History will not look kindly on those who kept schools closed longer than necessary by promising the delivery of a zero-risk environment.
For all the talk about following the science, it is amazing to me that there is still a debate about whether public schools will open for full time instruction in the fall. We have lots of evidence that hybrid schools hurt kids at home and kids in the classroom too. We have evidence that opening schools does not increase community transmission and that keeping kids home from school doesn’t lower the spread either. We also have lots of evidence of the impact of school-closing on mothers.
There is much more we know about why we should reopen the schools. But I thought David Leonhardt summed it up nicely this morning:
Fortunately, the available evidence indicates that schools can safely return to normal hours in the fall. Nearly all teachers have already had the chance to be vaccinated. By August, all children who are at least 12 are also likely to have had the opportunity. (The Pfizer vaccine is now available to people 16 and up, and federal regulators appear set to approve it for 12- to 15-year-olds in coming weeks.)
Few younger children — maybe none — will have been vaccinated by the fall. But data from both the U.S. and other countries suggests that children rarely infect each other at school. One reason is that Covid-19 tends to be mild for younger children, making them less likely to be symptomatic and contagious.
Even more important, this coronavirus rarely harms children. For them, the death rate resembles that of a normal flu, and other symptoms, like “long Covid,” are extremely rare.
But this is the important part:
Covid presents the sort of small health risk to children that society has long accepted without closing schools. A child who’s driven to school almost certainly faces a bigger risk from that car trip than from the virus.
Exactly. There is no such thing as a zero-risk society. We all take calculated risks all the time with our lives but also with the lives of our children, including by engaging in activities that are riskier than COVID. I fail to understand why people can’t see that at this point. It makes it hard not to believe that politics may play an oversized role in this state of affairs.
For one thing, blue states are slowest to reopen, hence, leaving more kids behind. And they also seem to be the ones where the teachers’ unions or associations exert the most power. Matt Welch writes:
“There is no relationship—visually or statistically—between school districts’ reopening decisions and their county’s new COVID-19 cases per capita,” the Brookings Institution found in a July 2020 study. “In contrast, there is a strong relationship—visually and statistically—between districts’ reopening decisions and the county-level support for [Donald] Trump.” A follow-up study in the fall by Education Next found the exact same leading correlation, with the second-biggest factor being the political strength of the local teachers union.
Unfortunately, the power of these teachers’ unions extend all the way to Washington to the point of reshaping the CDC guidelines on school reopenings, as Welch documents in his piece. A tidbit:
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten and National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle, who met with first lady (and teachers union member) Jill Biden on Day 2 of the administration, were both repeatedly stressing that the CDC guidance would be critical to getting their memberships back in school buildings.
And the president also had a respected new CDC director: Rochelle Walensky.
You would think that the stars would have been aligned to follow the science, scrap the 6-foot rule, and delink school-reopening from community spread. But Democrats had a different idea.
Back in her days at Massachusetts General and Harvard, Walensky had been free to follow the science and speak her mind. In Washington, she soon found out that both science and speech need to be vetted. Eight days before unveiling the updated school guidelines, the new CDC director was rebuked by White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki for having let slip the incontrovertible truth that “there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated.” Retorted Psaki: “Dr. Walensky spoke to this in her personal capacity.”
The process for producing what was billed as the CDC’s “science-based reopening” plan looked like this, according to a Washington Post preview: “In a sign of how carefully the administration is tending to the many stakeholders, the CDC met with more than 70 organizations as it crafted the upcoming guidelines.” Union presidents Weingarten and Pringle “met directly with Biden’s CDC head,” the paper reported, and both received phone calls from the president himself.
The final results? Not only did Walensky reaffirm the 6-foot rule she had previously opposed, but she took the further step of asserting that schools currently operating under a 3-foot standard were objectively unsafe. Even more aggressively, the CDC recommended that buildings remain at least partially shuttered in communities that have 100 COVID cases a week per 100,000 residents, a standard that upon issuance disqualified more than 90 percent of American schools.
There is much more in the piece, which is worth reading in its entirety, including how this resistance to opening has won a massive injection of government funds into state and school budgets. It also includes a fair amount on how these political decisions hurt minority kids the most, while being a disaster for most kids and many of their mothers. (Incidentally, I wrote about hygiene theater here.)
The president and Democrats may think that keeping school closed past this fall is a worthy move to please a special interest with many financial and political powers. But Ross Douthat highlights the risk, especially if you add wokeness to the mix.
I have no clue who is right in that calculation, but I do know that, when all is said and done, history will not look kindly on those who kept schools closed longer than necessary by promising the delivery of a zero-risk environment by waiting to reopen schools fully.