Paying Teachers To Do Nothing?

I argued constantly during the pandemic that remote elementary education was a waste of time, and all parents wanting to reopen schools should have just pulled their kids and threatened their district’s funding, but that doesn’t mean an elementary school teacher’s job was easy.  But I don’t know enough about the day to day work to comment on it.

I taught mostly high school math during the pandemic, for eighteen months: March to June 2020, summer school in 2020 and 2021, and the entire 20-21 school year.  I did a good job at it, too.  I can attest that for middle and high school, teaching is much harder in remote and required far more time.

Check for Understanding: In person, math teachers give kids a practice problem and walk around the room to determine who gets it, who needs help, what common misconceptions exist. We make sure the kids are all working, check for common misunderstandings to address, give the kids who finish in 30 seconds an additional challenge, and do this all in five-ten minutes.

To say that this task can’t be done in remote understates the difficulty added by remote. In-person, student response and teacher checking  are done simultaneously. In remote, these tasks are sequential. To determine kids understanding on Zoom, teachers had a few options, from unstructured to highly structured, all of which took far more time in an online class of anywhere from 25 to 36 kids.

Easiest method for ad-hoc questions: ask students to put the answer in private chat. For example, put a liner equation graph up and ask for the equation in slope intercept. The question had to be something that doesn’t require math notation, which Zoom chat can’t handle.  In general, getting 90% of students to answer takes on average 10 minutes AFTER the time needed to work the problem. Teachers need a list of names handy to check off each answer. Some kids won’t answer until nagged by name–which assumes, of course, the kids are actually online as opposed to logging in from work or bed or Disneyworld, which you can’t figure out until you’ve called them out by name several times. (I would always mark those kids absent then, despite their Zoom login. Revenge, and it did improve actual attendance.) Despite the problems, I used this method often. My student participation rate was generally over 80%, focus and obsess as I might over the remaining fifth.  So I could ask a question and get close to half of the kids answering quicky, chat them back a followup question while I harassed the rest into responding. It wasn’t perfect but it worked well enough and besides (as I reminded myself frequently) in the in-person version, there were always kids who didn’t work until I nagged them. And inevitably, there were kids who forgot to put it in private, meaning everyone could see their answer, meaning those who just wanted to avoid work could copy the response just to get me off their backs.

Next up for adhoc questions: create a poll, Classroom question (in Google) or a Google quiz. These made it far easier to track who had answered and who hadn’t and teachers didn’t have to go into Zoom logs to figure out who said what. This method also allowed for more than one question, so teachers could get more granularity on misunderstandings.  Still the same math notation limitation and the same nagging issues, delay in response. Moreover, it was really hard to make these genuinely ad hoc. Zoom poll takes a minute, but they’re hard to track outside of Zoom. Google Classroom questions take maybe two minutes, Google forms longer than that. From a practical standpoint, they can’t be really adhoc. So you have to plan ahead, which some teachers do automatically and others (raises hand) find a difficult task. Google forms were great for actual quizzes (see below) but they’re a bit too much work for a simple check for understanding. I never used Zoom polls, used Google forms for quizzes. I used Classroom questions occasionally.

Creating a poll, classroom question or google form quiz can’t be done easily on an ad hoc basis, especially if the question involved formulas that need special font, which most polls don’t allow. So teachers had to either plan and create their questions ahead of time (more hours of work) or create something simple in the moment–again, with response time for each taking ten minutes or so, for the same reason.

Classwork: Both of these methods give no clue as to what errors are being made and in fact, there’s no way online to check for understanding and get a real insight into student thinking. Checking for understanding by its nature has to be quick. Classwork, the bread and butter of math teachers is the other key way to see student thinking, what happens after the “release to work“, whether it be a book assignment, a worksheet, or an activity. For the first year of Zoom–from March to December 2020–I created Google Classroom assignments and students took pictures of their work to turn in.  Teachers using this method have to flip through multiple pages of student work online. This is brutal. I still have nightmares from the time spent reviewing classwork online until, thank the great math gods, a fellow teacher told me about Desmos activity builder and its integration with Google Classroom. As a former programmer, I was able to build my own custom lessons quickly, but for teachers without that skill, Desmos offers a lot of blessed options and googling finds a bunch of others. Desmos and Google Classroom combined were wonderful.  I could build my own activities, assign them to a class, and then see students work as they completed it, catching mistakes in action. If a student never logged in, I could see it. If a student logged in but did nothing, I could see it. I marked a lot of students absent on that basis,  which got them back into paying attention. Huge win.

But there’s that time factor again: either teachers could use their existing curriculum (worksheets or books) and spend hours reviewing work online (in my case, I don’t do homework normally, so this was a big chunk of added time) or they could rework all of their existing curriculum into Desmos assignments, which also took endless hours but at least had something of a payoff.

Assessment: Monitoring test integrity is relatively easy to do in person. (Relatively. And methods got much more sophisticated post-pandemic).  Rampant cheating was a huge issue during remote.  How to reduce cheating? Rewrite tests entirely.

For example, in a paper-based test you could ask a student to graph “y=2x+7” or “y=(x-3)(x+5)”. But Photomath–or, for that matter, Desmos–provides that answer in a heartbeat. Instead, I’d use a Desmos activity and ask students to graph a line with a slope of 2 and a y-intercept of 7, or a quadratic with zeros at 3 and -5. This wasn’t in any way a perfect substitute. Students wouldn’t have to know how to graph a slope of 2 or find a vertex. But at least I could ascertain a level of understanding. There were entire topics that were pointless to teach during the pandemic (exponents, factoring) because there was no way to see if the kids were doing it themselves or photomathing the work. Rewriting the tests still took hours.

Grading: Most non-teachers–hell, even teachers themselves–can’t really conceive of how hard it is to grade online. Automation takes care of the multiple choice scenarios, but Google forms allow short answers, and they don’t always exactly match. And never mind the exact matches, how about partial credit? Math teachers routinely give credit for setting up the problem correctly, deducting fewer points for minor math errors, and so on. I bought the least expensive Veikk tablet (love it, and still use it) but I could never find an easy way to mark up student work and save it for return without a lot of extra work. Leave aside that, it is still difficult to keep track of what you’re adding up. You can’t write directly on a google form or desmos, so you have to snip it and make your notes, which you then have to tally up and keep on a separate sheet….and so on. it’s a bitch.

These are essential tasks that went from 2 minutes per instance to an hour or more–each instance, with dozens of instances a week. For teachers (or me, at least), life outside of work was great. But work itself?  This article focuses on life during the early months of the shutdown, but I was able to institute more structure during summer school and by  fall 2021 my school had instituted a formal “bell schedule” with something approximating a normal school day online. It was a lot of work. Teachers coped with this in different ways. The more organized teachers who believe that coverage is the most important thing taught less time online and added far more to the students’ “asynch” hours, believing this would allow the motivated students  to learn more effectively. I did the opposite. But regardless of method, work was much longer and harder.

The only good thing about teaching during the pandemic is that I could do my bit to make life better for students after a government action I vehemently opposed from day one. Meanwhile, moving so much of school online added permanently not only to my pandemic school day, but to my day post-pandemic.

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I remember the day our school closed, asking the head custodian what he’d be doing during the shutdown. “Taking care of mom,” he said. She had cancer. Oh,  so he wouldn’t have to be on campus. He laughed. “Maybe a bit. Not much.”

Bus drivers were definitely furloughed. But in the main,  public education layoffs actually decreased during the pandemic.

Shutting down the schools in March 2020 left hundreds of thousands of people paid a full time salary to do almost nothing. Most non-teaching school lower level staff (attendance, custodial, teacher’s aides) had very little to do. We didn’t even take attendance in most schools from March to June 2020, so those clerks had nothing to do. Custodial staff had to clean if anyone came on campus, but otherwise were onsite doing nothing. Secretaries and clerks had half or less of their usual job. The more highly educated district staff, who are nice, supportive, but ultimately unnecessary staff anyway but ignore that for another time, had pandemic-related assignments, like finding online curriculum to purchase at great expense that we teachers generally ignored. I don’t blame any district or school staff for their long vacation. But they were on light duty at best.

