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Feb. 6, 2021 - Epoch Times
32:27
The Hidden Costs of School Closures—Hadley Manning | American Thought Leaders
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After 18 students committed suicide in Las Vegas, the Clark County School District decided to reopen for in-person learning.
The youngest of the students to commit suicide was a nine-year-old.
In Chicago, home to the nation's third largest public school district, teachers unions have rejected calls by Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot to reopen, citing concerns about health and safety.
In this episode, we sit down with Hadley Manning, Director of Policy at the Independent Women's Forum, To understand what recent studies have to say about schools reopening, and what the sometimes hidden costs are of keeping children and teenagers isolated.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
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Hadley Manning, so great to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me.
We've been talking offline about school closures, or more importantly, school reopenings.
I came across this clip just from recently, February 3rd, a Bronx public school student, a senior, at a press conference.
Let's take a look.
The academy is a public school in New Harlem.
I feel like these people, almost a year, almost a year has been really, really tough for me, not really as an athlete, as a student, but mostly as a person.
Because I haven't had any live insurance in college for almost a year.
We were told that, oh, in the fall, if you guys social distance, if you guys stay safe, if you guys work hard, you will get a season.
Well, it didn't happen.
And then, now the spring is approaching.
We were told, oh, in the spring, you guys might have a season.
And now, we're almost there backing away, like, oh, yes, we know you guys, we said this, but, you know, look at this and look at that.
And from an aspect, I feel like we were giving up on it.
I feel like they gave up on us.
I feel like they just kind of looked at the public school kids and was like, you know what?
They're not really that important.
You know, it really hurts because your senior year is the most important year.
And right now, I have friends who have not been able to apply to college because there's no leadership.
You know, they don't have the guidance counselors helping them.
They don't have the teachers helping them.
They don't have recommendations.
They don't have this.
They don't have that.
And I was able to take my SATs through folks who showed me the way You know, I signed for his classes.
It was really helpful.
And I went.
I couldn't take that 60s in the city.
I had to go to a new New Rochelle.
I had to get out of the city and take that 60s.
And I feel like it just isn't fair because I have friends who registered in the city numerous times.
And the city shut down on me every single time.
And I just feel like it's really unfair because you work so hard for your senior year and it just gets taken away from you.
You wake up in the morning, you just look at the screen from the morning to 3 o'clock and not basically school.
And I feel like that's not enough.
Virtual school is not real school.
So, thank you.
Okay, so what are your impressions here?
Oh, my heart just breaks for this young man and for so many other students across our country who have been in a similar situation the past year almost now due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
They're missing not just those educational opportunities, but really, especially since this young man is a high school senior, rites of passage in our society, in our culture, graduation, prom, football season, basketball season.
These are things that are really important to young people.
And they're important to their parents.
They're important just in terms of the experience, the socialization, the time with peers.
Those are things that those students will never get back.
Let's dive into this issue.
I mean, here he's talking about, you know, a number of the drawbacks that he's feeling.
One of the things he says is, I kind of feel like we've been forgotten about, like we've been neglected.
And so, you know, we're a year in right now, or almost a year in.
I think all of this started around March of last year.
And you've been arguing for school reopenings.
So tell me about this.
Pretty early on, we started to learn that the COVID virus, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, doesn't behave the same way that some other viruses like the influenza virus behaves in children.
That is to say that children are actually at higher risk for severe disease related to the flu, whereas they're at lower risk when it comes to COVID-19.
And what a blessing, really, that children have been one of the groups least impacted from a health perspective from the virus itself.
So the school reopening debate quickly became less about what is most safe for students.
Of course, there are concerns about especially older high school age students and the way that they can transmit or develop disease related to the coronavirus.
But ultimately, I think the debate began to hinge on the adults in the school system and what were the risks associated with being in a classroom if you're a teacher or if you're school staff or if you're a bus driver.
And those things are very important.
And of course, we have We had this debate and discussion about the risk-benefit analysis of keeping schools open.
And the problem is, ultimately, from my perspective, that in our public school system, we have a set of perverse incentives.
If the school system is dedicated to keeping teachers open, On payroll, at the same levels of pay, regardless of how they perform or what level, what type of instruction they offer to students, then there's very little leverage in terms of,
for example, offering hazard pay to teachers who are willing to get back into the classroom and reducing the pay of teachers who Might want to work from home because maybe they have a health issue or maybe they simply are more risk averse than other teachers.
And so that is a limitation on the public school system and has created this sort of incentive problem.
So what are studies saying about the actual costs and benefits and risks of reopening?
Of course, from the beginning of the pandemic, we've been sort of studying not just how the disease is transmitted, but what the risks are specifically associated with school closures and school reopenings.
And the findings in that regard, in terms of papers that have been published in Pediatrics and The Lancet Health Affairs, these are widely respected medical and health policy journals, suggest that school closures Have more risks, more downsides, more harms to students and are not justified.
That school should be reopened for in-person learning.
These are reliant on studies that have followed students throughout real school reopenings.
They followed the transmission risks.
And this is for first level transmission within the school and also secondary transmission outside of the school.
