Corey DeAngelis on COVID’s Damage to America’s Kids

Welcome to Old School, New School, Next School with Dom Giordano, a podcast devoted to shedding light on issues pertaining to making America smart again. These include, among many topics, school choice and parental rights. This podcast is dedicated to reversing the deeply disturbing trend known as the dumbing down of America. Now, here's your host,

educator and noted talk media commentator dom giordano hey everyone welcome in dom giordano with you an old school new school next school in some parts of the country i realize we're back to school already when this drops but next week i will have my back to school special you don't want to miss that tell people about it we will give you an insight on why this is such a critical year the nea the aft

going to protest President Trump with students. Not doing better in reading, math, or anything else. That's what they're about. But I have a story. This show is dedicated to school choice and parental rights as a way to deal with the dumbing down of America. It's really massive. Make America smart again. So I've been trying on my radio show in Philadelphia to get in touch with this UC Berkeley, which is a very

Good School in California, San Francisco area, Berkeley. Professor who made national news by spilling her guts. She has hundreds of kids in her class, I guess foundational math at Berkeley, and she has to teach fractions. This is a calculus class, a calculus math class at college. Why does she have to teach fractions? Because they don't know anything.

And as a follow up, a great follow up, the New York Post has this, a San Francisco high school where students get top grade simply for showing up. I'm not making this up. There's footage of it. The students talking about it. Grade inflation. You get an A basically if you show up and don't attack somebody. They have the highest acceptance rate in the state to the University of California, Berkeley, where the math professor is.

So this recent rampant grade inflation has resulted in the fact that Mission High School in San Francisco has a 45% acceptance rate into this elite university. I don't know if you've applied for college, your kids, whatever. You know, this is a top 2025 college. It may not be, quote, Harvard, but it's up there. How did 45% of the students from this school get in?

Well, it seems to be a DEI thing and a great inflation. I'm talking about Joe Biden-era inflation that we're talking about. The rest of the state only has a 15 percent acceptance rate, this compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle. But it's not because of superior academics. No, it's the other side of it. Bad. But a 15 percent. So out of 76 that applied last year to the school,

at Berkeley, 34 were accepted. That astounds me. You have to be kidding me. Well, if you have all A's and there's DEI and all the kinds of things going on, I guess you could. So this professor is saying, look at this. Look at how dumb we're making America, not just in these schools where poor kids don't have a choice, school choice again. This is making its way all the way up into prestigious colleges.

where you can't have a calculus class, she says, because you have to teach fractions. Fractions. I remember once a high school I was teaching in. I went by this math class. And they had on the board, and I stopped just to clarify it. Is seven an odd or even number? These were sophomores in an alleged math class. What do you mean is seven an odd or an even number? Are you kidding me?

Now, one of the biggest remedies that we know of is school choice, parental rights meshed together.

And the biggest guy in the country we have access to, and this year in 2026, 2027, it will be particularly important, we have Corey DeAngelis, the evangelist of school choice.

He's with us again today, and we're going to talk about what happened with this Fauci testimony, Fauci, the shutdown of schools,

How that corrupted schools even more and how all that continues and kind of a little tease look forward to the coming school year. Next week is the full bore Make America Smart Again back to school show in which we'll talk about your child, grandchild, your your area of the country, but also the big, beautiful bill, how that kicks in and frees hopefully a lot of students. So without further ado.

Joining us is America's evangelist of choice and making tremendous headway.

You should know 52 million kids is the number put out this week that I saw are eligible under the big, beautiful bill when it drops in January 2027 to make their way out of some of these fraudulent schools.

52 million.

There are others on the sidelines, though, because of people like Josh Shapiro and Randy Weingarten, et cetera. Let's bring in Corey DeAngelis. Corey, where were you at the beginning of COVID? What were you doing then? I don't quite remember when we started talking to you and you really came to national prominence. I actually was living in Washington, D.C., the worst place to live during COVID or one of the worst places. It was nuts. I wouldn't recommend. I now live in San Antonio, Texas.

where I grew up as well. But I had the unfortunate privilege of being stuck in Washington, D.C., working at think tanks while COVID was going on. So I got to see all the craziness up front.

Seen this surprise that he would 111 times invoke the Fifth Amendment?

Oh, yeah. I saw some of these clips. I mean, he won't even answer what color the carpet is in front of him.

He feels like he's in trouble and he's trying to cover this up.

