ARTIST: Kylie Minogue
ALBUM: Disco
RELEASED: November 6th, 2020
LABEL: BMG [in conjunction with her own company Darenote]
LISTEN: Spotify Apple Music
BACKGROUND: The 15th studio album of Australian turned British pop royalty, Kylie Minogue ends up evoking one of the current states of pop music from the name alone. It’s an album called “Disco” and for the past two or so years, anything with a mirror ball in the music video or was more blatantly pop was considered part of a resurgence of the long since “dead” genre of music from the 1970s. It’s something I’m calling for this writeup, a “false cognate” [“misnomer” has a slightly more odious connotation to it, like it’s falsifying or lying about what it is which isn’t exactly the case but more on that later.] In other words, “Yes, the look is there but the sound isn’t unless it’s just a club thing you’re going for.”
For those wondering why the 15th album by an Australian turned British queen needs to be discussed, Disco is the album that not only ended up being her eighth #1 album in the UK selling just over 54,900 units in the first week, her third highest charting album in the U.S. at #26 [even resulting in her first #1 on the Dance/Electronic albums chart in the U.S.] but more to the UK achievements, also managed to stave off Little Mix’s recent album Confetti by 5,000 units and in turn dethroned Chromatica to become the biggest opening first week sales by a female artist in 2020 [it would’ve retained biggest opening first week sales for the UK in 2020 had it not been for an AC/DC release the next week]. Even if it didn’t look like much in the U.S., this speaks to staying power and longevity, which seems more than apt for AOTY status.
REVIEW: For this section, I’m sharing my thoughts on the three official singles and promo single along with four songs of note.

“Oh we’re just/Just trying to find ourselves/In the storms we chase”

“Say Something” – The lead single from the album, which led to her 56th Top 75 in the UK, which stands to her staying power and longevity as most of her contemporaries haven’t bothered that much of the charts in years. It is, however, the thorn in my side and a bad first impression in terms of presenting itself as the lead single for an album called “Disco”. Normally, anything emitting 80s synthpop is fine and dandy but as I will illustrate later in the op-ed section, calling synthpop “disco” is flat out wrong. The gripe aside, it’s a track that makes sense in context of the album. It’s Minogue in her wheelhouse and as it will become clear, this is for the best. A major highlight of the era was the Infinite Disco performance of the song with the House Gospel Choir who in 2019 had achieved a #5 on the Dance Club Songs chart in “Salvation” with Adelphi Music Factory. The song received remixes from Syn Cole [who by 2020 had remixed “Secrets” by P!nk and “Never Really Over” by Katy Perry, both of which went #1 on the Dance Club Songs chart] and Freemasons under their moniker F9 [Freemasons having remixed “The One” from X for single release and are famous for their remixes of Beyonce’s “Green Light”, Solange Knowles’ “Sandcastle Disco” and Kelly Rowland’s “Work” to name a few.] A special remix by Basement Jaxx was also commissioned but appears on a digital “super deluxe” edition of the album available at Kylie’s official online store and has yet to make it to streaming services.
If you appreciate the newer remix stars, listen to the Syn Cole remix. If you want slightly more flourishing elements [remember the word flourish or flourishes, it comes up later], listen to the F9 remix. If you want the remix that evokes the most elements of the genre, the Basement Jaxx remix is not only 5:30 minutes in length but has the type of xylophone/milk bottle clanky sounds that makes disco hit differently and be recognized.

“It’s crazy I’m falling /I don’t know what else to call it”

“Magic” – The second single from the album, which gave her a Top 10 in Scotland but a 57th Top 75 in the UK (The UK is far far more forgiving of pop divas of a certain career span or the charts to look this up are than in the US.) and saw a remix from Purple Disco Machine [who by 2020 had scored a #1 on the Dance Club Songs chart in January 2019 over a Fatboy Slim remix and remixed Lady Gaga's second single from Chromatica, "Rain on Me"] and from Nick Reach Up [who also remixed “In And Out of Love” by Melanie C.] The song itself still feels slightly more 1981 than 1978, but it does have more of a bouncy disco feel that makes sense as a single and more effectively as the opener on the album. In a move that truly stunned the U.S. faction of Lovers AKA Kylie Minogue stans, a performance for American TV was sent to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The performance is great, considering it highlights the Catch 22 of her appeal; she’s a consistent entertainer who has her shit together and is happy to perform for the gays and general public alike. Sure, observations that can be made about her now have been made about her before in other eras, but consistency is something that can always be appreciated from a seasoned pop diva.
The Purple Disco Machine remixes are either in a 3:36 edit or a 5:07 extended mix [which is standard practice from even the 70s in terms of radio edit vs what could be an 8 minute or 12’’ edit of the song meant exclusively for club play]. Both evoke disco better in its production, but to get the full effect, if you have 5 minutes, give the extended mix your attention. The Nick Reach Up remixes are either in a 3:10 edit or a 5:37 extended mix and like with the PDM remixes, it evokes more disco realness than the song itself, and requires 5 minutes of patience to get the full effect [even though you don’t lose with the edit.]