And they've concluded that that risk is exceedingly low, especially compared to other activities that people might do socially and otherwise.
Well, the CDC says the rate of infection from students to teachers has been low.
The Lancet say that school closures might lead to a greater number of deaths than school openings.
Or then school closures might prevent.
The Journal of Pediatrics suggests that school closures do not reduce the spread of COVID-19 and that modeling is confirmed by studies from other countries.
Other countries say that their school closures didn't help control the pandemic.
There's studies from Ireland and Australia in particular that found no evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from school children.
There's a study in Sweden.
Sweden largely kept their schools open, even when many other European countries and the United States had school closures.
Swedish schools were even open last spring, in the spring of 2020.
And what they found was that zero deaths resulted One of the studies in health affairs actually suggested that, you know, there are a variety of policies that we have taken to try to mitigate the growth rate of the COVID-19 virus from sheltering in place, the most extreme example, restaurant closures, limitations on large gatherings.
All of these things do suggest that there are, to varying degrees, you can reduce the percentage growth rate of COVID-19 with sheltering in place being the most successful In terms of reducing the spread, as much as 8% or 9%.
Now, on the other hand, school closures have not been shown to reduce the growth rate of the spread of the virus.
In fact, this health affairs paper suggests that school closures actually led to a higher growth rate for the COVID-19 virus in a community.
And I suppose we could speculate that that's because in school, students are Being very cautious, they're wearing masks, they're washing hands, their desks are seated, you know, six feet apart.
In some cases, there's You know, face shields for teachers or plexiglass for teachers.
So some of these measures that schools are taking to mitigate the risk of transmission are very successful.
That's why the CDC, under both the Trump administration and the Biden administration, suggests that schools should reopen safely, even if vaccination for teacher is not a prerequisite for reopening.
And we've also seen, you know, groups like the Academy of American Pediatricians have said from the very beginning, at least with their initial statement about this, That schools should be open for in-person learning.
And so I don't think that the risk of putting students and teachers together in school is really enough to justify keeping schools closed, given that the benefits to students are incredible, not just in terms of keeping them learning, reading, writing, and arithmetic and so forth, but socially.
I mean, we haven't even talked about sort of the devastating impact on students when it comes to their mental health and when it comes to The stress and anxiety and depression and even suicide ideation and youth suicide rates that we're seeing and that I think we'll continue to see as a result of school closures.
Well, so tell me about that.
And he, of course, mentioned this in, like you said, in the video, there's been basically no sports, no physical activity, no phys ed class.
There might be some sort of, like you said, socializing on the side outside of school as well.
I guess it depends.
But what are the things that students can't do like that?
And what are the costs of that?
You know, I think certainly from a mental health perspective, the Las Vegas School District is an area that comes to mind because the New York Times did a sort of a story on why that district ultimately made the decision to reopen.
And it was after a very sad string of student suicides, 18 students in the Las District School District.
Had committed suicide since school closures went into effect and I just remember reading this story and I'm a mother and so I was really touched by this, the youngest of the students to commit suicide with a nine-year-old.
And you can imagine sort of the weight of the world that we've all been feeling as adults and as parents that certainly things have changed abruptly and we're concerned about our health, we're concerned about our politics, we're concerned about our communities.
Children are feeling that too and without the ability to be with their peers and to do normal things like have birthday parties, participate in sports, you know, sort of mark the coming of age activities that are so normal and so natural And so good for children is really taking its toll.
So this isn't just about sort of the learning loss.
I think that's where some of the debate, you know, people say it's no big deal if kids don't stay on par with sort of these metrics that we've put into place in terms of how much they read or how well they can do math.
That's one piece of the puzzle, of course, but I think maybe an even bigger piece is the mental health of students.
One thing that I haven't mentioned and a concern that I have that seems to be, you know, it's something that people give lip service to, but I don't know that the school reopening debate has really considered this point with as much priority as they ought.
And that is that schools, for better or worse, serve as community hubs that work beyond their mission of educating children.
And, you know, that's not just part of the discussion surrounding child care for women or child care for working parents.
But it also has to do with students' health, related not just to nutrition, but also the sort of detecting and reporting of neglect and child abuse, that absent a open school facility where children can go to escape what might be a very toxic home life,
and many home lives I imagine have become even more toxic Given the stressors related to the coronavirus, to public health, and to the economic fallout related to the coronavirus, there's fewer places for children to go to have a responsible adult lay eyes on them and say, wow, it looks like you are in a situation at home that's not acceptable to us as a society.
And certainly been the case that we've seen drug abuse increasing Among the general population, also among parents who have children in the home, this has resulted in an overburdening of our foster care system because there are still some avenues to find children in bad home situations, but it's an incredible loss for our society to not have open schools as a place where teachers and staff can do the reporting.
And my husband is a pediatrician, so I know at the pediatric hospital where they work that this is an issue that That's one place where, sadly, child abuse and neglect are often caught.
But without schools to do this, unfortunately, it's a reality for many children that they're not just sitting at home in front of a screen and feeling their educational loss, but they're subjected to much worse situations.
Does the virtual learning actually work?
How close is it to, I guess, the norm in terms of getting people educated?