Half of all school employees don’t teach. With the exception of school administrators, most of them had next to nothing to do during the school closures. So closing the schools meant that just under half of all public school employees had their jobs cut in half at least. Schools could have laid off millions of personnel to combine jobs. 

Just one of the many misconceptions deluding all those complaining about paying teachers to “do nothing” during remote education is the fact that teachers were one of only two employment categories whose jobs got much harder and longer during the pandemic. I’ve pointed out endlessly that school closures were primarily a function of parental preference, that teachers’ unions, no matter their pro-closure rhetoric, couldn’t do anything to affect those decisions. There’s mountains of evidence establishing this pattern. But even those who foolishly believe in the evil teachers closed the schools story should remember that if teachers closed the schools, they created more work for themselves, not less.

Meanwhile, does anyone remember the various folks howling about closed schools and lazy teachers demanding that district and support staff personnel get furloughed? Any complaints about the thousands of state government employees getting a long-term vacation at taxpayer expense? Demands that schools collapse jobs to eliminate expensive, unnecessary personnel?

Me neither.

The Pandemic School Policy Power Differential

I recently realized that the delineation between remote, in-person, and hybrid instruction doesn’t always mean the same thing to parents, teachers, media, and the general public. I don’t know if that’s why a significant power imbalance never got much notice–well. Not notice as such. It got a lot of notice.

Take a look at this table of different instruction models by Edweek, from a November 2020 survey:

This is a survey of school districts, and if you add up similar models, 49% offer full-time instruction, 29% offer part-time in=person, and 17% offer remote only.

Notice I say “part-time in-person” when most would simply say “hybrid”. I used to as well–but the “hybrid” definition varies based on whether the focus is on parents or teachers.

Parents define school model based on where their kids are during class-time. Teachers define school model based on where all kids are during class-time.

So using the above table, parents who opted for full-time remote instruction would experience all except the third as full-time remote instruction. Parents who were offered the choice of in-person instruction and accepted it would describe the first and third as full-time, the second and fifth as “hybrid” because their kids were at home some days, at school others.

For a teacher, “hybrid” means they are teaching online and in-person simultaneously: “Roomies” and “Zoomies”. Teachers working in the first, second, and fifth structures would say they were teaching in “hybrid”, even though all the parents in those situations would describe the education as full-time (either remote or in-person).

This could explain why Martin West et al did a survey at roughly the same time and found very different numbers–or seemed to:

Our data reveal that more than half of U.S. students are receiving instruction entirely remotely this school year, while 28% of students receive instruction that is fully in person. Of the 19% of students in hybrid models, in-person instruction varies from one to five days a week.

Was one survey just wrong? Unlikely. Edweek’s  surveys are generally reliable. Martin West’s team surveys are the gold standard, as far as I’m concerned.

I think they’re both correct, but tracking different issues. Edweek is looking at what schools offer. West is looking at what parents accept. The West researchers make this clear later in the article:

As for the range of available choices, the parents of only 41% of students report that their child’s school offers a fully in-person option, suggesting that more than two-thirds of students who were presented that option took it. The parents of 48% of students say that their child has a hybrid option, and the parents of 77% say that their child can attend fully online.

The Edweek graph doesn’t make this as explicit, because different rows are counted in more than one category. All but one of the described options includes full-time remote–and it wouldn’t surprise me if at least of those 100% in-person districts didn’t offer remote. While it’s not mentioned, most schools offering part-time inperson classes had Schedule A, B, and C, with A and B as the alternating schedules and C (or R) as full-time remote.

So once the Edweek values are totalled to include all options available to parents, the comparison looks more like this:

Option	Edweek	West et. al
Fulltime	49% (34+15)	41%
Hybrid	29% (20+9)	48
Remote	85% (100-15)	77%

Much closer, if not perfect. (Edweek is tracking districts while West is tracking parents, so it’s an imperfect comparison anyway.)

So overwhelmingly, parents had the option to remote instruction if they wanted, but far fewer parents had access to any kind of in-person instruction.

Remember, parents themselves were the primary drivers in determining whether school districts offered in-person instruction (hybrid or full-time being determined by the governor’s choice to follow CDC strictures). So a district decision was primarily influenced by parental majority.

But parents with the minority preference got wildly different treatment depending on which option won.

In rare cases, districts discontinued remote because so few students wanted it and were doing badly to boot; all of these districts seem to be in Texas (e.g., Blanco Independent District). But even when a district refused to continue offering remote, the parents  were supported–allowed to go to another district, hooked up with a virtual charter. Still, schools refusing to accommodate remote instruction were very much the exception.

This is supported by the West survey:

The parents of 84% and 89% of those being taught in the in-person and hybrid models, respectively, say they have a choice in the matter, but parents of only 60% of the fully remote children say they have an option for their children to receive instruction in a different way.

In contrast, parents who wanted in-person schooling in a remote-only district were generally ignored. Overwhelmingly, these parents were in blue states where the governor had insisted on following CDC guidelines, making part-time in-person with full-time remote available the only in-person option.

Why the disparate treatment? Why were parents wanting given remote catered to, while parents wanting in-person were ignored?

Well, for starters, the particular form of hybrid that the CDC regulations required is uniquely horrible.  Michael Pershan’s excellent article does the best at explaining why this form of instruction is terrible for teachers.  I recently described the additional complications that principals faced when their school offered any form of in-person instruction, whether hybrid or full-time.

The West survey and others show that parents didn’t noticeably prefer hybrid to remote.

Many central Florida schools had under half their students showing up for in-person instruction. The teachers’ lives sound miserable, but manageable, and many districts paid teachers more for hybrid. Most importantly, parents were given equal treatment.  But remember, Florida schools were 100% in-person, so even if only fifteen students came to class every day, it’s enough of a classroom experience to be worth it.

That scenario wasn’t the case in many other districts in blue states. The students were forced into alternate day scenario if the state was complying with CDC guidelines.  Moreover, far fewer  parents in these non-white districts were interested in in-person instruction–far fewer, even, than the numbers voting for it.

For example, my district’s survey showed about a third of parents wanted in-person instruction in a late winter survey.

(So first of all, if you are like me and think in-person instruction should have been the norm from the beginning, take a second to stop and think about that. Two-thirds of the parents of a very large district, with all the information they had about the low risk levels for young people, having been stuck in remote for months, voted for continued remote instruction. Realize that my district, close to 90% non-white, is typical of other majority non-white districts and then consider how many majority non-white districts there are. Then perhaps you will think twice about “blame” for remote education.)

When the district asked for signups to get schedules started, just ten percent signed up. That’s maybe 2-3 students per class.   Those are numbers that reasonably cause districts to decide it’s not worth the effort to move out of hybrid, even if it was unfair to the tiny number of parents who wanted it.

So there were reasons why districts didn’t support parents who wanted in-person instruction in high majority remote districts. It’s still unfair. It’s still disparate treatment.

But here’s the part that’s puzzling me: I don’t recall a single parent, much less parent organization, point out this inequity and ask for redress.

Here’s what I mean:

Virginia tracked its counties, which correspond almost exactly to districts, and their education model as of late September 2020. I’ve marked two counties that offered full-time instruction from the beginning of the school year, and two who were almost entirely remote through at least January 2021;. 

Tazewell and Hanover are labeled full-time, but both counties allowed parents to opt for full-time remote education in their local school–oh, hey, see the note at the bottom of the map? All VA districts offered family a remote option. Loudon and Fairfax were full-time remote. There is no note on the bottom of the map saying that all VA districts offered family an in-person option.

But I don’t remember a single Fairfax or Loudon parent asking why they weren’t given the same consideration as the remote parents in Tazewell and Hanover.

Why did no Fairfax or Loudon parent sue the districts and demand equal treatment? Where were their lawyer representatives on Tucker arguing that parents in the minority should both get their choice of instruction? Where were parents with placards saying “GIVE US EQUAL RIGHTS!”

This seems the logical strategy. It might not have worked, but it’s….American.

These parents didn’t suffer in silence, of course. But their strategy was stupid!  They insisted on in-person instruction as logical, “following the science”. They demanded open schools as the only response.  They didn’t appeal for equal rights, they demanded their schools submit.  They argued that their need was oppression, a clear-cut case of government misuse of power. These parents insisted they were acting not just for their own needs but representing countless black and Hispanic children who were being devastated by closed schools and remote instruction.

