Closing Elementary Schools Over Covid-19 is Anti-Science
By: Bj Campbell
Tags: Education, Culture War, Politics, Covid 19

I am alarmed by the public’s pivot away from sound science on reopening schools, particularly elementary schools, which are essential to single parents and two income households who do not have other childcare options. There is a broad consensus within the medical, scientific, and policy community that schools are one of the safest things we can reopen, but the culture war has bitten the reopening in many places, and there are many possible reasons why. Let’s first take a look at the consensus, and then speculate why the consensus is being ignored by the liberal faction in the United States.

Broad Consensus

This is merely a snapshot of the consensus, and is not comprehensive.

The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly recommends opening schools, and issued ordinary and reasonable guidance to do so. (American Academy of Pediatrics)

https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/clinical-guidance/covid-19-planning-considerations-return-to-in-person-education-in-schools/

The Harvard School of Public Health mirrors the AAP on this topic.

They have come to these conclusions because of the broad scientific consensus on how this virus affects children. Children do not get infected as easily, and closing schools will have a comparatively small impact on overall transmissivity of the disease. (Nature)

Even though child cases are mild, and only make up 5% of overall cases, when you break down the cases among children, elementary schoolers only account for 15 percent of the child cases. (0.75% of total cases) Less than 1% of children require intensive care when they do catch it. (UCLA, Ohio State)

https://www.uptodate.com/contents/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-clinical-manifestations-and-diagnosis-in-children

Numerous international contact tracing studies show that children are not super spreaders. (British Medical Journal)

In countries with comprehensive testing and contact tracing such as Iceland, they have not found a single instance of children spreading Covid-19 to adults.

Children are infected mainly from inside family clusters. In a Switzerland study, 92% of family cases showed adults were symptomatic before the children, and they could not confirm child to adult transmission happened in the remaining 8% of cases. (American Academy of Pediatrics)

In a Chinese study, 95.6% of child infections were shown to be originating from an adult family member, and no evidence was found revealing transmission of the virus from children to other children or to adults. (American Academy of Pediatrics)

“The evidence to support national closure of schools to combat COVID-19 is very weak and data from influenza outbreaks suggest that school closures could have relatively small effects on a virus with COVID-19’s high transmissibility and apparent low clinical effect on school children. At the same time, these data also show that school closures can have profound economic and social consequences.” (The Lancet)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30095-X/fulltext

Extensive research into the “summer learning gap” shows that socioeconomically marginalized communities achievement is more damaged by gaps in schooling than highly socioeconomically performing communities. (American Sociological Review)

German studies of schools that reopened in the spring showed no spreading between children, no hot spots developing, and a low incidence of children becoming infected even when they had an adult family member infected.

And then we have some media spots, even from far left sources, in which epidemiologists unanimously state they are sending their children back to school.

These links and references aren’t comprehensive. There is a wealth of additional material available on the safety of opening schools, particularly elementary schools, and on the damage that will be done by keeping them closed. Despite the consensus, we have seen a very nasty culture war outbreak the past two weeks in the USA over the topic, which has stranded many school systems in a predicament where they literally cannot open. If they do, and a single student is identified with Covid-19, the anti-school faction will protest, demonstrate, and sue in court for the schools to be closed. Even school systems which were providing “face to face” and “virtual” options for education, such as my school system here in Atlanta, were forced by activists and protesters to close.

A frequent mantra has developed in some of these protest circles that schools should remain closed until the entire county or region has “no new cases of Covid-19 for fourteen days.” Anyone from epidemiologist to data nerd agrees that that means “never open schools again” — a prospect that will decimate single parent employment and destroy marginalized communities where single parenting is more prevalent.

One of the most curious things about this culture war outcrop is the fact that it is being championed by American liberals, when the factional argument in Europe was exactly reversed. In Europe, the liberals were the pro-school faction, and fought to reopen them against their more conservative counterparts.

