School Closures Were Not a Crisis
Reading Time: 12 minutesLately, School Closures Have Been Called a ‘National Crisis.’ They Were Not., As the pandemic shifted, pundits revised our understanding of an important tool to keep kids safe., School closures: What the data really say about their cost.
The headlines were alarming. ‘Students Lost One-Third of a School Year to Pandemic,’ proclaimed the New York Times, adding that ‘school closures set student progress in math and reading back by two decades.’ ‘Online school put US kids behind,’ explained the Associated Press. Pundits, politicians, and much of the media describe school closings as producing a crisis: Closing schools was a ‘disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision,’ proclaimed FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief and statistical wiz Nate Silver. School closures were a ‘moral catastrophe,’ wrote University of California philosophy professor Shamik Dasgupta. It’s a ‘national crisis,’ opined former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And for what? A congressional hearing in March concluded that the ‘ ‘science’ promoted by our federal health officials never justified the prolonged closing of schools.’
Schools are magnets for ‘moral panics.’ Moral panics are widespread irrational fears over perceived, but exaggerated, threats to social values and interests, fanned by media and politicians. In the past few years alone we have had efforts to generate hysteria over trans kids using the wrong bathrooms, the perils of the ‘woke’ curriculum, school libraries having books about LGBTQ+ people, the danger of demanding that children wear face masks as a novel virus spreads, and the threat of school shootings, among others. This year the panic over the consequences of keeping schools closed during the pandemic loomed large.
Calling the distress about children’s learning losses a moral panic is not simply a way of dismissing arguments one disagrees with. Concern over the effects of school closures is certainly justified. It makes sense to ask what the costs and downsides of the policy were, and how to mitigate them. But the school closing critics wildly exaggerate or distort the losses, describing them as nothing less than a generational threat. They draw on beliefs, now discredited, that COVID posed no risk to children and that schools were not sources of the spread of COVID in the community. As has often been the case with school-based panics, while the underlying concerns cross political lines, it has been especially right-wing politicians and media figures who have waged a campaign to convince Americans that school closures were, in the words of conservative columnist Alex Gutentag, an ‘unforgivable crime.’
The panic matters. It’s not just a matter of overblown newspaper headlines and yelling pundits. For the critics, the evidence of school closings is reason to discredit pandemic mitigation efforts, ignore the sources of America’s abysmal performance during the pandemic, and promote traditional right-wing agendas about schools. By understanding how school closings went from being seen as a sensible measure to an outright failure, we can understand how moral panics around schools take shape—and how they keep American children disastrously stuck in harm’s way.
The decision was not initially controversial. In March 2020, virtually every state closed schools to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Every parent of small children knows how infectious diseases storm through a classroom and then are passed on to parents and siblings. Why should COVID-19 be any different?
Everyone also understood that closing schools for any extended period would, on many levels, not be good for children, and would create enormous problems for their parents and their parents’ employers. But the alternative was children dying of COVID or spreading it to their teachers and parents. That was worse. As former National Teacher of the Year and now Rep. Jahana Hayes later told a congressional committee, ‘We don’t need … data to tell us that if kids are not in school, they won’t learn. That’s pretty basic.’ ‘But,’ she added, ‘we also know if kids are dead, they don’t learn.’
By fall 2020, pandemic fatigue had already set in and many school districts reopened. The next spring, with the pandemic in temporary decline, less than half of the nation’s public schools still remained closed, and, by fall 2021, despite the onset of the deadly delta wave, almost all had reopened for good. This year, the public health ’emergency’ was officially ended by the Biden administration and the old consensus that school closures were a difficult, necessary trade-off is in tatters.
Critics of school closures started out in the minority. The costs were simply too high, they said: Closing schools would inevitably interfere with learning. The evidence suggested that children didn’t get COVID at the rates adults do and that they were not a serious risk to their teachers, their parents, and their communities. And the damage school closings would do to the economy would be considerable. Prolonging the initial closures beyond a few weeks was not acceptable.
That skepticism about the value of closing schools didn’t initially get much popular traction, however, at least among parents. Six months into the pandemic, in mid-September 2020, when the school year would normally be underway, 60 percent of parents polled supported delaying school reopening. And through winter and most of spring 2021, as wave after wave of COVID devastated the nation, most parents continued to prefer remote or hybrid instruction to fully reopened schools. Black and Latino parents were especially opposed to full reopening.
