During the early months of the Covid pandemic, Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ union she leads faced a vexing question: When should schools reopen?
For years, advocates of public education like Weingarten had argued that schools played an irreplaceable role. School was where children learned academic and social skills. It was where low-income children received subsidized meals. Without public schools, their defenders argued, society would come apart.
On the other side of the ledger, however, was the worst pandemic in a century. Teachers and parents feared that reopening schools before vaccines were available would spark Covid outbreaks, illness and death.
In 2020, the pandemic’s first full year, Weingarten came down strongly on the side of keeping schools closed. Safety measures were not enough to reopen them, she argued. Instead, Covid became an opportunity for her union, the American Federation of Teachers, to push for broader policy changes that it had long favored. As my colleague Jonathan Mahler writes in a new story in the Times Magazine:
The A.F.T. 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.’’
In retrospect, the strategy seems to have failed.
Today’s newsletter, like Jonathan’s story, looks at the lingering costs to public education.
A lost year
Many other education leaders took a different approach in 2020 and came to favor a faster reopening of schools. In Europe, many were open by the middle of the year. In the U.S., private schools, including Catholic schools, which often have modest resources, reopened. In conservative parts of the U.S., public schools also reopened, at times in consultation with local teachers’ unions.
Some people did contract Covid at these schools, but the overall effect on the virus’s spread was close to zero. U.S. communities with closed schools had similar levels of Covid as communities with open schools, be they in the U.S. or Europe. 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.
Despite the emerging data that schools were not superspreaders, many U.S. districts remained closed well into 2021, even after vaccines were available. About half of American children lost at least a year of full-time school, according to Michael Hartney of Boston College.
And children suffered as a result.
They lost ground in reading, math and other subjects. The effects were worst on low-income, Black and Latino children. Depression increased, and the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in children’s mental health. Shamik Dasgupta, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, who became an advocate for reopening schools, called the closures “a moral catastrophe.”
The closures also caused some Americans to sour on public schools. Nationwide enrollment fell by 1.3 million, or 3 percent, according to the latest federal data. The share of U.S. adults with little or no trust in public schools rose by a few percentage points, to 33 percent, according to Gallup. In last year’s elections, political candidates who supported vouchers — which effectively reduce public-school funding — fared well, as Jonathan explains in his story.
“It’s pretty undeniable that the last few years have been bad for public schools — even very bad,” he told me.
A democratic failure
I recommend his story because it’s a nuanced look at Weingarten and the challenges she now faces. Republican officials have spent years trying to demonize teachers’ unions, and Weingarten in particular (including during a House hearing this week), and have been less successful than they hoped. In Michigan, where Weingarten campaigned for Democrats last year, as she frequently does, the party won a sweep of major offices. In Chicago (an overwhelmingly Democratic city), a former teachers’ union organizer, Brandon Johnson, was elected mayor this month.
These results reflect the fact that many Americans are sympathetic to teachers and grateful to their children’s own teachers. Teachers do vital work and don’t make big salaries. Many spend their own money on teaching materials when schools don’t do so.
In the case of Covid, the risks associated with reopening schools were unclear in the spring of 2020, and teachers were understandably frightened. Over the course of the summer, however, evidence increasingly suggested that schools could reopen without accelerating the spread of Covid — and that the costs of keeping them closed were steep. Despite this evidence, many schools remained closed for months on end, even after vaccines became available.
Dasgupta, the Berkeley philosopher, has a thoughtful way of framing this failure. As he wrote to me in an email:
It is clear that extended school closures were a mistake — they harmed children while having no measurable effect on the pandemic. It is also clear that teachers’ unions were a major factor behind the closures. But remember that the unions were just doing their job. Their remit is to advocate for their members and that is exactly what they did.
Seen like this, the problem was not the teachers’ union per se — I am personally in favor of public sector unions — but the absence of a comparable organization at the bargaining table to represent the interests of students and their caregivers. It was a failure of democratic decision-making.
Looking ahead, my colleague Jonathan puts it this way:
The question (and political debate) is where do we go from here — double down on public education, try to address the learning loss and emotional damage caused by the pandemic closures and make an effort to restore the nation’s confidence in public schools, or create more alternatives via school choice?
