Some schools were closed, directing students to “distance learning” of various forms, while other schools were meeting in person in their buildings, and a third group of schools was using a hybrid approach. The authors argue that local school boards, administrators, and superintendents had chosen one of those three options, but had made that choice without clear reason.
Jessica Cohen, Sara Bleich, Joseph Allen and Benjamin Sommers wrote:
School policy decisions across the ideological spectrum are being made largely devoid of data, threatening the well-being of our children, economy and society.
The authors take a neutral approach: whether a school has chosen brick-and-mortar presence or online learning, the choice in either case has been made on a feelings-driven basis. How parents, students, teachers, administrators, or board members perceive the situation — and how they perceive potential courses of action — are often based on passion rather than logic.
The authors prescribe a calmer approach:
Policy should not be driven by emotion or anecdote.
Decisions made on the basis of sentiment are often reactions, not responses. They are often packaged with statistics to give the appearance of being “data driven” and “evidence based,” but the reader will remember Mark Twain’s famous comment about statistics.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are captive audiences to endless floods of numbers, percentages, and charts. Such allegedly mathematical presentations are subject to gerrymandering, and should not be presented in the context of a passionate debate:
Cases in school must be reported in context — both in terms of the population size in question (not just case counts) and whether infections were actually transmitted in schools rather than in the broader community.
For any statistic presented, a thorough and calm exploration of related variables is appropriate.
The typical school board meeting is not conducive to analytical thought. Analysis should be conducted without any eye to potential courses of action, or to the emotions roused by the topic.
Data on covid-19 clusters within schools, when they occur, should also be reported alongside information on which risk mitigation measures (e.g., masks, ventilation, etc.) were in place.
Any steps taken, any plan devised, should be examined in the light of opportunity cost. The decision to do one thing is the decision to forgo every other option available.
Schools which have entirely closed their buildings need to examine what the students are doing when they are not at home. Nationwide, pediatricians report an increase in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among high-school aged patients during the months of school shutdown.
Gatherings of teenagers, with varying amounts of alcohol and marijuana, and without “social distancing” and face masks, must be factored into any decision to close schools.
Any policy analysis must ask, “Compared with what?” While remote learning is often called the “safest option,” that view assumes children are at home, safely distancing from others. But policymakers must consider that in many households, parents have to work, meaning children are often in teaching “pods,” nanny shares or group hangouts at local playgrounds. This leads to a series of mixed interactions between children and adults.
Complicating any calculations is the existence of endless variations on each of the three options: in person, distance learning, or hybrid.
These complexities make any simple generalizations impossible.
Given this reality, it’s possible that hybrid models and remote learning may not reduce infection risk relative to in-person schooling that requires masks and keeps kids in smaller, contained groups.
Keeping children out of school is not the same as keeping them at home, and neither of those is an optimal situation.
Many children, kept out of school, will not be at home. They’ll be with groups of other children, perhaps in learning pods, or perhaps simply left to their own devices to entertain themselves. Data on assignment completion indicates that student engagement with academic work is lower when school is not in person.
These patterns also vary by age. The span of Kindergarten through 12th grade allows for immense variation. Still more disparities arise if pre-K education is included in the calculation.
For those students who remain at home when kept out of school, many face a lack of mental stimulation and a lack of supervision. Their ability to ask questions and engage in discussions is hampered by the affective effects of Zoom and all other online video chat platforms.
Policy choices should not focus on just one outcome. We need a richer accounting of the costs and benefits of schooling models beyond just virus transmission. Key metrics should include student learning, engagement and well-being.
No matter which option a school chooses, there will be costs. A clear reckoning of those costs includes the net impact on the wellbeing of the students, and the economic effects which will ripple through the entire community.
The pandemic will create a net downward pressure on the total national economy for several years after it’s over. Decisions should be made with an eye toward minimizing those negative impacts, as Jessica Cohen, Sara Bleich, Joseph Allen and Benjamin Sommers note:
We also must consider economic costs associated with school policy decisions.
Schools which perhaps should have shut down for a week or two, in order to slow the spread, remained open. Those which should have opened remained closed.
A global perspective is helpful. Other nations have locked down large parts of their societies, but left schools open. The schools were safer because there was less community spread of the virus when nearly every other institution or business was closed.
China, the home and source of the virus, provides an interesting example. Many Chinese schools are running normally, or nearly normally, with classes all day every day in their physical facilities. China had, of course, a longer lead time to prepare for the pandemic, but perhaps other nations will be able to follow suit after a proportional time interval.
Looking at the national pattern of school choices, it is clear that evidence-based policy is not driving these decisions.
Mistake in policy, whether too cautious or too risky, were made when sensationalized media accounts fueled passion in the various stakeholders. Once emotion overrode reason, faulty policies were adopted and enacted.
