Zoom calls expose bad behavior and undermine schoolkids

CNN talking head Jeffrey Toobin.

Boston School Committee hack Michael Loconto

Your soon-to-be-threegrade-levels-behind schoolkids.

All of them brought low, victims of the same nefarious tech villain who plagues us day and night:

The Dreaded Zoom Call. Hey, President Trump — want to rescue your troubled campaign? Issue an executive order banning all Zoom-related technology from American soil. You’ll jump 10 points in the polls with white-collar suburbanites overnight.

I assume you know the unfortunate Zoom call incident that sidelined liberal commentator Toobin. Let’s just say that your grandmother was right about “idle hands.”

And liberal bureaucrat Michael Loconto, Mayor Marty’s top stooge on the school committee, experienced his own self-inflicted crisis when he was caught on a Zoom mic allegedly mocking Asian names during a committee meeting.

“Mr. Loconto’s behavior last night was unacceptable. I’m deeply appalled, personally offended, by his words,” tweeted Boston City Councilor Annissa EssaibiGeorge. “It is unconscionable that he would mock & disparage our families. Our school communities & our City deserve more. It’s time for his resignation.”

Google ‘fired’ and ‘Zoom’ and you’ll get a long list of stories of people who were supposedly saving their jobs by working remotely, only to lose them thanks to the unblinking eye of the tech Sauron of Mount Zoom.

For example, a University of Miami professor was fired after teaching class via Zoom with a bookmark to a site for “Busty College Girls” atop the screen. Students spotted, recorded and Tik-Tok’d it and, within days, he was gone. The professor apologized, but insisted he had no idea how that link got on his computer. Yeah, right.

And if that’s not bad enough, until mid-July Zoom could be hacked to allow people to spy on Mac users via their own laptop camera. If Hugh Hefner and

Stalin collaborated on a tech project, the result would be Zoom.

Those are the unintended negative consequences of having Zoom in our lives. But for America’s schoolchildren, the intended ones are even worse.

Like progressives like to say about climate change, the science on Zoom school/remote learning “is settled”: It stinks.

A recent article for leftleaning Pro Publica recounts the devastating impact on children — particularly low-income, minority kids — of being kept out of the classroom.

“The costs of this are going to be huge,” said Christopher Morphew, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Education, particularly on disadvantaged students already struggling. “Eighteen months of ‘ summer melt’ (learning lost out of the classroom) when you’re already three grades behind is virtually impossible to come back from.”

Meanwhile, the data overwhelmingly indicate that schoolage children are in virtually no danger from COVID-19. Even the liberals of NPR reported this week:

“Two new international studies show no consistent relationship between inperson K-12 schooling and the spread of the coronavirus. And a third study from the United States shows no elevated risk to childcare workers who stayed on the job.”

So why we inflicting Zoom school on our kids? Why are we denying them a decent education?

Because the teachers unions demand it. They’ve put their brute, political force behind the Zoom tech. “Hey, why should we schlep to public school classrooms to deliver a mediocre education, when we can sit home in our PJs and do it?”

Zoom enables Massachusetts teachers unions to deliver the absolute lowest level of education, but still at one of the highest prices in the nation.

If you don’t care about our kids’ futures, Zoom is great!

Watching these “professional educators” treat our public school kids this way, at this point I’m thinking these young scholars would be better off with Roblox.