The Pandemic Counterfactual

What if politicians had resisted overwhelming media pressure and kept the schools open in March 2020?

¹If only.

If only the governors had just waited it out. Hung on for six more weeks.

Once Mike DeWine stepped up and declared Ohio’s children an acceptable sacrifice to media demands, most of the other dominoes fell. One by one the other governors joined in.

Ohio had just reported three cases on March 9th, three days before DeWine held that press conference. Montana had just one case when Bullock closed the schools, same as West Virginia. For all the talk today about California’s lockdowns, it had nearly 500 cases when Newsom closed the schools nearly a week after DeWine did.

Governors didn’t shut the schools because of perceived risk in their particular state. They closed the schools because the media demands were becoming deafening and it was the only way to placate opinionmakers.

But it’s one thing to send out some sort of vapid public statement to get the press off your back, quite another to shut down a massive government operation with enormous legally mandated responsibilities.

They didn’t really think it was a big deal. Shut things down for a few weeks, everyone realizes that shit’s going to happen, and will demand their lives back, creating an offsetting pressure to the media.

Their real error was assuming a uniform public response to the risk. Who could have predicted that race would be such a factor in fearing the virus?

(Answer: Me. Race is a factor in almost everything in America.)

If only.

What if governors had ignored the media and kept schools open? Fearful parents could have pulled their students. Teachers unions might have made noise, but it wouldn’t have gotten much traction: nationwide, just 450 active teachers have died of covid. Closing the schools might have prevented some deaths, but everything we know suggests that transmission just got delayed, not prevented.

If the schools had remained open for the rest of the 2020 school year, no one could have pointed to the increasing case and death tolls as a reason to keep them closed because hey, presto! They hadn’t closed. Add to that the nearly non-existent death count among children for those months. Six months of data with no clear answers would have made it considerably more difficult for special ed and 504 parents to threaten lawsuits that would tempt schools to close.

The schools were closed quickly, without any thought. Had they stayed open for months, powers that be would have had time to think about what a stupid idea it was.

But instead, well. This happened.

Here’s the question that long haunted me during my remote education purgatory:

Was I wrong about the pandemic’s original sin? Could catastrophe had been rerouted? Was there a path we could have taken that returned the schools to normal operating conditions in fall 2021 instead of a year later?

All the angry people demanding accountability think it was just a matter of teachers agreeing to go back to work, and that mean ol’ CDC setting unnecessary restrictions.

But this is due to their fundamental fuzziness on the real cause of remote education. Very few kids were forced into remote. Most kids were in remote by parent demand.

White parents in high-diversity urban and suburban areas have a lot of trouble grasping this fact, for understandable reasons. But like it or not, the non-white parents in their district felt differently. In large numbers.

Even in Florida.

Recall the Karol Marcowicz psychodrama? Regular readers experienced her shifting demands live, from “MR MAYOR, CLOSE THE SCHOOLS” to “STOP ABUSING CHILDREN OPEN THE SCHOOLS” to “THE FUTURE IS FLORIDA“. While New York City’s schools were open relatively early (December? Mother of god, woman, quit whining), she hated hybrid and wanted full-time. Finally, in desperation, she moved her kids to an 70% white elementary school in the Sunshine State, returning temporarily only to flee back permanently. Governor DeSantis, she proclaimed, “put children first.” Her children were finally back in school full-time. Not for Florida all that zoom time, the kids locked up at home, the horrible academic results, right?

Wrong.

Karol’s school, Marsh Pointe Elementary, is in the Palm Beach district. 60% of Palm Beach students chose remote in September 2020. By the time Karol transferred her kids, just 60% of students opted for in-person. So just a third of the students who chose remote in September had returned to school by the end of the year.

Thus it was that Palm Beach County test scores plummeted that year, particularly in math. And that, readers, is why it’s unsurprising that California outpaced Florida in the NAEP scores that year. Not predictable. Just not surprising.

Karol never mentioned that, did she? I’m not even sure she knew, given how thoroughly her opinions are derived from that little white cocoon she wraps her life in.

