By March 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic had taken hold in America, and within a few days the country had moved to an unprecedented slowdown of civic and professional life in an effort to limit the spread of the virus. As part of this general shutdown we closed K-12 schools. In spring of 2020, 48 states required or recommended the closure of public schools; more than 50 million children and their teachers stayed home. In the face of a new, poorly understood virus, our collective shut down was entirely reasonable, and to a large extent remarkably successful.
And yet, by the summer of 2020, data were emerging that showed that children were less likely to contract Covid-19, and if they did, their disease was mild, and they had a low probability of transmitting it. Data quickly accumulatedshowing that children were unlikely to be an important cause of viral transmission. This, coupled with other data showing the educational and social developmental losses that were being incurred due to persistent school closure—often affecting marginalized children more than others—made a strong argument for re-opening schools in the fall of 2020.
And yet, schools continued to remain closed, affecting as many as half of allchildren in the US in the fall of 2020 with only about a quarter of schools remaining fully open for in-person learning. Why did schools stay closed when we knew that the risk of them staying closed probably outweighed the risk of them re-opening? Of course, societally, we are always particularly tentative if we can imagine even the smallest risk of children dying. But we suggest that there were three additional reasons, and that we might do well to learn from each of them.
Read the full post at The Turning Point.