As a 3rd grade teacher in a completely open elementary school, It has frustrating to me that school reopening surveys do not look at age of the students. In my district, we are completely open for young children, but high schoolers are still mostly hybrid. There is a very different risk calculation for 8-year-olds and for 18-year-olds. I want very much to see a survey that asks about people's opinions about opening elementary schools but keeping high schools closed.
As a university professor, it bugs me even more that half the articles about opening or closing schools *seem* to be talking only about K12, but don't say *anything* that distinguishes K12 from university. It's remarkably how infrequently I see any article mention that six year olds have a harder time using Zoom than 16 year olds or 26 year olds.
This frustrated me as well from the other end -- as a parent of a kindergartener. San Francisco shut down schools (including private schools) for the first couple of months of the school year, and I was like, "Look, just let K-2 go in. It's a huge difference. With all the space you save from having the rest of the classes at home, you can absolutely be safe with that number of students."
This is still the case! We could use all the physical space in public schools to make for a very safe reopening of some amount of the lower grades (probably at LEAST K-4 or so) and leave the higher grades hybrid.
But isn't that American politics and culture, not just now but always? Cancel that celeb or forgive them. Capitalism is best, socialism is from the devil. Iran is great (1953-1978), Iran is run by terrorists (1979 to present).
Agreed, this is key to understanding parent hesitance. In Austin when they reopened in person learning as a option, something like 40% of elementary (preK-5th) opted to attend. Versus 10% of middle (6-8th) and 3% of high school—these ratios have probably changed some since. I am sure this is a combination of the younger the kid, the safer (in general) the virus infection and the harder to learn on Zoom.
Margaret, I'm a high school teacher and my wife teaches fifth (but did third for years). I've been intrigued by how much the national discussion seem clueless about how many of us have been doing this since August.
I just wanted to commiserate. I'm sure you are exhausted.
It's so funny how outside of the national discourse my experience has been, because I live in a red state but a blue city. I work in a 100% reduced lunch, Title I school, with 100%, students of color as our population. We've been in and out of full-time remote learning but the majority of our time has been in person. About 25% of our families have opted to keep their kids home full time, and the rest are back in person. I see my community reflected and absolutely no national coverage, because we're a weird combination of all of the different stereotypes of what's going on. It makes me assume that everywhere that isn't one of the five biggest cities in the country is also equally not represented in the national media. which is of course not shocking but it also isn't something I had really thought about before when it comes to education.
Just wanted to point out that in large swaths of the country, the schools opened in fall 2020 and have remained open the entire 2020-21 school year. Interpreting the polling, you have to take that into account! The resistance to schools being open is probably highest in places where the schools haven't been open for months?
I believe a significant part of the reluctance to open schools has to do with negative partisanship, specifically related to Trump. Trump started making a big deal about reopening schools which I think made Democratic partisans opposed to it as a knee-jerk reaction.
This Politico Article discusses how California parents felt reluctant to lobby and push for opening schools when it was deemed "pro-Trump"
>Gone is the fear of being politically incorrect by siding with Donald Trump or facing criticism for not caring about teachers. Instead, parents in the nation’s biggest state are emboldened and organizing as President Joe Biden pledges to reopen schools and top national disease experts say it is safe to do so with the right precautions.
Agreed. In the last big thread about reopening, I noted the whiplash teachers were feeling as they went from being official heroes of the resistance to being lazy anti-science privledge hoarders.
Over here in the Netherlands everything is closed *except* schools.‡ We have *triple* the per capita (seven day average) rate of (new) infection compared to the US and I might be eligible for vaccinated by November.
I fully agree that closing schools is nuts and that closing schools while opening restaurants is so completely at odds with reality as to make one wonder if we should just throw in the towel and give anarchy a try. But looking around at my neighbors (Belgium, Germany, France and the UK) you have to squint really hard to see any policies that make a difference beyond the general condition that ICUs don't get overrun when everything is closed. (And that hoarding vaccines is good domestic policy.)
By the way, the Netherlands actually comes very close to Matt's recommendations. I'm not 100% sure about who gets hazard pay, but that is somewhat offset by universal healthcare. Schools are open, masks are required everywhere (except churches), indoor anything is banned and government covers payroll for (most) businesses impacted by the closures. Also KLM Air France was bailed out and the government blocked foreign entities from buying out some beleaguered Dutch companies.
‡And grocery stores and, technically, some businesses will soon be open by appointment, but its the Netherlands so sex workers are organizing protests to be able to reopen so that might happen soon too.
It strikes me that more than a year into this, nobody knows nothing about the epidemiology of this virus. We don't know why there are surges and why they decline. We don't know why some countries get hit hard and others don't. We don't really know what strategies work and which don't. We read about highly transmissible variants dominating COVID in places like the UK . . . and then see infection rates there plunging.
Is East Asia pursuing better policies because of their experience with SARS and MERS? Or could it be that their experience with SARS and MERS created antibodies that attenuate the effect and transmissibility of COVID? I don't think anyone knows (see the great article on how little we know why countries vary so much by Siddhartha Mukherjee in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others)
Are teachers exaggerating the risk or underplaying it? Damned if I know.
The decision in Providence RI, where I live, was so straightforward I don’t understand why other districts didn’t do it.
Every family could choose between in-person class in their regular school and a district-wide “virtual academy.” At-risk teachers transferred to the virtual school. About half the families chose virtual, so it wasn’t hard to separate desks. Most parents and teachers were satisfied. My daughter in second grade has had a good school year. There has been little or no spread in school, I believe.
This is a sensible way to go, but unfortunately not a "silver bullet". The school district where I live in Michigan did this and they did receive full funding for the virtual option. However, interest in it was no where near high enough to create a significant reduction in class sizes. We did full in-person in fall and eventually switched to hybrid once #'s got too high. We are back to full in-person now (with virtual still an option for those that want it).
In our district, like elsewhere, there is a class/race dynamic where the poorer families were more likely to choose virtual. Those are the kids who already lack the family resources to get them caught up if they fall behind. I'm not sure how easy or hard it will be to bring the two groups back together in the Fall. Our friends who are in virtual say it's going well and their daughter is learning well, though.
My school district considered that, but decided not to for reasons that were never fully explained. The going belief is that the state would only pay 80% of funding for students in the virtual academy but would pay 100% of funding for students who were in their regular school but fully virtual.
Interesting article Matt. But I'm surprised you didn't mention private schools. I think a big reason that there hasn't been more parental pressure to reopen schools is that the most influential (typically the wealthiest) parents just sent their kids to private schools and sat this fight out.
Also, the profit motive shouldn't be ignored: indoor dining restaurants make more money than takeout-only restaurants, but in-person classes don't make a public school any more money than remote teaching. So there's no financial incentive to reopen schools. Say what you want about capitalism, money does at least sharpen decision-making. "Think of the children!" only goes so far.
I think this somewhat misinterprets the meaning of the private school data.
A lot of people look at private schools being open and say "well, see, the customers are demanding that the schools reopen and the Big Bad Unions" are stopping it. But what we see in the public schools is that it's the richer parents who are more eager to see the schools reopen.
Some of that is a differential sense of the health risk.
But I think it's probably that college-educated professionals and working-class people have different overall attitudes toward the school system. Most professionals view school as intrinsically very important and are themselves heavy school-demanders, who often made schools a key priority in their decision about where to live and worry that the school system is not providing their little darlings with all the attention and educating that they deserve.
Working-class people are more likely to have negative attitudes toward schooling personally, and to experience the education system as constantly attempting to coerce them to care more about their kids' homework, grades, etc.
So professionals are more likely to view a closed school through a lense of suspicion (the teachers aren't providing me the services I paid for with my property taxes) while lower class people view the opening through the same lense (now these jerks want me to send my kid into a hazardous situation, wearing a mask, etc. etc. etc.)
Scott Siskind had a pretty big rant as part of his review of The Cult of Smart. Caps lock and everything. It began by stating, "School is child prison," and I think it offered a sort of college-educated professional version of the lower class suspicion toward school. I suspect this is a minority position, but I am surprised by this because a lot of school is bullshit and people should object to it more often. Is that all attributable to their capturing the gains from schooling or is it something else?
I felt he had some good points in there, but he led himself to some wild ideas based on his own shockingly negative personal experience. The idea that kids should just be allowed to choose their own path, up to and including going to school or not, from a young age is pretty silly.
