When schools should have opened during COVID remains an open question
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It has become an accepted factoid among people who think that public authorities overreacted to the COVID pandemic that jurisdictions that waited past autumn 2020 to re-open schools inflicted a great deal of damage on students. Such arguments tend to cite the learning loss that has occurred since COVID, which is certainly real. The problem, though, it that in itself tells us nothing definitive about the effect going online per se, since many jurisdictions did open in fall 2020. (One problem with COVID discourse is that blue state pundits and academics tend to ignore the many places in the US where COVID mitigation basically ended in summer 2020.) We now have relevant data, and as of now it does not show that districts that opened early had substantially better educational results:
2/ The results show little correlation if any between test results and duration of school closures. The results are just out. And perhaps deeper analysis will show them. But at least on initial review they’re not there either on a state or school district basis.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 24, 2022
4/ Every time we hear new details about the academic or emotional challenges kids are having today there’s a chorus of people who attack teachers unions, or school boards or blue states about closures. But there’s another possibility: that students are suffering …— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 24, 2022
6/ credentialed sociologists and economists. It may be less true than a lot of us think.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 24, 2022
California, which has come under particularly harsh criticism, fared better than the libertarian paradise led by America’s COVID Governor:
If you just care about partisan politics one interesting comparison is that across this multi-year span, California & Illinois have done better than Florida. pic.twitter.com/DfvEII8dvZ— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 24, 2022
As JMM says, one thing that Ron DeSantis’s cheering section misses is that while the pre-COVID status quo is certainly better than Zoom instruction, “normal” education was never actually an available option once the pandemic started. It seems very likely that the pandemic itself, and not marginal decisions about when to open schools, caused most of the learning loss. And certainly the “anybody who opposed school re-openings in fall 2020 is an idiot because DATA” crowd needs to be a lot more modest.