But by late 2022, with the omicron wave receding into the past, the judgments shifted. Retrospectively, more and more people decided that closing schools had been a bad idea after all. The turning point was the October 2022 release of the federally mandated Nation’s Report Card, which reported that scores of fourth and eighth grade children had fallen sharply on standardized tests of reading and math skills. Adding to the accounts of learning losses, reports of a mental health crisis among adolescents mounted. ‘The kids are not alright,’ National Public Radio told Americans. ‘Data are piling up about the academic and mental-health catastrophes that pandemic school closures facilitated,’ wrote think-tankers Leslie Bienen and Margery Smelkinson in the conservative public policy magazine and website City Journal. ‘We must prevent such widespread, long-lasting closures from happening again.’
Of course no one wants school closures. It doesn’t take randomly controlled studies to tell us that closing children’s schools is not good for children’s educational achievement and emotional well-being.
Yet, the data do not show the children of the pandemic to be a ‘lost generation.’ School buildings closed, but school continued, with distance learning and hybrid modes of learning taking up much of the slack. Despite the reports of conservative think tanks and some newspapers, there was no ‘alarming decline in ‘basic skills’ of US students.’ Children did not forget what they already knew. They continued to learn, though the test scores indicated that they had learned less over the two pandemic years than they had in recent years.
Here is an example of what the test scores do show: Fourth grade and eighth grade reading scores both dropped three points, on a 500-point scale, over the three years of school closures. This is simply not a crisis. We know because we actually have a group of students with similar scores to compare this cohort to. Students tested in 2022 performed on average about as well as students had in the year 2000. Children who were in fourth or eighth grade 25 years ago are now in their 30s. Despite the slightly lower reading scores of 20 years ago, they are all right, intellectually. During the first 10 or 15 years of their working life, per capita GDP and productivity continued to rise. They managed to master computers and the internet, the new technologies of their day. Relatively small changes in test scores simply do not tell us everything—or even very much—about the quality of schooling or about children’s futures.
Still, it is reasonable to take a dip in educational performance seriously. If it’s your child or your students, in particular, of course you do not want them to fall behind where they could be. But the data do not provide convincing evidence that school closings, per se, bear the blame for the decline in reading and math test scores. For one thing, test scores in reading were declining just as fast in the several years preceding the pandemic as during the period that schools were closed. The distance learning and hybrid learning models used during the pandemic cannot be blamed for what was already happening before they were adopted.
Yes, school closures factored into the decline in test scores. Math scores did decline faster during the pandemic than they had been previously. On average, student scores dropped more in schools that took longer to return to full-time, in-person instruction. However, the effect is small and inconsistent: Students in some school districts that returned to full-time, in-person learning only in fall did better than those in some districts that were closed only very briefly. Overall, the differences in scores between students attending schools with distance learning, all in-person learning, or a hybrid model were small.
The other supposed big cost of the pandemic to children and teens is their emotional well-being and social skills. ‘How the Closure of In-School Learning Damaged Children’s Mental Health,’ Time magazine headlined. During the peak pandemic years, eating disorders, tic disorders, sadness and loneliness, and serious thoughts of suicide dramatically increased. When schools reopened, they reported increases in absenteeism, and in behavioral problems such as student misconduct, rowdiness, and acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff. It’s worth noting that, like test scores, these mental health issues were part of a larger trend. The teen mental health crisis long preceded the pandemic and the school closings. ‘Persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness,’ for instance, increased 40 percent between 2009 and 2019, and teen suicide rates doubled between 2008 and 2018.
In any case, it was not only school closings that affected both test scores and mental health. By May 2023, nearly 16 million children had gotten COVID. While most cases were relatively mild or entirely asymptomatic, 2,300 children died, 200,000 got sick enough to require hospitalization, and over a million had serious symptoms (including memory and concentration deficits) lasting three months or more. Almost 220,000 children lost a primary caretaker; millions experienced the death of a family member, relative, neighbor, or friend, or the serious illness of a parent or grandparent. Black and Latino kids lost their caregivers at nearly twice the rate of white children. An entirely reasonable fear of illness created a tidal wave of anxiety for children and their families. Any of these, and certainly all of them together, certainly played an important role in affecting children’s learning and emotional well-being during the pandemic.
