Schools that opened their doors have not proven to be the superspreader hubs that Twitter ghouls predicted; neither have they proven to be the death sentence for teachers predicted by teachers unions. The research on this is robust. Look here, here, here, or here.
Trying to educate children over the internet, meanwhile, has proven disastrous. “Students made little or no progress while learning from home,” one study found. “Worryingly, losses are particularly concentrated among students from less-educated homes.”
Add these two things together — school isn’t particularly dangerous COVID-wise, and remote teaching is a disaster — and you have a very strong case for opening schools, especially where social distancing is possible, and keeping them open. There’s good reason to believe that the school districts that refused to open were following not science but political pressure from teachers unions. It’s why some of us fought like crazy when our county health czar tried to close our private schools, disregarding the efforts the schools were making to be safe.
Now, case counts are rising across the country, and so, the school closers are lobbying again to bar the schoolhouse doors. Closing schools was prudent in March, back when we knew next to nothing about the virus. Now that school systems have invested money and time in mitigation, including air filtration, spacing, masking, outdoor facilities, and so on, schools have a lot more ability to fight against in-school transmission. Closing schools that use mitigation techniques is, as they say, an unproven intervention.
But, of course, cities, counties, and states are closing schools. Thankfully, some of them are at least trying to let science guide them in which schools they close.
The losses to learning are universal when students go remote, but they are not necessarily even. Older children can handle a Zoom class better than young children. Older children can learn more from a packet of handouts. For younger children, a much larger share of learning is socialization and interaction. So, as far as the costs of closing schools, those may be smaller on older children.
As far as the dangers of in-person schooling, those are evidently greater (though not necessarily great) among older children. Younger people don’t get the coronavirus as much, they don’t spread it as much, and when they do get it, they don’t get it as bad.
So, if you were doing a cost-benefit analysis of school closures, it’s obviously an easier question for younger children — leave the schools open — and a harder question for older children, for whom the costs of closing might be smaller and the benefits of closing slightly higher.
This is the thinking behind Michigan’s decision to bar in-person schooling for only college and high school, and Philadelphia’s decision to close high schools but allow K-8 classes to keep meeting. I expect Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will close K-8 schools over Thanksgiving, but for at least this coming week, she’s allowing the meeting of students who need in-person education more and pose a lesser risk of coronavirus transmission.
A cost-benefit analysis before decision-making? That resembles science!
