There is broad consensus across partisan groups that children desperately need in-person schooling. Republicans began making the argument forcefully during the summer, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield has repeatedly stressed the immediate necessity of opening schools for reasons beyond learning.
In a Monday press conference outlining the district’s school reopening plan, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser said much the same: “We also know that this distance learning is not working for a lot of our kids, and it doesn’t allow us to reach our young people in the same way.”
Projections from Tennessee’s Department of Education suggest that the failure of virtual learning is universal. The state has estimated high rates of learning loss among its third-graders in both reading and math due to shortcomings of an at-home learning environment. Remote learning is just not working.
These were the subtexts of a question posed to Joe Biden in a Monday town hall hosted by NBC News. Asked about his plan to ensure the safe reopening of schools, Biden responded that schools need personal protective equipment, that classes need to have fewer children so that they can be spread out, and that schools need increased sanitation capacity. All are prudent measures, but Biden presented an unreasonably high barrier to reopening. “If you’re at a place where it’s [the transmission rate] under 1, then in fact it’s possible to open,” Biden said. Remaining school closures in places with low transmission rates and low positivity rates demonstrate that a much more textured argument needs to be made.
Washington, D.C.’s transmission rate has risen above 1 a few times since mid-July, but it has been hovering at or below 1 for the last several months. Yet the city’s schools don’t plan to begin bringing students back until Nov. 9. Even then, the phased reopening will only be for pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. Students in grades 6-12 will not be returning until at least February of next year.
Transmission in New York City was at or below 1 all summer long, along with extremely low test positivity rates. Still, schools remained closed as teachers fought reopenings, well after Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave his blessing in early August. “We are probably in the best situation in the country right now,” Cuomo said at the time. “If anybody can open schools, we can open schools, and that’s true for every region in the state.”
That didn’t matter much. Continuing delays pushed the reopening date for K-8 to Sept. 29 and for 9-12 to Oct. 1. Now, with transmission increasing, Cuomo is ordering some 100 schools to close again, and there will almost certainly be more closures. At this rate, with more virus transmission expected during fall and winter and with this level of reticence, New York City may well go the whole school year without in-person instruction.
Biden is not the mayor of Washington or New York, but it stands to reason that low transmission did not lead to prompt reopenings in these cities when it should have. “Trust the science” doesn’t necessarily lead to prudent decision-making.
The argument that Biden and other Democrats have been unwilling to embrace is the most convincing of all: Children are at very low risk of getting ill or dying from COVID-19. They can contract the virus and spread it, but that’s the reason schools are still implementing the measures that Biden recommended — masks, distancing, sanitation, and the rest.
Moreover, the closures are extremely harmful to their social and educational development. Both have been recognized as reasons for getting kids back in school by Redfield, Anthony Fauci, and others.
Remaining differences on the school reopening issue stem from disagreement over the point at which it is reasonably safe for students to return to school. Low transmission rates are important to consider, but they do not deserve to be the singular metric, nor do they necessarily empower districts to open schools. The argument has to be much broader. The virus isn’t going away, it poses only a marginal risk to children, and they desperately need schools. All three of those things are true.