Brief summary: according to a 1930s experiment, apparently teaching or not teaching math for the first five years made no difference in the sixth year (i.e., one year of math instruction = six years). I can't find if this experiment has ever been repeated. Another anecdote from the article, apparently most K-6 teachers don't know how to find the area of a rectangle?
Unrelated to the main point, I'm wondering why you choose to refer to him as "Scott Siskind" rather than "Scott Alexander". Since he writes under the name "Scott Alexander", referring to him as "Scott Siskind" while talking about his writing seems like saying "Stefani Germanotta sang an unusual version of the national anthem for Joe Biden's inauguration", rather than referring to her as "Lady Gaga".
When referencing the Federalist papers, do you refer to the author as Publius or do you refer to them by their actual names - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay?
That's an interesting case. A few others I've thought of, prompted by this, include the fact that we refer to most "Lennon/McCartney" songs as being by the one of them that actually wrote it, and that although Søren Kierkegaard published most of his books under a variety of pseudonyms we refer to them with his name. I think it's important that in these cases, there's not a one-to-one correspondence of pseudonyms to authors, so it's useful to use the author's official name when we want to talk about their contribution to the corpus. (I think Nicolas Bourbaki is an interesting exception where people almost always refer to the pseudonym rather than the subset that was involved in any particular book.)
But it's very rare to refer to the official name of authors like George Eliot, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll, or Anatole France, who published nearly all their work under a single pen name, not shared with anyone else.
(I don't know how many of them tried to keep their identity secret while working under the pen name, as Scott Alexander did on his previous blog, and how many just wrote that way without actively trying to hide their identity, as Scott Alexander does now.)
It's possible that I'm generalizing way too far from the preferences of trans people, who often don't try to hide the name they grew up under, but strongly prefer to be referred to under their current name, rather than their "deadname".
I think he did mention his real last name. But someone pointed out to me that "Astral Codex Ten" is an anagram of "Scott Alexander" (and that "Slate Star Codex" is an anagram of "Scott Alexaader" - presumably a typo in the input to the anagram engine?). And when he replies to people in the comments, it is under the name "Scott Alexander".
He's no longer actively trying to hide the last name "Siskind", but he's still using the name "Scott Alexander".
The whole rant was interesting to me. He sounds a lot like the people who love to quote Foucault and talk about how schools exist to discipline and punish children. I was surprised given that a lot of his writing pushes back against perspectives like that in other contexts.
Maybe blue collar workers think of their own K-12 education as child prison, whereas highly educated professionals look back with fondness? I'm educated, but like a lot of people who homeschool for non-religious reasons, I hated every minute of K-12, so I'm with the child prison side.
In my experience working class people tend to think that one is either academically inclined or not. More or better school isn't going to change one's nature. Educated professionals tend to think that schools can indeed change who a person is on a fundamental level.
I wonder if it's not a regional thing too? When I moved to the Northeast, I began encountering people who really felt school was a major change agent in peoples' life. Growing up and teaching in the South, I didn't encounter this view much. Not that we thought school did nothing, but nobody I worked with or grew up with felt like school was going to totally fix society. Maybe I just didn't hang out with the right people, though. A friend of mine up here who works for a big staff development organization was flying down to South Carolina every few weeks to support a handful of districts. He kept telling me that people there seemed not to care about school. Teachers, parents, students, nobody seemed invested in making schools work better. And these weren't run-down poor schools, either! These were schools that could afford an out-of-state curriculum consultant and several staff developers.
Matt this seems like a really classist look at things. "Poor people don't see any good in learning" but "the rich understand the true value of schools". I know that's not precisely what you are saying, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but what you are saying doesn't seem that far off. And I think it's easy to see my version is clearly problematic.
It may be classist but if it's accurate enough to explain the decisions and interests of vast numbers of parents then it's pretty useful. Matt's take is certainly what I've observed in my own extended family, which is a mix of blue and white collar, college educated and not. Although I wouldn't exactly agree with your paraphrasing, it seems clear to me that people who went to college themselves are much more likely to prioritize education when compared to people who finished high school and were happy be to be done with it forever.
It’s anecdata, but that’s what I did. Two things happened at the same time last summer: I got a new job with a big raise, and the teachers’ unions released a statement saying they wouldn’t return for in person teaching unless they “felt safe.” That statement plus Trump yelling incoherently about reopening was enough to tell me how it was going to go.
As soon as that statement came out I unenrolled my kids from public school (after being a vocal booster for years) and put them in a tiny private school. They’ve been meeting full time in person since September. No cases.
In Massachusetts, enrollment dropped something like 7%. Last week I received a very nice letter from the local district acknowledging that some people unenrolled their kids in the last school year for various reasons, and if we'd like to come back, they'd prioritize placing those kids in the same schools they used to attend.
I got a call from our local school district asking if we were interested in re-enrolling. I didn't understand what why they were asking about until you said this. It makes so much more sense now.
I think your comment about financial incentives is correct. If Congress had properly bailed out restaurants and bars so they could stay closed and provided money to schools to safely re-open, we wouldn't be in this problem. The federal government can print money, local governments can't.
I think the article basically hits the nail on the head. Another underrated factor seems to be the social class of teachers. Teachers generally see themselves as white collar professionals. They have college degrees and often advanced degrees and so do their friends, spouses and neighbors. For the average teacher, their social peers have mostly been working from home during the pandemic, so asking them to go teach in person feels like an extraordinary ask that has generally not been required of other people they think are similar.
I am at a private school, not a union, but I wonder how much of the unions that oppose reopening has to do with the fact that few teachers in the country have any clue how to teach hybrid and maintain social distancing? It's not that teaching and learning in a pandemic is harder than in normal times, it's that schools as institutions are not set up to be agile for a shift like this.
Teaching in a pandemic is unlike anything I've ever done in my almost two decades at progressive schools. Right now I'm used to hybrid learning - juggling between the kids in front of me and the kids on the screen. And I no longer worry too much about the huge lack of collaborative discussions that results when kids have to be distanced, in fact I've found new ways to accomplish this. But in the fall I felt like a first year teacher again. It's hard to describe to someone not in the profession just how insanely different this year is. So much of teaching and learning requires an open feedback loop that is wildly different in a pandemic setting.
To what extent, if any, should teachers be held accountable for their performance this year?
Like, if your students don't perform as well (in whatever sense of performance you prefer), does it make sense to you that you should take some of the responsibility? How much?
You are asking a question that is a subset of a much bigger and thornier question in education, which is, "How can we determine the impact of a teacher on their students' performance?" I am afraid I just don't have the energy to find you some links. But suffice to say it's not as simple as you might think and it is certainly a thorny issue to scale.
After we explore that question, we move on to "to what extent, if any, should teachers be held accountable for their performance". Then we can get to the issue of this particular year.
I am definitely begging the question a bit. I read a lot about this but rarely do I get teacher perspectives. You'd think people would spend more time talking to teachers about school stuff but they're usually the last people asked.
In general, I'm big on teacher accountability and think much of the resistance to value added accountability metrics is misplaced.
Having said that, I don't see how in the world there can be any performance related accountability this year. There are just too many confounding factors.
Most teachers are good people who do their best. This year, I think that's all we can ask.
I think you're right that the institutions aren't set up for agile shifts - that might be exactly the words I would use for my local affluent but administratively beleaguered school system. I try to be patient with them because at no point did we (the people in the town who have to approve their budget) say "we need you to develop a bunch of reserve capacity and backup plans for a pandemic", but my friend teachers at a private religious day school and they clearly just made it work in a way we haven't seen.
But ... I'm not sure how teachers knowing how to teach in new ways plays in - the alternative to hybrid is full remote and that's totally novel and weird too. Watching my son's second grade teacher start the year full remote was rough - she's a good (in person) teacher and you could tell how frustrated she was to not be able to do that good of a job because she was a total newbie at Zoom school.
Short of "full re-open", I'd think every other option is "get into novel and uncharted territory"?
Ha you are spot on. I thought about posting a PS of something to this effect. I certainly don't think that the novel & uncharted territory made for a compelling reason to stay closed. But I wanted to wonder if perhaps this was a reason some unions didn't want to open. Also, at least for secondary students, remote is way easier than hybrid. Little kids don't work on zoom.