Florida was great for Karol and family. But DeSantis didn’t “put kids first”. DeSantis gave parents equal rights, rather than privileging parents’ preference for remote, as most other states did.

That’s no small thing! Had all governors followed DeSantis’s lead, the 15% of parents living in majority non-white districts trapped in endless remote would have had much less to bitch about. We all would have been spared a few thousand op-ed pieces by pissed off urban white moms clueless as to their minority status.

However, the academic damage was caused not by parents forced into remote, but by parents choosing remote. Preventing that damage required ending remote. Take away the choice entirely. That is, ultimately, what got everything back to normal. It wasn’t parent protests or union settlements, but wise blue states taking away choice, as I wrote in my very first piece on this topic two years ago.

So going back to the question I posed, the only way to undo the original sin of closing the schools in March 2020 would have been to eliminate the option of remote instruction in fall 2020 instead of fall 2021.

Was that an option? Is there some way we could have pushed out remote instruction a year early?

I want to say yes. I can’t shake the longing for the counterfactual. Like maybe if Trump hadn’t tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!” in July 2020, well, schools might have ended optional remote education at local schools.

Certainly, the response to Trump’s tweet doesn’t leave much room for hope. Trump was ;widely accused of politicizing issue with his “open the schools!” tweet by the left and the media, if that’s not the same thing, but with the conservative media not far behind. National Review criticized him for not getting covid19 under control and demanded more testing. Some conservatives wondered why Trump was closing schools–wouldn’t it be better for school choice and home schooling if all the schools stayed closed? The Bulwark was aghast at his very suggestion that schools should be open–how could little kids follow safety protocols?

But Trump was a lightning rod. By demanding that schools be open, Trump put everyone’s hackles up on both sides of the political wisdom aisle.

What if Trump hadn’t said anything? If white Democrat parents hadn’t seen open schools as a victory for the Orange One, they might have used their political power effectively at a time when it might have done some good. If public schools have learned one essential lesson from fifty years of policy errors, it’s that you don’t piss off white parents. Had white parents in majority non-white districts had understood that accepting remote education in September meant remote education for several more months, might they have made their displeasure clearer when it would have mattered?

I want to believe we had a shot at business as usual until July 2020 not because Trump was wrong–in fact, he was right, even if no one but me will say so–but because if he hadn’t raised the issue maybe…maybe. Maybe it would have been safer for someone else to suggest the possibility. Maybe more Democrat white parents would have realized the risk from failing to open immediately. Maybe support would have been enough that schools would have told fearful parents that their opposition wasn’t sufficient rationale to service their remote education needs and give them a list of online charters.

I want to be like everyone else, in short, arguing that the One True Path was there, if only. But I can’t. For two big reasons. First, opening the schools had already become political, and I just don’t think white Democrat parents would have sided with MAGA folk demanding schools open at that time. Like the governors in March, they probably assumed everyone sane wanted schools open and once Biden was elected, schools would open. They could wait. But even that wouldn’t matter, because like Karol Marcowicz, those parents would only give a shit about their own schools. Like Karol, they don’t realize the mores of Marshmallowland aren’t universal.

But the larger reason I can’t convince myself that 2020-21 could be saved is best characterized by the actions of Deborah Birx, Coronavirus coordinator, aka Scarf Lady. She made the roundsto everystate, meeting with every governor, pushing masks, warning of contagion risks, pushing distance learning, strengthening the case for parents to oppose in-person education. She openly opposed Trump’s push to open schools. In short, Birx was ;a walking amicus brief for a class action lawsuit by furious parents demanding the right for their kids to view their teachers on a computer screen.

No governor was going to risk forcing in-person instruction on parents. No governor was going to tell parents they couldn’t have their own local school on zoom. No governor was going to force parents to sign up for a virtual option or find a virtual charter. No, not even DeSantis. Not in 2020. Not with Congress and the states having waived attendance laws. It just wasn’t worth the bother.

I’ve reluctantly abandoned all belief in a counterfactual. There was no chance, ever, that schools would return to business as usual in the 2020-21 school year. Parents would be guaranteed remote instruction in their local school. No one was going to force them back to in-person instruction or make them enroll in a virtual academy. Not that year.