And it's, you know, Rand Paul called it out that, you know, if you're pardoned for this same time period for the same reason, you should not be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment because you're pardoned. So, like, it's, but yeah, I mean, a big part of this was the teachers unions closed the schools during COVID. That, you know, Bernie Moreno was, Senator from Ohio was pointing this out, and a lot of parents were very upset. We, this is one of the reasons why we have so much school choice.

is because the teachers unions lobbied the CDC to make it more difficult to reopening schools.

So the people in charge weren't following the science. They were following the political science.

And the teachers unions wanted more money, and they knew that they could use kids as bargaining chips.

They held them hostage to say, well, if you want us to open, give us hundreds of billions of dollars.

And they ultimately got that money from Congress.

There was so much pressure from parents that want their schools reopened.

And, Corey, maybe even the biggest tell of all, they take that $100 billion, whatever it was, and they don't put it to a Manhattan Project on learning loss. I have some of the, you have it, and you broke some of these, where they put out memos saying, did you know you could spend this money on this? And it's all tangential stuff, all stuff for adults, nothing about this. In fact, if I were in charge, if I had Trump's ear today, I would appoint somebody,

And it would probably be you to be the national advisor or czar of learning loss and cracking the whip that we're going to documenting it. We're going to do something about it. I just think people think we can go on forever in America with kids getting dumber every day. Yeah, I mean, they got one hundred and ninety billion dollars in so-called COVID relief. They weren't using that to reopen the schools. In fact, I did a study in 2020 looking at one, two separate studies.

One found that the places with stronger teachers unions were more likely to be closed longer, all else equal.

That was a surprise to some people at the time. It's a surprise to nobody right now, because a lot of them were saying, oh, no, the unions are fighting to reopen the schools.

Randy Weingart repeats that lie over and over again.

But my second study with Christos MacCready's, we had found, they're both peer-reviewed, that places that had more money per student, in fact, were less likely to reopen.

And it's probably because the places that had more money were because they had stronger teachers unions there as well, fighting for two things. One, to keep the schools closed as long as possible, while also fighting for as much taxpayer resources as possible. I mean, it just got so stupid, Dom, during COVID. You had the Chicago teachers unions. They deleted a tweet saying that the push to reopen schools is rooted in racism, sexism, and misogyny.

You had daycares that You had schools that were closed But then they opened the same buildings for daycare And then they charged parents On top of what they were paying in taxes For the privilege to go back into those same buildings It's like COVID knew if you were learning something It was going to activate and get you Whereas if you were just sitting there for daycare Then all of a sudden it's okay It's because private employees Came into those same buildings to staff them But the teachers unions would not go back to work

You even had one California private school rebrand itself as a daycare.

We're not a school, trust us.

And they wanted to keep their doors open because they operated in the marketplace.

Parents wanted them to be open.

And in order to get those tuition payments, they had to provide a service.

So that just shows you the difference between government failure and private sector entrepreneurialism.

And it just revealed how crazy all of it was.

Corey, the silver lining that we mentioned, I think the number out the other day was, I'm not sure if it's your number too, 52 million are thereabouts. 52 million are eligible under the big, beautiful bill that goes in effect in January. And it's going to be interesting. How quickly will those kids be able to, I guess it won't be till the next school year or could they in the middle of the school year? Yep. So, I mean, we have tons of state level programs for school choice, 18.

And red states have gone universal, not Pennsylvania. But 31 states have opted in to Trump's Big Beautiful Bill program. Anybody can donate, whether your governor opts in or not. So anybody can benefit starting in January of 2027 to donate, get that dollar-for-dollar tax credit up to $1,700 per person. And I believe students can start receiving scholarships in 2027 as well. So that's right around the corner.

And it's incumbent upon governors to make the easy decision, I would say. This should be all 50 states at some point opting in. But Governor Shapiro, although he said he's for school choice, he has caved to the teachers union time and time again, who has given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in political funding. So that's kind of the tightrope I think he's trying to walk. I mean, he knows it's popular school choice in Pennsylvania, so he says he's for school choice.

He said he was in his gubernatorial campaign in 2022, but then he vetoed his own campaign promise, which was crazy to me.

And now he's just kicking the can down the road saying he's waiting for more rules and waiting for more guidance.

But we've gotten the guidance. We know how the program is going to work.

And this should be a no-brainer like Jared Polis, the Colorado Democrat governor, said.

He said, why would I not opt in? I don't want to leave money on the table.

And you can even raise money for the public schools with this new program. So it's almost a win-win situation. But the teachers unions don't want anyone leaving their schools at all. You're the best we can get. We saw what happened in Texas when they suddenly were universal school choice. It was 100,000 plus applying. How many do you think are going to apply? Let's say it's about 35 states by then. Maybe 38. Maybe closer to 40.

