Summer of 2020, the following happened in quick succession: Trump blustered schools should open, the teachers unions immediately took the anti-Trump position, my friends in Europe all started sending their kids back to school without any masks at all, Covid cases were similar there and here in Massachusetts, I pointed this out to my local friend group and one response is that if I wanted similar in Massachusetts that means I don’t care if teachers die, I got a new job in pharma with a huge raise, the local teachers union declared they wouldn’t teach in person unless they “felt safe,” …..and this former public school booster transformed her raise into private school tuition so her kids could go to school in person for all of 2020-2021.
The progressive conversation about this issue was profoundly alienating. I’m still voting blue bc the alternative is even worse, but my political participation went off a cliff.
School is a key institutional support for my family. If I can pay my way out, I won’t rely on the state to supply that support ever again.
Democrats are really bad at governing. They're struggling to keep schools open. They're failing to build enough homes in the states they govern. They struggle to enact incredibly popular measures when they have a federal trifecta.
Republicans are worse. But it seems very likely Democrats' incompetence is part of the reason Republican craziness doesn't lead to electoral defeats large enough to get them to clean up their act.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I guess more sane people need to primary Democratic incumbents. The party desperately needs a refresh.
My girlfriend student-taught at a low-income school in Massachusetts last year. They were fully remote until March, but the YMCA next to the school ran a program where parents could drop their kids off during the day and do Zoom school there. So hundreds of them would sit in the gym on their ChromeBooks with minimal supervision and their masks on their chins all day long, and then they went home to their parents, many of whom seemed to be doing zero social distancing.
Meanwhile, my father, a teacher in a rich school in the DMV that vaccinated it’s teachers extremely early, opposed reopening because of the risk to him, and got all conspiratorial if you tried to show him evidence of the minimal spread in schools. To this day he can’t bring himself to say that the learning loss last year wasn’t worth whatever reduced spread it got us.
As a member of a teacher's union in Wisconsin, I've never understood why we were making the argument during covid that *what we do doesn't matter.* This has been a real emperor has no clothes moment even for many liberal members of teacher's unions, and I'm increasingly thankful to work in a district that managed to be open every day of the 20-21 school year in a hybrid model.
I just don't know how teaching can become a more attractive profession without unions though. It's true that a public sector employee union has interests that don't align with the service recipient, but without unions public sector employees are pitted against the collective will of society to get that service as cheaply as possible. I don't see that as compatible with the desire to provide a high quality education to every child.
My thinking on COVID: As with other viruses, such as rhinovirus and the flu, everyone is likely to get it; the question is *when* they will get it. We want the answer to be "after they are vaccinated and there are good treatments available", and/or "when they are young enough that the virus is very unlikely to cause serious health problems". It seems to me we are now in that desirable time frame. The only people who have not had ample time to be vaccinated are young children, to whom covid is very unlikely to cause serious harm. We should thus not be concerned about positive cases / testing positive for covid. What am I missing?
I think a lot of teachers were genuinely afraid - probably excessively so.
A frustration I’ve had through this entire pandemic is that I don’t think we’ve done a good job of communicating about risk in a way that ordinary people can understand. I’m open to suggestions but something like “In January 2020 the average 45 year old female teacher had an X% chance of being hospitalized over the next 3 months for any reason. Teaching in a community with Y% COVID positivity rate increases this hospitalization rate by Z%” Of course there are a bunch of variables at play here, but you could imagine someone (a competent CDC?) setting up a website where you could adjust those variables, select specific mitigations and see the result. You could also throw in comparisons like “this increase in risk is equivalent to driving an extra 30 miles per week” or something like that. By contrast what I see is people way under-rating the risk (who me? Get vaxed? Why?) or massively overstating the risk (30% of infected people get long COVID! <uh- no>). In the absence of clear data and communication people run wild with their over-confidence or anxiety.
“ but institutions can become excessively responsive to their noisiest members.”
This is almost always the case, but in this case the consequences were so severe, and the chance of repeating the mistake so likely, that it justifies extirpating the institution root and branch.
Uncomfortable position for someone who generally believed that teachers’ unions generally/usually had the best interests of students at heart two years ago, but they proved me wrong.
Mass closures of schools (and colleges) was one of the greatest disasters of the entire pandemic. Double digit trillions of dollars of welfare over the lifetime of these kids thrown onto a bonfire, for no public health benefits for themselves and minimal effects on community transmission. What a catastrophe. I hope no country betrays young people in such a manner ever again.
