As long as schools remain closed, all the talk about reopening the economy is going to run into a brick wall.
Already, it’s difficult enough to figure out how to transition from a state of lockdown to some semblance of normalcy. Various plans to reopen the economy that involve isolating the elderly and those with underlying health conditions already leave a lot of people out of the workforce. Add to that list working parents who have nobody to watch their children during the day, and it becomes even harder to see what any “reopening” would look like.
The die is mostly cast on the current academic year, with 43 states plus the District of Columbia either closing schools or recommending that schools close. But local officials are going to have to come up with some way to return to school, perhaps by starting the next academic year earlier in the summer.
Among all types of closures, school shutdowns are among the most damaging to society. Younger children have no outlet for social and emotional development. Sustained shutdowns inhibit the ability of older children to meet grade-level requirements. Parents who are trying to juggle homeschooling with working full time from home are not in a position to replicate the instruction a child would receive in a full day of school. The closures also exacerbate the achievement gap between wealthier households with more resources and the ability to work from home and those that do not have that option.
For all the costs, the benefits of school closures remain quite debatable. Even guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on school closures is equivocal, noting that the longer they go on, the more likely it is that children will begin to congregate outside of school and that parents will have to lean on grandparents for additional child care help.
There is now an overwhelming amount of data that children themselves are at little risk of getting seriously ill from the coronavirus. From the beginning, the argument has been that schools must remain closed so that children don’t transmit COVID-19 to more vulnerable adults — either older teachers or caregivers. But even that is now very much in doubt.
An analysis from the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health looked at contact tracing data from the World Health Organization and found not a single case of a child under 10 transmitting the coronavirus to an adult. This is on top of a separate study from China that concluded “that children have not played a substantive role in the intra-household transmission” and a review in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal that found that, at a minimum, “the importance of children in transmitting the virus remains uncertain.”
Given all of this, education officials should consider a plan under which they reopen schools in phases, with younger children going first — a process that is underway in other countries, including Israel and Norway.
Starting with younger children makes sense for several reasons. Those in the early ages are in the crucial period where they are learning how to read and develop early math skills, and it is significantly harder to apply remote learning to a first grader than a ninth grader who has already acquired those fundamentals.
Furthermore, the closure of schools presents a greater child care challenge at the younger levels: Obviously, a kindergartner is much less equipped to manage without a hands-on parent than a high schooler. Also, because younger children typically remain in the same classroom with a single teacher rather than switching classes, they won’t have as many interactions over the course of the day.
Starting with younger children would also be supported by evidence showing that the disease has very little effect on them in the overwhelming majority of cases and would be consistent with the lack of evidence that those under 10 transmit the virus to adults.
By focusing on early grades, local officials would also have more flexibility to employ social distancing across buildings. Imagine, for instance, if instead of cramming all K-5 students into a single elementary school, they were spread across elementary, middle, and larger high school buildings. While there are over 50 million pre-K through 12th grade students, less than half, or about 24 million, are in pre-K through 5th grade.
Slowly reopening elementary schools, perhaps one grade at a time, would allow public officials to gather more data about the role of schools in transmission. It would also give them more time to work out new procedures, more frequent and thorough sanitation, temperature checks, mask wearing, and so forth, before returning 50 million students to school all at once.
No doubt, this is suboptimal. Of course, parents want all children to be back to school and wouldn’t necessarily want to leave high schoolers on their own all day with easy access to video games and Netflix.
But right now, no children are going to school. Unless parents want to live for years without in-person schooling while researchers try to come up with a vaccine, there will have to be some way to enact a gradual return. It makes sense to start with the population whose absence from school has the most acute effect on learning, places the largest burden on working parents, and has the least obvious risk from a public health perspective.