Great piece. Our work across CO has helped me understand that a significant amount of this has to do with size of school district. Smaller and medium size school districts have been able to be more nimble in their responsiveness to COVID and their reopening strategies. On top of that, small and medium size districts, even ones with boards (not always an inhibitor sometimes a dramatic accelerator) can learn the lessons of the pandemic to rethink education broadly. No lie bigger systems have bigger problems and bigger politics, including the teacher ones you mention.
Therefore I don't disagree we have an institutional design challenge (radical localism) but if you show up with a combo of tool and accountabilities, you can turn it into an incredible opportunity. In CO we had a Guv that creatively leveraged CARES dollars to create a competitive grant fund that prioritize districts and higher ed partnerships with business and community. Philanthropy and local leadership rallied to meet the challenge. The result has been a significant move forward in many districts on some exciting piece, in particular our largest system has struggled with the type of institutional challenges you mention. So I don't disagree that the learning and social emotional challenges of this past year has been (and continue to be) enormous...but as I often say on here: creative and partnership-drive local leadership can make a difference!
If you're interested in how Colorado has leaned into this new moment:
A big issue is that this position didn’t really have a clear political support group.
1) A significant (though minority) portion of left leaning people are in the “keep everything closed” camp, schools included
2) A large majority of right leaning people got into the “open everything” camp because of Trump
3) Some of the remaining people were in a “we should try to open everything in a modified way” camp - this is probably the best summary of what actually happened
4) The “we should prioritize opening schools and closing other things” camp is probably the smallest of all (though it was over represented among public health and blue check Twitter people)
5) A lot of normal people (include parents who are skeptical about going back to school now) just want someone in power to declare that schools are “safe” before going back. That couldn’t happen without extreme lockdowns or mass vaccinations regardless of policy
Flights, indoor dining, etc were all pretty popular when they were available, so at least a big portion of consumers wanted this stuff too. Given this opening them in a modified fashion was inevitable.
Were flights "pretty popular"? I guess I'm not sure exactly what this means. But it looks like the only days that reached half the number of passengers as the same day last year were Dec. 23 and Dec. 30: https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput
In recent weeks it's been hovering just a bit under half of last year numbers, but in August and September it looks like it was more like 1/3 or even 1/4 of the previous year.
(That said, given the size of the drop in business travel, and the usual ratio of business to leisure travel, this might actually represent an increase in leisure travel. So maybe flights are popular?)
Vox ran an article two weeks back from an epidemiologist and father about how he's losing patience with teachers unions over reopening (https://www.vox.com/2021/2/15/22280763/kids-covid-vaccine-teachers-unions-schools-reopening-cdc). I thought it illustrated why schools find themselves in very weird binds when talking to parents, even expert parents. The author talks about how his district's union is fighting hard for 6ft of distancing:
"In the process, they [the union] have misinterpreted scientific guidance and transformed it into a series of litmus tests that keep our district in hybrid learning. These litmus tests are not based on science, they are grounded in anxiety, and they are a major component of the return-to-school quagmire in which we are stuck. ... One sticking point, for example, has been the union’s early and continued insistence that desks remain at least six feet apart at all times. This requirement mathematically determines whether there is enough space for learners in the building. Distancing is absolutely critical to Covid-19 mitigation, but there is no magical threshold that makes six feet the “safe” distance and five feet “dangerous.”
But if you look at the guidelines released that very same week by the CDC it says very clearly:
"2. Physical distancing (at least 6 feet) should be maximized to the greatest extent possible. To ensure physical distancing, schools should establish policies and implement structural interventions to promote physical distance of at least 6 feet between people. Cohorting or podding is recommended to minimize exposure across the school environment."
That's the second of two recommendations. It's masks and 6ft of distance.
Now, I'm not here to debate aerosols and the physics of 6ft vs 5 ft. Instead, what I think matters here is that this one epidemiologist says a particular measurement of public safety doesn't matter, following it strictly isn't scientifically supported, and efforts to keep capacity and distance low mean too few students can be in the schools. Meanwhile, the CDC says its review of the (presumably scientific) evidence indicates that 6ft is a minimum, distancing should be maximized, and schools should adopt approaches to cut down on the number of kids in school.
So, it's not just that the teachers' union is picking out 6ft as a magic litmus test to create hurdles and slow down reopening, is it? Instead, it really seems like the expert who wrote this article is asking his local schools to go against the CDC guidelines. Maybe we should, but that's a very different situation from the one described by the author.
If the experts actually disagree about the best way to safely reopen schools, how are districts and unions and parents supposed to make informed decisions? I'd imagine one reason you're seeing so much politicization around the whole process is that nobody's effectively communicating a stable set of practices that schools can use to safe-ish-ly reopen.
I think the concept of deference to CDC guidelines here is somewhat inappropriate and that this is a failure of leadership on the part of the Biden administration.
Like suppose the CDC were to say, accurately, that:
(a) Seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of Americans each year
(b) Schools are major vectors for flu transmission
(c) To avoid seasonal flu transmission all staff and students should wear masks
(d) Optimal anti-flu classroom design is for desks to be spaced six feet apart
I know of some pediatricians who are now advocating for (c) and saying that schools should keep masking in place *forever* as a measure against flu and the common cold. I don't know anyone who is advocating for (d) as a forever measure. But (d) isn't scientifically false or anything. We'd just say that (d) doesn't pass a cost-benefit test.
That's a political decision for the President of the United States and his Secretary of Education to make, _citing_ scientific information about the merits of 6 vs 3 vs whatever feet of spacing in a context where you have masks and are opening windows and using HEPA filters.
Roads would be safer if we imposed a national speed limit of 30 miles per hour, but that's not a *decisive* consideration in picking a speed limit.
A good example about the 30 mph point is car seats. A few years back the guidance was changed to suggest kids stay in rear facing car seats longer and car seats period longer. We and many other conscientious parents tried to do that but still stopped the rear facing a little early because rear facing is really boring for the kids and can be uncomfortable. The actual fact is that even adults would be safer in rear facing car seats, but nobody is going to recommend that even though it would actually save lives.
Sure but how are schools supposed to know when guidelines are simply political and can be safely ignored? And, importantly, what rules and principles are going to guide them when they decide to ignore those guidelines?
It's not that I disagree with you, it's that I don't see how telling schools to ignore things they don't agree with is going to work. At some point, schools need to make informed decisions, not random ones or uninformed ones.
They are not political except in the sense everything is. The issue is public health decisions shouldn’t be made by public health officials because there are issues other than public health. They are and need to be made by competent elected officials who can balance public health against other stuff. Incompetent person at the top equals bad.
By the fact that millions upon millions of public school students and tens of thousands of teachers HAVE been in person all school year. Some people are talking about this as hypothetical or potential. It's been happening. The data is in. Schools are not major vectors of community spread. We do not have widespread cases of teachers dying due classroom exposure. Whether we should have or not, America ran the dual condition experiment. And we basically confirmed the null hypothesis.
The CDC says 6 feet “as much as possible.” I think that’s unfortunate wording because it’s not clear on whether that means 6 feet is necessary or not, and people on both sides can point to it to support their case.
But apropos of Matt’s article last week on not listening to the CDC, this is something we would expect the CDC to say. In fact they probably would rather all people stayed 6 feet apart as much as possible in all settings, forever. After all, that would reduce transmission of many aerosol based illnesses, and reducing disease is their only mission; they don’t balance various needs like people’s desire to do stuff.
So even if 6 feet were only slightly important, they would still say this. OTOH, if it were very important they would also say it.
I agree with this and Matt's post about it the other day, but I don't know how this helps institutions make better decisions right now. Or, rather, institutions are making all kinds of random decisions right now. There are school systems that have been online for almost a full year now. There are school systems that went back to in-person in August. There is every flavor in between.
We don't have a good set of recommendations that schools can follow to do reopening well. Instead we have different sets of experts yelling dramatically different things. The position between the CDC's recommendations and the epidemiology-expert-dad isn't one of degrees, it's almost totally the opposite. How does a school board or union negotiator look at those two positions and feel like there's anything but an all-or-nothing approach?
I agree that this is unhelpful and we need clearer guidance.
I would just say I don’t see the CDC and being diametrically opposed to anything - they are splitting the difference in a confusing and unhelpful way. You thought the guidance says 6 feet absolutely period, and I think it said something very different, and maybe it said both.