Separately:
>For years, study after study has shown that the effect sizes of education interventions tend to be really small. And when they don’t look small, they tend to be very difficult to scale up. That led some people to infer that schooling is largely pointless. But we learned during the pandemic that if you try something out-of-sample like not having school at all, the effects are actually very large.
This particularly ropey argument that school doesn't matter so we can shut them all down was ofc most explictly made by a certain S. Alexander. For a certain period of time earlier this year, the extremely clever and contrarian "rational" take on school closures was that they would have minimal impact on learning outcomes, because extremely clever and contrarian rational bloggers hated having to study foreign languages when they were at school. Kids going months without education is basically just a big Snow Day.
Given the large mutual audience with Slow Boring, I hope readers here take the claims of that outlet on the big policy questions with generous helpings of scepticism in future.
“Pre-pandemic, … ‘[S]uck it up, the kid almost certainly won’t die’ is not a thing you would say to the parents of a young child.”
This is certainly true, but what pediatricians constantly did tell parents with sick kids was, “It’s viral, so just go home, give the kid rest and fluids, and come back or go to the hospital if it gets worse.”
Which kind of amounts to the same thing, just said much more nicely.
I agree with Matt's take here, though I wish the post had given more than just a throwaway line to non-white parents being more supportive of school closures ("I will acknowledge that surveys indicate low-SES parents were more supportive of school closures than high-SES ones.") A common tactic of the "keep schools closed" crowd was to cite public support for virtual schooling, and the more savvy among them would trot out this specific point about non-white parent support for that position. It also fed into the "bougie parents want babysitting" argument. I'm fairly tuned into this debate for both personal and professional reasons, but never came across any good research on specifically why non-white parents were more supportive of school closures/virtual learning, despite the clear research showing disproportionately negative academic impact on those student groups. (I also think this is why it's not a coincidence that the one large district to announce virtual learning for January 2022 is PG County, a majority Black district.)
I get the anger at teacher unions, but given a significant portion of the Dem coalition (non-white families with school age kids, not just teacher unions) was also supportive of school closures, then I think it's worth more than a throwaway line here, even if the overall conclusion (keep schools open) is correct on the merits.
Omicron isn’t that lethal. The unwillingness of public health authorities to say this explicitly has further discredited them as risk averse ninnies.
The data are quite clear. South Africa has a 20% vaccination rate, suffered a huge outbreak, is so poor that only a tiny minority of non-serious cases are detected, and is averaging 40 covid deaths a day. Omicron has been spreading in Europe for much longer than the US. Deaths have not exploded anywhere. The UK is averaging 40 something deaths a day, which would project to 220 deaths in the US or 20% of our present death rate. I don’t know whether the death rate from omicron is 3% or 20% the rate of delta, but it’s low enough that only the most vulnerable should worry much.
"Democrats are the party that thinks education is important"
You mean "Democrats are the party that "says" education" is important. But actions speak louder than words. And Democrat resistance to charters, school choice, and of course open schools has clearly shown that teachers unions are way more important that actually educating students
Hey Milan, some hopefully constructive criticism for today's plots:
* The colors are too similar, so it's hard to distinguish the different subjects.
* Having the post-covid points disconnected from the pre-covid data makes it even harder.
* It seems like one subject is missing from the post-covid data (history?). Since all the subjects tracked pretty closely together pre-covid, the missing one could just be removed to make the plot less busy, without losing anything important to the message of the plot.
* To make things easier to distinguish, use different marker shapes and/or line styles for each subject. Open markers are often a better choice when data points overlap.
As a resident of flyover country (suburban Des Moines to be exact) with two small children in school and another two at home, the fact that this argument is still being circulated boggles my mind. Just another anecdotal point for me that shows we are rapidly splitting into two cultures, because the argument for closing schools is a cultural one not based on "science" but relative values of risk.
Just to add my own observations from my three school-age children - every kid is different and the restrictions and Covid affected them differently.
My oldest, who just turned 18 and is a senior currently, was always a self-starter and required very little parental intervention to do well with pretty much anything. Our high schools here did a hybrid system in the fall of 2020 and at first she did fine. But the hybrid schedule was very disrupting, so she opted into online-only, which was an option given by the district. Academically she did worse, but OK - no longer straight A's but not failing either. But she developed depression and anxiety which affected everything, including her grades. Therapy, medication and going back to 100% in-person school has helped, but she's not completely over it yet.
My next kid, currently 16, was historically kind of the opposite of my daughter - not much of a self starter, diagnosed with ADD, easily distracted, etc. Online/hybrid school for him was a complete shit-show. One of us parents would need to check on him constantly to make sure he was doing his work. And he hated being online. HATED. If the district had frozen grades in the spring of 2020 when schools were completely closed, he would have failed that semester completely.
