Red-state governors who pushed to reopen schools should not expect to receive the apologies they are owed.
This won’t be news to anybody who has paid attention to American education or science since 2021, but the New York Times has published a lengthy piece by Sarah Mervosh, Claire Cain Miller, and Francesca Paris summarizing studies of Covid school closures that show that “the more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind.” Not only that: “And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.” You won’t see an apology here to red-state governors who were relentlessly smeared for battling to keep their schools open, or any consequences visited upon public health “experts,” teachers’ unions, or voices in journalism who did the smearing. But the studies’ verdict is about as close as you’re going to get.
Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.
A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting. While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels. . . . Poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer. Some of the country’s largest poor districts are in Democratic-leaning cities that took a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor areas, and Black and Hispanic communities, also suffered higher Covid death rates, making many families and teachers in those districts hesitant to return.
That’s exactly what anti-lockdown voices on the right predicted at the time, including the disproportionate impact on kids from poorer or otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds. And we haven’t recovered yet:
The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year. . . . Many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups.
And all of this was unnecessary:
Was it safe? That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission. “Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the University of California, San Francisco health system.
National Review editorialized in November 2020 that schools needed to reopen here in New York:
Unless you’re old enough to have survived the 1918 pandemic, our kids are going through something completely different from anything we ever experienced.
Everyone who studies mental health in children is sounding the alarm; it’s not just the fear, stress, and anxiety, it’s the isolation. To the extent we can get kids safely in front of teachers and interacting with each other again, we need to do that. Our kids must not pay the price for adults’ ideological differences, fear of lawsuits, or need to placate key urban constituencies such as teachers’ unions. . . .
Much of Europe has kept schools open, even at the cost of some harsher measures aimed at the adult population. Moreover, many American private schools have maintained in-class instruction, with little evidence to show that has caused severe consequences.
Others were not on the same page:
In the fall of 2020, [Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers] called attempts to reopen schools “reckless, callous, cruel.” Every few days during the spring and summer of 2020, Weingarten would give more reasons why schools must remain closed. Affiliated unions said even more bizarre things. The Chicago Teachers Union, in December of 2020, said that the push to reopen schools “is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
Even in early 2021, the Biden administration was taking orders from teachers’ unions to disregard scientific evidence supporting school reopening. I was writing in April 2021 about the foot-dragging risk aversion of teachers.
It’s hard to recreate now the full hysteria that was deployed against the governors who opened up first. In April 2020, Amanda Mull wrote about Georgia’s reopening in an Atlantic essay with the now-infamous headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” The freakouts directed specifically at school reopenings were just as overwrought. Iowa’s Kim Reynolds had a testy exchange with Associated Press reporter Dave Pitt, who raised alarms that reopening in fall 2020 could kill teachers or students, and a “Drive for Lives” parade of more than 500 teachers in cars who “called returning to school during the pandemic a life and death issue that Reynolds simply does not understand.” Ron DeSantis faced much the same onslaught, and with even more national press coverage: “‘The reckless endangerment of our children across Florida is wholly unacceptable and irresponsible,’ said Adora Obi Nweze, president of the organization’s Florida State Conference. ‘We must send a message to Gov. DeSantis that we will not allow children, families and communities to be unnecessarily exposed to Covid-19.’” Jackie Flynn Mogensen wrote an article for Mother Jones titled “’I Hope You Can’t Sleep At Night’: My Former High School Teacher Has Some Words for Ron DeSantis.” A flavor of that interview:
Would you say most teachers are against reopening or are in favor of reopening?
There are some that are in favor, I think. But I think the majority, I would say, probably 75 percent to 80 percent, are opposed in general. Most people I speak to, they don’t want to be in the classroom.
They were wrong. And they harmed the kids they were supposed to be serving.