I'll stop picking nits after this one but it says "maximized to the greatest extent possible" which leads me to think this is saying that greater than six feet is desirable when possible. It's a greater-than-or-equal-to. This is reinforced by the second time where it's stated that schools should use policies and structural interventions to get to that six feet point. That is also only the summary. The deeper and more detailed guidelines make it clear that 6ft is considered a minimum.
That said, I don't particularly care about the distance so much as the process by which schools and unions and parents are supposed to figure all this out by themselves.
Six feet as some sort of magical distance germs can't travel past is one of the most pernicious simplifications plaguing us. The three factors which affect transmission are distance, duration of exposure, and number of interactions.
For example, fast food workers and grocery store clerks have a lot of interactions daily but very briefly at a close to moderate distance. Health care workers necessarily have to be very close but can be more distant for some or most of the work shift.
Teachers are exposed to a lot of people at moderate distances but for very long durations. They are essentially locked into a building with a couple of hundred people for six to eight hours at a time, especially if the classrooms share a common HVAC system. There should be much better epidemiological study of how these factors interact rather than simplify them down to "six feet and masks."
The epidemiological experiment was inadvertently done by hundreds of districts around the nation, including mine. It was reasonable to worry, but we did it. Virtually everyone in my community (Republican, Democrat, white, black, poor, working class, professional, etc.) is glad we did and would do it again.
Sure but the alternative proposed in the article is less than 6ft because distancing = closed schools. The author objects to 6 ft but he also objects to other ways of reducing school capacity because it makes it harder/impossible to reopen. And he's an epidemiologist so I'm presuming he's talking in his capacity as an expert.
I can buy the conclusion that 3 feet while wearing a mask is equal to six feet without a mask. But nobody is going press that point. The perfect is the enemy of the good but the downside risk of being wrong is fatal. Just how many dead teachers is society willing to accept?
There's downside risk everywhere. What do you think this time period is going to look like 20 years from now in career achievement statistics? What is it doing to people's physical and mental health right now? I don't think it's accurate to characterize schools being closed as the completely safe option and schools being open as the incredibly risky one.
How many dead nurses and doctors are we willing to accept? Why should a nurse be forced to be exposed to Covid just because of her profession, but a teacher is exempt?
"My view of teachers unions is close to my view of police unions."
100% yes. Teachers unions are exactly like police unions in that their interests are all about their members, not the public good. To be clear. That doesn't make teacher's unions bad perse; it just makes them unions. And their perspective should be treated accordingly.
To be clear, I believe that teachers' should be paid far more than they are today, but at the same the rules of their employment should be changed to reduce the role of seniority in driving pay increases and to make it far easier for principals to fire bad teachers (note: the same should go with principals as well) and to hire the ones that can best implement their vision of what their schools should be. In other words, principals should have the same ability to select, manage, and compensate their workforce that virtually every private sector boss of a professional workforce has.
I believe that the police, who historically have been more successful at negotiating favorable pay, should have more resources, but basically just to do the kinds of things that Matt outlined in his previous article:
But certainly teacher's unions should not be trusted to drive any element of education policy any more than police unions should be trusted to drive any element of our judicial system.
That may be true in the US, but the UK is extremely centralised with the government and yet we've ended up in the scenario where we subsidised indoor eating all summer, then big-banged open school and universities in September, saw a run up of cases which we met with an ineffectual month-long lockdown, and then reopened restaurants to indoor dining just before Christmas. Then things went haywire all over the end of December with a new semi-lockdown with everything more or less shutdown.
We then reopened schools - and I cannot believe I am writing this, because it is so dumb - for a single day on January 4th before closing everything down for a Wave One style lockdown which will last until early March when a slow multi-month reopening will happen. I think the US's disjointed government explains some of your errors....but I am not sure that joined up government would have helped you avoid them.
The very nature of teaching in person is different from other essential work. Particularly in the early grades, there is a lot of close contact required and not just for tautological tasks. Those runny noses aren't going to wipe themselves, not to mention getting shoes tied. Teachers did not go into the profession to be health care workers and are not being provided that level of disease prevention protocol even under the most careful reopening schemes.
While grocery store check out clerks see hundreds of customers a day the exposure periods are brief and usually involve physical barriers. Teachers on the other hand are literally stuck in a small enclosed space. Many classrooms are 750 to 800 square feet for 25 to 40 students making social distancing a mathematically impossible task. Anyone who has seen attempts to provide physical barriers between students have been duly and widely mocked.
We probably exaggerated the risk among young people put that is only in proportion to the general population. Exclusive of the wider contagion, this would still be a disastrous public health risk. And schools are not just teachers (many of whom are in high risk groups) and students but also custodians and food service workers and parent volunteers.
This pandemic has presented lots of false choices. Grocery stores versus schools versus restaurants. Education is largely in the public sector which creates lots of other incentives and disincentives. If all bars and restaurants were government run, what would be the counterfactual for elected officials directly putting lives at risk.
I agree with some of this. But the flipside is that teachers actually are ROUTINELY exposed to elevated infectious disease risk, especially during flu season since kids really are flu superspreaders in a way that they aren’t for Covid.
Teaching little kids is a hard job! We should pay more. But it’s a job that does in fact require its practitioners to run some elevated disease risks, just like health care workers do.
When our school district (not far from yours) was dithering over what to do, we lost a tremendous number of highly skilled veteran teachers who decided to retire rather than risk being forced back into classrooms. A huge, huge loss, and we're paying the price. Health care workers enter the profession knowing that exposure to disease is at the heart of the job. For teachers, it's an incidental risk--and they could and did get flu shots, whereas it's just now that there's a vaccine for COVID.
I have yet to see data on this but I would not be surprised if we find a large portion of the teacher force quit this year. Anecdotally, a good friend of mine who teaches in a district that has been open since August is teaching 40 students in his freshman algebra classes because so many teachers quit and replacements haven't been found. Being socially distanced isn't possible and his area is very anti-mask. Thankfully, he's in line to get the vaccine this week.
Yes to this - teachers are regularly exposed to diseases. It's "anecdata" (stolen from another commenter) but it's pretty typical for me to hear of colleagues who spend the first week of a break sick. Your body can fight through a lot to get to the end of term and then boom, you're horizontal.
If only there had been a national-scale, significant hazard pay boost for all in-person teachers, it would have been a basis for arguing for higher federal-supported regular pay post-pandemic.
There are factors of 2 "elevated risks" and there are factors of 10 "elevated risks"—the flu goes in the former category, COVID goes in the latter. This is a really important distinction that you're missing.
And yet, my kid (in kindergarten) has been at school since the fall and the teachers have had no illness. Which is not some weird statistical fluke -- it's the common experience of private schools.
The part about hazard pay I think is very interesting. Nurses had probably the worst job changes of any career in the pandemic, especially ICU nurses. Even in a year into it I don’t think people understand how traumatic COVID has been for healthcare workers or how much it has stressed hospitals - the horror stories I’ve heard anecdotally never make it out into the media.
But anyway most nurses didn’t quit because those who would have had a form of hazard pay through travel contracts. An ICU nurse working at a staffing agency pulled in $8000 a week to go to places that were hard hit.
If you want people to work pay them more money. It isn’t hard.
As a 3rd grade teacher in a completely open elementary school, It has frustrating to me that school reopening surveys do not look at age of the students. In my district, we are completely open for young children, but high schoolers are still mostly hybrid. There is a very different risk calculation for 8-year-olds and for 18-year-olds. I want very much to see a survey that asks about people's opinions about opening elementary schools but keeping high schools closed.
The discussion of reopening has been all-or-nothing for months. It's insane.
As a university professor, it bugs me even more that half the articles about opening or closing schools *seem* to be talking only about K12, but don't say *anything* that distinguishes K12 from university. It's remarkably how infrequently I see any article mention that six year olds have a harder time using Zoom than 16 year olds or 26 year olds.
This frustrated me as well from the other end -- as a parent of a kindergartener. San Francisco shut down schools (including private schools) for the first couple of months of the school year, and I was like, "Look, just let K-2 go in. It's a huge difference. With all the space you save from having the rest of the classes at home, you can absolutely be safe with that number of students."
This is still the case! We could use all the physical space in public schools to make for a very safe reopening of some amount of the lower grades (probably at LEAST K-4 or so) and leave the higher grades hybrid.