“Know it’s been a while…baby a while/Do you still feel the fire”

“Real Groove” – Confirmed as the third single on December 5th, 2020 even if that was mildly spoiled by the fact a music video was thrown together using the performance for it via the Infinite Disco livestream about a month before the date. The song itself of the singles, is…like “Magic” in that it isn’t indicative of the album’s standout tracks but because of the production and Minogue being in her comfort zone, it makes sense and adds to the cohesion of Disco. Around New Year’s Eve 2020, a remix was released featuring Dua Lipa. The remix did less to highlight Lipa’s contributions to the song but stands as an important footnote with a pop veteran collaborating with a pop act who cited them as inspiration. A subsequent remix EP was then released on the 20th of January that alongside the Dua/Studio 2054 remix, included remixes by Cheap Cuts and Claus Neonors [neither remix measures up to the others, however, the Claus Neonors remix at least makes sense with the general club direction Minogue’s career has been guided by for the last 20 years.]
PROMOTIONAL SINGLE

“We’ll dance through the darkness/Together eternally”

“I Love It” – Released on October 23rd, 2020 as a promo single, it made sense and of the songs released in any single/promo/buzz capacity, has the closest technical elements of disco with the strings kicking in the first 17 or so seconds of the song. It’s a good way to create buzz about the album and adds to the album being cohesive, but as a single in any capacity, there were better options [though after enough listens, “I Love It” is a good track.] Despite some release, it didn’t receive any remixes of its own but housed the radio edits of the “Magic” remixes alongside “Say Something” and “Magic” in their original forms.
OTHER SONGS OF NOTE FROM DISCO

“So get that body up on the dance flooDrive me wild oh just make me want more”

“Miss A Thing” – If there’s a song that highlights Minogue’s wheelhouse of slinky dance music and her disciplined, silky vocals, “Miss A Thing” delivers on that front and then some. The song holds a distinction of being the most like her previous material [specifically Fever] but with a groove that is the most reminiscent of late 70s disco.

“Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday/It’s the weekend (it’s the weekend)”

“Monday Blues” – This is the track that bridges or has Minogue’s previous eras come full circle. Aside from using a classic move of pop music [“it’s the weekend”], “Monday Blues” emits the most ebullience or flat out happiness that the good disco songs of the late 70s had to their name. Minogue sounds the happiest on this track which can read a bit dorky or cheesy, but considering she had her start for what would be 4 albums in the S/A/W wheelhouse, it’s not impossible that the “shiny, happy” aspect of her music still permeates where it needs to {keep in mind, by 1990 or her 3rd album, Rhythm of Love, the lead single “Better the Devil You Know” was already Kylie striking out and wanting to take on more sounds and control of her image}. “Monday Blues” has a happy sheen to it and has Minogue’s career in dance music explained then and now all in a catchy 3:09 song.

“Baby all I need/Is just a little bit of your starlight”

“Supernova” – Where this song shines the brightest is touching on the space motifs that were ever present in the late 70s, and even capturing two production elements that have stood the test of the time: “robotic” speech that was prevalent c. 1979-1983. To get an idea, think in terms of “I Can Make You Dance” by Zapp and even some cowbells can be heard in the background.

“Coz the night ain’t even over yet/Gonna take you where the music never ends”

