About half of American children lost at least a year of full-time school, according to Michael Hartney of Boston College. districts remained closed well into 2021, even after vaccines were available. How could that be? By the middle of 2020, there were many other ways for Covid to spread - in supermarkets, bars, restaurants and workplaces, as well as homes where out-of-school children gathered with friends.ĭespite the emerging data that schools were not superspreaders, many U.S. communities with closed schools had similar levels of Covid as communities with open schools, be they in the U.S. Some people did contract Covid at these schools, but the overall effect on the virus’s spread was close to zero. In conservative parts of the U.S., public schools also reopened, at times in consultation with local teachers’ unions. In the U.S., private schools, including Catholic schools, which often have modest resources, reopened. In Europe, many were open by the middle of the year.
Many other education leaders took a different approach in 2020 and came to favor a faster reopening of schools. Today’s newsletter, like Jonathan’s story, looks at the lingering costs to public education. In retrospect, the strategy seems to have failed. had issued its own reopening plan in late April calling for adequate personal protective equipment, new cleaning and sanitization regimens in school buildings, a temporary suspension of formal teacher performance evaluations, a limit on student testing, a cancellation of student-loan debt and a $750 billion federal aid package to help schools prepare to reopen safely and facilitate ‘‘a real recovery for all our communities.’’ As my colleague Jonathan Mahler writes in a new story in the Times Magazine: Instead, Covid became an opportunity for her union, the American Federation of Teachers, to push for broader policy changes that it had long favored.
Safety measures were not enough to reopen them, she argued. In 2020, the pandemic’s first full year, Weingarten came down strongly on the side of keeping schools closed. Teachers and parents feared that reopening schools before vaccines were available would spark Covid outbreaks, illness and death. On the other side of the ledger, however, was the worst pandemic in a century.
Without public schools, their defenders argued, society would come apart. It was where low-income children received subsidized meals. School was where children learned academic and social skills. During the early months of the Covid pandemic, Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ union she leads faced a vexing question: When should schools reopen?įor years, advocates of public education like Weingarten had argued that schools played an irreplaceable role.
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