How many kids and parents, as Corey DeAngelis think, are going to say, yeah, I've had it. If I can get that little bump, that'll help. I'm looking for private school. Could it be millions? Yeah, it really depends on how many donations there are. But, you know, if you just look at surveys asking people, where do you send your kid to school now? And if money weren't a problem, where would you send them? Constantly, it shows, you know, 80, 90 percent of kids are in public schools right now. But only half of that amount said that they'd actually want to send them there.

They'd prefer homeschooling or private schooling. This was even a trend that was even before COVID people were saying this. So it could be millions and millions of people benefiting, and there's no cap on the total amount of donations for this program. The original version in Congress had a cap of a certain amount of billions of dollars, $4 billion or something, but now there's not a cap. So if you can raise that funding, and I don't see why you want it, it's just going to be an education operation.

Because if you know you can get that $1,700 back in April when you do your taxes, why would you not contribute to a scholarship? It's dollar for dollar. That's where the campaign is going to be big to come in because I'm sure they'll try to muddy the waters. But you're right. You're not losing anything and you're benefiting. This could be one of the biggest moments that turns around getting out of public school indoctrination, inefficiencies, etc. That's a big moment and you're right in the center of it.

Yeah, and there's a bill in Congress to get rid of the program.

It's not going to go anywhere, but the Democrats, there's 34 co-sponsors.

And I found out, I wrote about in the Washington Post recently, that a majority of those 34 co-sponsors either went to private school themselves or sent their kids to private school or both.

So they're total hypocrites on school choice.

It includes Elizabeth Warren, who lied to a voter about this issue back in 2019 when she was running for president.

A black mom had approached her at a campaign event saying, I just want the same opportunity you had for your kid. I heard you sent him to a private school because I had reported on it at the New York Post at the time. Elizabeth Warren apparently didn't know she was being recorded or she thought she could get away with a lie or she hadn't read my New York Post article yet. But she responded saying, no, I sent my kids to public school. So Pocahontas added to her list of lies. And it's just this school choice for me, but not for the hypocrisy that they think they're going to be a public school.

They're better than us, but everybody should have that opportunity, and they shouldn't pull the ladder up from behind themselves.

Senator Rick Scott just a little while ago called Dr. Fauci a villain. You know, before today, I think I would have said that, but now after seeing this today and seeing his sheer shirking of his duty to at least, he doesn't have to agree or apologize. Duke it out. That's the American way. Have to fight on this.

Let's hear your side. I don't think he should apologize if he doesn't think he did anything wrong. Yeah, but discuss it. Yeah, it's infuriating seeing him just sit there and plead the fifth the entire time for a period where he was pardoned. It makes you wonder how much deeper does this go? And I looked through some of those emails, the Fauci files, thousands of pages, and schools were mentioned a bunch. And what I mostly saw was just the vanity in it.

He was just so excited about being on TV and just getting all this national attention. And it was just really weird and narcissistic of him. And it just goes to show you that a lot of these decisions probably aren't based on what the science actually says. I think a lot of times these people were just making it up on the fly and then imposing their will on everybody else. I think that COVID also allowed petty tyrants to be able to control

people who had no power in their lives to begin with. They said, oh, this is one way I can get you to wear a mask. This is one way I can tell you to put that shot in your arm. It was a way to control other people. It was really sick. And I'm glad that a lot of this is being exposed right now. And I think that includes Fauci as well. He had a little bit of a period in his life where he felt like he was all powerful and he loved it. You can you can just tell by reading the emails. Absolutely. Corey, where do we find you and your book every day?

It's more and more important Yep, it's at DeAngelisCory on X

and you can get my book. It's The Parent Revolution

It's endorsed by Trump, Pete Hegseth

and others. Find it anywhere. Just

search for the name The Parent Revolution

Corey, thank you so much. Thanks for coming

on today. Yeah, thanks, Tom

Alright, that is Corey DeAngelis

laying out what happened

here. The teachers unions, large

part of the problem. As I said

they're going to march on Washington to protest

President Trump with students before the

midterms. Not reading, writing, not fixated on that. That's what they're fixated on.

Our mission is to break loose millions and millions more kids and parents in 2026 into 2027.

Now, if you have a question for me or comment, you can always email me, Dom Giordano.

So it's domshow, D-O-M-S-H-O-W, at AOL.com.

Domshow at AOL.com.

Already looking forward to this school year. The things that are going to happen that will have power. Be with us. Tell other people each week, old school, new school, next school. Old school, new school, next school with Dom Giordano is a presentation of Giordano Productions LLC. Copyright 2026. All rights reserved.