Perspective: Democrats knew school closures were disastrous

Imagine the following scenario. As the 2024 Republican presidential primary draws closer, education emerges as a key GOP flashpoint. Instead of typical debates over vouchers and charter schools, however, an unexpected rift opens up over school closures. In this alternate universe, it was the Democrats who prioritized school reopenings during the pandemic, while many conservatives remain angry over policies that they perceived as putting children at risk.

Meanwhile, Democrats capitalize on internal Republican divisions over the issue, characterizing the GOP’s support for remote learning as “anti-teacher” and oblivious to potential learning loss from prolonged school closures. In her impassioned congressional testimony, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten says, “We spent every day from February [2020] on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre touts the left’s record on reopening schools, saying, “That was the work of ... Democrats in spite of Republicans.” Union officials and education policy experts emphasize the disproportionate impact of school closures on poor and minority communities.

You’ll notice this counterfactual neatly reverses the ideological polarities of the real school reopening debate. But this parallel timeline is less outlandish than you might think. The statements from Weingarten and Jean-Pierre are 100% accurate. Now that the disastrous consequences of school closures are staring us in the face, the Democratic Party and its political allies are scrambling to distance themselves from a policy they once supported.

American school closures really were an astonishing outlier among peer nations. From Sweden to New Zealand, the duration and severity of pandemic lockdowns varied significantly, but every Western country reopened schools much faster than the United States. So why did American children endure such lengthy school shutdowns? And what lessons can be drawn from our catastrophic experiment in remote learning?

The first and most obvious lesson is that future school closures should be avoided. It would be impossible to summarize the negative consequences of remote learning in one short article, but here are a few of the lowlights. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report, commonly cited as the nation’s report card, shows that several decades worth of gains in eighth grade reading and math were reversed by a few pandemic school years. Not coincidentally, Oregon quietly waived math and literacy tests as a requirement for high school graduation in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Students who miss class for extended periods create problems because they’re not used to the rhythms of a normal school day, which explains the post-COVID rise in disciplinary issues and chronic absenteeism.

Beyond the educational costs, remote learning also wreaked havoc on students’ psychological well-being. Spikes in teenage depression and related mental health problems are strongly correlated with school closures. Lack of in-person interaction with teachers and peers pushed children to spend more time on social media, another plausible culprit for rising rates of teen depression, and less time with friends and loved ones. Even if their career and educational prospects recover from school closures, the pandemic generation will have to live with the social consequences of going online for the rest of their lives.

The second lesson is that teachers unions, policymakers, and pundits who opposed school reopenings or soft-pedaled their reservations about remote learning must be held to account. Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers, and other powerful unions did everything possible to keep schools shuttered during the pandemic. They should not be allowed to rewrite the record.

Neither should public health experts and respectable centrists. As memories of the pandemic fade and the remote learning hangover persists, a new center-left consensus has gradually emerged. Yes, closing schools was, in retrospect, a poor policy decision. But who could have known that remote learning would be this bad?

“One of the things that we got wrong is the schools,” said Carlos del Rio, dean of the Emory University School of Medicine. “And we hope we don’t make this mistake again.”

A pundit guest on the popular Bill Simmons Podcast, a reliable barometer for conventional wisdom whenever the topic strays from sports, carefully conceded the need for a “reevaluation of the relationship between COVID lockdowns and schools.” This “mistakes were made” line has been echoed by various respectable media outlets.

Yet if remote learning was a truly unforeseeable disaster, why did so many affluent Americans in the same blue districts consumed by COVID hysteria immediately abandon online classes?

As public schools shuttered, private schools that remained open experienced surging enrollment. Well-to-do parents hired private tutors, experimented with homeschooling, or formed “pandemic pods” with other families. While California public school students suffered online, Gov. Gavin Newsom sent his children to a private school that offered in-person classes.

These were not the actions of people unsure about the efficacy of remote instruction. Say what you like about America’s class of affluent, overextended helicopter parents, but they are exquisitely attuned to anything that might hamper their children’s educational prospects.

These same parents, meanwhile, are wildly overrepresented among America’s media and pundit class. If remote learning wasn’t good enough for Junior’s college transcript, why would it be good enough for families who couldn’t afford to enroll their children in private schools?

One curious artifact of the pandemic era is that the United States’ wealthiest districts stayed closed for longer, on average, than poorer districts, despite alarmist claims that public schools lacked the resources to reopen. The private school safety valve allowed middle-class parents who should have been clamoring for a return to in-person instruction to insulate their children from the worst consequences of remote learning while indulging in performative COVID hysteria.

There is one final lesson to be drawn from the COVID schooling debate, and it is a depressing one. If the downsides of remote instruction were obvious from the beginning of the pandemic, why did the U.S. endure such prolonged school closures? Why was our approach to remote instruction such a remarkable outlier among peer nations?

The depressing answer, hinted at by the alternate history above, is that antipathy toward Trump overcame private reservations about online learning. One divisive president was all it took to make the party of public education abandon public schools.

Every developed country experimented with school closures; only American children endured such lengthy stints online. In the U.K., a government that enforced some of the harshest lockdown measures still managed to keep children in class for most of the pandemic. In Sweden, a center-left coalition opened schools over the objections of right-wing populists. Under a Democratic president — or even a traditional Republican — it is likely that respectable left-wing opinion would have quickly coalesced around a return to in-person instruction.

Trump’s talent for enraging his critics transformed what should have been a measured debate about how to reopen schools quickly under challenging conditions into a political loyalty test. If you publicly advertised your skepticism of remote learning, you were at risk of being labeled a Trumpist, or at least politically suspect.

Parents and pundits who intuited the downsides of online classes early but couldn’t bring themselves to support a Trump-endorsed policy squared this circle by quietly enrolling their children in private schools.

Now that Trump is safely out of the Oval Office, media figures, unions, and politicians are belatedly grappling with the consequences of prolonged school closures.

They should not be allowed to obscure their complicity in a disastrous and eminently avoidable mistake. Remote learning was never a good fit for young people, who thrive on social interaction and are easily distracted online. It’s just too bad we had to wait for Trump to leave office to acknowledge this obvious truth.

Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.

Comments are open to Gazette subscribers only

Ryan McKibben, ChairmanChristian Anschutz, Vice ChairmanChris Reen, PublisherWayne Laugesen, Editorial Page EditorPula Davis, Newsroom Operations Director