Getting schools open again can be done, but it\u2019ll take a lot of money and a real plan.<\/b>
\nWhen Roy Romer took over as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District after three terms as governor of Colorado in the 1990s, he faced a daunting challenge. The district was 150,000 desks short, forcing kids to use classrooms in shifts on chaotic year-round schedules. It didn\u2019t work well, he says, especially for kids who were already behind and struggling with difficulties at home. He decided there was no alternative but to try to get the facilities students needed.
\u201cWe built 137 schools, made it available so every child could have a place in the classroom, and massively changed the course of instruction in LA,\u201d Romer said.
It cost a lot of money, but it worked.
America\u2019s entire education system is teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Distance learning has proved to be the education disaster experts feared, parents are at the end of their tethers, and the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) is now calling for schools to reopen. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), unlike the AAP, has assessed the school question essentially without reference to the educational impacts. They are calling for schools to operate with \u201cdesks at least 6 feet apart when feasible,\u201d which would make it impossible for schools to maintain anything resembling the normal number of students in a classroom. Many districts are planning to have kids in school only two days a week to free up more space.
That\u2019s a logistical nightmare for working parents, and it also seems unlikely to be adequate educationally \u2014 the same problem Romer faced in Los Angeles in the early 21st century but on steroids.
Now Romer and his son, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer, are calling for another ambitious (but hopefully faster) plan to get kids back into normal classrooms: large-scale testing. If you can test students, teachers, and staff frequently, isolate the positive cases, and retest their close contacts, it is possible to control the spread of the virus without heavy-handed closures. Things like masks and an effort to shift as much activity as possible outside would serve to further enhance the impact.
This would, again, be a big effort, but Paul Romer thinks it\u2019s worth it.
\u201cThe CDC guidance on schools here is just irresponsible and inexcusable,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re taking no account of what\u2019s happening to student learning.\u201d
A shift to a testing-based strategy rather than a distancing-based one would require both money and regulatory changes. Right now, everything from federal fiscal policy to CDC guidance is conspiring against a safe reopening, raising the prospect of a lost year (or potentially even more) of American education with massive long-term damage that will exacerbate every class, racial, and gender gap in the country.
The United States could have spent May and June pushing for all-out suppression of SARS-CoV-2, which would have allowed schools to reopen this fall under safer conditions. Instead, many states \u2014 not just red ones but blue ones like California \u2014 let their guards down and plowed ahead with reopening indoor venues like bars and restaurants that can\u2019t be enjoyed with masks, leading to a surge in case counts.
At the same time as data has poured in, it\u2019s becoming increasingly clear that America\u2019s spring experiment with distance learning was a failure.
Back when the distance learning experiment was relatively new, Andrew Rotherham, the co-founder of Bellwether Education Partner and an education policy staffer in the Clinton administration, had the most optimistic assessment of school closures of any expert I found, saying that for older kids from middle-class families, \u201cthis will be not that big of a deal.\u201d
Nonetheless, he was very worried about \u201cearly grades where we\u2019re focused on literacy, which really is foundational to your experience in school and life.\u201d And absolutely everyone was extremely alarmed about the fate of kids from lower-income families, kids whose parents don\u2019t speak English, kids whose parents can\u2019t work from home, and others who are most vulnerable to breakdowns in the education system.
Research from the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker suggests that, eventually, the burden of school closures overtaxed even most affluent families\u2019 ability to help their kids keep up. As this chart shows, student progress in Zearn math (a popular distance learning program used in my son\u2019s school and many others) actually rose in high-income zip codes for the first six weeks or so of the crisis, offsetting a decline in progress in low-income zip codes. Then, starting in May, even the more affluent areas started falling, and by the mid-June end of the normal school year, progress had plummeted across the board.
The upshot is that white-collar parents probably can make distance learning work for their kids at the expense of their sanity and job performance, but working-class parents often can\u2019t. And nobody can keep it up forever.
A team of researchers affiliated with the NWEA, Brown University, and the University of Virginia concluded in a May working paper that, based on what we know from research on past closures, \u201cstudents are likely to return in fall 2020 with approximately 63-68% of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year and with 37-50% of the learning gains in math.\u201d The reading losses in particular are projected to be concentrated in students in the bottom two-thirds of the socioeconomic status distribution.
The urgent need to start making up for lost time rather than seeing further regression is one reason why the American Academy of Pediatrics is so adamant that \u201call policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.\u201d But given the conjunction of pressures on state and local governments, there\u2019s no feasible way to get this done without a dramatic improvement in federal leadership.
The original sin of the schooling problem was the decision to move ahead with indoor eating and drinking rather than focus on suppression and relaunching education.
But as unwise as this was, it\u2019s not exactly a mystery. Bars and restaurants generate tax revenue for hard-hit state and local budgets. Schools don\u2019t. The Trump administration has worked for months to block generous federal aid to state and local government in part out of generic zeal for small government, but in part because Trump wanted a hasty reopening of economic activity so he didn\u2019t want to make going slow fiscally viable. As cases have surged in the Sunbelt, many states are reconsidering their reopening plans. But that still creates a situation where there\u2019s no money to spare for extra school initiatives.
Emily Oster, the Brown University economist and parenting book author, calls in her newsletter for \u201ccreative staffing\u201d to make it possible for children to at least be supervised full-time even if they can\u2019t be in a traditional classroom for a full school day:
Here is a proposal. There are many students on college gap years (turns out, many students do not want to start college or return to college online. Athletes whose seasons are cancelled may wait a year to preserve eligibility). These people are not teachers, obviously. But they are low risk for the virus, and with some training I think they could help.