But in fact, the schools were responding to the demands of the majority–among whom were most of the black and Hispanic children the in-person parents claimed to speak for. (Asians, too, but you know, they’re always left out of the discussion.)

Thousands of Twitter debates with these angry folks has convinced me they were all utterly clueless of their minority status. They didn’t see themselves as a minority. They couldn’t even conceive of the idea. Even today, most people talking about “closed schools and the damage done to our poorest children” are still ignorant of the irony: huge majorities of non-white kids had parents who wanted remote and got their wish.

Surveys repeatedly reveal that 70% or more of parents are satisfied with their schools’ responses to the pandemic. The Understanding America survey is one of a number of surveys showing that just 15% of parents wanted in-person instruction that their schools didn’t offer.

Fifteen percent.

A very loud fifteen percent.

A very white fifteen percent.

A very loud, very white fifteen percent that are, to this day, unaware they weren’t outraged on behalf of an oppressed majority.

This ignorance cost them any hope of victory. I don’t know if an equal treatment argument would have prevailed in court, but at least it would have been an argument that made sense. A quest for equity might have yielded some solutions. Maybe the district could have had one or two in-person schools and assigned willing teachers. (Sure, that would have incurred union pushback, but think of that argument: “the union is blocking willing teachers from supporting a  minority!” Much more effective than blaming unions for all closed schools, since the decisionmakers knew otherwise.)

But they couldn’t see past their bubbles. Most of the parents whose kids were trapped in remote live in highly diverse areas–but enclaved enough that they only think white. Everyone they knew–Republicans, even!–agreed with them. So instead of asking for equal rights, they screamed about government oppression.

Keep in mind: I wanted these parents to win. And yet I found their willful ignorance appalling. So ultimately, despite the power differential, I find it hard to be sympathetic.

Except… the other side was just as bad! Progressives (and here I include teacher union leadership) were dogmatic and obnoxious. Only MAGA delusionals could possibly want in-person instruction. Reasonable, responsible, intelligent parents would understand in-person instruction was too unsafe for at risk individuals. Selfish parents who don’t value the well-being of the community are unworthy of support.

Of course, most of the arguments in the media were between white people–white parents and white progressives opposing them. The non-white parents whose preferences were keeping schools closed didn’t often participate in these debates. No need to. They had what they wanted. Like most public debate, the battle to get out of remote instruction was conducted white on white.

Make of that what you will.

Principal Responsibilities in the Pandemic

Layfolk have little clue what principals do all day. For example, principals spend very little time evaluating teachers and that’s how they like it. Most of them aren’t terribly interested in outward metrics of student learning, like test scores.  Most school administrators only worry about problematic teachers on an exception basis: they don’t hear, they don’t care.

School administration is an intense, brutal management position that has a limited relationship to teaching. Issues that are largely unconsidered in the public perception are of fundamental and compelling importance to a school and its districts, dwarfing such piddling concerns as teacher quality. Merely excellent teachers aren’t terribly valuable in a principal’s currency. Without too much vanity, I can say that my students and colleagues alike consider me one of our school’s top three or four pure-play teachers. (meaning pedagogy, curriculum, delivery, effectiveness).  From a technical standpoint, I know my principal admires and appreciates my skill. From a school ecological health standpoint, my quality matters not at all. For years, my value to administrators was my ability to fill a teaching gap in any one of three subjects. Taking on a new responsibility six years ago bumped my stock skyhigh–which barely moved me into the lowest tier of valuable teachers. The top tier is peopled with the coordinators of school-wide initiatives: student activities, ELL testing, Title I.

Day to day operations combined with a series of one-offs rule the administrator world. Student discipline. Answering a tiny slice of the thousand emails received since 8 am. Parent phone calls. Meetings. Facility emergencies. District visits. Attending every single sporting event. Routine yearly or regularly scheduled events that nonetheless require planning, which at the high school level might look like: the master schedule, state tests, graduation, accreditation. Most of the intense planning occurs during the summer month when teachers and students are gone.

But these interrupt-driven tasks are actually a luxury permitted because the district manages the really important school responsibilities, the hulking beasts known as federal and state education mandates. These obligations are so essential and failure so threatening that the tasks are automated and audited by clerical or administrative staff at an expense of millions per year.

For example: attendance reporting is critical to school funding, audited at the district, county and state level. Principals aren’t usually evaluated on test scores. They are evaluated on whether or not their teachers take role. As in, if 90% or more of teachers in a school aren’t identifying any missing students on the expensive online attendance system and clicking “Save”, the principal will get some negative attention and an evaluation metric on that point for the next year.

Another important requirement:  a credentialed human being has to be in each classroom nearly every minute of the school day. As in the case of attendance management, districts spend millions each year to take this off individual administrators, usually with a teacher absentee system that allows substitute teachers to sign up for logged teacher absences. This frees principals from a task that would otherwise dominate their day–and, in fact, has dominated their days since the return from the pandemic occasioned a catastrophic sub shortage.

Then there’s the food issue. School researchers and reporters academically and casually use the term FRPL–the usual criterion for Title I designation–but far less attention is spent to the logistics of lunch time or, god spare me, breakfast time, particularly in elementary schools. It’s not just the money for food, but the scheduling, the hygiene standards, the workers, their pay, their hours, their substitutes….it’s a whole thing. No point in blaming federal mandates for this, mind you:  school lunch had  been in place for over fifty years in 1946, when Truman signed the National School Lunch program. (To this day I wonder why we never decided just to give school kids coupons for meals at local diners. Maybe just add the food cost onto SNAP cards? Sure would have been cheaper and more efficient.)

But the most significant requirement lurking at the edge of every principal’s worry horizon is special education. A behemoth of legal responsibility created by the unexpected collision between 1975’s special education law and 1991’s ADA, the legal mandate of IDEA and the civil right statute known as 504 have effects that were exacerbated by collisions created by medical advances and the APA’s ever-expanding DSM. The original special education law was intended for mildly “retarded” students but for the past 30 years, ever since it was retagged IDEA, the monster has created a whole slew of rights for kids who are a) severely mentally disabled, b) physically disabled (from minor to severe) and c) kids who have learning disabilities that were after the fact categorized as disabled. These are rights that only accrue to those with the magic three letter document known as an IEP, or the less-impressive but still powerful 504. (I would repeal IDEA in its current form, so take my pith with some salt.)

504 is primarily about disabilities that require equal treatment. IDEA covers “learning disabilities” that require equal educational opportunities. IDEA gradation goes from mild learning disability (executive function, auditory processing, ADHD) to low IQ but otherwise functional, to needs two paras and diapers and constant monitoring, to all that plus a $300k wheelchair, by which point school is little more than free institutional daycare.

Special education tasks are usually one-offs, only raising their head when a parent complains, which is often.  Ask any principal about the high-maintenance sped parents and they’ll have a list. Any time the parents are unhappy, well, just add more entries onto the day-to-day list–attend the IEP meetings, write careful emails, and so on.

So that was life before the pandemic closed all the schools. The method of teaching underwent a tremendous change,  but the responsibilities did not. Administration, on the other hand, had a pretty dramatic shift in responsibilities because they had to assume some of the responsibility for delivering legally mandated services.

First, the good news: they lost one responsibility, gained another that was easy to handle, and a lot of the day to day tasks got a lot easier.

Technology was the only new factor.  Ensuring Internet access was one of the easier tasks schools took on. In reality, students age twelve or over probably had a phone and at the high school level far too many students used their phone anyway. Younger than twelve, I’d argue online school wasn’t much use. Still, it was a popular method of looking productive. Look, we’ve passed out 300 Chromebooks. Easy metric.

Substitutes became a non-issue, at least on a daily basis. Most student disciplinary issues ended, once they got the zoom-bombing under control. No suspensions, no expulsions, and no teachers calling to remove students from the classroom.

Attendance would have been a problem except the binding federal and state mandates were first lifted and then redefined by legislative act or Betsy DeVos, depending.

The bad news: closing schools also closed the cafeterias.

