The Pandemic’s Original Sin

I was loudly and vehemently opposed to conventional wisdom on school closure and really all pandemic restrictions, from March 2020 to today. But that’s me. I’m a little weird, plus I don’t get sick much. My standard for closing down schools is Contagion. Or The Last Ship.

I’m nobody, of course,  but a nobody pretty clued in to media coverage, and I’m well aware that  arguing against school closure back in March 2020 was a fool’s errand. Then, ironically, I was likewise mostly alone on the right in refusing to blame teachers or blue state governance for remote education that persisted well beyond what those on the right thought was necessary. So for the better part of forty months I have been a lonely voice in the wilderness, which has given me a lot of time to argue fruitlessly with the fact-ignorant, but also a lot of time to wonder productively what could have been done differently

If the remote education push was bottom-up rather than top down, what could have been done differently from March 2020 to June 2021 that so devastated the public school system? I have mulled for many months, using this factbase:

1. Parents were guaranteed remote education at their local school for the entire 20-21 school year, even Florida and Texas. This guarantee was not extended to parents wanting in-person education, with the notable exceptions of Florida and Texas.
2. Student disability law is ferocious and unrelenting and while it wasn’t much reported, had a considerable impact on district constraints in remote education decisions.
3. Race played a huge role in parental preference for remote education, with white parents being the only group with majority support for in-person instruction.
4. Politics played a significant role in CDC compliance, with Democrat majority states adhering and Republican majority states generally ignoring.  Schools required to follow CDC mandates could not realistically offer full-time in-person instruction. (Example: both Florida and Vermont offered in-person instruction for most of the 2020-21 school year, but Vermont was in hybrid while Florida was full-time)
5. Individual American schools do not represent national demographics. About a third of all schools are majority non-white. A third of whites attend schools that are majority non-white. On average, a third of non-whites attend majority white schools, but fewer than 20% of blacks and Hispanics do. (Cite)

Understand this fact base and nothing else about the year is relevant.

Points 1 and 3  combine to explain why NAEP scores aren’t explained by more than 10% of a state’s use of remote instruction.  Florida and Texas may have guaranteed parents in-person instruction, but only if they wanted it. Blacks and Hispanics, regardless of state, were far more likely to select remote, so those students would see a decline in scores regardless of policy. And so Florida and Texas actually lost more total NAEP points than California.

Points 1, 3, and 5 explain why most parents were content with their school instruction policies but a small vocal minority of whites was not. Non-whites, regardless of school demographic, were able to choose remote instruction. Most white students attend majority white schools, so got what they wanted as well. But that 33% of whites in majority non-white districts, which tend to be wealthy whites in high immigration urban or sububan areas, are a small but highly influential group with access and ability to make a lot of noise.

Points 2 and 4 explain much of the hesitance that schools had about rolling back restrictions.  Lawsuits are the form of accountability schools fear most. States and districts were crushed between disabled students with polar opposite needs–kids with mental disabilities needed in-person instruction, kids with physical disabilities had airtight claims for the wildest and most extreme protections. The CDC guidelines supported any lawsuit by the kids with physical disabilities. Blue states in general give much more support to these laws. Blue states with large non-white populations (pretty much all of them except Vermont, Washington, and Oregon) were under tremendous pressure to heed CDC guidelines with the progressives adding vocal pressure to then non-white existing preference. And the minute a state vows to follow CDC guidelines, their decision to *not* follow those guidelines becomes a material fact that gives weight to parental demands for adherence to the education disability laws.

So there’s the fact base. Very little to do with teachers unions, a little to do with blue state politics, but not as much as the day of reckoning demanders claim. The facts aren’t really in dispute. Randi Weingarten’s nonsense: irrelevant. CDC guidelines: a bit relevant, but in the context of governors could and did ignore them. Blaming the rhetoric for scaring parents: well, explain how whites weren’t fooled but non-whites were without getting hinky. What, non-whites are just more gullible?