Imagine your kid goes to school with their normal teacher and half their class in the morning. They do school. Then, after lunch, they go to another location \u2014 a curtained off space in the gym? A trailer? \u2014 with two gap year kids. They do a little online math or reading. They color. They have recess.
It\u2019s not perfect, but I\u2019m guessing kids would get a lot more online Zearn badges if they were supervised in school rather than being asked to do it at home. Plus, they are out of the house so parents can work.
Oster touts this as more fiscally realistic than a Romer-style plan for massive testing, but she still concedes that it would obviously cost money. But how much?
\u201cHonestly, I have no idea,\u201d she tells me. The problem is that, as currently constituted, state and local governments don\u2019t have any money at all to spare.
Wesley Tharpe, the deputy director of state policy research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, estimates that, over the next two calendar years, \u201cstate budget shortfalls will total about $615 billion.\u201d Under those circumstances, there\u2019s just no way school districts will be able to initiate even modest efforts to increase spending. It fundamentally all hinges on whether or not congressional Republicans are willing to let the federal government ride to the financial rescue. Certainly the federal government has the capacity.
Right now, the interest rate on government debt is less than the rate of inflation, meaning it is extremely affordable to borrow money for anything that has any kind of long-term payoff \u2014 which educating children surely does. So while district leaders and especially philanthropists should pay close attention to Oster\u2019s ideas, it\u2019s still worth pressuring the federal government to truly invest in mass testing. But right now, in the absence of funding or capacity, some federal agencies continue to downplay the value of testing.
Many American colleges are in a different economic situation than are K-12 schools \u2014 because they charge tuition, their financial circumstances get better if they can have kids on campus, so they are eager to invest money in finding safe ways to do so. Paying to make sure all students are tested before they arrive easily passes cost-benefit scrutiny, so colleges with the means are inclined to do it.
But the CDC\u2019s official guidelines discourage this kind of \u201centry testing,\u201d saying that \u201cit is unknown if entry testing in [institutions of higher education] provides any additional reduction in person-to-person transmission of the virus\u201d because it \u201chas not been systematically studied.\u201d
Obviously it hasn\u2019t been studied since there\u2019s never been a Covid-19 pandemic before, so this style of argument would disqualify doing anything at all. But the mechanism by which entry testing would reduce transmission \u2014 making sure that nonsymptomatic but infected students don\u2019t show up on campus \u2014 hardly involves an outlandish untested theory.
\u201cI have no idea what the hell they are doing,\u201d Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist and scholar of science communication tells me. \u201cWhy was the absence of evidence allowed to trump common sense?\u201d
The Trump White House relies on routine surveillance testing of nonsymptomatic individuals (daily for those in closest contact with the president and weekly for the second-tier staff) to ensure its own smooth operation. Harvard University has announced plans to have every on-campus student tested once every three days.
Romer\u2019s mathematical modeling shows that you could suppress the virus across the entire population by testing every American once every two weeks, even if the test had a relatively high error rate. Trying to apply this to the more limited \u2014 but socially significant \u2014 case of students and school personnel could be a game-changer for American education. But Romer notes that the federal government has been routinely hostile to the idea of implementing the kind of surveillance testing the White House uses for the rest of the country.
Back in early May, a team of scientists at Rutgers University developed a Covid-19 test that relies on saliva rather than swabs. Romer says, \u201cthe FDA said Rutgers can do it but nobody else can do it.\u201d
In other words, rather than promulgate a standard saliva testing procedure that labs around the country could emulate, authorization still needs to be done individual lab by individual lab. So the Rutgers breakthrough never led to a massive expansion of saliva testing. Instead, we have Rutgers and now a separate lab at UC Berkeley which last week started submitting the paperwork to the FDA. The state of Nebraska successfully used pooled testing (where you test a whole bunch of people\u2019s samples at once) to get around capacity constraints, but they were technically breaking the law and school districts don\u2019t want to follow them.
In political terms, the regulatory issues and the fiscal issues are closely linked. If public health agencies announced that mass surveillance testing is useful for educational institutions and technologically possible to boot, that would only heighten the question of why the federal government isn\u2019t appropriating the money that\u2019s needed.
Schools operating at full capacity under reasonably safe conditions would be an enormous step toward normalcy and, as such, a boon to Trump\u2019s reelection efforts. But achieving that goal would require work and leadership. Instead, NBC News reports that White House officials are preparing a pivot to a new message: \u201cThe virus is with us, but we need to live with it.\u201d
But if schools follow the CDC\u2019s guidelines for how to \u201clive with\u201d the virus, then children\u2019s educations will be fatally compromised \u2014 as will parents\u2019 ability to do their jobs.
And if districts try to force schools to operate normally even as a pandemic rages, then teachers \u2014 many of whom may be much more vulnerable than their students or live with people who are \u2014 are going to revolt. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), reminds me that \u201cwe did our guidance first on April 30,\u201d releasing a detailed plan that called for a much more cautious summer economic reopening in order to lay the groundwork for safe education in the fall. It\u2019s likely too late for that, but it\u2019s definitely not too late to invest resources in making school reopening safer.
\u201cTeachers want to reopen and see their kids again because remote learning was a nightmare,\u201d says AFT press secretary Andrew Cook. \u201cBut it has to be safe and that means more money.\u201d
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