We ended up transferring him to a smaller and different school in the district that had 4 days a week in person and also utilized a different teaching model. The change was an immediate 180 for him academically, psychologically and socially.
My youngest, in 6th grade this year, also has attention issues. School closings in the Spring of 2020 were a shit-show similar to my older boy. Fortunately, our district made the wise decision to have 100% in-person school for elementary. So the 2020-2021 year was normal for him except for masks and a couple of times he had to stay home due to quarantine/exposure rules.
Now I'm an educated person who has worked remotely for almost 5 years. And my wife, with a STEM PhD, had recently retired from the USAF and hadn't started full-time work, so she was home as well. And we are in the 2nd quintile for income, probably upper-middle-class for our area. We had a ton of advantages that most other families did not have - two parents at home, stable marriage, secure financially, educated parents who help kids with learning, etc. And yet it was still a massive struggle, especially for my daughter and her depression and anxiety which didn't have an obvious cause, except for the timing with Covid restrictions.
So I think of our advantageous and fortunate position and the struggles we faced, and try to imagine how it must have been for the many parents who did not have our advantages. It's really no wonder that many parents are upset and angry about how things turned out. That anyone is considering repeating school closures at this stage is mind-boggling.
Yes there are non-children in schools, and that needs to be taken into account, but largely that should be handled by mandating vaccination for the adults in schools. Also mandating the vaccination for the kids, we mandate plenty of vaccinations in order to go to schools, add this to the list.
You convince adults schools are safe by requiring vaccination and masking. Most of the infection we have seen around here is from non-school activities - parties and the like.
If a school has an outbreak such that there are not enough staff, then you close the school for 2 weeks.
But again... tie this all back to the restaurant and bars point... so if vaccinated adults in schools can't be a relatively safe work environment, then how is it all these other workplaces are open?
Key point is schools must be the last thing that close, not the first. If we are in a societal total lockdown, then fine, lockdown the schools as well. Otherwise you shut everything else down first, and only get to the schools last.
This issue is where the left lost me.
Summer of 2020, the following happened in quick succession: Trump blustered schools should open, the teachers unions immediately took the anti-Trump position, my friends in Europe all started sending their kids back to school without any masks at all, Covid cases were similar there and here in Massachusetts, I pointed this out to my local friend group and one response is that if I wanted similar in Massachusetts that means I don’t care if teachers die, I got a new job in pharma with a huge raise, the local teachers union declared they wouldn’t teach in person unless they “felt safe,” …..and this former public school booster transformed her raise into private school tuition so her kids could go to school in person for all of 2020-2021.
The progressive conversation about this issue was profoundly alienating. I’m still voting blue bc the alternative is even worse, but my political participation went off a cliff.
School is a key institutional support for my family. If I can pay my way out, I won’t rely on the state to supply that support ever again.
Democrats are really bad at governing. They're struggling to keep schools open. They're failing to build enough homes in the states they govern. They struggle to enact incredibly popular measures when they have a federal trifecta.
Republicans are worse. But it seems very likely Democrats' incompetence is part of the reason Republican craziness doesn't lead to electoral defeats large enough to get them to clean up their act.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I guess more sane people need to primary Democratic incumbents. The party desperately needs a refresh.
Every word of this is correct.
My girlfriend student-taught at a low-income school in Massachusetts last year. They were fully remote until March, but the YMCA next to the school ran a program where parents could drop their kids off during the day and do Zoom school there. So hundreds of them would sit in the gym on their ChromeBooks with minimal supervision and their masks on their chins all day long, and then they went home to their parents, many of whom seemed to be doing zero social distancing.
Meanwhile, my father, a teacher in a rich school in the DMV that vaccinated it’s teachers extremely early, opposed reopening because of the risk to him, and got all conspiratorial if you tried to show him evidence of the minimal spread in schools. To this day he can’t bring himself to say that the learning loss last year wasn’t worth whatever reduced spread it got us.
Truly mind boggling.
As a member of a teacher's union in Wisconsin, I've never understood why we were making the argument during covid that *what we do doesn't matter.* This has been a real emperor has no clothes moment even for many liberal members of teacher's unions, and I'm increasingly thankful to work in a district that managed to be open every day of the 20-21 school year in a hybrid model.
I just don't know how teaching can become a more attractive profession without unions though. It's true that a public sector employee union has interests that don't align with the service recipient, but without unions public sector employees are pitted against the collective will of society to get that service as cheaply as possible. I don't see that as compatible with the desire to provide a high quality education to every child.