So alas. Closing the schools was the original sin from which there was no redemption. The penalty must be paid.

If you’re looking for bright spots, consider the bullet we dodged. What if legislatures hadn’t acted to remove the remote option?

In spring 2021, plenty of evidence showed that at least 30% of students were remote education, and of that group, 90% chose it. By fall 2021, polls showed 20-25% of parents still wanted remote education. That winter, when omicron took hold, a Pew poll showed only 1 in 4 non-white parents wanted full-time inperson instruction. 61% wanted “a mix”. Reams of anecdotal evidencesuggests that non-white parents were more likely to be freaked out about returning to in-person instruction, both in the fall and during the rise of omicron.

Given the demographic skew of schools….it could have happened again. Polls and revealed preferences strongly suggest that non-white parents in many districts would have had sufficient majorities to demand remote instruction. White parents in those urban districts, including all those Republican moms with op-ed columns, would be deeply pissed off. More importantly, low-income non-white children would continue getting half as much education, if that, on zoom.

None of that happened.

By the grace of God, the Fates, karma, or simple happy circumstance, we got a window.

From November 2020 to June 2021, everyone believed the vaccines would end covid. For a few months in early summer, that seemed to be the case. And during that brief window, a miracle happened: blue state legislatures took action.

No, really.

Even better, those legislatures took the right action. They wisely passed laws taking away a parent’s right to choose remote education at their public school. That’s not what the laws said, of course. They said that schools couldn’t offer remote instruction. Ultimately, it’s the same thing.

I realize that to anyone who didn’t actually look at the data–or to those intent on ignoring the data because they want their audience to blame unions–this seems absurd.

Am I really saying that once the schools closed there was no way out of the damages followed?

That giving parents a choice guaranteed that millions of kids would learn much less and never be able to recover?

That rather than look for people to blame we should simply thank the summer 2021 pause that the damage didn’t go on for longer?

And most ridiculous of all, that we actually have politicians’ quick action to thank for it ending as soon as it did?

Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

Just one more thing to drop onto the “crazy shit” pile.

It’s hard to face, given the damage caused by keeping kids at home, but it could have been much worse had legislatures not acted swiftly and correctly.

Go figure. Government worked.

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I really don’t know why I’ve kept up this series. Lord knows, the prevailing winds of discourse have hurricaned against me. But hey, what else is new. I think it’s finally out of my system.

On the Cause and Fix for School Closures and Remote Education

• Tradeoffs in the Era of Covid-19: I’d forgotten I’d written this! Not really about policy, but proves I said closing schools was a bad idea from the very beginning.

• The Real Reason for School Closures: The data showing how strongly parental race determined parental preference for remote and that race, not unions or politics, drove school decisions about remote education.

• Principal Responsibilities in the Pandemic: A look at the way adminstrator responsibility changed during the pandemic, and the role these changes played in school decisions on whose needs to prioritize.

• The Pandemic School Policy Power Differential: A key difference in parental rights during the pandemic went entirely unreported, but explains so much of the difference between perception and reality. Parents who wanted remote were primarily non-white and were guaranteed this choice in 2020-21. Parents who wanted in-person were primarily white and were not guaranteed their choice. White parents tend to be loud when they don’t get their way. But rather than argue for equal rights, they just assumed that they were speaking for a majority. Bad call.

• Paying Teachers To Do Nothing?: The pandemic narrative insists that teachers were paid to do nothing. In fact, teachers were the school district employees with the most to do, the jobs that were least unchanged in terms of time, and most changed in terms of delivery.

• The Pandemic’s Original Sin: Closing the schools in March 2020 pretty much guaranteed all the disasters that followed.

• Wise Blue States Take Away Choice: Chronologically, this was my first pandemic piece. I’m kind of proud of that, because late 2021 was pretty early to realize how essential it was that legislatures removed the means of committing further educational damage.

• Teaching Life in the Pandemic:

  • Life During Lockdown

  • Five Things I Learned Remote Teaching Summer School

  • Post-Pandemic Update

1. First published September, 2023.