Feeding students took up a great deal of a principal’s pandemic day. In urban and suburban regions, lunch distribution was a centralized activity; parents lined up at the school. I once counted a hundred cars–a quarter of a mile of cars–waiting for food delivery from an elementary school. In rural areas, where transportation is more of an issue, teachers themselves had to step in to distribute lunches. In either case, schools had to assume responsibility for feeding the kids that would otherwise be getting free meals from the cafeteria.  So in the early days of the pandemic,  food distribution took hours each day in the spring of 2020, and still consumed a lot of effort throughout the 20-21 school year.

The worst news: the special education beast rose to greet the pandemic monster and it’s still hard to figure out who won. I would love to know if anyone in education policy gave a thought to special education during those crazy weeks in March 2020. The binding, restrictive and costly laws that schools face were utterly unworkable. Shutting down infuriated one group of special ed parents, while staying open outraged the other.

There was no right answer for special education during the school shutdown era. Remote education screwed one big chunk of their population whose parents desperately wanted them in school ever day, while in-person education would trigger lawsuits from another chunk of parents who were convinced that covid exposure would kill their children.

Severely disabled students basically needed daycare and stimulus so, by definition, remote education violates their right to a free and appropriate education (FAPE). In Seattle, one of the earliest areas hit by the virus, a school district suspended all remote education for fear they’d be sued by parents or the federal government for failing to provide special education students equitable access. The Department of Education responded:

ensuring compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504), and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act should not prevent any school from offering educational programs through distance instruction

Translated: Districts can’t refuse to offer remote education using special ed mandates as an excuse–but districts still need to comply with special ed mandates.

Later, Betsy DeVos, who never met a public school she didn’t despise, issued guidance exempting schools from IEP compliance in the event of school closure but required compliance if only the school building was closed–that is, remote education was no excuse for IEP non-compliance.  Schools had to provide remote education and live with the fact that the feds could punish them for failing to meet special ed mandates.

Meanwhile, kids with any immunity issues had an instant ADA lawsuit were they required to attend in-person instruction–at the time, that is. Before the vaccine, everyone looked to the day when the  vaccine would eliminate the risks. Now we know there will never be any perfect protection, so the entire rationale that so terribly threatened schools is mostly a moot point. However, even after schools opened, sped parents whose child had an immune issue were furious at being forced out of remote–and some of them won lawsuits to gain that remote access.

The above is another logic point in support of my case that school districts heeded parents, not unions, in keeping schools closed. Yet another unacknowledged hierarchy: districts fear special ed parents far more than they fear unions. But even with the obvious violation of special education law and the threat of penalty from the federal government, schools still stayed in remote when that was what a majority of parents wanted. And even with the obvious risks of lawsuits that arose when schools were opened and no remote option was available, schools ended mask mandates when a majority of the parents called for it.

Based on their behavior, districts prioritized in this order: 1) overall parental preference, 2) special ed and 504 disability demands  3) in-person institutional needs of severely disabled students.

Generally, schools made the right bet. The lawsuits from angry sped parents whose severely disabled students were non-responsive and miserable all day haven’t been nearly as bad as originally feared. (Moreover, judges haven’t been totally sympathetic to the parents.) Settlements, on the other hand, in which the government just agrees to fork over compensatory services, are still an open issue.

So why am I nattering on about administrators, special ed, and lunch?

I’m trying to give a very rough, incomplete overview of actual school administrator responsibilities to give people  to a better grasp of school life during the pandemic. Principals had serious shit to deal with. They told teachers to figure out zoom and do their best. Even over the summer of 2020, it was district staff who focused on finding some curriculum they could use as talking points when asked what they were doing to help teachers with remote instruction.

For decades, we’ve been piling on additional responsibilities to public education. Finally, it turns out that during an emergency, actual education has to take a managerial back seat to those other demands.

In the main, teachers did much better than they were given credit for. I taught online nearly continuously from March 2020 to August 2021. I’m a good teacher. I adjusted my curriculum. Made sure my kids couldn’t easily cheat, and as much as possible eliminated cheating. And I’m here to tell anyone who’ll listen that teachers could not realistically cover the same material while ensuring student learning–that is, no cheating. We also couldn’t reasonable ensure student attention, or even presence. I’d say 70% of my kids learned 60% of a normal year. Teachers with more motivated students might be able to do better, but the harsh truth is (and those teachers will agree with me) using normal methods and teaching at normal pace meant the kids were cheating.

More administrative attention on teachers would not have improved results. If nothing else, the pandemic should lead people to question the value of virtual instruction. (Instead, since many parents are still terrified of covid19, they are booming in popularity.)

Principals had to completely reorient their world during the pandemic for remote instruction.Then consider the exponentially more hellish their lives became in hybrid mode, when some students are on campus and some still in remote, and teachers likewise.  Food and technology must still be delivered, but substitutes and student discipline get thrown back into the to-do pile. Additional levels of (ultimately needless) sanitizing. The only schools that would undergo hybrid would be blue state districts forced to comply with CDC restrictions as well as a white parent populations demanding in-person instruction (Vermont, sections of Connecticut and Washington). Polls showed that hybrid didn’t satisfy parents enough for the work it took–and teachers hated it.

My last article argued that parents, not unions, were the primary driver of school and district choices for remote or in-person education. By examining the administrative requirements of schools during the pandemic, it becomes clear why districts only opened if enough parents demanded it. If demand for in-person was weak, then the second group in priority, special ed parents with immunity concerns, as well as the hassles of hybrid, would prevail.

This puts the hybrid mode offered by NYC and Chicago in a different light.  While angry Republican moms bewailed the union control, the importance of white (taxpaying) parents, even as a minority, was such that these large districts went through the hassle of aggravating their unions and the expense of hybrid instruction (all that was possible given state governance) to at least partially assuage these constituents.

But generally, districts had no incentive to push for inperson instruction without parent support, even though they clearly saw the problems with remote learning.  Absent significant majorities for in-person instruction, remote would be the preferred delivery.

The Real Reason for School Closures

Now that we’ve finally moved on from covid19, can we also look honestly at what was driving school closures?

Most importantly, school board bureaucrats weren’t controlling a furious parent population anxious to get their kids back to school.

I knew closing schools was a horrible idea back in March 2020, and opposed everything short of return to in-person instruction. But even though the reporting on school closures was very solid, the narrative was universally wrong.

So I thought I’d go through the data to paint a more accurate picture. Schools were fully remote when a majority of parents in the school or district wanted them that way. For reasons no one entirely understands, parent choice was strongly influenced by one particular demographic factor. There is some variation on this, but it’s by far the most reliable predictor.

Where’s the rage?

NYTimes writer Jessica Grose described her surprise at recent polling showing that parents are generally happy with their public schools, even after the pandemic.

This isn’t new. Polls consistently showed all through the pandemic that 70-80% of parents  were satisfied with their schools’ response. Dozens of polls tell the same story.

Morning Consult has been polling on education throughout the pandemic.

In October 2020, they found that most parents polled wanted remote education and, of those parents who had a choice, most chose virtual learning.

In April 2021 they found that most parents (82%) were very or somewhat satisfied with how their school responded and both the general public and parents were surprisingly satisified with local and national teachers unions (well under 30% strongly or somewhat disapproved, while 48% (public) and nearly 60% (parents) strongly or somewhat approved of local and national teachers unions.

In November 2021, Democrats won the education question so thoroughly among pollsters that Morning Consult advised Republicans to focus on the economy instead.

Morning Consult also runs a tracking poll on parental preference for instruction method, comfort with inperson instruction, and beliefs on school reopening. While they only poll 400-500 adults, the results do not in any way support the preferred narrative. Even today, 21% of parents thought schools were opened too quickly and no more than 50% at any tme believed they were opened at the right speed–and at no point in time did more than 50% of parents think in-person instruction was the best solution.

All polls reject the narrative of Goliath school districts beating down the little David parents who finally banded together to fight.  Polls mostly show a very contented parent pool, consistently at 70% or over satisfaction, with relatively little unmet demand for in-person instruction. At a time when increased media attention was occupied by furious parents with megaphones, most parents were quietly satisfied with their schools’ response to a difficult situation.

Political Approval

Polls also seem to contradict the assertion that aggressively lenient covid19 policies were the road to political success. Covid19 hawk politicians seemed to have more voter approval than covid doves.