As Jonathan notes, public education is likely to be a major issue again in the 2024 campaigns. Read his story about Weingarten here.
THE LATEST NEWS
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Mike Pence appeared before the grand jury hearing evidence about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
South Carolina and Nebraska, two conservative states, both failed to pass new bills prohibiting abortion.
The nonbinary son of Montana’s Republican governor urged his father to reject new bills on transgender issues.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York State lawmakers reached a deal on a budget that would change the state’s bail laws and increase the minimum wage.
War in Ukraine
Russia launched a major assault on civilian targets in Ukraine for the first time in more than a month, killing at least 12 people.
As temperatures rise and mud hardens into terrain ideal for armored vehicles, both the Ukrainians and Russians are preparing for renewed fighting.
Other Big Stories
Paramilitary fighters have moved into homes and taken over stores and hospitals in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.
“He raped me, whether I screamed or not”: Trump’s lawyer aggressively questioned E. Jean Carroll, probing for inconsistencies.
The U.S. economy grew slowly in the first three months of the year but did not fall into a recession.
Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation led to the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, died at 88.
Jerry Springer died at 79. His talk show defined an era of daytime TV.
Opinions
Private equity firms are often shielded from legal consequences for their actions. Brendan Ballou explains how people can fight back.
Nuclear waste is less dangerous and easier to manage than many people believe, Madison Hilly argues.
Here are columns by David Brooks on America’s soul and Jamelle Bouie on the Supreme Court.
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Dizzy buzz: Primates spin in circles for a temporary high, too.
Bachelor: It’s OK to be single, according to the Church of England, because Jesus was, too.
Former status symbol: Stretch limousines have all but disappeared.
Home décor: Judge these books by their covers — they’re fake.
Modern Love: David Schwimmer provides solace after a death in the family.
“Carbage can”: Keep your car clean for $10.
Advice from Wirecutter: These are the best travel car seats.
Lives Lived: Dick Groat helped lead the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series victory while earning an M.V.P. award. Yet he insisted he was better at basketball — and played a season in the N.B.A. He died at 92.
SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC
N.F.L. Draft: Bryce Young went No. 1 overall to the Carolina Panthers, but the Houston Texans — who picked at Nos. 2 and 3 thanks to a last-second trade — earned the night’s spotlight.
The jilted QB: Kentucky’s Will Levis was projected to be picked in the top 10 of last night’s N.F.L. draft, but was still in the green room at the end of the first round.
The East gets clearer: The Boston Celtics closed out the Atlanta Hawks, securing a second-round matchup with the Sixers. The Heat and Knicks begin their second-round tilt Sunday.
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Shiny jewels with a dark past
Christie’s is preparing for a major jewelry sale next month, and the collection — 700 jewels from the heiress Heidi Horten’s estate — is expected to bring in more than $150 million. (For comparison, Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels sold for $137 million in 2011.)
But a painful history hangs over the auction: Horten’s husband, Helmut, built his empire by buying companies from Jews who had been forced to sell them by the Nazis, often at a steep loss. After drawing criticism for the sale, Christie’s added a mention of the history to the auction listing and said it would donate some proceeds to Holocaust research and education.
PLAY, WATCH, EAT
What to Cook
These biscuits are crusty on the outside but tender on the inside.
What to Read
In “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things,” Katy Kelleher considers her desire for rare or pretty objects.
Travel
Spend 36 hours in Philadelphia.
News Quiz
How well did you follow the headlines this week?
Late Night
James Corden signed off after eight years as the host of “The Late Late Show.”
Now Time to Play
The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were benefited and benefitted. Here are today’s puzzle and the Bee Buddy, which helps you find remaining words.
And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Tiles.
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David
P.S. Times journalists won the Hillman Prize in Newspaper Journalism for their investigative series on Haiti.
Here’s today’s front page.
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at [email protected].