But isn't that American politics and culture, not just now but always? Cancel that celeb or forgive them. Capitalism is best, socialism is from the devil. Iran is great (1953-1978), Iran is run by terrorists (1979 to present).
Agreed, this is key to understanding parent hesitance. In Austin when they reopened in person learning as a option, something like 40% of elementary (preK-5th) opted to attend. Versus 10% of middle (6-8th) and 3% of high school—these ratios have probably changed some since. I am sure this is a combination of the younger the kid, the safer (in general) the virus infection and the harder to learn on Zoom.
And on the other end, the younger the kid, the harder to deal with them loose around the house while you're trying to do a Zoom meeting.
Margaret, I'm a high school teacher and my wife teaches fifth (but did third for years). I've been intrigued by how much the national discussion seem clueless about how many of us have been doing this since August.
I just wanted to commiserate. I'm sure you are exhausted.
It's so funny how outside of the national discourse my experience has been, because I live in a red state but a blue city. I work in a 100% reduced lunch, Title I school, with 100%, students of color as our population. We've been in and out of full-time remote learning but the majority of our time has been in person. About 25% of our families have opted to keep their kids home full time, and the rest are back in person. I see my community reflected and absolutely no national coverage, because we're a weird combination of all of the different stereotypes of what's going on. It makes me assume that everywhere that isn't one of the five biggest cities in the country is also equally not represented in the national media. which is of course not shocking but it also isn't something I had really thought about before when it comes to education.
Just wanted to point out that in large swaths of the country, the schools opened in fall 2020 and have remained open the entire 2020-21 school year. Interpreting the polling, you have to take that into account! The resistance to schools being open is probably highest in places where the schools haven't been open for months?
I believe a significant part of the reluctance to open schools has to do with negative partisanship, specifically related to Trump. Trump started making a big deal about reopening schools which I think made Democratic partisans opposed to it as a knee-jerk reaction.
This Politico Article discusses how California parents felt reluctant to lobby and push for opening schools when it was deemed "pro-Trump"
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/02/25/california-parents-mobilize-after-feeling-political-disillusionment-1364686
>Gone is the fear of being politically incorrect by siding with Donald Trump or facing criticism for not caring about teachers. Instead, parents in the nation’s biggest state are emboldened and organizing as President Joe Biden pledges to reopen schools and top national disease experts say it is safe to do so with the right precautions.
Trump is definitely part of it, and the politics have eased a bit with Biden. But they haven’t eased that much.
Agreed. In the last big thread about reopening, I noted the whiplash teachers were feeling as they went from being official heroes of the resistance to being lazy anti-science privledge hoarders.
I think this is the case as well in places with Republican governors and Democratic mayors (MA, MD).
This has been the case for quite some time https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/07/29/school-reopening-plans-linked-to-politics-rather-than-public-health/
Over here in the Netherlands everything is closed *except* schools.‡ We have *triple* the per capita (seven day average) rate of (new) infection compared to the US and I might be eligible for vaccinated by November.
I fully agree that closing schools is nuts and that closing schools while opening restaurants is so completely at odds with reality as to make one wonder if we should just throw in the towel and give anarchy a try. But looking around at my neighbors (Belgium, Germany, France and the UK) you have to squint really hard to see any policies that make a difference beyond the general condition that ICUs don't get overrun when everything is closed. (And that hoarding vaccines is good domestic policy.)
By the way, the Netherlands actually comes very close to Matt's recommendations. I'm not 100% sure about who gets hazard pay, but that is somewhat offset by universal healthcare. Schools are open, masks are required everywhere (except churches), indoor anything is banned and government covers payroll for (most) businesses impacted by the closures. Also KLM Air France was bailed out and the government blocked foreign entities from buying out some beleaguered Dutch companies.
‡And grocery stores and, technically, some businesses will soon be open by appointment, but its the Netherlands so sex workers are organizing protests to be able to reopen so that might happen soon too.
It strikes me that more than a year into this, nobody knows nothing about the epidemiology of this virus. We don't know why there are surges and why they decline. We don't know why some countries get hit hard and others don't. We don't really know what strategies work and which don't. We read about highly transmissible variants dominating COVID in places like the UK . . . and then see infection rates there plunging.
Is East Asia pursuing better policies because of their experience with SARS and MERS? Or could it be that their experience with SARS and MERS created antibodies that attenuate the effect and transmissibility of COVID? I don't think anyone knows (see the great article on how little we know why countries vary so much by Siddhartha Mukherjee in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others)
Are teachers exaggerating the risk or underplaying it? Damned if I know.
The decision in Providence RI, where I live, was so straightforward I don’t understand why other districts didn’t do it.
Every family could choose between in-person class in their regular school and a district-wide “virtual academy.” At-risk teachers transferred to the virtual school. About half the families chose virtual, so it wasn’t hard to separate desks. Most parents and teachers were satisfied. My daughter in second grade has had a good school year. There has been little or no spread in school, I believe.
This is a sensible way to go, but unfortunately not a "silver bullet". The school district where I live in Michigan did this and they did receive full funding for the virtual option. However, interest in it was no where near high enough to create a significant reduction in class sizes. We did full in-person in fall and eventually switched to hybrid once #'s got too high. We are back to full in-person now (with virtual still an option for those that want it).
In our district, like elsewhere, there is a class/race dynamic where the poorer families were more likely to choose virtual. Those are the kids who already lack the family resources to get them caught up if they fall behind. I'm not sure how easy or hard it will be to bring the two groups back together in the Fall. Our friends who are in virtual say it's going well and their daughter is learning well, though.
My school district considered that, but decided not to for reasons that were never fully explained. The going belief is that the state would only pay 80% of funding for students in the virtual academy but would pay 100% of funding for students who were in their regular school but fully virtual.
Interesting article Matt. But I'm surprised you didn't mention private schools. I think a big reason that there hasn't been more parental pressure to reopen schools is that the most influential (typically the wealthiest) parents just sent their kids to private schools and sat this fight out.
Also, the profit motive shouldn't be ignored: indoor dining restaurants make more money than takeout-only restaurants, but in-person classes don't make a public school any more money than remote teaching. So there's no financial incentive to reopen schools. Say what you want about capitalism, money does at least sharpen decision-making. "Think of the children!" only goes so far.
I think this somewhat misinterprets the meaning of the private school data.
A lot of people look at private schools being open and say "well, see, the customers are demanding that the schools reopen and the Big Bad Unions" are stopping it. But what we see in the public schools is that it's the richer parents who are more eager to see the schools reopen.
Some of that is a differential sense of the health risk.
But I think it's probably that college-educated professionals and working-class people have different overall attitudes toward the school system. Most professionals view school as intrinsically very important and are themselves heavy school-demanders, who often made schools a key priority in their decision about where to live and worry that the school system is not providing their little darlings with all the attention and educating that they deserve.
Working-class people are more likely to have negative attitudes toward schooling personally, and to experience the education system as constantly attempting to coerce them to care more about their kids' homework, grades, etc.
So professionals are more likely to view a closed school through a lense of suspicion (the teachers aren't providing me the services I paid for with my property taxes) while lower class people view the opening through the same lense (now these jerks want me to send my kid into a hazardous situation, wearing a mask, etc. etc. etc.)
Scott Siskind had a pretty big rant as part of his review of The Cult of Smart. Caps lock and everything. It began by stating, "School is child prison," and I think it offered a sort of college-educated professional version of the lower class suspicion toward school. I suspect this is a minority position, but I am surprised by this because a lot of school is bullshit and people should object to it more often. Is that all attributable to their capturing the gains from schooling or is it something else?
I felt he had some good points in there, but he led himself to some wild ideas based on his own shockingly negative personal experience. The idea that kids should just be allowed to choose their own path, up to and including going to school or not, from a young age is pretty silly.
I did find this linked article really interesting though: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-school
Brief summary: according to a 1930s experiment, apparently teaching or not teaching math for the first five years made no difference in the sixth year (i.e., one year of math instruction = six years). I can't find if this experiment has ever been repeated. Another anecdote from the article, apparently most K-6 teachers don't know how to find the area of a rectangle?
Unrelated to the main point, I'm wondering why you choose to refer to him as "Scott Siskind" rather than "Scott Alexander". Since he writes under the name "Scott Alexander", referring to him as "Scott Siskind" while talking about his writing seems like saying "Stefani Germanotta sang an unusual version of the national anthem for Joe Biden's inauguration", rather than referring to her as "Lady Gaga".