Gavin Newsom of California, who enforced remote instruction by mandate longer than any other state,  won a recall with just 49% approval on covid19–but a lot of that disapproval was from covid19 hawks pissed he hadn’t been more restrictive.  Recently he’s been polling at 60% on his covid19 handling. New Mexico’s Michelle Grisham, another governor who kept schools closed for a long time, doesn’t have great polling on crime and economy, but her covid policy approval is at 60%. Meanwhile, Florida’s DeSantis, much lauded by school opening proponents, saw his polls go up and down; while Florida is gaining a lot of transplants who like his policies, the natives are split. Texas’s Greg Abbott has tracking polls specifically on covid, and his approves were almost always lower than his disapproves.

If the policies that Abbott and DeSantis insisted on were as popular and obvious as their media fans would have it, shouldn’t they be getting raves for their policies?

Newsweek evaluated governor polls a year ago and found that “Democrats and Republican governors in blue states appear to have benefited the most from their approach to the crisis, while Republicans in deep-red states have largely suffered if they did not take strong action against the virus.”

So there’s a clear cognitive dissonance between the opinion rhetoric from all areas of the political and media arena (where even the covid19 hawks are defensive) and the public opinion polls, which seem to be largely satisfied with whatever policy their state has to offer, but not noticeably preferring aggressive re-openers.

The First Variable

Everything gets a bit clearer by tossing race into the narrative.

Race? Good lord, why think about race?

Well, for starters, pretty much everything about public schools involves race. It’s the first variable. It’s the one researchers and the media control for when they want to blame public education for its failure, and the one they ignore when it brings up questions no one wants to answer.

For another, like most issues involving education, viewing the issue through a racial prism is instructive–even if, as in this case, it’s hard to figure out why the racial aspect exists. Any poll on parent preference that controlled for race–which was most of them–showed the same results: white parents were consistently distinct from non-whites. They were the first to demand school openings, in-person instruction, and the first to reject mask mandates and vaccine mandates.

For once the journalist side of the media did its job in reporting the parental preference. There are dozens of articles like Angry White Parents vs. the Public School System:

Belying the issue of urban school districts’ hesitance to reopen for in-person learning amid outcries from mostly white and upper-middle class parents is a complex racial dynamic that underscores how the coronavirus pandemic was experienced by and has affected groups of people differently.

Or More non-white than white parents prefer remote learning for their children

 White parents are least happy with online learning. Only 34% of white families prefer fully remote school, compared with 58% of Hispanic, 59% of black, and 66% of Asian families.

Every state in the country  has produced articles or research discussing the racial imbalance of parent preference, that non-white parents were reluctant to return to inperson instruction and whites were eager and angry at any delays.  National surveys told the same story. By November 2020, 45% of “low-minority” districts throughout the country were offering full-time in-person instruction, while only 28% of “high minority” districts were–and “low minority” and “high minority” cover a huge range.

Combining this clear racial distinction in education model preferences, and then adding in the fact that most school districts don’t reflect America’s demography on a percentage basis, and much becomes clear. From the earliest days of the pandemic to today, white parents are disproportionately the covid-19 doves. This pattern is found throughout the country and holds up regardless of state covid19 policy, political affiliation, or relative union strength.

The race factor is often obscured to those who don’t go looking for it. Regional and school demographics don’t always run in tandem.  Many majority white counties have majority non-white school districts.  For example, Arlington County is 60% white, but the school district is 46% white. Fairfax County  is 50% white but its school district is 39% white.  San Francisco’s school district is 34% Asian, 31% Hispanic, 14% white, and 8% black, while the city itself is 39% white, 34% Asian, 16% Hispanic, and 5% black. These differences matter when the racial pattern of support for strict covid19 policies is so clearly predictive.

Sometimes seemingly inexplicable decisions make more sense when district demographics are taken into consideration. For example, Michael Brendan Daugherty was furious earlier in the year when two neighboring districts in Westchester County ended mask mandates while his district was still mandating them. But the two neighboring districts are 75% white and if MBD still lives in Mt. Kisco, his school district is just over 50% white.

Similarly, urban charters closed for as long as their public counterparts. In California, charter students were more likely to be in remote instruction than publics (63 to 55) and less likely to be in hybrid or full-time, a finding that Martin West’s excellent survey confirmed nationwide as well.

That charters were more likely to be remote than publics is very consistent with the racial preference in covid policy argument, as the charter student population is majority non-white, and thus more likely to favor remote instruction.

School Choice

Polls were the very first sign of different racial attitudes towards opening schools. But revealed preferences show the same story. Whenever parents were given a choice for in-person instruction–at least where we can track the data–white parents were far more likely to take that choice. Non-white parents were far more likely to stay in remote mode, even when state leadership was aggressively in favor of in-person instruction.

Florida and Texas were hailed by the conservative media and chastised by the mainstream media for their bold approach to opening schools. Meanwhile, New York City and Chicago were targeted by the conservative media and, eventually, the mainstream media for their delayed reopenings.

At various points in the year, Chicago, New York City, Houston, and a wide swath of central Florida either a) surveyed its entire parent population for enrollment intent or b) tracked each student by actual enrollment choice. All four areas provided datasets revealing parental preferences for in-person or remote instruction and included a wide variety of family demographics.

In September 2020, Houston polled all the parents in its districts on whether they were coming to school in person or remote. A central Florida newspaper collected school data attendance, remote vs in-person, for several districts in November 2020.  In March 2021, Chicago queryed its parents in k-8 schools on intent to enroll. New York City collected enrollment choices throughout the pandemic year.

Only one of these data sources coded parental choice by race. But all district and school demographic data is publicly available information and while it’s boring to look up every district and school for that information, it’s not difficult. That makes it possible to compare percentage of white students to percentage of students opting for in-person instruction.

A. 

B.

C.

D.

Logic will aid in matching  graph to region. Politics will not. In all cases,  white students are positively correlated with in-person instruction. Governance or unions or even time in pandemic cycle doesn’t affect the strong white preference for in-person instruction. (It’s theoretically possible that more white students in a school led more non-white kids to opt in and the white students to opt out, but I’m hoping it’s obvious that’s not the most likely explanation.)

Graph A: 5 central Florida counties (November 2020, actual enrollment, source).  While the data patterns have the widest range, I looked up several of the outliers and found a few inconsistencies. For example, Hegerty High School has a 66% white population with  only 3% in-person enrollment, according to the data record. But several stories  written just a couple months after the data record makes it clear that a much larger percentage is in school.  So some outliers are probably genuine, others might be errors.

While I’m on the topic of Florida, nowhere was the narrative more egregiously skewed than on the fabled state where “the schools are open”. As the data shows, many non-white schools were in remote mode. The two largest counties had similar patterns. Broward County (65% nonwhite) and Miami Dade County (90% nonwhite) refused to open their schools  at all until October and November.  By the end of the 2021 school year, half of Miami’s public school students and 55% of Broward County’s were still in remote. Both counties were described by Edweek as “open for wide-scale, inperson learning”. Nat Malkus of AEI introduced an instructional status tracker that scraped school district websites and determined how many districts in each state were offering in-person instruction. His tracker showed Florida’s districts as 100% in-person from its inception.

Both Edweek and Malkus may have been technically accurate, but when half of the two largest Florida districts were remote for the entire year and large chunks of central Florida were likewise choosing remote, perhaps these statements were a tad misleading.

30% of all Florida students were still in remote instruction in February 2021. Given the pattern above, it’s very likely most of those students were non-white.

Graph B: Houston (September 2020, enrollment intent, source). Texas governor Greg Abbott was very aggressive about opening schools, believing long before it became common knowledge that remote education was bad for students. In fact, the open nature of Texas schools was a compare-contrast case to New Mexico in Pro Publica’s heartrending story of a high school football star’s suicide in New Mexico. But even though “the schools were open in Texas”, Texas students of color returned to person in below average rates: ” 56% percent of Texas students on average returned to on-campus instruction during the school year, including 75% of white students, about 53% of Black students, 49% of Hispanic students and 31% of Asian students.”

