Someone shared this with me, not knowing I know you. :) One clarification is that the AAP walked its guidance back 2 weeks later. It said minimum of 3 feet, ideal 6, and universal masking for over 2. It did so at the lobbying of the teacher unions and was the final nail for a lot of schools in what to do for fall 2020. We were one of the only western countries that masked early childhood students. The WHO recommended not masking children under 6.
Anyway… don’t get me started on this topic. I hate this saying, but for school closures, “it was vibes all the way down.” Also, as a current resident of the south, the CDC guidance each COVID year came out well after we had returned to school. It was targeted for those metros you mention who start closer to Labor Day. I don’t remember the correct stat, but definitely more than 50% of districts had returned every summer before updated guidance was released.
Yeah the masking policy was also shameful. I kept talking to Europeans who couldn’t believe we were expecting children as young as two to mask! I specifically sought out a daycare that didn’t require masking for extremely young kids (perhaps not coincidentally it was owned by a European parent company). And it was all such theater - on such young kids the masks became super wet super quickly (I had a son who was especially prone to drooling) and the masks had to be changed constantly.
Shameful incident for the AAP (the partisan walk back). The loss in trust in institutions is well earned and will reverberate disastrously for decades.
This is just....not true. It ignores the fact that many states completely ignored CDC rules about six feet. There was no requirement to do so. So stop making it about that idiotic CDC requirement. If you want to look back and revisit things, how about the fact that the CDC was *not* suggesting schools be closed on March 16, the date that most governors closed the schools?
It's utterly absurd to blame the CDC, teachers' unions, or "experts".
What happened was this: every single state legislature voted to pause state attendance requirements for the entire 20-21 school year. Moreover, pretty much every governor *promised* parents that they wouldn't be forced to send their students back to school before *the parents* thought it was safe.
This turned out to be really stupid, although it's hard to blame them. But what they never predicted was that parent preferences would vary by race, with white parents wild outliers in wanting in-person instruction by a ratio of 3:1. Nonwhite parents (black, Hispanic, Asian) were barely 50% *polled* in preferring in-person, but revealed preferences were always much closer to 1 in 3 or even less.
And no, this wasn't political. Vermont and Washington are very white states. Vermont had inperson instruction all year (see caveat below). A Washington newspaper did a close study of what school areas had inperson instruction and concluded that political preferences wasn't enough to explain in-person preferences, that they had to include overwhelmingly Dem but majority white areas as clearly preferring in-person.
The simple truth is that parents were largely content with their schools during the pandemic and very happy with their teachers. School districts were giving parents what they wanted. Several surveys showed that only 15% of parents wanted inperson instruction and couldn't get it. Given the demographics of schools, this suggests that the loud, angry white parents in city schools demanding in-person instruction weren't the tip of the iceberg but the entire icecube. They would have done better to demand minority rights, but they were too smug in their certainty that everyone was unhappy, when in fact the non-white majorities in their districts were the *reason* they were in remote.
So all this educational damage you are sad about, the damage of remote education mostly done to the poor and the non-white students, was damage *actively chosen* by their parents! They felt safe at home. Many of them were still unready to go back to school in fall 2021, but the state legislatures had largely wised up and allowed the attendance exemptions to lapse, thus creating penalties for schools allowing remote. State regs always trump parent preference.
There was only one way to prevent this, and that was to have KEPT THE SCHOOLS OPEN IN MARCH. If you called for closing schools then, or if you still think that was the right call, then accept all that followed as inevitable.
If you think the state legislatures acted correctly in lifting attendance requirements for a year, if you think, as you argue, that Trump was unhelpful in saying that schools should lose money if they didn't open, then you are granting the very conditions that led to what you are upset about. The majority of nonwhite parents were given the opportunity to have their kids educated remotely at their local school and they liked it, and had to be forced out of it by the law change in fall 2021. Fin.
There's tons of data showing the non-white preference, both polled and revealed preference. It wasn't a secret to the journalist side of the media. The opinion side consistently ignored this reality as they screamed for schools to open.
*Caveat: while inperson or remote was definitely predictable by race, it's true that hybrid vs full time was a political decision. Dems felt compelled to heed the CDC because it was on their "side" and Trump wanted to reopen. But inperson versus remote? All race. Why? No clue. I'm not arguing cause, I'm just pointing out reality, which is overwhelmingly absent from your analysis.
So to be really clear. Trump was 99% right and just doing what he said would have improved things 10,000% whatever your hang ups, and then to spite him out of a sense of Trump Derangement Syndrome tens of millions of kids lost a year+ of their lives.
There is no "both siding" this and calling Trump extreme. We had whole states (Florida) and whole countries (Scandinavia) do exactly what he said and it turned out fine.
I appreciate your calling out the vibes after the vibe shift a couple years after it mattered. But if at this point you can't even bring yourself to say "the teachers union was wrong and those that stood up to it were brave and we should have supported them" I don't have confidence in behavior during the next crisis.
The US was also an outlier in demanding masks for children as young as preschool and kindergarten age. I live in Victoria, Australia, where only kids well into primary school age were expected to wear masks. Younger than that and the experts made the call that mask use hygiene was likely to be so poor and with the kids at such low risk that the health benefits didn't outweigh the costs.
Someone shared this with me, not knowing I know you. :) One clarification is that the AAP walked its guidance back 2 weeks later. It said minimum of 3 feet, ideal 6, and universal masking for over 2. It did so at the lobbying of the teacher unions and was the final nail for a lot of schools in what to do for fall 2020. We were one of the only western countries that masked early childhood students. The WHO recommended not masking children under 6.