My thinking on COVID: As with other viruses, such as rhinovirus and the flu, everyone is likely to get it; the question is *when* they will get it. We want the answer to be "after they are vaccinated and there are good treatments available", and/or "when they are young enough that the virus is very unlikely to cause serious health problems". It seems to me we are now in that desirable time frame. The only people who have not had ample time to be vaccinated are young children, to whom covid is very unlikely to cause serious harm. We should thus not be concerned about positive cases / testing positive for covid. What am I missing?
I think a lot of teachers were genuinely afraid - probably excessively so.
A frustration I’ve had through this entire pandemic is that I don’t think we’ve done a good job of communicating about risk in a way that ordinary people can understand. I’m open to suggestions but something like “In January 2020 the average 45 year old female teacher had an X% chance of being hospitalized over the next 3 months for any reason. Teaching in a community with Y% COVID positivity rate increases this hospitalization rate by Z%” Of course there are a bunch of variables at play here, but you could imagine someone (a competent CDC?) setting up a website where you could adjust those variables, select specific mitigations and see the result. You could also throw in comparisons like “this increase in risk is equivalent to driving an extra 30 miles per week” or something like that. By contrast what I see is people way under-rating the risk (who me? Get vaxed? Why?) or massively overstating the risk (30% of infected people get long COVID! <uh- no>). In the absence of clear data and communication people run wild with their over-confidence or anxiety.
“ but institutions can become excessively responsive to their noisiest members.”
This is almost always the case, but in this case the consequences were so severe, and the chance of repeating the mistake so likely, that it justifies extirpating the institution root and branch.
Uncomfortable position for someone who generally believed that teachers’ unions generally/usually had the best interests of students at heart two years ago, but they proved me wrong.
Mass closures of schools (and colleges) was one of the greatest disasters of the entire pandemic. Double digit trillions of dollars of welfare over the lifetime of these kids thrown onto a bonfire, for no public health benefits for themselves and minimal effects on community transmission. What a catastrophe. I hope no country betrays young people in such a manner ever again.
Separately:
>For years, study after study has shown that the effect sizes of education interventions tend to be really small. And when they don’t look small, they tend to be very difficult to scale up. That led some people to infer that schooling is largely pointless. But we learned during the pandemic that if you try something out-of-sample like not having school at all, the effects are actually very large.
This particularly ropey argument that school doesn't matter so we can shut them all down was ofc most explictly made by a certain S. Alexander. For a certain period of time earlier this year, the extremely clever and contrarian "rational" take on school closures was that they would have minimal impact on learning outcomes, because extremely clever and contrarian rational bloggers hated having to study foreign languages when they were at school. Kids going months without education is basically just a big Snow Day.
Given the large mutual audience with Slow Boring, I hope readers here take the claims of that outlet on the big policy questions with generous helpings of scepticism in future.
“Pre-pandemic, … ‘[S]uck it up, the kid almost certainly won’t die’ is not a thing you would say to the parents of a young child.”
This is certainly true, but what pediatricians constantly did tell parents with sick kids was, “It’s viral, so just go home, give the kid rest and fluids, and come back or go to the hospital if it gets worse.”
Which kind of amounts to the same thing, just said much more nicely.
I agree with Matt's take here, though I wish the post had given more than just a throwaway line to non-white parents being more supportive of school closures ("I will acknowledge that surveys indicate low-SES parents were more supportive of school closures than high-SES ones.") A common tactic of the "keep schools closed" crowd was to cite public support for virtual schooling, and the more savvy among them would trot out this specific point about non-white parent support for that position. It also fed into the "bougie parents want babysitting" argument. I'm fairly tuned into this debate for both personal and professional reasons, but never came across any good research on specifically why non-white parents were more supportive of school closures/virtual learning, despite the clear research showing disproportionately negative academic impact on those student groups. (I also think this is why it's not a coincidence that the one large district to announce virtual learning for January 2022 is PG County, a majority Black district.)
I get the anger at teacher unions, but given a significant portion of the Dem coalition (non-white families with school age kids, not just teacher unions) was also supportive of school closures, then I think it's worth more than a throwaway line here, even if the overall conclusion (keep schools open) is correct on the merits.
Omicron isn’t that lethal. The unwillingness of public health authorities to say this explicitly has further discredited them as risk averse ninnies.