Accept that the public discourse on this is completely off-base with no connection to the underlying problems, and look at the history of the pandemic with the only facts that matter, and it becomes clear that one key decision set everything in motion, from which I can see no certain path to undoing.

The schools should never have been closed in the first place.

And that’s sadly hilarious. In the entire history of the pandemic, with all the political and racial schisms that developed around remote vs in-person education, masks, lockdowns, vaccines, vaccine mandates, social distancing, the only milestone about which seemingly everyone acted and argued in lockstep was shutting down the schools in March 2020.

So hey, good news! No accountability needed. The decision that caused all the damage had everyone’s approval. Well, except mine.

The decision to close the schools was bipartisan. Omni-partisan, really. Everyone with a voice in the public sphere supported school closure, lockdowns, masks, and censure for the non-compliant. Even the voters apparently supported closed schools in March 2020.

The media pressure was unrelenting and likewise bipartisan. The negative blowback on politicians who balked at shutting down was tremendous.  Bill DeBlasio took an extra two days to close NYC schools and was excoriated. I have yet to see anyone acknowledge that his stated concerns for poor kids being robbed of education were well-founded. Florida governor Ron DeSantis was willing to ignore the media and set fewer restrictions and was likewise subjected to waves of criticism.

So. Close the schools, all the shit rolls right downhill to parent majorities determining method of instruction, zoom school, social isolation, the whole Mission burrito.

If everyone had continued to agree on the dangers of covid19, well, we’d all be just looking at the test scores as a regrettable but necessary expense of saving America.

Instead, in less than three months, the unity had fractured.. The progressive left remained firmly and loudly in support of remote education, masking, and if anything held that the country was moving beyond covid too quickly. Most non-white parents agreed,  from all available evidence, but didn’t chime in.

Meanwhile, conservative media and politicians, originally and loudly in favor of closure, switched effortlessly in the summer of 2020. (Republican voters, of course, had never particularly favored shutdown–as early as June, GOP support for opening schools approached 60%.)

Since it was largely conservative media that flipped on school closure, it’s worth expending a paragraph to demonstrate just how thorough, unrelenting, and total the 180 was amongst the people who are have been howling for accountability for a couple years now.

Timothy Carney originally praised the “reasonable and responsible” school closure and  chastised President Trump for demanding the schools open in ALL CAPS. But his kids were depressed and unhappy without school, so soon he was a vocal activist demanding that his private Catholic schools stay open. Recently Carney acknowledged that the lockdown he demanded may have done more harm than good.  Michael Brendan Dougherty emailed his district superintendent begging him to close schools, then a few months later said gosh,  I’m not sure how long I can keep doing this remote education thing, and finally began pressuring the school board to end its mask mandate. Karol Markowicz screamed loudly for then-mayor DiBlasio to close the schools; a year later she howled just as furiously for him to re-open the schools, finally moving down to Florida and a much whiter school district to get in-person education for her kids. Jim Geraghty did a ticktock on what he saw as DiBlasio’s terrible failure to close the schools in  timely fashion and called for an end to clickbait opinion journalism when an op-ed predicted catastrophic damage caused by school closure. Our “improvised solution, keeping kids out of school, is going to have some bad effects”  doesn’t get the clicks of “setting back a generation” he wrote, dismissing the very notion that closed schools could do any serious damage.Two years later, Geraghty wrote an article talking about the toll the pandemic took on America’s kids and it sure sounds now like he thinks it’s a generational setback as opposed to “some bad effects”.  And let’s never forget “don’t touch my baby’s hands” “for god’s sake people social distancing! Stop going!”  Bethany Mandel, who was hysterically against killing Grandma before she was for it. For equal time, Damon Linker was chastising people who wanted to open the schools and submit his kids to the trauma of guilt at being the cause of their parents’ death until he saw the trauma of his kids’ remote education. But by and large the flippers making the most noise were on the right.

In each of the above cases, the writers are now sublimely oblivious to their original support for closure. All they remember now is their rage at not getting the open schools they wanted exactly when they demanded them.