When referencing the Federalist papers, do you refer to the author as Publius or do you refer to them by their actual names - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay?
That's an interesting case. A few others I've thought of, prompted by this, include the fact that we refer to most "Lennon/McCartney" songs as being by the one of them that actually wrote it, and that although Søren Kierkegaard published most of his books under a variety of pseudonyms we refer to them with his name. I think it's important that in these cases, there's not a one-to-one correspondence of pseudonyms to authors, so it's useful to use the author's official name when we want to talk about their contribution to the corpus. (I think Nicolas Bourbaki is an interesting exception where people almost always refer to the pseudonym rather than the subset that was involved in any particular book.)
But it's very rare to refer to the official name of authors like George Eliot, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll, or Anatole France, who published nearly all their work under a single pen name, not shared with anyone else.
(I don't know how many of them tried to keep their identity secret while working under the pen name, as Scott Alexander did on his previous blog, and how many just wrote that way without actively trying to hide their identity, as Scott Alexander does now.)
It's possible that I'm generalizing way too far from the preferences of trans people, who often don't try to hide the name they grew up under, but strongly prefer to be referred to under their current name, rather than their "deadname".
Does he? I thought he was using his real name now? If not, my mistake.
I think he did mention his real last name. But someone pointed out to me that "Astral Codex Ten" is an anagram of "Scott Alexander" (and that "Slate Star Codex" is an anagram of "Scott Alexaader" - presumably a typo in the input to the anagram engine?). And when he replies to people in the comments, it is under the name "Scott Alexander".
He's no longer actively trying to hide the last name "Siskind", but he's still using the name "Scott Alexander".
Noted.
The whole rant was interesting to me. He sounds a lot like the people who love to quote Foucault and talk about how schools exist to discipline and punish children. I was surprised given that a lot of his writing pushes back against perspectives like that in other contexts.
Maybe blue collar workers think of their own K-12 education as child prison, whereas highly educated professionals look back with fondness? I'm educated, but like a lot of people who homeschool for non-religious reasons, I hated every minute of K-12, so I'm with the child prison side.
In my experience working class people tend to think that one is either academically inclined or not. More or better school isn't going to change one's nature. Educated professionals tend to think that schools can indeed change who a person is on a fundamental level.
I wonder if it's not a regional thing too? When I moved to the Northeast, I began encountering people who really felt school was a major change agent in peoples' life. Growing up and teaching in the South, I didn't encounter this view much. Not that we thought school did nothing, but nobody I worked with or grew up with felt like school was going to totally fix society. Maybe I just didn't hang out with the right people, though. A friend of mine up here who works for a big staff development organization was flying down to South Carolina every few weeks to support a handful of districts. He kept telling me that people there seemed not to care about school. Teachers, parents, students, nobody seemed invested in making schools work better. And these weren't run-down poor schools, either! These were schools that could afford an out-of-state curriculum consultant and several staff developers.
Matt this seems like a really classist look at things. "Poor people don't see any good in learning" but "the rich understand the true value of schools". I know that's not precisely what you are saying, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but what you are saying doesn't seem that far off. And I think it's easy to see my version is clearly problematic.
It may be classist but if it's accurate enough to explain the decisions and interests of vast numbers of parents then it's pretty useful. Matt's take is certainly what I've observed in my own extended family, which is a mix of blue and white collar, college educated and not. Although I wouldn't exactly agree with your paraphrasing, it seems clear to me that people who went to college themselves are much more likely to prioritize education when compared to people who finished high school and were happy be to be done with it forever.
It’s anecdata, but that’s what I did. Two things happened at the same time last summer: I got a new job with a big raise, and the teachers’ unions released a statement saying they wouldn’t return for in person teaching unless they “felt safe.” That statement plus Trump yelling incoherently about reopening was enough to tell me how it was going to go.
As soon as that statement came out I unenrolled my kids from public school (after being a vocal booster for years) and put them in a tiny private school. They’ve been meeting full time in person since September. No cases.
"Anecdata." Love it, let's make this neologism stick.
It’s a good term. It’s been around awhile.
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/anecdata
Does enrollment data back this up? When would we see districts publish their numbers and find out how many opt-outs there are?
In Massachusetts, enrollment dropped something like 7%. Last week I received a very nice letter from the local district acknowledging that some people unenrolled their kids in the last school year for various reasons, and if we'd like to come back, they'd prioritize placing those kids in the same schools they used to attend.
I put the letter in the recycling.
I got a call from our local school district asking if we were interested in re-enrolling. I didn't understand what why they were asking about until you said this. It makes so much more sense now.
Our county just started back with voluntary in-person attendance. About 30% signed up. We'll see how many actually show.
I think your comment about financial incentives is correct. If Congress had properly bailed out restaurants and bars so they could stay closed and provided money to schools to safely re-open, we wouldn't be in this problem. The federal government can print money, local governments can't.
I think the article basically hits the nail on the head. Another underrated factor seems to be the social class of teachers. Teachers generally see themselves as white collar professionals. They have college degrees and often advanced degrees and so do their friends, spouses and neighbors. For the average teacher, their social peers have mostly been working from home during the pandemic, so asking them to go teach in person feels like an extraordinary ask that has generally not been required of other people they think are similar.
I am at a private school, not a union, but I wonder how much of the unions that oppose reopening has to do with the fact that few teachers in the country have any clue how to teach hybrid and maintain social distancing? It's not that teaching and learning in a pandemic is harder than in normal times, it's that schools as institutions are not set up to be agile for a shift like this.
Teaching in a pandemic is unlike anything I've ever done in my almost two decades at progressive schools. Right now I'm used to hybrid learning - juggling between the kids in front of me and the kids on the screen. And I no longer worry too much about the huge lack of collaborative discussions that results when kids have to be distanced, in fact I've found new ways to accomplish this. But in the fall I felt like a first year teacher again. It's hard to describe to someone not in the profession just how insanely different this year is. So much of teaching and learning requires an open feedback loop that is wildly different in a pandemic setting.
To what extent, if any, should teachers be held accountable for their performance this year?
Like, if your students don't perform as well (in whatever sense of performance you prefer), does it make sense to you that you should take some of the responsibility? How much?
You are asking a question that is a subset of a much bigger and thornier question in education, which is, "How can we determine the impact of a teacher on their students' performance?" I am afraid I just don't have the energy to find you some links. But suffice to say it's not as simple as you might think and it is certainly a thorny issue to scale.
After we explore that question, we move on to "to what extent, if any, should teachers be held accountable for their performance". Then we can get to the issue of this particular year.
I am definitely begging the question a bit. I read a lot about this but rarely do I get teacher perspectives. You'd think people would spend more time talking to teachers about school stuff but they're usually the last people asked.
In general, I'm big on teacher accountability and think much of the resistance to value added accountability metrics is misplaced.
Having said that, I don't see how in the world there can be any performance related accountability this year. There are just too many confounding factors.
Most teachers are good people who do their best. This year, I think that's all we can ask.
I think you're right that the institutions aren't set up for agile shifts - that might be exactly the words I would use for my local affluent but administratively beleaguered school system. I try to be patient with them because at no point did we (the people in the town who have to approve their budget) say "we need you to develop a bunch of reserve capacity and backup plans for a pandemic", but my friend teachers at a private religious day school and they clearly just made it work in a way we haven't seen.
But ... I'm not sure how teachers knowing how to teach in new ways plays in - the alternative to hybrid is full remote and that's totally novel and weird too. Watching my son's second grade teacher start the year full remote was rough - she's a good (in person) teacher and you could tell how frustrated she was to not be able to do that good of a job because she was a total newbie at Zoom school.
Short of "full re-open", I'd think every other option is "get into novel and uncharted territory"?
Ha you are spot on. I thought about posting a PS of something to this effect. I certainly don't think that the novel & uncharted territory made for a compelling reason to stay closed. But I wanted to wonder if perhaps this was a reason some unions didn't want to open. Also, at least for secondary students, remote is way easier than hybrid. Little kids don't work on zoom.
Great piece. Our work across CO has helped me understand that a significant amount of this has to do with size of school district. Smaller and medium size school districts have been able to be more nimble in their responsiveness to COVID and their reopening strategies. On top of that, small and medium size districts, even ones with boards (not always an inhibitor sometimes a dramatic accelerator) can learn the lessons of the pandemic to rethink education broadly. No lie bigger systems have bigger problems and bigger politics, including the teacher ones you mention.
