The Excuses for Keeping Schools Closed Are Imploding One by One

D on’t look now, but every major excuse for keeping schools closed — as they still are for about two-fifths of American kids — is crumbling before our eyes. Joe Biden’s CDC says reopening is safe. The winter wave of COVID infections is finally falling back to earth. And teachers are rapidly getting vaccinated.

In the places where they’re powerful, the teachers’ unions will push this fight as far as they can. Some have already declared that teachers shouldn’t have to teach in person even after they’re vaccinated. But as the excuses fall away, the political pressure to reopen should become overwhelming. The terrible policy of closing schools — which has disrupted educational progress, kids’ social development, and parents’ work across much of the country for nearly a year, with essentially zero health benefits to show for it — will start to end.

Already, state and federal lawmakers are starting to get impatient, and even some places that have kept schools closed nonstop since last March are promising to get kids back in classrooms.

When the CDC came out for opening schools last year, critics argued that the Trump administration had unduly pressured the agency. And there was evidence of that. But that argument does not apply to the CDC’s stance as of January 26, 2021, nearly a week after Biden was sworn in. That day, CDC researchers published an article in JAMA that went through the evidence on schools and COVID-19, finding that schools can operate safely with basic precautions.

The researchers wrote that while “school-related cases of COVID-19 have been reported . . . there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.” Various studies show that schools are rarely home to “clusters” of COVID-19 cases, that transmission of the virus is rarely traced to schools, and that teachers don’t have higher COVID-infection rates than non-teachers.

Plus which, kids themselves are not much affected by COVID-19 even if they get it. Out of hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths nationwide, only a few hundred have been kids 17 and under. To put that risk in perspective, several times as many minors die in car crashes, and about as many die from the flu, each year.

The virus can spread in schools, of course, and kids who get it can infect others. Toward that end, some precautions are in order, especially for older kids. A high school in Israel, per the JAMA article, contributed to an outbreak thanks to “crowded classrooms with insufficient physical distancing (eg, student density in classrooms exceeded recommended values), exemption from face mask use, and continuous air conditioning that recycled interior air in closed rooms during a heat wave.” Schools must avoid recreating those conditions by requiring masks and keeping people spread out. Yet in general, “the type of rapid spread that was frequently observed in congregate living facilities or high-density worksites has not been reported in education settings in schools.”

Say you’re extraordinarily risk-averse, and all this still doesn’t quite convince you. You might point out that we’re in the middle of a winter COVID wave in which hospitalizations and deaths have reached their highest point ever. The more common the virus is in the broader community, the more likely it will be to spread in schools, you could argue.

But that case won’t hold up much longer either, because the third wave is receding. Cases and hospitalizations are dropping rapidly, with deaths almost certain to follow:

(Why is this happening? Probably a combination of the holidays ending and people getting more careful in the places that were hardest-hit. As the weather warms up, people will spend less time crowded indoors, too.)

Crucially, this third wave should be the last, or at least the last to be anywhere near so bad. We’re vaccinating the folks most likely to spread or die from the disease. Nursing homes by themselves account for about two-fifths of COVID deaths, and they’ve been a top priority for vaccination. (New York, for instance, has already given shots to most nursing-home residents.) We’re also vaccinating the elderly who live outside of nursing homes, as well as essential workers with lots of day-to-day interpersonal contact.

These shots should greatly reduce deaths and spread, and the rest of the population should start getting vaccinated in spring or early summer. The assorted vaccines are quite effective against the new variants of the virus, too, and scientists are working on modifications to make them even more so.

Oh, and guess who else is being prioritized for vaccination? Teachers. Here in Fairfax County, Va., 90 percent of school staffers have either gotten their first shot or at least scheduled an appointment, though some other places aren’t making progress as quickly.

So “the science” says that schools can operate safely. Soon enough, when closed schools open for in-person instruction for those who want it, the only people directly affected will be teachers who’ve been offered vaccines, kids at little risk even if they’re infected, and families who opted in. Meanwhile, deaths and spread will be down.

This week, to drive the point home, Biden’s CDC director said that vaccinating teachers “is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.” The White House later tried to walk the comment back, implausibly claiming the high-level official speaking at a White House briefing was doing so in her “personal capacity.” But if teaching is safe without a vaccine, in the “personal” view one of the nation’s top health experts, surely it must be safe with one.

There are plenty of parents who don’t want to send their kids back yet, but the rest of us have been fed up for months. And politicians are getting in on the game as well.

Ohio required schools to reopen as a condition of teachers’ getting vaccines. The Virginia senate passed a bill to reopen schools, too. And at the federal level, Senator Marco Rubio recently proposed denying federal funds to schools that don’t offer in-person instruction by the end of April. I’m not a fan of this last approach; the federal government shouldn’t take taxpayers’ money in a scheme to redistribute it to lower levels of government, only to then use it as leverage to override the policies that those lower levels of government enacted on behalf of those very same taxpayers. But with state and federal lawmakers acting at every level, it’s clear the issue resonates at very least.

We’re almost a year into the coronavirus pandemic. Everyone is tired and frustrated, and every halfway plausible reason to close schools is either dead or dying. Let’s reopen them already.