Graph C: New York City (Jan 2021, actual enrollment, source). NYC has the least impressive trendline in my graphs given the fact that almost no school had a majority white population. But the NYC data source has something that none of the others have: a breakdown of all students’ in-person or hybrid selection by race, which makes another easy graph possible (I only do easy graphs):

One of every two white NYC students chose inperson, as opposed to 1 in 3 Hispanics, 3 in 10 blacks, and 1 in 5 Asians.

Graph D: Chicago (March 2021, enrollment intent, source). As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in  the New Yorker back in February,  the first time the Chicago teachers refused to return to class, roughly a third of Asians, Hispanics, and blacks signaled an intent to return to in-person instruction and of those numbers less than half of blacks and Hispanics and only 60% of Asians actually showed up. Meanwhile, two-thirds of whites opted in and 75% of that group actually showed.

Four regions. Two different covid19 policies. Same pattern. These are  parents making choices based on identical policies offered, often in the same schools.

Was Race a Proxy for Politics?

Nate Silver has speculated that the racial skew in education preferences is just reflecting political preferences.

Indisputably, Democrat governors were far more covid-hawkish than GOP governors, and GOP-run states were more likely to allow full-time in-person instruction. State political control was the second biggest factor in school opening decisions and in my telling, Democrat governors bear a huge amount of the blame for the angry white parents (a topic for a second piece I’m working on, assuming I ever finish this one).

But why were Democrats more cautious and controlling? Why were Democrats stressing safety long after the media had determined that covid19 didn’t pose much of a risk to young people? Perhaps because there weren’t millions of angry parents.

To disentangle this, begin with the fact that the progressive left went totally nuts on covid. I don’t know if it began as a reaction to Donald Trump’s desire to play down the pandemic or a genuine fear of a virus that wasn’t all that dangerous for most of us, but even today thousands, possibly millions of people are still covid hysterics freaked out that mask mandates are ending, and they all are the sort who post their pronouns.

The moderate left did not go totally nuts, or at least got less scared much faster. That’s why Democrat politicians are so terrified that a midterm meltdown awaits them, right?

But who is the moderate left?   Non-whites aren’t particularly progressive.  It’s well-established of late that progressive, “woke” Democrats are much more likely to be white, that non-white Democrats are more centrist and moderate.

Building out from that fact: if politics controlled choices, then centrist non-whites should behave more like moderate white Democrats,  favoring in-person instruction and less restrictive policies.  But the evidence shows exactly the opposite. So either nonwhites are more progressive than is currently thought, or non-white centrist Democrats are behaving differently from white centrist Democrats and politics is a less effective predictor than race.

To separate politics from race, I looked at three cases.

Case 1: how did Republican politicians respond to the demands of majority non-white districts? If these districts wanted in-person instruction, the politicians themselves would owe no allegiance to the teachers unions and would readily open the schools.

But data above from Florida and Texas show nonwhites actively opted for remote instruction. Couple that evidence with that from Mississippi, a state with weak unions and a governor who aggressively opened schools (and oh, by the way, had pretty terrible polls as a result). The six poorest school districts in Mississippi, all entirely African American students, were online for the entire 20-21 school year. Then consider Tennessee, where just 1 in 4 students started the 2021 year in remote. Yet in two largest schools districts, the remote rates were  46% (Nashville, 75% non-white) and 67% (Shelby County Schools, 88% nonwhite–and by the way, when allowed to go mask optional, just 2% took the deal in the early days).

GOP governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Democrat state, had to beg schools to open by March, and Baltimore City schools were still primarily remote for most of the year. Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, also a Republican running a blue state, first started pushing in November 2020 to convince districts to open, but 23% of students were still in full-time remote instruction in February.  Boston, the largest district, (15% white) didn’t start opening schools to the general population until March while Springfield, the second largest district (10% white),  delayed opening even elementary schools until April.

One of the more interesting and instructive examples of politicians responding to race-related covid hawkishness better than politics just took place in Virginia. Glenn Youngkin ran on ending the mask mandate. Virginia’s counties are school districts, for the most part, so it’s very easy to map county demographics, governor support, and–thanks to the Washington Post–whether or not the district went mask optional after Youngkin’s declaration but before the lawsuit was decided. The first graph shows the county’s decision to go mask optional or mask mandate based on the percentage of white students in the district. The second breaks down the decisions further by the district governor support. (Forgive the weird colors.)

As the Washington Post story noted, many districts were simply holding onto the mandate until the court case was decided, for all sorts of legal reasons I’ll try to discuss in my next piece on this. This probably explains the outliers.  Still, many Republican voting districts with majority non-white student populations held onto the mandate.

Case 2: What did schools do in  majority white Democrat states? If politics drove school policy, then Vermont (90% white) and Washington (63% white) should have had the same school closure patterns as more diverse Democrat states.

In Vermont,  just 14% of students were in remote and 30% of students were in school full time by February 2021. At no point in the entire 20-21 year were Vermont students more than 18% remote. High school students were rarely allowed to return full-time, but were overwhelmingly in hybrid mode.

In Washington,  statewide data shows that much of the state had open schools (light and dark blue).

The map on the left outlines the Trump voting counties. The northwest and a southeast corner of dark blue did not vote for Trump, but have plenty of dark blue. The map on the right is all the majority white districts which account for the dark and medium blue areas that the Trump voting regions miss.

Only with the white majority district map do you see how many districts had lukewarm Trump support and decent to high in-person instruction.

Thus, in at least two majority white states dominated by Democrats, school options were far more similar to Republican states and very unlike diverse Democrat states.

The final case, and the most difficult to hunt down, is the inverse of majority white Democrat regions. What did majority non-white counties that voted Republican do?  I found two, one that went each way.  Dodge City School District, a Republican area with a school districts that’s 80% Hispanic, saw 95% of kids choose in-person instruction despite very high covid19 rates. Another, Zapata County, despite governor Greg Abbott’s stated priority for open schools and inperson instruction, was one of the school districts that begged for more time in remote instruction and pushed the time to even offer in-person instruction, much less open the schools to everyone, to December. No helpful conclusions there.

Recently,  Report Card podcast’s Nat Malkus discussed his Return to Learn tracker that’s been updated to reflect mask mandates, and he goes on for half an hour about political views and never once mentions race.  It’s depressing how often people attempted to correlate political positions with covid19 policies. Many public schools are filled with students whose immigrant parents can’t vote. Moreover, school districts only occasionally overlap with counties. But school districts faithfully report their racial demographics. It’s much easier to correlate racial demographics than political ones. So easy a teacher could do it! For some reason few researchers wanted to go there.

It Wasn’t Unions

(I originally had a lot more rebuttal to the “unions closed the schools” narrative, but that was probably my obsession talking.)

The most common culprit offered up for continued remote education are teachers unions–although most union leaders think of their responsibility as credit, not blame. In fact, unions were at best tertiary.

Randi Weingarten has no power to influence the teachers in her union–and by the way, her union is an also-ran of the Big Two. (Quick, name the president of the really powerful union, the NEA. No googling.) Weingarten’s primary job is as fundraiser and showboat, not teacher representative. What Weingarten advises the CDC has absolutely no impact on school closures. Governors weren’t bound to follow the CDC, and many didn’t.

Several studies purported to find union strength as predictive of remote education, most notably Corey De Angelis’s study of September 2020.  DeAngelis used four metrics of union strength: right to work status, Fordham Institute ranking, percentage of union members in labor force and increase in union menbers at county level. If I’m reading this correctly, only the Fordham Institute ranking was directly related to teacher union strength. All but four of the right-to-work states are over 60% white. Two of the states with right to work laws, Texas and Florida, have clear patterns of large percentages of non-white students opting out of in-person instruction.

The Fordham Institute rankings are good, and when DeAngelis used this ranking, he found that a10% increase in “union power” made a school 1.3% more likely to close, which doesn’t seem to be all that much.

In any event, exceptions to the union story abound.

For all the complaints,  New York City, considered to have strong unions, opened schools relatively early in December, February, and  March for elementary, middle, and high school. Similarly union-strong Chicago opened schools by March. California didn’t open most of its schools until April and only after Gavin Newsom essentially bribed the school boards , not the unions, to open. Even then, at least three large districts stayed in remote education all year.

