School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error

Jonathan Chait brings the fire:

In the panicked early week of the pandemic, the initial decision to close schools seemed like a sensible precaution. Authorities drew on the closest example at hand, the 1918 Spanish flu, which was contained by closing schools.

But in relatively short order, growing evidence showed that the century-old precedent did not offer much useful guidance. While the Spanish flu was especially deadly for children, COVID-19 is just the opposite. By the tail end of spring 2020, it was becoming reasonably clear both that remote education was failing badly and that schools could be reopened safely.

What happened next was truly disturbing: The left by and large rejected this evidence. Progressives were instead carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions, who were organizing to keep schools closed. Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed.

…the Democratic Party’s internal debate on school closings was making room at the table for some truly unhinged ideas. The head of the largest state’s most powerful teachers union insisted on the record “there is no such thing as learning loss” and described plans to reopen schools as “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”

Within blue America, transparently irrational ideas like this were able to carry the day for a disturbingly long period of time.

Chait is completely correct, of course. It really was remarkable watching in real time how supporters of public education suddenly started shouting that education didn’t matter and how supporters of structural racism suddenly started arguing that it was the people who wanted to open the schools who were racist despite the obvious deficits that closing the schools was causing.

It was almost as if there was a formation of a mass psychosis.

Read the whole thing.

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