Source: Read Full Article
Home » Analysis & Comment » The Long Shadow of Covid School Closures
The Long Shadow of Covid School Closures
During the early months of the Covid pandemic, Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ union she leads faced a vexing question: When should schools reopen?
For years, advocates of public education like Weingarten had argued that schools played an irreplaceable role. School was where children learned academic and social skills. It was where low-income children received subsidized meals. Without public schools, their defenders argued, society would come apart.
On the other side of the ledger, however, was the worst pandemic in a century. Teachers and parents feared that reopening schools before vaccines were available would spark Covid outbreaks, illness and death.
In 2020, the pandemic’s first full year, Weingarten came down strongly on the side of keeping schools closed. Safety measures were not enough to reopen them, she argued. Instead, Covid became an opportunity for her union, the American Federation of Teachers, to push for broader policy changes that it had long favored. As my colleague Jonathan Mahler writes in a new story in the Times Magazine:
The A.F.T. 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.’’
In retrospect, the strategy seems to have failed.
Today’s newsletter, like Jonathan’s story, looks at the lingering costs to public education.
A lost year
Many other education leaders took a different approach in 2020 and came to favor a faster reopening of schools. In Europe, many were open by the middle of the year. In the U.S., private schools, including Catholic schools, which often have modest resources, reopened. In conservative parts of the U.S., public schools also reopened, at times in consultation with local teachers’ unions.
Some people did contract Covid at these schools, but the overall effect on the virus’s spread was close to zero. U.S. communities with closed schools had similar levels of Covid as communities with open schools, be they in the U.S. or Europe. 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.
Despite the emerging data that schools were not superspreaders, many U.S. districts remained closed well into 2021, even after vaccines were available. About half of American children lost at least a year of full-time school, according to Michael Hartney of Boston College.
And children suffered as a result.
They lost ground in reading, math and other subjects. The effects were worst on low-income, Black and Latino children. Depression increased, and the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in children’s mental health. Shamik Dasgupta, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, who became an advocate for reopening schools, called the closures “a moral catastrophe.”
The closures also caused some Americans to sour on public schools. Nationwide enrollment fell by 1.3 million, or 3 percent, according to the latest federal data. The share of U.S. adults with little or no trust in public schools rose by a few percentage points, to 33 percent, according to Gallup. In last year’s elections, political candidates who supported vouchers — which effectively reduce public-school funding — fared well, as Jonathan explains in his story.
“It’s pretty undeniable that the last few years have been bad for public schools — even very bad,” he told me.
A democratic failure
I recommend his story because it’s a nuanced look at Weingarten and the challenges she now faces. Republican officials have spent years trying to demonize teachers’ unions, and Weingarten in particular (including during a House hearing this week), and have been less successful than they hoped. In Michigan, where Weingarten campaigned for Democrats last year, as she frequently does, the party won a sweep of major offices. In Chicago (an overwhelmingly Democratic city), a former teachers’ union organizer, Brandon Johnson, was elected mayor this month.
These results reflect the fact that many Americans are sympathetic to teachers and grateful to their children’s own teachers. Teachers do vital work and don’t make big salaries. Many spend their own money on teaching materials when schools don’t do so.
In the case of Covid, the risks associated with reopening schools were unclear in the spring of 2020, and teachers were understandably frightened. Over the course of the summer, however, evidence increasingly suggested that schools could reopen without accelerating the spread of Covid — and that the costs of keeping them closed were steep. Despite this evidence, many schools remained closed for months on end, even after vaccines became available.
Dasgupta, the Berkeley philosopher, has a thoughtful way of framing this failure. As he wrote to me in an email:
It is clear that extended school closures were a mistake — they harmed children while having no measurable effect on the pandemic. It is also clear that teachers’ unions were a major factor behind the closures. But remember that the unions were just doing their job. Their remit is to advocate for their members and that is exactly what they did.
Seen like this, the problem was not the teachers’ union per se — I am personally in favor of public sector unions — but the absence of a comparable organization at the bargaining table to represent the interests of students and their caregivers. It was a failure of democratic decision-making.