New York, California, and Illinois are ranked in the top ten for most powerful teacher unions states but had wildly different reopening schedules. One possibility: New York City and Chicago need their white parents for their tax base, and assuaging them to the extent possible would have to be a high priority. Meanwhile, California has different power bases depending on the location. In the northeastern part of the state, just a third of all students were in remote mode.  (Quick, guess what blue stands for in this California county map.)

Meanwhile, Montana, third on the list for most powerful teachers unions and with a Democrat governor, opened schools in May 2020 and by September 2020, most schools–not school districts, but schools–were open for full-time instruction. Ohio has strong unions but its schools were mostly opened in September, as were the aforementioned Vermont and Washington, both with strong unions.

DC, with unions so weak they can’t even get rid of performance pay, opened schools in February.

Texas and New Mexico, whose school policies were compared in the Pro Publica football piece, both have very weak unions yet had entirely different re-opening policies at the state level. (These two states are an interesting contrast, more on this some other time.)

North Carolina has very weak unions, and is over 60% white. School boards were given the choice at the beginning of the 2020 school year to go full remote, hybrid, or full-time in person. Last amateur graph, I promise:

Another study finding that union strength correlated with closures found that districts with Catholic schools were more likely to open for in-person learning. As it happens, North Carolina isn’t terribly Catholic, but its recent Hispanic influx has increased the numbers over the past 20 years. There are 46 Catholic private schools in the state. Forty of them are in districts that chose remote; six were in districts that opted for in-person. Of those six schools, 5 were in counties that were 50-80% white. One was an outlier, just 34% white.

Why?

I don’t know why white parent preferences varied so distinctly from the others. Nor do I “blame” non-white parents for taking the remote option, even though that preference clearly appeared to have damaged educational outcomes for low income black and Hispanic children.

As Andy Smarick wrote a year ago, making many similar observations to the ones here: “the story hasn’t been politics, unions, laziness, risk-aversion, or ignorance. It’s been parents, pluralism, and self-government.”

A year ago. His article was largely ignored, as were the many polls and stories reflecting the fact that schools were in fact responding to local parent demand.

How would things have changed if the debate had honestly acknowledged the reason for school closures? Both sides were actively distorting reality. For every “open the schools” advocate, there was a matching “covid19 is dangerous” proponent. But in fact, the correct answer to “open the schools” was “the majority of parents in your district disagree with you”–a response the covid19 hawks didn’t want to give because they wanted to present school closures as “science”.

Perhaps an honest discussion would have gone into when and how it was easier and less expensive to default to closed schools, and when the odds went the other way. Perhaps acknowledging the schools never should have been closed would have been helpful and, having made this mistake, that parents should never have been given a choice to keep their kids home once schools were open again.

The irony, of course, is that most of the loudest voices advocating for opening schools are often in favor of giving parents a choice.

I’m not interested in blame. I’m interested in making sure people understand what happened because lord knows I don’t want this to happen again.

But that’s for the next article. (At least, I hope so. I’m a slow writer.)

(Note: I edited this after I posted it, focusing all the union content in one area, and I added a review of the Corey DeAngelis study. No other changes were made. I just realized I was getting a tad obsessive about the “union closed the schools” narrative).

2020 Thankfulness.

I’m thankful for my brother.

On January 22, I was sitting in stopped traffic at 9:30 at night, thanks to two closed lanes on a major interstate. I’d been at work trying to get grades in shape while finishing the final for the next day, and was cursing my aversion to road tolls and the shorter trip home–I do what I can to deny the government money, but I’d have been home half an hour by now if I’d paid. Suddenly the world seemed to explode. I remember Tom Petty’s “American Girl” was on the radio and thinking I’ll never hear a song in this car again because some motherfucker just killed it. (Yes, readers, my first thought during what turned out to be a four-car pileup was that my beloved 2001 Honda Accord with 300K miles on it was no more.) The motherfucker in question was a county bus driver who never bothered to brake.

Four hours later, when the tow trucks finally came to clear up the mess and I’d made it to my mother’s house (the closest to the accident), staring at the ceiling from my spot on her couch mulling a  a grim and expensive month or three. Either I cut out of school at the semester cutover, when I get new students, all to buy a car in a hurry, or I uber to work, which would be $100/day. (You might think the bus company would cut a quick check but my instincts said no, and I was right).  Yes, of course, I should have been grateful I was unharmed but I’m a pessimist. At 6 am, my couple hours sleep was woken by a text from my brother, already at work, wondering why my car hadn’t been in the driveway. I’d gotten lucky, perhaps? Alas, no, I said, and texted back a picture of my car.  He called. “Hey, my car just sits here all day. Want to borrow it?”

And so for the next two months I got up early, drove him and his bike to his store, and then to school. He rode his bike home and lost ten pounds. I got a blissful break from having to buy a car in a hurry. Even once the shutdown ended my commute, his car was mine to borrow whenever needed.

I pay most of the bills of our household outside of rent, as my salary is nearly double his, but when he had a chance to offer something of value, he didn’t hesitate. I didn’t buy a car until late July.

I’m thankful for all my family.

It was my stepfather’s mechanic who mentioned he had a 2005 Honda Civic for $4000. I said no when my stepfather called. Automatic transmission? Civic not Accord? Pish tosh. He said I should think for longer. Five minutes later I called him back and said yes. The case may never settle.  I had 4K in the bank. This was a nobrainer. Defying his daughter’s social distancing orders, my stepdad and my mom drove me to check out the Civic, which I bought on sight. It’s a good car.

I’m thankful that my sister mostly ignores the similar social strictures of her daughter, my niece, an adorable nurse who has been traumatized by her time in the covid-19 wards. I”ve defied nonsensical travel guidelines to visit twice: first in June, now for Thanksgiving.

I’m thankful my father is doing well as can be expected, given that he spent six weeks in the hospital in February and March. When he came home, he did so well that by early July, he was bored. When I called and told him that my brother and I would like to come see him and take him on a vacation but, you know, covid-19, you’re 83 with every known risk factor and even if we could get in to take a test, the waiting period would render it useless. My dad said unhesitatingly, “Screw that. Let’s go fishing.” We went on a two-week trip through Table Rock Lake and Bull Shoals. Caught nothing, although my casting improved dramatically. Epic vacation.

I’m thankful my son is a good father and husband, even if it means  I can’t go see my grandkids because his wife is, well, clearly not of the same mindset as my family, and the kids can’t leave the house because she’s afraid they’ll get covid19. He backs her play loyally. Or maybe she’s convinced him. Whatever. I’m happy he’s happy.

I’m thankful for my family’s economic good fortune.

No one in my family is suffering from these idiotic pandemic shutdowns. It’s truly a blessing that we’re all still gainfully employed. Hell, my investments are even slightly ahead.

I’m thankful for my students.

Back in September late one night, endlessly grading, I noticed Valerie hadn’t turned in anything in a week and suddenly realized I had no idea what Valerie looked like.

There’s one mirror in my house, in the bathroom. Until the shutdown, I never spent more than a second or two seeing my face, usually when brushing my teeth. Now I spend all day looking at myself in a zoom shot but can’t summon a mental image of my students–a tiny thumbnail impression, maybe, or their avatar.

I asked Valerie to office hours. She kept her camera off until I told her the missing assignments weren’t a problem, that I just needed to know how she was doing. Could she turn on the camera? She was crying. She didn’t understand anything. She was so busy with her English assignments. She kept putting my work off because she didn’t know what to do or how to catch up. She listened, she paid attention, she just didn’t get it. I told her to breathe, to not worry about catching up, and to turn in the next assignment no matter how much wasn’t done so I could see what she needed.

Valerie nodded and smiled. She turned in the next assignment. And the one after that. She’s doing well now. And I know what she looks like.

My attendance rates in all three classes are 100% most days. No chronic absences. No cuts.  All of my students get enough work done to pass, most are learning and improving. Some are thriving.

I am so thankful they come back, day after day, in a world where their lives and opportunities have been traded off in a mostly doomed effort to save the elderly.

I wish their faces were all in my memory.

I’m thankful I’m a teacher.