“Dance Floor Darling” – Like “Supernova” before, “Dance Floor Darling” excels in production elements that are very clearly disco or of the timeframe of around 1979-1983. Where “Dance Floor Darling” scores bonus points are the flourishes and twinkly moments at the beginning of the first chorus and towards the end where the climax of the song takes place. It also has some of the cheesy sentimentality [calling someone your “dance floor darling” but not caring about how cheesy it sounds] that makes a lot of disco songs and Minogue’s albums enjoyable in their own right.
Taking It Personal: For this section, I’ll be going semi op-ed on you all by relaying my thoughts about Disco and what it means for Kylie Minogue and the scope of 2020.
Kylie Minogue’s 15th studio album ends up achieving more than anyone looking at the career trajectories of dance divas could ever imagine. As mentioned earlier, the album title isn't a misnomer, but a false cognate especially given the “Say Something” music video interpretation of disco is just a reference to some of the outlandish shit that transpired at Studio 54. The disconnect between an 80s synthpop track on an album called "Disco" is something between disco, the genre of music and a discotheque, a venue in which disco or other club music can be played or performed in; i.e. how in 1981 there was a program in Italy called Discoring, which was playing some of the earliest Hi-NRG pop (and this is before Italy created its own spin on the genre known as Italo-Disco) or more to the album point on “Dance Floor Darling”, Minogue herself sings “…be those party people/We bumping at the disco”. “Say Something”, along with the lead single of Miley Cyrus' Plastic Hearts album "Midnight Sky", Doja Cat's fifth single from her Hot Pink album "Say So", Katy Perry's music video for the Smile track "Champagne Problems" and most of Dua Lipa's sophomore effort Future Nostalgia [most notably the music video for “Physical” which registers more as 80s synthwave inspired] have been labeled as "disco" mainly for their aesthetic cues but not because of the music itself.
Looking at the disconnect through history, imagine the period between 1979-1984 in which a successor to disco was being secured. In the U.S., this would turn into the beginning of Madonna’s career through dance-pop or if you look to one off divas of that time, there’s Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time” which was Hi-NRG [high energy] which even to her daughter and pop artist Sinitta, was considered the successor to disco. Looking to the UK for further context, especially because of Minogue’s career beginning and flourishing in that market, by August 1984, Stock Aitken Waterman [or S/A/W] would basically take the Hi-NRG direction from the likes of Brown and apply it to the Top 20 hit, “You Think You’re a Man” by Divine and the Top 5 hit, “Whatever I Do” by Hazell Dean. The description of Dean’s song as “…a class of record inspired by gay disco, but which had taken pop overtones..” ends up being the base for not only Minogue’s success come 1989 onward but ends up describing how one of the ongoing states of pop music basically translates to, “Make sure the gays like it before the public ever hears about it.” which ironically counters some initial reaction as the late Pete Burns described when discussing their eventual #1 song and US Top 20 hit “You Spin Me Round” {and in a cruel twist, counters Minogue’s label who felt the Light Years song “Your Disco Needs You” was “too gay” to see single release in the UK.}
In terms of how disco became dance-pop or Hi-NRG depending on the market, Europe specifically embraced all the successors from not only Italo-Disco but Eurodisco, post-disco, Eurodance and Nu-disco [genres like house did kind of sort of find its place within both the UK and U.S. but you’d be hard pressed to find any that managed to make it to the U.S. and also stick if it wasn’t so blatantly European in presentation.] In fact, most of Kylie’s output from 2000 onward has been a solid mix of Eurodance, post-disco and finely crafted dance-pop. Even on the 2018 release Golden and even her umpteenth compilation Step Back In Time: The Definitive Collection a year later, her dance music background never totally left the picture considering the lead single for Golden was “Dancing” and the promo single was “Raining Glitter”, [plus there’s the single for Step Back, “New York City” which aside from being scrapped from Golden, was the most blatantly “disco” thing to her name in years especially with the music video capturing the ever popular Studio 54 aesthetic, but more on that later.] Even in context of how a seasoned pop veteran in the UK did anything dance related with disco being slapped on it in some regard, be it the production value in the first half of What's Your Pleasure? [specifically the first three tracks produced by James Ford] or even the music video for “In And Out of Love”, the third single from Melanie C’s latest album, but more to the point of what Minogue’s album was going for was in the latest album from Róisín Murphy, Róisín Machine, specifically the single “Murphy’s Law” [“Narcissus” is also an acceptable answer]. What Disco possesses for a mainstream audience like Róisín Machine did for its audience were the technical aspects of disco as redone for the modern audience [even if Disco needs to take righteous hits for evoking more 80s than 70s.]
The difference and main gripe I’ve had with the “disco false cognate” over the past two or so years, is based on production value. Production wise, there’s a certain element known as “flourishes” or in most classic disco songs, like ImADudeDuh’s rate had, have a certain “twinkle” or “starry” cadence on top of the energy they exude and that arguably is quintessential disco production. “Raining Glitter”, “New York City”, the first 4-15 or so seconds of “Miss a Thing” and around the 2:00 mark on of “Dance Floor Darling” have the starry/twinkling aspects of classic disco to them [to further highlight this, Little Monsters, think about the first 17 seconds of “Replay”.] The point is that the element I bring up is one that stands or stood the test of time vs. being “timeless” and there is a difference. There’s no way I bring up four different songs by Minogue over the last two years and a Chromatica album track without saying, they use production elements that originate decades ago and when used are still effective in making quality, enjoyable music. Anything “timeless” can be effective across more than one genre, and disco as a genre has very, very specific traits to it: from the type of vocalists that exceled at the genre to the fact that lush, orchestral elements on top of the starry or twinkly flourishes appeared at the genre’s peak.
Spelled out more bluntly, the disconnect can seemingly be explained as, "Hey, we still really like playing off the 80s but people are wanting disco for some reason. I think disco didn't quite die until like 1983 so let's just shill synthpop with the disco name on it and have a mirror ball in the video.” In her defense, it plays as contemporary anyway given that again, Disco would debut at #1, giving Kylie Minogue her 8th #1 album in the UK and a chart achievement as she became the first female artist to score a Number 1 on the UK’s Official Albums Chart in five consecutive decades, following Kylie (1988), Enjoy Yourself (1989), Greatest Hits (1992), Fever (2001), Aphrodite (2010), Golden (2018) and Step Back In Time: The Definitive Collection (2019). Visually, Disco succeeds using the Studio 54 reference point for aesthetic sake and that’s also something that like the flourishes have stood the test of time in evoking its specific mood. Within the span of two to five years, dumblonde’s sophomore effort Bianca was built around and named after Bianca Jagger, the regular at Studio 54 who is synonymous with the outlandish horse stunt, Minogue’s video for “New York City”was a flat out homage to the club and Minogue joined Dua Lipa for Act III of her Studio 2054 livestream, meaning that timing was everything and that despite not being able to actually be among the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Studio 54 aesthetic Minogue played into was of the moment and she was the most seasoned mainstream approved act to do it justice.
Part of the overall minor issue is that the album is Kylie Minogue in her wheelhouse, which is a blessing and a curse. In her defense, no one expects a dance diva to last beyond 3 albums at the most; no one expects most pop divas to survive beyond maybe 4 albums. The fact that Kylie Minogue has survived to 15 albums [her contemporary Madonna reaching 14 back in 2019] is astounding. What has this album stand out is that it's a well-respected dance diva having fun regardless of singles being paid [and certified] dust. Granted, most listeners can ask and answer the same questions: does Disco challenge Minogue artistically? [no] Is Disco that reminiscent of the late 1970s/heyday of disco the genre? [no] Is Disco the most cohesive album to Minogue's name since Fever or Aphrodite? [yes] Should clubs being playing this album once the COVID-19 pandemic is over and humanity is safe? [yes, yes, 1,000 times yes] Enthusiasm or ebullience is inherently part of disco considering all the good songs ever did was get people dancing even if they weren’t good or didn’t know any moves to go with it, but people didn’t care as long as they had reason to be out there having fun. Even the chorus to “Magic” has the line, “Do you believe in Magic?” which despite sounding like it was from the time disco was finding a successor genre wise, did maintain part of the carefree fun the quality disco songs of the 70s always had [even if you read some of the lyrics, do not me].
In short, Disco was a 2020 release from a "Dance Floor Darling" that did its best to get listeners through "Monday Blues".
Discussion Questions: Now we come to the part where you can use these questions as starting points to relay your thoughts on Disco as an album, its single releases, how you think it fared compared to other Kylie albums in its album cycle, etc.
The first two singles from Disco, “Say Something” and “Magic” narrowly missed the Top 50 of the UK Charts but each extended Minogue’s number of Top 75 hits, while “Dancing” from Golden was her most recent Top 40 UK hit at #38. What would you suppose the reason is for Minogue’s continued charting ability?
Production on Disco was mostly handled by Sky Adams, Biff Stannard, Teemu Brunila and Nico Stadi while remixes from Syn Cole, Freemasons using the F9 moniker, Purple Disco Machine, Nick Reach Up, Basement Jaxx, Cheap Cuts and Claus Neonors were commissioned for the singles. Who of the main producers and remixers do you think did the best in their attempts to capture or emulate the disco sound for the project?
It’s long rumored on forums and the sort [a “please god let this be true” level rumor no less] that “Dance Floor Darling” could be a 4th single for the album. If you could pick the next single for Disco, which song would you go with?

Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

Alright dudes, we all know the K-12 education system's far from ideal. Though there are a multitude of directions to better structure it to ensure the kids become the leaders of tomorrow. I'll break each piece into large, yet digestible bites for us to understand. Let's go!
Part I. The Problems

• Lack of Student Preparation--students just aren't as prepared to handle the day-to-day assignments or feel they're receiving a substantive education. Retention for important info has been relatively meager, and many struggle with fundamental concepts and aren't adept at learning to the degree they should be.
• Lack of available resources--many children don't have the necessary tools to be successful in the classroom, whether it's poorly-structured teaching, lack of book-resources, poor-school funding, lack of former education at younger ages or a combination of factors.

And one of the most contentious ones as of late---

• The Achievement Gap--For those of us that are aware, especially those in the states, there exists what's referred to as an "achievement-gap."

This means that the differences in academic aptitude vary between different social groups, whether it's between natives and immigrants/refugees, people of means versus people of lesser means and more promptly, ethnic/racial groups.
There are a variety of explanations given as to why the racial achievement gap in particular exists, though unfortunately there aren't definitive answers as of late to my knowledge.
One of the main concerns are the differentials in standardized testing. This can become especially worrying when certain studies note that gaps are still present even when accounting for socioeconomic factors like income.
One startling example shows that--High-income blacks are outscored by low-to middle-income whites on college admission tests.
Studies have also that despite gradual narrowing of these disparities, gaps are still present.
These problems additionally extend to both Hispanics, Native Americans and other marginalized ethnic groups across. I'm not going to delve into why these inequities are the case, whether it's genetic in origin, socially driven or otherwise.
Honestly, it'd be an exercise in futility at this point. Though I can explain how to strongly mitigate these.

Solution # 1: Positive Psychological Affirmation.

Psychological testing has shown that teachers that demonstrate constant positive affirmation towards all ethnic groups showcase higher-performance for students when done consistently.
One study has this to say: "Two randomized field experiments tested a social-psychological intervention designed to improve minority student performance and increase our understanding of how psychological threat mediates performance in chronically evaluative real-world environments.
We expected that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype aimed at one's group could undermine academic performance in minority students by elevating their level of psychological threat. We tested whether such psychological threat could be lessened by having students reaffirm their sense of personal adequacy or “self-integrity.”
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/313/5791/1307.full#ref-17
The intervention, a brief in-class writing assignment, significantly improved the grades of African American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40%. These results suggest that the racial achievement gap, a major social concern in the United States, could be ameliorated by the use of timely and targeted social-psychological interventions.
What this means suggests that reducing psychological threats and having social-interventions where students recognize what's valuable to them and what integrity they possess. Implementing this in a classroom setting by having constant interventions where students are allowed to express what they value before taking quizzes, tests or performing a worksheet can curb the achievement gap.

