Four years ago, schools across the country closed their doors. It was supposed to be for two weeks or three or . . . Most schools stayed closed till the end of the school year. Teachers tried to learn how to teach online.
Some schools reopened for full-time, in-person learning in the fall. But many urban schools and schools in "blue states," did not fully reopen for a year or more.
"Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting," write Sarah Mervosh, Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris in the New York Times.
"For each week spent remote, students in poor districts experienced steeper losses in math than peers in richer districts," they write. High-poverty districts "were also more likely to stay remote for longer." Academically, the poor got poorer.
Isolated at home, children experienced more anxiety and depression. They ate more, spiking obesity rates, and exercised less.
When schools reopened, teachers reported "more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students," notes the Times. Chronic absenteeism is way up.
The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.
Children were not "safer at home" from Covid.
“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the University of California, San Francisco health system.
By the fall of 2020, there was "evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission," write Mervosh, Miller and Paris.
Emily Oster, a Brown economist, analyzed the data and made the case for reopening child-care centers and schools in July 2020. She was a hero to privileged parents, wrote Dana Goldstein in the Times, and vilified by others. (She is owed apologies by many, but I'd advise her not to hold her breath.)
I think the decision to close schools four years ago was understandable. Keeping schools and playgrounds closed is a lot harder to defend. We could have learned from countries that reopened (or never closed) K-8 schools. We could have used common sense. But, no.
John Stossel doesn't want to forgive or forget.
"Sweden didn't impose lockdowns, school closures, or mask mandates," he notes. The elderly and at-risk were encouraged to stay home, but healthy Swedes were not.
Covid posed little threat to the young and healthy, and those who were infected and recovered would built "herd immunity" to stop the spread.
NBC called it "Sweden's failed experiment and Time magazine headlined "disaster," Stossel recalls.
Then herd immunity kicked in. "Sweden's excess death rate was the lowest in Europe," he says. "Because Swedish schools never closed, Swedish students didn't suffer the learning losses that American kids did."