Therefore I don't disagree we have an institutional design challenge (radical localism) but if you show up with a combo of tool and accountabilities, you can turn it into an incredible opportunity. In CO we had a Guv that creatively leveraged CARES dollars to create a competitive grant fund that prioritize districts and higher ed partnerships with business and community. Philanthropy and local leadership rallied to meet the challenge. The result has been a significant move forward in many districts on some exciting piece, in particular our largest system has struggled with the type of institutional challenges you mention. So I don't disagree that the learning and social emotional challenges of this past year has been (and continue to be) enormous...but as I often say on here: creative and partnership-drive local leadership can make a difference!
If you're interested in how Colorado has leaned into this new moment:
https://www.coloradoedinitiative.org/from-chaos-to-sustained-innovation/
A big issue is that this position didn’t really have a clear political support group.
1) A significant (though minority) portion of left leaning people are in the “keep everything closed” camp, schools included
2) A large majority of right leaning people got into the “open everything” camp because of Trump
3) Some of the remaining people were in a “we should try to open everything in a modified way” camp - this is probably the best summary of what actually happened
4) The “we should prioritize opening schools and closing other things” camp is probably the smallest of all (though it was over represented among public health and blue check Twitter people)
5) A lot of normal people (include parents who are skeptical about going back to school now) just want someone in power to declare that schools are “safe” before going back. That couldn’t happen without extreme lockdowns or mass vaccinations regardless of policy
Flights, indoor dining, etc were all pretty popular when they were available, so at least a big portion of consumers wanted this stuff too. Given this opening them in a modified fashion was inevitable.
Yeah I do think that’s right
Were flights "pretty popular"? I guess I'm not sure exactly what this means. But it looks like the only days that reached half the number of passengers as the same day last year were Dec. 23 and Dec. 30: https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput
In recent weeks it's been hovering just a bit under half of last year numbers, but in August and September it looks like it was more like 1/3 or even 1/4 of the previous year.
(That said, given the size of the drop in business travel, and the usual ratio of business to leisure travel, this might actually represent an increase in leisure travel. So maybe flights are popular?)
Yes, in other words no one outside of the system really cares about public education
Vox ran an article two weeks back from an epidemiologist and father about how he's losing patience with teachers unions over reopening (https://www.vox.com/2021/2/15/22280763/kids-covid-vaccine-teachers-unions-schools-reopening-cdc). I thought it illustrated why schools find themselves in very weird binds when talking to parents, even expert parents. The author talks about how his district's union is fighting hard for 6ft of distancing:
"In the process, they [the union] have misinterpreted scientific guidance and transformed it into a series of litmus tests that keep our district in hybrid learning. These litmus tests are not based on science, they are grounded in anxiety, and they are a major component of the return-to-school quagmire in which we are stuck. ... One sticking point, for example, has been the union’s early and continued insistence that desks remain at least six feet apart at all times. This requirement mathematically determines whether there is enough space for learners in the building. Distancing is absolutely critical to Covid-19 mitigation, but there is no magical threshold that makes six feet the “safe” distance and five feet “dangerous.”
But if you look at the guidelines released that very same week by the CDC it says very clearly:
"2. Physical distancing (at least 6 feet) should be maximized to the greatest extent possible. To ensure physical distancing, schools should establish policies and implement structural interventions to promote physical distance of at least 6 feet between people. Cohorting or podding is recommended to minimize exposure across the school environment."
That's the second of two recommendations. It's masks and 6ft of distance.
Now, I'm not here to debate aerosols and the physics of 6ft vs 5 ft. Instead, what I think matters here is that this one epidemiologist says a particular measurement of public safety doesn't matter, following it strictly isn't scientifically supported, and efforts to keep capacity and distance low mean too few students can be in the schools. Meanwhile, the CDC says its review of the (presumably scientific) evidence indicates that 6ft is a minimum, distancing should be maximized, and schools should adopt approaches to cut down on the number of kids in school.
So, it's not just that the teachers' union is picking out 6ft as a magic litmus test to create hurdles and slow down reopening, is it? Instead, it really seems like the expert who wrote this article is asking his local schools to go against the CDC guidelines. Maybe we should, but that's a very different situation from the one described by the author.
If the experts actually disagree about the best way to safely reopen schools, how are districts and unions and parents supposed to make informed decisions? I'd imagine one reason you're seeing so much politicization around the whole process is that nobody's effectively communicating a stable set of practices that schools can use to safe-ish-ly reopen.
I think the concept of deference to CDC guidelines here is somewhat inappropriate and that this is a failure of leadership on the part of the Biden administration.
Like suppose the CDC were to say, accurately, that:
(a) Seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of Americans each year
(b) Schools are major vectors for flu transmission
(c) To avoid seasonal flu transmission all staff and students should wear masks
(d) Optimal anti-flu classroom design is for desks to be spaced six feet apart
I know of some pediatricians who are now advocating for (c) and saying that schools should keep masking in place *forever* as a measure against flu and the common cold. I don't know anyone who is advocating for (d) as a forever measure. But (d) isn't scientifically false or anything. We'd just say that (d) doesn't pass a cost-benefit test.
That's a political decision for the President of the United States and his Secretary of Education to make, _citing_ scientific information about the merits of 6 vs 3 vs whatever feet of spacing in a context where you have masks and are opening windows and using HEPA filters.
Roads would be safer if we imposed a national speed limit of 30 miles per hour, but that's not a *decisive* consideration in picking a speed limit.
A good example about the 30 mph point is car seats. A few years back the guidance was changed to suggest kids stay in rear facing car seats longer and car seats period longer. We and many other conscientious parents tried to do that but still stopped the rear facing a little early because rear facing is really boring for the kids and can be uncomfortable. The actual fact is that even adults would be safer in rear facing car seats, but nobody is going to recommend that even though it would actually save lives.
Sure but how are schools supposed to know when guidelines are simply political and can be safely ignored? And, importantly, what rules and principles are going to guide them when they decide to ignore those guidelines?
It's not that I disagree with you, it's that I don't see how telling schools to ignore things they don't agree with is going to work. At some point, schools need to make informed decisions, not random ones or uninformed ones.
They are not political except in the sense everything is. The issue is public health decisions shouldn’t be made by public health officials because there are issues other than public health. They are and need to be made by competent elected officials who can balance public health against other stuff. Incompetent person at the top equals bad.
By the fact that millions upon millions of public school students and tens of thousands of teachers HAVE been in person all school year. Some people are talking about this as hypothetical or potential. It's been happening. The data is in. Schools are not major vectors of community spread. We do not have widespread cases of teachers dying due classroom exposure. Whether we should have or not, America ran the dual condition experiment. And we basically confirmed the null hypothesis.
The CDC says 6 feet “as much as possible.” I think that’s unfortunate wording because it’s not clear on whether that means 6 feet is necessary or not, and people on both sides can point to it to support their case.
But apropos of Matt’s article last week on not listening to the CDC, this is something we would expect the CDC to say. In fact they probably would rather all people stayed 6 feet apart as much as possible in all settings, forever. After all, that would reduce transmission of many aerosol based illnesses, and reducing disease is their only mission; they don’t balance various needs like people’s desire to do stuff.
So even if 6 feet were only slightly important, they would still say this. OTOH, if it were very important they would also say it.
I agree with this and Matt's post about it the other day, but I don't know how this helps institutions make better decisions right now. Or, rather, institutions are making all kinds of random decisions right now. There are school systems that have been online for almost a full year now. There are school systems that went back to in-person in August. There is every flavor in between.
We don't have a good set of recommendations that schools can follow to do reopening well. Instead we have different sets of experts yelling dramatically different things. The position between the CDC's recommendations and the epidemiology-expert-dad isn't one of degrees, it's almost totally the opposite. How does a school board or union negotiator look at those two positions and feel like there's anything but an all-or-nothing approach?
And let's not forget that compliance isn't assured. KHN had a piece in January about how districts that are open aren't enforcing masking, distance, or even sending visibly sick children home. When teachers complain about this, they face reprisals. (https://khn.org/news/article/were-not-controlling-it-in-our-schools-covid-safety-lapses-abound-across-us/)
Speaking of over-interpreting recommendations, look at this school that shuffled the students every 14 minutes: https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/14-minute-shuffle-billings-schools-retreat-from-controversial-policy-after-criticism-from-health-experts/article_83c7cc04-617b-5537-aca0-a2f8483a3d6c.html
(I probably saw it here last week, but I don't remember who posted it.)