Solution # 2: Collective Efficacy And Merit Pay:

• The research, led by Roger Goddard, Novice G. Fawcett Chair and professor of educational administration, found that teachers’ sense of collective efficacy in any one school – the belief that they had the capability and support necessary to educate their students – was closely connected to the achievement gap.
• Schools in which teachers showed high levels of collective efficacy had a 50 percent reduction in the academic disadvantage experienced by black students, compared to schools where teachers had average levels, the study showed.
• Goddard said other research suggests teachers who feel efficacious put forth more effort, are more creative problem solvers, and are less likely to give in to negative thoughts when things go wrong.
• This approach was evident in another part of their study in which the researchers conducted focus groups with teachers in six schools. They chose schools that were both above and below average when it came to student test scores and collective efficacy for teachers.
• Another key point that came through in the focus groups was that the support of principals and school administrators was absolutely vital for teachers to feel this sense of collective efficacy.

Therefore, we should have promote teachers that have substantive faith in school abilities, which can be assessed by transparent reports to determine confidence. Investing greatly in Title I funding, improving student amenities and having large subsidies for textbooks, desks, and school supplies could effectively boost "collective-efficacy."
This combined with the concept of "merit-pay"---which suggests having locally-drawn incentives for improving teacher performance. Basically, better teachers get paid more, whereas those which perform less well earn less. This may be rather controversial as an appropriate educational tactic, but it has grown surprisingly a large amount of support, and the evidence weighs in its favor.
For example, One Vanderbilt study found co-led by Matthew G. Springer, assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, and two Peabody College doctoral students, Lam D. Pham and Tuan D. Nguyen:
“We found overall that the presence of a merit pay program was associated with a modest, but statistically significant, positive effect on student test scores,” Springer said. “Approximately 74 percent of the effect sizes recorded in our review were positive. The influence was relatively similar across the two subject areas, mathematics and English language arts.”
https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/04/11/teacher-merit-pay-has-merit-new-report/
Among studies conducted in U.S. schools, the academic increase was roughly equivalent to adding three additional weeks of learning to the school year.
“These general findings continue to hold even when we restrict our analysis to those studies utilizing the most rigorous methods,” Nguyen said.
Structure matters as well. For example, it states:
"Program impacts varied depending on the design of the incentive pay scheme. For example, merit pay programs rewarding teams of teachers produced an effect almost twice as large those rewarding merit raises on rank-order. That finding lends support to the shared nature of teaching and learning in schools."
Another meta-analysis found that despite roadblocks such as teachers not being as likely to stay when incentives run dry or the effects being statistically insignificant on student performance, they found:
"Overall, we found a positive and significant 0.043 SD effect of teacher merit pay on student test scores. Also, our qualitative review of mechanisms explaining merit pay found evidence to support both the motivational and the compositional pathway. We found that when a merit pay program motivates teachers, it also tends to produce positive effects on student test scores."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0002831220905580
Promoting merit-pay as both a competitive drive to get teachers to perform their best and structure so it can create a colloborative effort among small-groups could improve test-scores and possibly reduce the achievement gap.

Solution # 3: Universal Pre-K

A decent percentage of students, both low-and high income, are unable to attend pre-K, which puts them behind their peers in terms of development, both socially and academically. Implementing Nationwide Universal-Pre-K could rectify this path.

• Research suggests that high-quality ECE produces the largest positive effects on children’s development. Further benefits can result when children have access to high quality ECE for a full-day, five days per week.
• Multiple recent studies suggest a highly promising route to quality in preschool education: providing support for teachers to implement specific evidence-based curricula and instruction through coaching and mentoring.
• For example, a recently conducted meta-analysis indicates that the positive effects of preschool education can be augmented when a parenting education component is added, but only when this component focuses on providing parents the opportunity.

https://nieer.org/2016/03/31/how-much-can-high-quality-universal-pre-k-reduce-achievement-gaps
Another Rutgers study found: an analysis of high quality preschool programs and fourth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress scores found gains for Black students, including a nearly 6% increase in math and a nearly 4% increase in reading. The more successful preschools had staff educated in the multiple elements of early childhood development, reasonable numbers of students, and two or three teachers in the classroom.
https://imprintnews.org/featured/study-shows-excellent-preschool-experience-can-narrow-racial-achievement-gap/45195
Having high-quality early-preschool programs universally for all students regardless of financial background with low-student-teacher ratios, ones where parents are generally present and where they are aimed at both promoting good socializing, problem-solving and fully-racially-integrated could help close the gap.