Looking ahead, my colleague Jonathan puts it this way:
The question (and political debate) is where do we go from here — double down on public education, try to address the learning loss and emotional damage caused by the pandemic closures and make an effort to restore the nation’s confidence in public schools, or create more alternatives via school choice?
As Jonathan notes, public education is likely to be a major issue again in the 2024 campaigns. Read his story about Weingarten here.
THE LATEST NEWS
Politics
Mike Pence appeared before the grand jury hearing evidence about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
South Carolina and Nebraska, two conservative states, both failed to pass new bills prohibiting abortion.
The nonbinary son of Montana’s Republican governor urged his father to reject new bills on transgender issues.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York State lawmakers reached a deal on a budget that would change the state’s bail laws and increase the minimum wage.
War in Ukraine
Russia launched a major assault on civilian targets in Ukraine for the first time in more than a month, killing at least 12 people.
As temperatures rise and mud hardens into terrain ideal for armored vehicles, both the Ukrainians and Russians are preparing for renewed fighting.
Other Big Stories
Paramilitary fighters have moved into homes and taken over stores and hospitals in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.
“He raped me, whether I screamed or not”: Trump’s lawyer aggressively questioned E. Jean Carroll, probing for inconsistencies.
The U.S. economy grew slowly in the first three months of the year but did not fall into a recession.
Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation led to the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, died at 88.
Jerry Springer died at 79. His talk show defined an era of daytime TV.
Opinions
Private equity firms are often shielded from legal consequences for their actions. Brendan Ballou explains how people can fight back.
Nuclear waste is less dangerous and easier to manage than many people believe, Madison Hilly argues.
Here are columns by David Brooks on America’s soul and Jamelle Bouie on the Supreme Court.
MORNING READS
Dizzy buzz: Primates spin in circles for a temporary high, too.
Bachelor: It’s OK to be single, according to the Church of England, because Jesus was, too.
Former status symbol: Stretch limousines have all but disappeared.
Home décor: Judge these books by their covers — they’re fake.
Modern Love: David Schwimmer provides solace after a death in the family.
“Carbage can”: Keep your car clean for $10.
Advice from Wirecutter: These are the best travel car seats.
Lives Lived: Dick Groat helped lead the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series victory while earning an M.V.P. award. Yet he insisted he was better at basketball — and played a season in the N.B.A. He died at 92.
SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC
N.F.L. Draft: Bryce Young went No. 1 overall to the Carolina Panthers, but the Houston Texans — who picked at Nos. 2 and 3 thanks to a last-second trade — earned the night’s spotlight.
The jilted QB: Kentucky’s Will Levis was projected to be picked in the top 10 of last night’s N.F.L. draft, but was still in the green room at the end of the first round.
The East gets clearer: The Boston Celtics closed out the Atlanta Hawks, securing a second-round matchup with the Sixers. The Heat and Knicks begin their second-round tilt Sunday.
ARTS AND IDEAS
Shiny jewels with a dark past
Christie’s is preparing for a major jewelry sale next month, and the collection — 700 jewels from the heiress Heidi Horten’s estate — is expected to bring in more than $150 million. (For comparison, Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels sold for $137 million in 2011.)
But a painful history hangs over the auction: Horten’s husband, Helmut, built his empire by buying companies from Jews who had been forced to sell them by the Nazis, often at a steep loss. After drawing criticism for the sale, Christie’s added a mention of the history to the auction listing and said it would donate some proceeds to Holocaust research and education.
PLAY, WATCH, EAT
What to Cook
These biscuits are crusty on the outside but tender on the inside.
What to Read
In “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things,” Katy Kelleher considers her desire for rare or pretty objects.
Travel
Spend 36 hours in Philadelphia.
News Quiz
How well did you follow the headlines this week?
Late Night
James Corden signed off after eight years as the host of “The Late Late Show.”
Now Time to Play
The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were benefited and benefitted. Here are today’s puzzle and the Bee Buddy, which helps you find remaining words.
And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Tiles.
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David
P.S. Times journalists won the Hillman Prize in Newspaper Journalism for their investigative series on Haiti.
Here’s today’s front page.
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at [email protected].
Source: Read Full Article