I agree that this is unhelpful and we need clearer guidance.
I would just say I don’t see the CDC and being diametrically opposed to anything - they are splitting the difference in a confusing and unhelpful way. You thought the guidance says 6 feet absolutely period, and I think it said something very different, and maybe it said both.
I mean, it says "at least six feet" two times. That leads me to believe the recommendation is at least six feet.
"To the greatest extent possible."
I'll stop picking nits after this one but it says "maximized to the greatest extent possible" which leads me to think this is saying that greater than six feet is desirable when possible. It's a greater-than-or-equal-to. This is reinforced by the second time where it's stated that schools should use policies and structural interventions to get to that six feet point. That is also only the summary. The deeper and more detailed guidelines make it clear that 6ft is considered a minimum.
That said, I don't particularly care about the distance so much as the process by which schools and unions and parents are supposed to figure all this out by themselves.
Six feet as some sort of magical distance germs can't travel past is one of the most pernicious simplifications plaguing us. The three factors which affect transmission are distance, duration of exposure, and number of interactions.
For example, fast food workers and grocery store clerks have a lot of interactions daily but very briefly at a close to moderate distance. Health care workers necessarily have to be very close but can be more distant for some or most of the work shift.
Teachers are exposed to a lot of people at moderate distances but for very long durations. They are essentially locked into a building with a couple of hundred people for six to eight hours at a time, especially if the classrooms share a common HVAC system. There should be much better epidemiological study of how these factors interact rather than simplify them down to "six feet and masks."
The epidemiological experiment was inadvertently done by hundreds of districts around the nation, including mine. It was reasonable to worry, but we did it. Virtually everyone in my community (Republican, Democrat, white, black, poor, working class, professional, etc.) is glad we did and would do it again.
Sure but the alternative proposed in the article is less than 6ft because distancing = closed schools. The author objects to 6 ft but he also objects to other ways of reducing school capacity because it makes it harder/impossible to reopen. And he's an epidemiologist so I'm presuming he's talking in his capacity as an expert.
I can buy the conclusion that 3 feet while wearing a mask is equal to six feet without a mask. But nobody is going press that point. The perfect is the enemy of the good but the downside risk of being wrong is fatal. Just how many dead teachers is society willing to accept?
There's downside risk everywhere. What do you think this time period is going to look like 20 years from now in career achievement statistics? What is it doing to people's physical and mental health right now? I don't think it's accurate to characterize schools being closed as the completely safe option and schools being open as the incredibly risky one.
How many dead nurses and doctors are we willing to accept? Why should a nurse be forced to be exposed to Covid just because of her profession, but a teacher is exempt?
Just how many dead teachers has all the in-person teaching caused so far?
(which is a different number from the number of people who have died who were also teachers)
This really highlights something important. There is (or should be) a big time for federal guidelines to support reopening
"My view of teachers unions is close to my view of police unions."
100% yes. Teachers unions are exactly like police unions in that their interests are all about their members, not the public good. To be clear. That doesn't make teacher's unions bad perse; it just makes them unions. And their perspective should be treated accordingly.
To be clear, I believe that teachers' should be paid far more than they are today, but at the same the rules of their employment should be changed to reduce the role of seniority in driving pay increases and to make it far easier for principals to fire bad teachers (note: the same should go with principals as well) and to hire the ones that can best implement their vision of what their schools should be. In other words, principals should have the same ability to select, manage, and compensate their workforce that virtually every private sector boss of a professional workforce has.
I believe that the police, who historically have been more successful at negotiating favorable pay, should have more resources, but basically just to do the kinds of things that Matt outlined in his previous article:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-more
But certainly teacher's unions should not be trusted to drive any element of education policy any more than police unions should be trusted to drive any element of our judicial system.
That may be true in the US, but the UK is extremely centralised with the government and yet we've ended up in the scenario where we subsidised indoor eating all summer, then big-banged open school and universities in September, saw a run up of cases which we met with an ineffectual month-long lockdown, and then reopened restaurants to indoor dining just before Christmas. Then things went haywire all over the end of December with a new semi-lockdown with everything more or less shutdown.
We then reopened schools - and I cannot believe I am writing this, because it is so dumb - for a single day on January 4th before closing everything down for a Wave One style lockdown which will last until early March when a slow multi-month reopening will happen. I think the US's disjointed government explains some of your errors....but I am not sure that joined up government would have helped you avoid them.
Yeah...wat? My neighbor is an English ex-pat whose parents are in London and tried to explain the national bar holiday to me...what happened??
The very nature of teaching in person is different from other essential work. Particularly in the early grades, there is a lot of close contact required and not just for tautological tasks. Those runny noses aren't going to wipe themselves, not to mention getting shoes tied. Teachers did not go into the profession to be health care workers and are not being provided that level of disease prevention protocol even under the most careful reopening schemes.
While grocery store check out clerks see hundreds of customers a day the exposure periods are brief and usually involve physical barriers. Teachers on the other hand are literally stuck in a small enclosed space. Many classrooms are 750 to 800 square feet for 25 to 40 students making social distancing a mathematically impossible task. Anyone who has seen attempts to provide physical barriers between students have been duly and widely mocked.
We probably exaggerated the risk among young people put that is only in proportion to the general population. Exclusive of the wider contagion, this would still be a disastrous public health risk. And schools are not just teachers (many of whom are in high risk groups) and students but also custodians and food service workers and parent volunteers.
This pandemic has presented lots of false choices. Grocery stores versus schools versus restaurants. Education is largely in the public sector which creates lots of other incentives and disincentives. If all bars and restaurants were government run, what would be the counterfactual for elected officials directly putting lives at risk.
I agree with some of this. But the flipside is that teachers actually are ROUTINELY exposed to elevated infectious disease risk, especially during flu season since kids really are flu superspreaders in a way that they aren’t for Covid.
Teaching little kids is a hard job! We should pay more. But it’s a job that does in fact require its practitioners to run some elevated disease risks, just like health care workers do.
When our school district (not far from yours) was dithering over what to do, we lost a tremendous number of highly skilled veteran teachers who decided to retire rather than risk being forced back into classrooms. A huge, huge loss, and we're paying the price. Health care workers enter the profession knowing that exposure to disease is at the heart of the job. For teachers, it's an incidental risk--and they could and did get flu shots, whereas it's just now that there's a vaccine for COVID.
A lot of older teachers retired rather than struggle to teach virtually. A very reasonable choice!
I have yet to see data on this but I would not be surprised if we find a large portion of the teacher force quit this year. Anecdotally, a good friend of mine who teaches in a district that has been open since August is teaching 40 students in his freshman algebra classes because so many teachers quit and replacements haven't been found. Being socially distanced isn't possible and his area is very anti-mask. Thankfully, he's in line to get the vaccine this week.
Yes to this - teachers are regularly exposed to diseases. It's "anecdata" (stolen from another commenter) but it's pretty typical for me to hear of colleagues who spend the first week of a break sick. Your body can fight through a lot to get to the end of term and then boom, you're horizontal.
If only there had been a national-scale, significant hazard pay boost for all in-person teachers, it would have been a basis for arguing for higher federal-supported regular pay post-pandemic.
There are factors of 2 "elevated risks" and there are factors of 10 "elevated risks"—the flu goes in the former category, COVID goes in the latter. This is a really important distinction that you're missing.
And yet, my kid (in kindergarten) has been at school since the fall and the teachers have had no illness. Which is not some weird statistical fluke -- it's the common experience of private schools.
Matt you are a MACHINE 💪💪😤 Always cranking out thought provoking and interesting articles. Keep it up, I appreciate the work
The part about hazard pay I think is very interesting. Nurses had probably the worst job changes of any career in the pandemic, especially ICU nurses. Even in a year into it I don’t think people understand how traumatic COVID has been for healthcare workers or how much it has stressed hospitals - the horror stories I’ve heard anecdotally never make it out into the media.
But anyway most nurses didn’t quit because those who would have had a form of hazard pay through travel contracts. An ICU nurse working at a staffing agency pulled in $8000 a week to go to places that were hard hit.
If you want people to work pay them more money. It isn’t hard.