Solution #4- Universally Free School Meals

There's also been an associated stigma with low-income students qualifying for free-and reduced lunch. Not to mention the lower-middle income students who are too well-off to afford it but aren't of well enough means to pay for it daily.
The solution to make it more inclusive would just be to by fully-subsidize it across the board. It's been proven to have a strong dividend on both participation rates and noticeably improves scholastic performance.
One empirical study found: ... "The impact of extending free school lunch to all students, regardless of income, on academic performance in New York City middle schools. Using a difference-in-differences design and unique longitudinal, student level data, we derive credibly causal estimates of the impacts of “Universal Free Meals” (UFM) on test scores in English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics, and participation in school lunch.
We find UFM increases academic performance by as much as 0.083 standard deviations in math and 0.059 in ELA for non-poor students, with smaller, statistically significant effects of 0.032 and 0.027 standard deviations in math and ELA for poor students.
Further, UFM increases participation in school lunch by roughly 11.0 percentage points for non-poor students and 5.4 percentage points for poor students. We then investigate the academic effects of school lunch participation per se, using UFM as an instrumental variable. Results indicate that increases in school lunch participation improve academic performance for both poor and non-poor students; an additional lunch every two weeks increases test scores by roughly 0.08 standard deviations in math and 0.07 standard deviations in ELA.
Finally, we explore potential unintended consequences for student weight outcomes, finding no evidence that UFM increases the probability students are obese or overweight. We also find no evidence of increases in average BMI. Instead, we find some evidence that participation in school lunch improves weight outcomes for non-poor students. "
Maxwell Study/Center For Policy Research: "Let them Eat Free Lunch"
Another additional study found that it had surprisingly large effects on low-income students' future earnings. It concluded:
"The program’s positive effects were nearly universal, with large gains for the students with family incomes in the bottom 75 percent. Even the richest students derived some benefit, though it was statistically insignificant. For the lowest-income children, the gains were particularly substantial: Kids in the bottom 25th percentile of family income increased their adult earnings by nearly 5.5 percent, for an average of $21,560 more in lifetime earnings.* That means the program’s benefits were seven times larger than the cost of the meals. And, since low-income students benefited more than students in higher income groups, the program can actually be credited with decreasing inequality."
https://talkpoverty.org/2018/02/08/new-study-shows-free-school-lunches-boost-earnings/

Solution #5- Increase Number of Tests, But De-Emphasize High-Stakes Testing

Kids should be well-prepared to whatever assignment follows in a class-room setting, but of course, information-retention isn't very strong. How to improve it? Increase the number of quizzes and tests in order for students to better maintain info from a previous class. There's an associated "retrieval effect" which help kids better keep knowledge in their heads and learn more efficiently.

• Incorporating frequent quizzes into a class’s structure may promote student learning.
• These quizzes can consist of short-answer or multiple-choice questions, and can be administered online or face-to-face. Studies investigating the testing effect suggest that providing students the opportunity for retrieval practice—and ideally, providing feedback for the responses—will increase learning of targeted as well as related material.
• Providing “summary points” during a class to encourage students to recall and speak towards key elements of the class.
• Lyle and Crawford’s study examined the effects of asking students to write the main points of the day’s class during the last several minutes of a class meetup, and observed a considerable effect on student retention towards the end of the semester (Lyle and Crawford, 2011).
• Setting aside the last few minutes of a class to ask students to recall, articulate, and organize their memory of the content of the day’s class may provide significant benefits to their later memory/retention towards these topics and other associated subject matter .
• De-emphasize high-stakes testing
• ---the “testing” can simply be a learning activity for the students; in the language of the classroom, it could be considered a “no-stakes” formative assessment where students could evaluate their memory of a particular subject.
• In most of the studies from classrooms, the “testing” was either no-stakes recall practice (Larsen et al. 2009; Lyle and Crawford, 2001; Stanger-Hall et al., 2011) or was considered a low-stakes quizzes (McDaniel et al., 2012; Orr and Foster, 2013).