The data are quite clear. South Africa has a 20% vaccination rate, suffered a huge outbreak, is so poor that only a tiny minority of non-serious cases are detected, and is averaging 40 covid deaths a day. Omicron has been spreading in Europe for much longer than the US. Deaths have not exploded anywhere. The UK is averaging 40 something deaths a day, which would project to 220 deaths in the US or 20% of our present death rate. I don’t know whether the death rate from omicron is 3% or 20% the rate of delta, but it’s low enough that only the most vulnerable should worry much.
"Democrats are the party that thinks education is important"
You mean "Democrats are the party that "says" education" is important. But actions speak louder than words. And Democrat resistance to charters, school choice, and of course open schools has clearly shown that teachers unions are way more important that actually educating students
Hey Milan, some hopefully constructive criticism for today's plots:
* The colors are too similar, so it's hard to distinguish the different subjects.
* Having the post-covid points disconnected from the pre-covid data makes it even harder.
* It seems like one subject is missing from the post-covid data (history?). Since all the subjects tracked pretty closely together pre-covid, the missing one could just be removed to make the plot less busy, without losing anything important to the message of the plot.
* To make things easier to distinguish, use different marker shapes and/or line styles for each subject. Open markers are often a better choice when data points overlap.
* You can check color choices for legibility here: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/, and there's a proposed accessibility-friendly color palette at https://github.com/mpetroff/accessible-color-cycles.
As a resident of flyover country (suburban Des Moines to be exact) with two small children in school and another two at home, the fact that this argument is still being circulated boggles my mind. Just another anecdotal point for me that shows we are rapidly splitting into two cultures, because the argument for closing schools is a cultural one not based on "science" but relative values of risk.
Thank you for writing this.
Just to add my own observations from my three school-age children - every kid is different and the restrictions and Covid affected them differently.
My oldest, who just turned 18 and is a senior currently, was always a self-starter and required very little parental intervention to do well with pretty much anything. Our high schools here did a hybrid system in the fall of 2020 and at first she did fine. But the hybrid schedule was very disrupting, so she opted into online-only, which was an option given by the district. Academically she did worse, but OK - no longer straight A's but not failing either. But she developed depression and anxiety which affected everything, including her grades. Therapy, medication and going back to 100% in-person school has helped, but she's not completely over it yet.
My next kid, currently 16, was historically kind of the opposite of my daughter - not much of a self starter, diagnosed with ADD, easily distracted, etc. Online/hybrid school for him was a complete shit-show. One of us parents would need to check on him constantly to make sure he was doing his work. And he hated being online. HATED. If the district had frozen grades in the spring of 2020 when schools were completely closed, he would have failed that semester completely.
We ended up transferring him to a smaller and different school in the district that had 4 days a week in person and also utilized a different teaching model. The change was an immediate 180 for him academically, psychologically and socially.
My youngest, in 6th grade this year, also has attention issues. School closings in the Spring of 2020 were a shit-show similar to my older boy. Fortunately, our district made the wise decision to have 100% in-person school for elementary. So the 2020-2021 year was normal for him except for masks and a couple of times he had to stay home due to quarantine/exposure rules.
Now I'm an educated person who has worked remotely for almost 5 years. And my wife, with a STEM PhD, had recently retired from the USAF and hadn't started full-time work, so she was home as well. And we are in the 2nd quintile for income, probably upper-middle-class for our area. We had a ton of advantages that most other families did not have - two parents at home, stable marriage, secure financially, educated parents who help kids with learning, etc. And yet it was still a massive struggle, especially for my daughter and her depression and anxiety which didn't have an obvious cause, except for the timing with Covid restrictions.
So I think of our advantageous and fortunate position and the struggles we faced, and try to imagine how it must have been for the many parents who did not have our advantages. It's really no wonder that many parents are upset and angry about how things turned out. That anyone is considering repeating school closures at this stage is mind-boggling.
Totally agree with Matt here.
Regarding some points from other comments...
Yes there are non-children in schools, and that needs to be taken into account, but largely that should be handled by mandating vaccination for the adults in schools. Also mandating the vaccination for the kids, we mandate plenty of vaccinations in order to go to schools, add this to the list.
You convince adults schools are safe by requiring vaccination and masking. Most of the infection we have seen around here is from non-school activities - parties and the like.
If a school has an outbreak such that there are not enough staff, then you close the school for 2 weeks.
But again... tie this all back to the restaurant and bars point... so if vaccinated adults in schools can't be a relatively safe work environment, then how is it all these other workplaces are open?
Key point is schools must be the last thing that close, not the first. If we are in a societal total lockdown, then fine, lockdown the schools as well. Otherwise you shut everything else down first, and only get to the schools last.