The hardships of school closings among these factors can all too easily be exaggerated. As Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg noted, ‘Engaging in distance learning with your classmates, being part of a pod and keeping in frequent touch with friends online is hardly tantamount to solitary confinement.’ Teen suicides actually dropped sharply when schools first closed down. (They began to rise again when schools began to reopen, but the increase was to a rate no greater than it was before the school closures.)
Both early and current critics claim that school closures were all downside, with little benefit in curbing the spread of COVID-19. The most recent studies indicate that they were wrong. Although nearly half of children infected with COVID-19 have no symptoms, between one-third and one-half of even presymptomatic or asymptomatic child cases carry virus in their nasal passages. They do shed virus and they can transmit it to others. A systematic review of studies conducted thorough mid-2022 concluded that the weight of the evidence was that school closures were associated with reduced COVID-19 transmission and a significant drop in morbidity and mortality in the community, although the authors of the paper conceded that the certainty of the evidence was low. A 2023 study found that in more than 70 percent of households with viral infections suggestive of COVID, it was a child who had transmitted the infection to the others in the family. This was especially the case during periods when children were attending school. Other studies suggest that when community transmission is low, reopening school buildings may not contribute much to the virus’s spread, but that when community transmission rises, the risk to the community also rises. How can people look at all this evidence and still insist closures were unjustified?
Moral panics flourish when they are fanned by opportunistic actors. Pundits and politicians on both sides of the American political divide have expressed alarm at the impact of school closings on children’s academic progress and mental health, but right from the start, it was especially right-wing politicians, academics, and think tanks that pushed for a rapid reopening and who have subsequently pushed the panic button over the impact of closures.
Like so much with the pandemic, reopening schools quickly became a major political issue. As early as May 2020, then-President Trump, facing reelection and concerned about the impact of the pandemic on the economy, demanded that schools be prepared to fully reopen by fall. Centers for Disease Control reopening guidelines were too ‘tough’ and too ‘expensive,’ he said. ‘Keeping [children] out of school and keeping work closed is causing death also. Economic harm, but it’s causing death for different reasons, but death. Probably more death.’
Business interests and the right pushed strongly for rapid reopening of schools. Many Republican governors reopened schools in their states in the fall 2020 semester; months later, in spring 2021, most blue-state schools were still not fully open. Public opinion also split along political lines. By February 2021, 55 percent of Republican parents thought schools should fully reopen, compared to only 6 percent of Democratic parents.
Teachers’ unions were a particular target for those on the right who pushed for rapid school reopening. The American Federation of Teachers had issued its own reopening plan in late April 2020. It called for reopening schools only when it was safe to do so. To make schools safe required, among other things, testing and isolation of sick children; adequate personal protective equipment for children and school staff; smaller class sizes and staggered schedules to permit social distancing; mental health supports for children; and, if full in-person learning was not possible, a model that blended in-person and distance learning. Yet somehow, the conservative National Review turned this into ‘If you want to know why your children are in Zoom school, look to your local teachers’ union.’
Many on the right were undoubtedly sincerely concerned about the teen mental health crisis, the decline in test scores, and the growth of the gap in academic skills between Black and white students. But whether cynically or sincerely, the chorus of ‘never again’ served their long-term ideological and partisan goals as well. The school-crisis mantra served to promote long-standing right-wing demands for ‘school choice’: for parents being able to choose among public, private, and religious schools, traditional schools or charter schools, or to home school their children. Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups, joined by Republican allies in Congress and in state legislatures, promised that ‘parents’ rights’—the rights of individual parents to determine curriculum at the expense of public decision-making and accountability—would counter the malign influence of teachers’ unions.