I’m so angry at this wasted year. My own life is splendid, as you might infer from the regular mention of vacations.  But the idiocy of politicians, the media, the “public health experts” who are doing their best to destroy the young and the poor, to obliterate small businesses by forcing them closed….enough. I’m not going to rant again. And I know they can only achieve this destruction with our permission. Far too many people are terrified of a generally mild illness, embrace the shutdowns, wear their masks in the belief they protect, blame the spread on non-compliance. I await the day those people, the compliers, the believers, realize what a waste all this is. Or the vaccine. Whatever gets life back.

Until then, I find great comfort in my job.  Like many other teachers, I work constantly to improve my lessons, to reach more students, to find ways to help them learn. How much worse would all this be if I were forced to watch the effect of these hated shutdowns, do nothing? If nothing else, I can focus my energy on making education something enjoyable and productive for my ninety or so students. I’m grateful for that privilege.

I’m thankful you’re reading.

Hope your Thanksgiving was as good as mine.

Tradeoffs in the Era of Covid-19

Lawmakers Want to Reopen America, But It May Not Be So Easy–Charles Fain Lehman
No One Is In Charge of Reopening the Country–Michael Brendan Dougherty
Curve-flattening a result of behavioral change, not central planning–Jonah  Goldberg
The important question isn’t when the government is going to lift restrictions–Megan McArdle
Experience Counts When It Comes to Preparing a Population for a Viral Threat-Jim Geraghty

(There are many other such pieces on the center and center/right; I just picked a few at random.)

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I am deeply skeptical of the totality of the nation’s shutdown. End arena attendance of professional sports, sure. Close Disneyland, yah. Halve occupancy rates of popular bars, require people to spread out when waiting in line, by all means. I’m very much in favor of closing airports, which effectively quarantines a lot of the country geographically. Require schools, gas stations and restaurants to devote considerably more labor to bleaching and cleaning restrooms several times a day, and close public access restrooms in most other retail outlets.

I’m not a “floomer”, although I really despise the smug way that people use that term. I worry a little bit about getting the bad form of the virus, but not as much, say, as I dread takeoffs when flying. My concerns revolve more about my mom and stepdad, less about my dad because he’s in a safe state.

But I firmly believe we should not have closed the schools. We should not have shut down most retail outlets, nor should we have forced restaurants to take out only. Give me back Starbucks!

The casual inequities of the shutdown really piss me off. It’s absurdly unfair that Walmart and Target, by virtue of four or five aisles of groceries, are allowed to sell pillows, picture frames, clothes, and electronics, while Best Buy, Staples, Kohls, and Macys are forced to close for months. It’s ridiculous that Home Depot and Ace can sell plants and seeds, but nurseries have to do online orders and curbside pickups.   I’m just grateful I don’t live in the state where “that woman” doesn’t let you buy mosquito repellant and seeds even from Walmart.

My attitude towards the virus is undoubtedly shaped in part by the same mindset that leads to my confusion that there are people in this world who don’t just get flu shots, but actually schedule them in advance. I worry about plane crashes and electrocution, occasionally fear the idea of getting cancer. But on a personal level, I simply don’t find a brand new virus that probably won’t kill you but might worth the level of reaction we’ve had forced on us by the governors, whipped on by a frantic media who clearly worries a hell of a lot more about germs than I do.

I am also personally outraged by the casual disregard those pushing the shutdown have for the nation at large. Shutting down the economy creates winners and losers, while the media and politicians pretended that business as usual = loser and shutdown = winning.

But such an outlook is manifestly incorrect, and before long people began (very hamhandedly) pointing out that we are bankrupting our future, hurting the children of our society, to save the elderly and the “vulnerable” (as if children aren’t vulnerable). But we aren’t, as all the same people will acknowledge, saving the elderly and the vulnerable, because without a vaccine or a cure the virus is out there and will wreak the same havoc on the elderly and vulnerable if it reaches them in six months instead of today. Thus all we achieved by shutting down, we were told constantly, is “flattening the curve”, saving our hospitals and our ventilators so they could be spread out to serve more covid-19 victims.  Except ventilators turned out to worsen symptoms, or close to it, so doctors aren’t using them as muchand we never had a shortage anyway. Meanwhile, hospitals are laying off staffbecause no covid19 patients, but no elective surgery, so no money.

I am grimly amused by the massive media layoffs which is not fair of me, especially since the layoffs aren’t really hurting the worst culprits. But here is my meanest thought: the media shutdown would have acknowledged considerably more complexity involved in shutting down the economy if the millions of opinion columnists, star reporters, and anchors  screaming for shutdown had realized how completely their industry would be clobbered when they got their wish.

The reaction to Covid-19 has split various communities of like folks. The GOP has certainly been split between those who were aggravated we didn’t shut down in late February to those who think it’s time to get back out there and eat, drink, and drive to work.  There are Dems who are noticing it’s not quite that awful, notably Kevin Drum, although most of them are all blaming Trump for, whatever. The skeptic community has been riven, and I’ve blocked more people on Twitter for their tedious lectures in the past month than in 8 years. I’ve been pretty far out there on the “this is all overkill” path and have received a number of private DMs from people saying they agree with me but are worried they’ll be professionally hurt by saying so.

But put aside what we should have done. We should reopen now. Not entirely. Not without restrictions. But we should reopen schools, stores, restaurants, and coffeeshops. We should reopen parks at all levels of government, let beaches have people, and let gas stations provide restrooms, again with restrictions. We should provide hotel rooms not just to the homeless, but to elderly and vulnerable populations that don’t live alone and might not survive their family returning to normal.

And when there are calls to reopen society, there are responses like those linked above, which fall into two categories.

First: whether or not governments reopen the economy, the public will have the final say. And the public isn’t ready to go back to work, school, and restaurants. Polls support this view. If you believe those polls are representative of actual behavior should the government reopen–well, all I can say is, you underestimate Americans’ capacity to tell pollsters what they want to hear. I think easily 30-40% of any given community will go running right out to shop, eat, drink, and beach/hike within a day of the order. And after a few days, another 40% will be right behind them. I’d guess 20 or maybe 30% of the population will claim they will “socially distance” for a while longer, but when you question them closely it turns out they go to stores early and restaurants late, after the crowds. Business will be down at first, sure. Millions are out of work. But most Americans will get out there. The only thing that’s keeping them from this now is the government fiat.

Suppose, however, that I am wrong and only a few people leave their homes, so restaurants and stores will still go bankrupt. Well, so what? Isn’t that what we’re spending trillions of dollars to help? Isn’t there a case for government support helping those businesses who get out there to help our economy recover, start rebuilding our tax base? Let the people who want to go out and shop, eat, drink, and recreate get started on it–again, with restrictions.

And if the reply is yes, but those people are going to transmit the coronavirus if they go out and about? Well, then, you’ve just shifted the debate again, haven’t you? If you don’t want to reopen the economy, then just say so.

Second: there are those who create these laundry lists of requirements that have to happen to end the shutdown. First, we need more tests. Then we need to use technology to track down infected contacts so we can stick them in hotel rooms. Then we need infrastructure to enforce and track all this and then we need to close everything down again in case we have a recurrence.

Wrong. We don’t need surveillance. We don’t need tests. We don’t need to build out an infrastructure. All of these things are nice. But we can do our best with what we have and move on, continuing to build capabability. Surveillance and tests are what the laundry list writers want, and they’re just continuing to confuse their preferences with what America needs. Generally, these are the writers who say things like: the American people had no idea how much covid19 was going to change their lives. There’s no returning to normal soon.

Well, no. Covid19 didn’t change Americans’ lives. Forced shutdowns did. And the Americans who don’t think these all-encompassing shutdowns were necessary don’t blame covid19. They blame governors. The media. By and large, these people appreciate Trump’s resistance to total shutdown and his enthusiasm for moving back to something approaching normal, whether or not it’s his call.

I don’t want old folks to die. I appreciate the need to protect the elderly and the vulnerable from a new virus that’s cutting a swathe through our population. But make no mistake: we are privileging the security of the vulnerable by purchasing the well-being of the youngest generations not just in terms of immediately lost education but also in the huge budget cuts that schools and other institutions will face because of the forced bankruptcy we’ve just imposed on much of America.  The public discourse is not acknowledging the tradeoffs involved in minimizing covid-19 deaths over the wellbeing of those who face minimal risk. People who argue for balance are ignored or mocked.

Change is coming. I hope it’s soon.