Aurore Marechal/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
French middle schoolers in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, are back in class after the coronavirus shutdown, June 3, 2020.
Planning for the reopening of schools ought to be one of the top priorities at every level of government in the United States. The news from the more than 20 European nations that have reopened schools has been extremely encouraging, and the urgency of duplicating that achievement here is indisputable. We cannot have a functioning economy, or any hope of reducing economic inequalities, without a functioning educational system. But key questions need to be answered to get schools back in session in the fall, and this country has not yet taken the necessary steps to resolve those issues.
National guidance by the Trump administration on the reopening of schools is meager. The Centers for Disease Control has published a minimal “School Decision Tool” that says only that schools shouldn’t reopen unless they can answer such basic questions as whether they can screen students and employees for the virus, protect those at higher risk for severe illness, and institute recommended health and safety actions such as social distancing. The National Education Association rightly calls CDC’s decision tool a “watered down,” “flimsy flowchart.”
Last Wednesday, Anthony S. Fauci said on CNN that some schools may have “no problem” reopening in the fall but added that he hesitated “to make any broad statements about whether it is or is not quote ‘safe’ for kids to come back to school” since it would depend on the viral activity in an area.
Meanwhile, the reopening of schools in Europe and elsewhere should raise confidence that there is a practical path forward here in this country too, especially for younger children. Denmark has had schools open since April 15, Norway since April 20, and 20 other European countries since at least mid-May. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Researchers and European authorities said the absence of any notable clusters of infection in reopened elementary schools so far suggested that children aren’t significant spreaders of the new coronavirus in society.
They acknowledged that their findings might change with the onset of winter and cold weather, and a recent outbreak at a Jerusalem high school affecting students and staff was a reminder of the higher risk to teenagers and adults.
But Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries that have reopened classrooms haven’t had outbreaks in schools or day-care centers. …
In some countries, sporadic infections have happened among schoolchildren and staff, but none have been reported to have resulted in bigger infection clusters. In France, after schools reopened on May 11, several closed after around 70 reported infections in schools and preschools nationwide. Almost all were adults, local authorities reported.
COVID-19 is a scourge, but the one blessing in the pandemic is that it rarely strikes school-age children. According to the most recent CDC data, children 5 to 14 years of age account for less than 0.15 percent of all COVID cases in the United States. An international review of 78 studies found that “deaths remain extremely rare in children from COVID-19.”
Moreover, the international experience with school reopening suggests that children-to-adult infection is also rare. According to the co-author of a study of the spread of COVID-19 in Iceland (which never shut down its elementary schools), researchers there did not find “a single instance of a child infecting parents.” A report from the British Columbia Ministry of Health states: “There is no documented evidence of child-to-adult transmission. There are no documented cases of children bringing an infection into the home, from school or otherwise.”
Whether some children may be carriers of the virus is still a contested point. A German study found that viral loads in very young patients with COVID-19 “do not differ significantly” from those of adults with COVID-19 and consequently “children may be as infectious as adults”—but since very few children get COVID-19 (indeed, the study had only a small number of pediatric patients), even this finding does not imply an equivalence.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been concentrated among the aged, the immunocompromised, and individuals with underlying conditions, especially in low-income black and brown communities. The United States needs to protect vulnerable groups. But it does not need to keep schools closed to do so.
In fact, keeping schools closed will compound the problems of the low-income communities that are suffering the most from the disease itself. Remote learning may work for some children of affluent, educated families who have the resources at home to substitute for schools. But, as some reports indicate, remote learning is not likely to work for the children of families who don’t have those resources. The many parents who put together two incomes to stay afloat financially cannot both get back to work if schools stay shut. Neither can single parents.
Keeping schools closed into the fall and next year is a prescription for increased educational and economic inequality. To say that we have to wait for a vaccine or a treatment to open schools is simply untenable—especially since school-age children only rarely suffer from the disease and, at least at younger ages, do not appear to be a significant factor in spreading it either.
But many important questions remain about how to reopen schools. A coherent national effort to get schools back in session in the fall would require a series of steps to resolve the many public-health, organizational, and fiscal questions about the alternatives facing schools and communities.
- We need better data on what specific policies and arrangements are safest for children of different ages, as well as for their parents and teachers, and other staff.
- We need clear alternatives to in-person classes for children and teachers who are at high risk of severe illness.
- We need a commitment of federal funds to the states to prevent massive layoffs of teachers and other personnel that will make it impossible to get schools back in session safely.
- We need a collaborative process that would enable all relevant interests to be represented in policy.
Recently, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (“Using Controlled Trials to Resolve Key Unknowns About Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic”), I proposed that state public-health officials use short-term summer programs to gather data that could help provide guidance for the fall. Many programs for children are moving ahead this summer; the existing research has particularly left open questions regarding teenagers. Instead of requiring all programs to follow the same rules, states could give school districts and other program sponsors freedom to choose among a range of rules (for example, regarding the size of groups, age of participants, and social-distancing regulations). To determine the effects of those arrangements, states ought to systematically test children, staff, and members of their families at the beginning and end of such programs.
Without doing such studies here, we will depend on data from other countries on reopening schools, even though the overall level of viral activity in those countries may be much lower than in many areas of the United States.
What is surprising to me is not only that we have so little data on organizational alternatives for structuring reopened schools; there also appears to be little interest in acquiring it. This seems to be just one more aspect of the collapse of a shared commitment in the United States to the use of scientific evidence in making policy.
Regardless of what studies show, parents who prefer to keep their children out of school in the fall should be able to do so and continue with remote learning. This is not only a necessary compromise in light of widespread public distrust and legitimate uncertainty. As well, should some families choose to keep children at home, school classrooms will be less crowded for the students who show up in person—a factor that may be especially important in middle and high schools.
At the same time, there will be teachers and other staff who, because of age or health, have legitimate grounds for remaining at home. They should not lose their jobs. The challenge will be to deploy them in online teaching and to match them with the students who continue in online learning. This is only one of the enormously complex organizational problems that schools will confront in reopening.
The reopening of schools in Europe and elsewhere should raise confidence that there is a practical path forward here in this country too.
Ideally, the federal government would provide needed fiscal support to the states and localities and bring together representatives of parents, teachers, school health officials, and other groups to hammer out guidelines that protect the health and well-being of children and adults alike in the schools. But even if Congress eventually enacts legislation for state aid, state and local officials will probably have to fill the void in leadership left by President Trump. Local negotiations will be crucial. The American Federation of Teachers points out that to ensure that reopening plans address the specific challenges of each workplace and community, “broad worker and community involvement is necessary. They must be engaged, educated and empowered.”
No doubt, as Fauci said last week, reopening the schools in the fall will depend on viral activity—and if there is a second wave of the pandemic, it could derail plans. But we should also be cautious about overreacting to new outbreaks when there may be no danger to school-age children and no evidence that they are spreading the disease. Norway’s education minister has said that even if cases of COVID-19 start rising there, the country will not close its schools again because reopening them has not had negative consequences.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic early this year, public-health authorities were basing their judgments about schools on earlier experience with the role of children in spreading influenza. Now we know that COVID-19 is different, and we ought to make different policies accordingly, as the Europeans have. There’s a school lesson here for Americans. Children are thankfully being spared by this disease. But they also need to be spared from the misplaced anxieties of adults.