Anyway… don’t get me started on this topic. I hate this saying, but for school closures, “it was vibes all the way down.” Also, as a current resident of the south, the CDC guidance each COVID year came out well after we had returned to school. It was targeted for those metros you mention who start closer to Labor Day. I don’t remember the correct stat, but definitely more than 50% of districts had returned every summer before updated guidance was released.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/10/889848834/nations-pediatricians-walk-back-support-for-in-person-school
Yeah the masking policy was also shameful. I kept talking to Europeans who couldn’t believe we were expecting children as young as two to mask! I specifically sought out a daycare that didn’t require masking for extremely young kids (perhaps not coincidentally it was owned by a European parent company). And it was all such theater - on such young kids the masks became super wet super quickly (I had a son who was especially prone to drooling) and the masks had to be changed constantly.
Shameful incident for the AAP (the partisan walk back). The loss in trust in institutions is well earned and will reverberate disastrously for decades.
This is just....not true. It ignores the fact that many states completely ignored CDC rules about six feet. There was no requirement to do so. So stop making it about that idiotic CDC requirement. If you want to look back and revisit things, how about the fact that the CDC was *not* suggesting schools be closed on March 16, the date that most governors closed the schools?
It's utterly absurd to blame the CDC, teachers' unions, or "experts".
What happened was this: every single state legislature voted to pause state attendance requirements for the entire 20-21 school year. Moreover, pretty much every governor *promised* parents that they wouldn't be forced to send their students back to school before *the parents* thought it was safe.
This turned out to be really stupid, although it's hard to blame them. But what they never predicted was that parent preferences would vary by race, with white parents wild outliers in wanting in-person instruction by a ratio of 3:1. Nonwhite parents (black, Hispanic, Asian) were barely 50% *polled* in preferring in-person, but revealed preferences were always much closer to 1 in 3 or even less.
And no, this wasn't political. Vermont and Washington are very white states. Vermont had inperson instruction all year (see caveat below). A Washington newspaper did a close study of what school areas had inperson instruction and concluded that political preferences wasn't enough to explain in-person preferences, that they had to include overwhelmingly Dem but majority white areas as clearly preferring in-person.
The simple truth is that parents were largely content with their schools during the pandemic and very happy with their teachers. School districts were giving parents what they wanted. Several surveys showed that only 15% of parents wanted inperson instruction and couldn't get it. Given the demographics of schools, this suggests that the loud, angry white parents in city schools demanding in-person instruction weren't the tip of the iceberg but the entire icecube. They would have done better to demand minority rights, but they were too smug in their certainty that everyone was unhappy, when in fact the non-white majorities in their districts were the *reason* they were in remote.
So all this educational damage you are sad about, the damage of remote education mostly done to the poor and the non-white students, was damage *actively chosen* by their parents! They felt safe at home. Many of them were still unready to go back to school in fall 2021, but the state legislatures had largely wised up and allowed the attendance exemptions to lapse, thus creating penalties for schools allowing remote. State regs always trump parent preference.
There was only one way to prevent this, and that was to have KEPT THE SCHOOLS OPEN IN MARCH. If you called for closing schools then, or if you still think that was the right call, then accept all that followed as inevitable.
If you think the state legislatures acted correctly in lifting attendance requirements for a year, if you think, as you argue, that Trump was unhelpful in saying that schools should lose money if they didn't open, then you are granting the very conditions that led to what you are upset about. The majority of nonwhite parents were given the opportunity to have their kids educated remotely at their local school and they liked it, and had to be forced out of it by the law change in fall 2021. Fin.
There's tons of data showing the non-white preference, both polled and revealed preference. It wasn't a secret to the journalist side of the media. The opinion side consistently ignored this reality as they screamed for schools to open.
I wrote about this several times.
Tons of data showing racial skew in remote vs in-person preferences: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/04/04/the-real-reason-for-school-closures/
Parental satisfaction with offered school methods: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/the-pandemic-school-policy-power-differential/
*Caveat: while inperson or remote was definitely predictable by race, it's true that hybrid vs full time was a political decision. Dems felt compelled to heed the CDC because it was on their "side" and Trump wanted to reopen. But inperson versus remote? All race. Why? No clue. I'm not arguing cause, I'm just pointing out reality, which is overwhelmingly absent from your analysis.
How did someone write this article WITHOUT INCLUDING the word 'Ventilation' ?
So to be really clear. Trump was 99% right and just doing what he said would have improved things 10,000% whatever your hang ups, and then to spite him out of a sense of Trump Derangement Syndrome tens of millions of kids lost a year+ of their lives.
There is no "both siding" this and calling Trump extreme. We had whole states (Florida) and whole countries (Scandinavia) do exactly what he said and it turned out fine.
I appreciate your calling out the vibes after the vibe shift a couple years after it mattered. But if at this point you can't even bring yourself to say "the teachers union was wrong and those that stood up to it were brave and we should have supported them" I don't have confidence in behavior during the next crisis.
The US was also an outlier in demanding masks for children as young as preschool and kindergarten age. I live in Victoria, Australia, where only kids well into primary school age were expected to wear masks. Younger than that and the experts made the call that mask use hygiene was likely to be so poor and with the kids at such low risk that the health benefits didn't outweigh the costs.