What needs emphasis is that the panic was not an expression of outrage among parents—at least not until they were persuaded by the media that they ought to panic. In fall 2022, just as the school-closings panic was getting rolling, 80 percent of parents of K–12 children told the Gallup poll that they were satisfied with their own children’s education—about the same as before the pandemic and about the same as every year since 2000. But among American adults— nonparents as well as parents—satisfaction with schools in general had dropped. The decline was entirely among Republican and Republican-leaning nonparents. Since nonparents don’t generally have any direct experience of the schools, the decline in their approval must have been shaped by what they heard and read in the media and social media or heard from politicians.
A moral panic can develop only if millions of people are vulnerable to being panicked. The pandemic created feelings of powerlessness and fear, of isolation and misery. These in turn gave rise to frustration and anger. You can’t be angry at the virus: Viruses do what viruses do. That anger has to go somewhere. Many blamed the Chinese for supposedly letting the virus escape from their research labs, though most scientists who’ve studied the origins of COVID have dismissed this belief. For others, the frustration and anger became focused on the inconveniences and limitations on daily life created by the very efforts to mitigate the virus themselves—shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and, of course, the closing of schools.
But school closure panic is about more than just feelings. Blaming mitigation measures and the teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians who supposedly demanded them is a coherent political response to the social fractures revealed by the pandemic. If there was no need to close schools or to undertake other pandemic mitigation measures, then there was no need to spend money on ventilation and air filtration to make schools safer or to enforce workplace infection control measures or to mandate vaccination or to address the social inequities that made the pandemic worse. Rejecting public health measures absolves our fellow citizens, disproportionately on the right, whose refusal to cooperate with mask and vaccine mandates may have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. It is a politics that sees demands that we take care of each other, not just look out for ourselves as, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, perhaps ‘the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.’
Moral panics, note a group of scholars and human rights activists assembled by the Century Foundation, are ‘about power—more policing of the marginalized; stifling social and economic change that would cost the elite; fighting democratic reforms; and redirecting grievances toward scapegoats.’ The idea of government-run public schools, publicly accountable and open to children of all social origins, is central to our idea of democracy. It stands in sharp contrast to the idea that children should attend nonpublic schools based on their parents’ religious beliefs, racial identity, ideological concerns, or individual demands. To use the pandemic measures that created a safer learning experience for all children as the virus spread as a way of attacking public schools and teachers’ unions is a direct effort at grabbing control.
Children, like the rest of us, suffered greatly during the pandemic. It was the pandemic itself, far more than school closings, that disrupted children’s school progress and their mental well-being. Dwelling on the supposed cost of school closures and blaming them on teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians wraps up children’s actual experience of the pandemic into a simplistic narrative. It ignores the real daily lives of American children and what we’d have to do to make them better.
Schools have a darker side. At school, children may face sexual assault and harassment and racism. One in five high school students reports being bullied on school property. Schools create stress over academic performance, pressure students to fit into normative gender roles, force invidious social comparisons on children, and conjure up feelings of failure and shame and humiliation over academic failure. Perhaps as a result, a recent Yale University study reported that nearly 75 percent of high school students’ self-reported feelings related to school were negative. Other studies show that teen suicide rates are highest during the months children are in school and lowest during the summer.
Day after day, pandemic or no, in school or on the streets or at home, children face the reality of gun violence (far more at home and in the streets than in the form of mass shootings). Eleven million children live in poverty; one in three families with children face economic insecurity. One and a half million live in substandard housing or face periods of homelessness. One in eight experiences food insecurity, and more than one-quarter lack sufficient access to medical and dental care. At least one in seven are physically or emotionally abused or neglected. Black and brown children were disproportionately likely to face these problems, though in absolute numbers, more white children were affected.
And yet, it is school closings during the pandemic that critics call a ‘moral catastrophe.’ It is a three or four point drop in scores on tests of reading and math that they call a ‘generational crisis.’ It is school closures that may have saved many thousands of lives that they blame for the ills of American children.
Exaggerating the impact of school closings and separating the effects of closings from the impact of the pandemic as a whole and ignoring the interactions between the pandemic and the structure of daily life for American children is a way of not thinking about the disastrous U.S. response to the pandemic, of not thinking about the many failures of our schools, of not thinking about how to prepare for any future pandemics, of not thinking about all the disastrous ways we treat children. Calling the pandemic school closures a ‘crisis’ dishonors American children.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/school-closures-covid-pandemic-learning-loss.html
Ref: slate
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