https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/test-enhanced-learning-using-retrieval-practice-to-help-students-learn/
I have plenty of other studies available if anyone wants to peruse them. What questions do you have about anything I've written and researched? Was there something big I've left out when discussing these topics?
I'll likely make a Part II if I get the opportunity though I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Right, apologies for the long post but I was accused earlier of not backing up my statements with evidence. This is why I’m against school closures as a whole.
Initially, it seemed that closing schools was essential. We know that children commonly pass respiratory viruses between themselves. In my respiratory clinic one of the most common presentations is persistent or recurrent cough. Most of these are just children who have been unlucky. I normally tell parents that young children get 9-12 respiratory viral infections per year. So it seemed clear that SARS-CoV-2 would be the same. We knew before we had any cases that data from China were showing that children were largely unaffected, but we expected them to be asymptomatic superspreaders.
As the pandemic continued, it was borne out that there weren’t many cases in children requiring hospitalisation, and only a tiny number of children requiring critical care (we still haven’t seen a single patient with COVID in my centre’s critical care), with a single figure number of deaths in children (all with severe underlying conditions - it is worth noting that we see children die every year from common viruses like influenza, rhinovirus, RSV, adenovirus etc). The UK picture was nicely summarised by a colleague of mine (Swann - link below).
But what we also started to see was transmission data demonstrating that children who have COVID weren’t really passing it to each other. (The caveat is that transmission studies are very difficult). For example, Yung et al in Singapore showed by testing all school contacts of positive cases (aged 5, 12 and adult staff) there were no positives. This included testing asymptomatic contacts. Heavey et al did similar in Ireland, although a limitation of their study was that they only tested symptomatic children. They screened 1155 contacts of positive children and adults in schools. The only documented case was an adult staff member to another adult outside the school.
Inside homes, children pass it less frequently to adults as demonstrated in papers from Israel (Somekh et al) where 12/13 index cases at home were adults and the other was a 14 yr old (they tested everyone even if asymptomatic). Jing et al also showed this was true in China, with only 5% of primary household cases were “children”. I use inverted commas because they define “children” as being under 20yrs (a real bugbear in paediatric research is wide age margins - neonates are different to toddlers who are different to primary school children etc). These studies are in keeping with other reports from Asia (Zhang) and the USA (Rosenberg). Zhang also estimated odds ratios for age groups to become infected, and performed statistical adjustment for clustering and correlation structures of contacts exposed to the same index case. Their finding was that susceptibility to infection increased with age, lowest in children 0-14 years (OR 0.34, 95% CI 0.24 – 0.49 – reference participants aged 15 – 64yr).
Li et al looked at risk of developing COVID when exposed to a positive contact - 4% in children v 21% in adults. Similarly Wang et al showed 11% in children v 60% adults. Zhou et al did a meta analysis which looked at cases from several countries - children were the index case in 9.7% of cases.
So based on this, we (majority of paediatricians) backed schools reopening (RCPCH - https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/news-events/news/statement-schools-re-opening). There have subsequently been papers looking at what happened when schools reopened. Yoon et al looked at this in South Korea. 13,000 students and school staff were tested for COVID-19 infection (by SARS-CoV-2 PCR) during the study period. 44 children were found to be positive after schools re-opened. The authors state that there was not an obvious sudden increase in the number of paediatric cases, or in the proportion of paediatric cases amongst all confirmed cases, before and after school re-opening. Out of 800 tests at kindergartens (5- to 7-year-olds), six children were positive for SARS-CoV-2 by PCR. There were no cases of transmission between kindergarten children. Out of 3,000 tests at elementary schools (7- to 12-year-olds), 17 children were positive. There was only one case of transmission, between a pupil who infected two fellow pupils. Out of 7,500 tests at middle schools (13- to 15-year-olds) and high schools (16- to 18-year-olds), 21 students were positive. There were no cases of transmission between students at middle school or high schools.
Ismail et all looked at reported outbreaks in English schools in June and showed they were rare. Of those that did occur, 53% involved just 2 cases. The majority of cases were in staff. When a child was the index case the most contacts who caught it was 2. This was 9 for the adults.
Similar studies in Japan (Wada et al), Germany (Otte im Kampe et al, Ehrhardt et al), Hong Kong (Fong et al) and Australia (MacCartney et al) showed schools safely reopening and low rates of transmission.
Interestingly:
There are also modelling studies showing that schools opening reduced transmission, although I’m not convinced by this. https://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_22_20.pdf
There’s also evidence from across Europe showing cases falling while schools have been open: https://www.ft.com/content/7e1ad517-762b-4212-a6cb-79579e619409
More and more studies came out from different countries showing children were rarely primary cases in households like Lee et al in S Korea and Pitman-Hunt et al in the US.
An Icelandic study actually looking at genomics appears to show children as a whole group are half as likely to be infected and half as likely to transmit when compared to adults (but I haven’t seen the actual study yet - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/12/we-now-know-how-much-children-spread-coronavirus/)
But but but....”children are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people aren’t tested”. Well, many of the studies I’ve cited above did screening testing of asymptomatic contacts. But the ONS also do screening of populations. They screened a bunch of people in school recently. Rates in primary schools were half that of secondary, and in areas of low community transmission there were zero cases in primary schools: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/covid19schoolsinfectionsurveyround1england/november2020
NB - sampling was heavily weighted towards high prevalence areas. This is a study of school prevalence, not transmission. As ever, and I’ve said a million times, prevalence in schools reflects community prevalence.
A common response is that it doesn’t matter about kids passing it amongst themselves, it’s the risk they pose to people at home.
There was a really interesting (preprint of a) massive study recently by Forbes et al looking at the risk, in England, of living with children. This was a large scale population-based study. It is powered enough to look at several outcomes and has taken into account many potential confounders as well as looking for important interactions. The findings summarised by the Don’t forget the bubbles website were:
Risk in adults aged ≤65 years:
a) who live with children aged 0 to 11 years:
There was no association with increased risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 related hospital or ICU admission. There was a reduction in the risk of dying from COVID-19 (HR 0.75, 95%CI 0.62 – 0.92).