But sorry, folks. Did you call for closing the schools in March 2020? You own the results.

This might strike some as unfair.  Of course, the argument goes, *everyone*–or at least everyone who mattered–supported school closure in March 2020. People were scared.  Uncertain. Worried. Best to close the schools, keep people home. But once “the science” made it clear that schools were safe, it was incumbent on everyone to change their minds and do what was best. And Democrats didn’t do what was best. They didn’t follow the science.  It’s those stupid woke educators and the Democrats in thrall to the unions that caused the damage.

Ah, yes.  “I supported closing for two weeks, but…” or “Look, we didn’t know. It made sense at the time to shut down. But times changed.”

There is no “but”. It didn’t make sense at the time. Why close the schools? The goal was never to save the children because as early as February 2020, everyone knew children weren’t at risk. Mike DeWine and most governors closing schools expressly said the objective was to “slow the spread” or “flatten the curve”.

To restate: attendance requirements enabled and overwhelming opinion mandated that no parent be required to choose in-person instruction for their student, while parents were not given a similar guarantee out of remote.

Another fact rarely acknowledged: March school closure set a standard for unacceptable risk.

That standard set the stage for lawsuit threats over the following year. As can be seen from the Washington Post’s covid statistics, deaths and infections were far above the March 2020 levels for all of the next 18 months. This data made it very hard for schools even in the states that had no “mandatory remote option” requirement to deny parents the right to an in-home education.

See, here’s the thing: People are just stupid. In all ways, all the time. We all get to define stupid for ourselves. I personally think anyone under the age of 70 who *ever* felt unsafe about covid is pretty damn dumb. I also think the flippers who couldn’t accept that not everyone agreed with their change of perspective were idiots. I think the columnists endlessly yammering about infection rates and deaths in the apparent conviction that covid19 could be somehow controlled were foolish obsessives wasting print space.

Stupid is multi-directional.  Matt Ygelesias’s comment section is filled with self-styled thoughtful progressives who soberly discuss methods to educate MAGA folk out of their moronic devotion to Trump. Commentary podcast regulars smirk at the woke mentality and the MAGA morons. Pick your population, they’ll find a whole new stupid.

I’ve always known fixing stupid is hard, particularly in our polarized society with little agreement on what, exactly, stupid is. This explains my opposition to school closure. I knew people would react in idiotic ways. Not who, when,  or how.  But I was sure we could bank on stupid. And that meant closing the schools, which was a horrifically drastic action, would be impossible to undo as easily as the jackasses yapping about two weeks to slow the spread assumed.

People supported closing the schools because they felt afraid. When they stopped feeling afraid and felt safer, they wanted schools open. It’s just….everyone didn’t feel safer at the same time. As I’ve been writing for a while, now, the race factor was the unanticipated gotcha.

I realize that to anyone who didn’t actually look at the data–or to those intent on ignoring the data because they want their audience to blame unions–this seems absurd. Am I really saying that giving parents a choice guaranteed the damages done by 2021? That we were simply lucky the damage didn’t go on for longer?

Yes.

I am also saying that the media’s agitation for school closure caused this.

I doubt opinionmakers will ever understand how much damage they did.

If you ever called for school closure, if you have any sort of public voice and you added it to the demands for lockdowns and school closures, then nothing you said or did after that point mitigates your joint responsibility for the following eighteen months.  You didn’t understand how school works. You didn’t understand the massive legal restrictions and mandates that schools face. You didn’t understand that other people weren’t going to recover their sense of security as quickly as you did. You didn’t understand, period.

So yeah, Tim, Jim, Bethany, Karol, Michael, and all the other media golems who demanded closure then complained about remote education, with your only guiding principals being MAKE ME FEEL SAFE: you caused this. You want accountability? Look in the mirror.  Publish your own mea culpas.

Closing the schools was an act only fixable by ending remote education as a choice in local schools. And forcing kids back to in-person wasn’t going to fly that first year.

There aren’t always do-overs. There are mistakes that can’t be walked back. You can’t ctrl-z out of original sin.