom to Learn conversation on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. If you have suggestions for future guests or topics, please send them to podcast@dfipolicy.org.

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