Millions of American children have been thrown under the school bus by liberals refusing to reopen schools.
After decades of sanctimonious lecturing about the importance of educational equity, in the past year progressives have promoted a policy — school closures in response to COVID-19 — that disproportionately hurts students from disadvantaged backgrounds, with dubious public health benefits.
Despite all the cliches about “following the science,” the science has been largely ignored. In a devastating takedown, a group of scientists and medical experts recently detailed how the CDC under the new Biden administration are blatantly ignoring the science on opening schools. These experts demonstrate that children are generally not at risk from COVID-19, there is little evidence of significant spread within schools, and it is possible to open schools safely. The inescapable conclusion is that it was simply unnecessary to close schools for such a long time, even from a purely public health standpoint.
Meanwhile, the numerous educational costs of school closures — especially for socially disadvantaged students — are considerable and indisputable. It’s harder to have genuine learning with Zoom classes because they lack the in-person teacher-student interactions. Educational technology has significant limitations — it’s incredibly difficult to ensure all students are actually on task and not checking social media — even if there are technologically-competent teachers and all students have reliable internet (a ‘big if’, to say the least). Students miss out on the structure of the school day and playing in person with their peers. And mental health problems, especially for students but for parents too, have skyrocketed.
And the growing educational inequity is well-established. Students who are in wealthy areas with parents who can supervise them, with access to fast and reliable internet, and who have tech-savvy schools and teachers, may not be significantly harmed. But students without these advantages have likely lost a whole year of learning. This is especially the case for young children, who likely haven’t yet developed early reading and math skills. And as disadvantaged students fall behind, the educational achievement gap will grow even wider in the coming years and flow through into high-school and post-school outcomes as well — a truly disastrous social outcome.
Even if we concede that closing schools may have reduced COVID-19 cases — and this is hotly disputed — the overwhelming educational and human cost was probably much worse than the alternative. Alas, this kind of common-sense, cost-benefit approach to pandemic education policy has been sorely missing from the public discourse. The reality is policy making necessitates trade-offs. But in the eyes of many progressives, any concern about pandemic restrictions being excessive is equivalent to wanting to kill grandma.
Of course, schools could have stayed open — or at least re-opened much sooner — while taking precautions to minimize COVID-19 transmission, as has been done successfully overseas and in some states. And don’t forget, many essential workers — like police, bus drivers, and doctors and nurses — continued to work throughout the pandemic despite the risk of COVID-19transmission while doing their jobs in-person. It is a tragedy that the work of teachers was not considered similarly essential by progressives.
We are left with a baffling mystery: how could so many progressives support the policy of school closures given that it has had such regressive outcomes? It is easy to dismiss the policy of school closures as a mere consequence of teacher union power and cowardly, tribal politics. This is undoubtedly part of the story, but there is a more fundamental social disconnect at play here.
There is an underlying yet clear cosmopolitan bias in how we see school closures. The ‘elites’ in society — journalists, office white-collar workers, and academics — experience difficulty in supervising their children’s education at home. But their challenges are small compared to parents in other professions — such as construction workers, wait staff, and cleaners — who cannot stay at home to supervise their child’s education without jeopardising their household income. It is completely unreasonable for governments to expect parents to work from home while simultaneously supervising their children’s education.
And it should be obvious to anyone who lives in the real world that students with reliable internet connections and highly-educated parents at home have much less at stake when schools close than students who don’t have these advantages.
School closures are extremely regressive. This is an undeniable fact that we ought to remember the next time progressive central planners try to lecture us about inequity and “the science.” When our education system faced its most critical juncture, they chose to wreck the education of millions of schoolchildren. This fiasco may have been the biggest failure of the U.S. policy response to the pandemic.