b) who live with children aged 12 to 18 years:
There was a small increase in recorded infection (HR 1.08, 95%CI 1.03-1.13), but no association with hospital, ICU admission or death from COVID-19.Risk in adults aged >65 years:
a) who live with children aged 0 to 11 years:
There was no evidence of association with any outcome.
b) who live with children aged 12 to 18 years:
There was no evidence of association with any outcome.
Living with children of any age was associated with a lower risk of dying from non-COVID-19 causes in the ≤65 years but no association was seen in the >65 group.
Extensive sensitivity analyses which included for example, assumptions on the distribution of high- risk occupations, didn’t materially altered the results from the comorbidity adjusted models, although there were higher recorded infections in the period three weeks after school closures. However, there was no increased risk for any of the other outcomes. There was no evidence of a “dose-response” related to the number of children in the household
So there is a risk when schools are open, but it’s low. But low risk is still risk, so why not just close schools and move everything online?
Well, there is evidence of significant harm while schools are closed. School closures have been shown to cause harm to children’s wellbeing, learning opportunities and safety, even when face-to-face classroom learning is replaced by (theoretically) full-time, online, distance learning (see ECDC, WHO, ENOC, UNICEF and UNESCO). It impacts their mental health significantly (Courtney et al, Cluver et al). We have seen an increase in non-accidental injury (NAI) and this has been backed up by reports across the country, as well as published evidence (Baron et al, Weale). A modelling study in the USA concluded that the decision to close primary schools could lead to more years of life lost than if they had remained open, based upon a model that linked school closures, reduced educational attainment, and the association between reduced educational attainment and life expectancy (Christakis et al). All of these effects are magnified and much worse in vulnerable children and those in low income households.
So my summary is that, surprisingly, a) kids are less affected when they get it b) they are less likely than adults to get it when they have the same exposure c) are much less likely to transmit it (risk increases with age) and therefore d) schools are not drivers of transmission, especially primary schools e) school closures are not particularly effective and f) cause considerable harm to children, especially young and vulnerable children.
This is why I’ve been opposed to schools closing. Now I recognise there are (anecdotal) reports of the new strain spreading more in children. I will begrudgingly support a delay in secondary schools reopening until we have more information. But definitely not the closure of primary schools.
TLDR
There is a recent summary from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/children-and-school-settings-covid-19-transmission) that summarises the evidence as follows:
There is a general consensus that the decision to close schools to control the COVID-19 pandemic should be used as a last resort. The negative physical, mental health and educational impact of proactive school closures on children, as well as the economic impact on society more broadly, would likely outweigh the benefits. In surveillance data, among childhood COVID-19 cases, children between 1-18 years of age have lower rates of hospitalisation, severe hospitalisation and death than do all other age groups. Children of all ages are susceptible to and can transmit SARS-CoV-2. Younger children appear to be less susceptible to infection, and when infected, less often lead to onward transmission than older children and adults. This report does not consider the epidemiology of COVID-19 in relation to new variants of SARS-CoV-2, for which robust evidence on the potential impact in school settings is not yet available, such as one recently observed in the United Kingdom. School closures can contribute to a reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but by themselves are insufficient to prevent community transmission of COVID-19 in the absence of other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as restrictions on mass gathering. The return to school of children around mid-August 2020 coincided with a general relaxation of other NPI measures in many countries and does not appear to have been a driving force in the upsurge in cases observed in many EU Member States from October 2020. Trends in case notification rates observed since August 2020 for children aged 16-18 years most closely resemble those of adults aged 19-39 years. Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can occur within school settings and clusters have been reported in preschools, primary and secondary schools. Incidence of COVID-19 in school settings appear to be impacted by levels of community transmission. Where epidemiological investigation has occurred, transmission in schools has accounted for a minority of all COVID-19 cases in each country. Educational staff and adults within the school setting are generally not seen to be at a higher risk of infection than other occupations, although educational roles that put one in contact with older children and/or many adults may be associated with a higher risk. Non-pharmaceutical interventions in school settings in the form of physical distancing that prevent crowding as well as hygiene and safety measures are essential to preventing transmission. Measures must be adapted to the setting and age group and consider the need to prevent transmission as well as to provide children with an optimal learning and social environment. Specifically regarding schools:
Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can occur within school settings and clusters have been reported by countries in preschool, primary and secondary schools (high confidence).
• In situations with high levels of community transmission, prevalence of COVID-19 within the school is influenced by the prevalence in the community (moderate confidence).
• Where epidemiological investigation is carried out and setting of infection data is available, transmission in schools account for a minority of all COVID-19 cases in a given country (moderate confidence).
• The available literature does not consider the epidemiology of COVID-19 in relation to new variants of SARS-CoV-2, such as one recently observed in the United Kingdom [2].
• Educational staff and adults within the school setting are generally at no higher risk of infection than other occupations although educational roles that put one in contact with many older children and/or many adults may be associated with higher risk (moderate confidence).
• The detection of multiple COVID-19 cases within a school does not automatically imply that transmission occurred within the school setting itself, making the calculation of reliable secondary attack rates in these settings challenging. Factors related to the level of community transmission and nature of contact with others appear to have a higher impact on one’s risk of exposure than presence in a school. Although potentially influenced by mitigation measures enacted, similar COVID-19 rates in teachers and non-teachers indicate that schools are not settings of higher transmission and that schools are not settings that are fuelling community transmission.
And there is an incredible paediatric website called Don’t Forget the Bubbles which has been incredible at keeping on top of the evidence: https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/evidence-summary-paediatric-covid-19-literature/
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