What’s Actually Going On?

I have heard a lot of talk from the liberal tribe that teachers are concerned for their health, and that teachers have a high comorbidity rate that alarms them. When I’ve seen references to the comorbidity rate among teachers, obesity is included, and teachers are referenced to have a 40% comorbidity rate. But the US obesity rate alone is 42%, so teachers aren’t unique here. And given the science linked above, teaching elementary school is a far safer job than, say, being a Longhorn Steakhouse waitress. In an elementary school you see the same group every day, and that group is shown not to spread disease in the way adults do. Serving a random assortment of adults is obviously far more dangerous, and retail is open.

I know many parents across political tribes who think this is a money grab by teachers. The push to keep schools closed in many districts was made by the teachers unions, and that the push only started after they negotiated their annual salary contracts. Once their salaries were set in stone, they pushed to work from home, without regard to student outcomes. Some teachers in my district have even reached out to parents on the sly and offered to teach face to face on the side, while still collecting their salaries from the district. Double dipping, in effect, being paid to push out curricula on the one hand and being paid to watch children on the other. I don’t now how prevalent this is, but it seems possible.

I have conservative friends who believe this is purely a political ploy, to make everything about life in the United States as god-awful as possible before the election, and that schools will be reopened immediately if Biden wins. I am a deeply cynical person, but I don’t think even I’m that cynical. That said, time will tell. If this is true, and it’s obvious, then it stands to backfire spectacularly.

I think what’s going on is much more simple, and fits fairly well within the prior HWFO analyses of other culture war freakouts on social media. Our media exposure is limited to the things shared within our echo chamber, and our media sources do not write impartial articles because impartial articles do not generate traffic. Further, our propensity to share articles is heavily weighted towards articles that give us anxiety instead of articles that make us feel safe. Finally, our propensity to share articles is steered by the need to virtue signal a tribal alliance to our peer group, and steered by attacking or blaming the other tribe for our problems, even if those problems are self-inflicted. They think they’re right because their bubble is telling them they’re right.

What we are witnessing, I think, is a very elaborate group dynamic version of the transactional game Eric Berne MD described as “See What You Made Me Do” in his seminal book “Games People Play, The Psychology of Human Relationships.” At a personal level, we might see this game manifest between a husband and a wife, where the couple is arguing in the kitchen, the wife breaks a dish, and then points at the dish on the floor and says to her husband “see what you made me do!” I broke the thing and it’s your fault that I broke it. I have heard this sort of language come from the mouths of liberals I speak to more than once — they would be okay with opening schools if “the leadership changed.”

The dynamic is as if every liberal were at once in a codependent marriage with Donald Trump.

This also explains why the left-wing factions in Europe did not manifest this behavior — in fact they manifested the opposite. European political systems, whether one agrees with them or not, are largely still functional marriages instead of dysfunctional ones.

The Only Option

Unfortunately, none of these attempts at an analysis helps single parents or dual income parents with elementary school children. They, their families, and their children are completely torpedoed by this culture war outbreak, and will remain so indefinitely. Urban districts are never going to have two straight weeks with no new cases of Covid-19. If every school shuts down after a single case, schools will spend more time shut down than not. If there is a threat of legal action, schools will remain closed because they cannot afford the lawyers necessary to open. The only possible return to school in these districts is if my conservative friends are right, and it’s a giant cynical ploy that will be wiped away on November 4th. And even then, that presumes a Democratic win in the national election, which is not a sure thing.

The only option single parents and two income parents have is to abandon public school entirely, or to hire someone to perform the “kid watching” duties elementary schools performed before they fell into dysfunction, while doing distance learning through the school. And since many don’t have the money to do so, they need a voucher. Ideally one that comes from the school system itself, since it is the school systems which have abdicated their responsibility and are not providing the product the taxpayers bought with their taxes.

Here is such a plan, and a petition. If you are a single parent, or in a two income household, consider signing it.