Yeah, I've heard mixed stories from parents.
Certainly, there have always been Some, for example, charter schools that have specialized in virtual learning and they seem to have a good formula for that.
And I know there are some people who have gone with that option and they say, this is working great for my student, but those stories tend to be in the minority.
I've heard other parents, particularly with younger students, if you've got a kindergartner or first grader, you can imagine how frustrating it is to try to get that student to sit still in front of a computer screen and learn how to use the different online platforms to click here, to click there.
And so it's been enormously frustrating for those parents who have had to step aside typically from their work and their focus and their jobs and their vocations to help become really online instructors or online proctors for their children.
So this model of virtual learning for most people, I will say, has not been effective.
It has been very frustrating.
It has been something that has created so much work for teachers and for parents And for students just to learn how to learn in that environment and it's simply not working for many.
Well, and there's also this element.
There's students that are just generally very self-motivated, tend to excel, basically kind of outside of parental or even teacher involvement to some extent, right?
And that's probably not everybody.
There's a lot that need a lot of that support, I guess, right, from school.
So are you seeing differences there?
Absolutely.
I mean, I think...
In almost every area of life, the pandemic sadly has exacerbated inequalities in our society, whether that's between women and men in the workplace, as women, as mothers, have taken on increased caregiving responsibilities, largely in response to school closures, or whether it's the socioeconomic inequalities between people who are in Essential wage jobs where they have to leave the home.
They cannot be there physically present to ensure that their children are logging on and doing the schoolwork versus parents who have the ability to sort of have more oversight over their children's virtual learning.
So that's absolutely the case.
And even on top of that virtual learning piece, there's this layer of, again, people leaving the public school system and going to the private learning pod or the private school.
That's only an option for people who have the resources to do so.
So these private schools, they've actually kind of been a crucible of sorts to figure out how to deal with the pandemic while keeping schools open.
Tell me about what they found.
Well, you know, what's interesting is that many, many more private schools open to in-person learning, particularly with the start of the fall semester in 2020.
I think, you know, fewer than less than 10% of private schools were using the virtual learning options.
That means over 90% of private schools were offering some form Of in-person learning, whether that's the hybrid model where you're in a classroom for part of the time or a full-time sort of five-day-a-week in-person option.
Versus in the public school, it was less than half of public schools started the school year in 2020 open to in-person learning.
And so you can see that that's a pretty big variation, a pretty big difference just in general between the route that private schools took and the route that public schools took.
And what we found with private schools being open, and of course I understand the nature of private schools.
This is an important caveat.
The nature of private schools is different from the nature of public schools.
So what I mean by that is you might have maybe more white collar parents in the private school community who have the benefit of having the ability to work from home or do more social distancing.
Versus parents and grandparents and caregivers in the public school population that don't have that benefit.
So I understand there are other important differences, but certainly I think part of what we're seeing is a reflection of students and families' preferences for in-person learning and the sort of reaction that private schools have to have to their population's preferences.
Whereas the public schools can be more intransigent on this point, they can respond to, for example, the political power of teachers unions ahead and before the interests of students and their families.
So what's the bottom line right now?
Are there examples where school reopening doesn't make sense at this point that you're aware of, or is it just something that everybody should be seriously considering?
Well, I think that this issue, unfortunately, gets painted as so black and white when it's really been varying degrees of gray.
And the public school system does have a lot to deal with.
It has some issues that maybe don't present in the private school system.
So, for example, public schools have to offer services related to feeding kids, related to transporting kids.
Some of those issues have been very hard for public school districts to sort through.
It depends largely on if you're in a rural area or urban area.
Those issues might play out very differently.
And certainly the public school system employs a lot of people who are retirement age, they're older, they're at higher risk of COVID-19.
Many women are public school teachers and they have children of their own, so they have to figure out, you know, How to oversee the virtual learning of their own children while they're teaching virtually or while they're trying to do the hybrid model.
So many of these issues are very complicated.
They've been very hard for districts to sort out, even if all parties are negotiating in good faith.
I think the biggest problems come into play when some parties aren't negotiating in good faith and they're using the pandemic, they're using school closures as an opportunity to say, you know, here's our offer of when we will come back into the classroom.
And then, you know, a month later, That offer has changed and the goalposts have moved, whether that has to do with vaccination or positivity rates in the community.
I mean, I really think ultimately we're only going to see a solution to this when parents and families are able to I have the same negotiating power and the same leverage that, for example, teachers unions have had in some of these debates and parents and families don't have that leverage right now because in the public school system, funding comes from taxes.
Taxes are not optional.
And so public schools are going to continue to be funded regardless of the services that they offer or how.
Whereas private schools are more responsive to consumer demand because if they don't offer the services that parents and students and families want, Well, so obviously this begets this question of the value of school choice or the availability of school choice for parents.
You know, perhaps it's not the private school, but maybe there are charter school options and things like that.
I do want to get back to the public schools a little bit, but tell me about that first.
You know, it's interesting.
I've just heard anecdotally from a handful of parents who have submitted their stories to us at Independent Women's Forum.
We've been collecting pandemic learning stories.
There are folks out there who said, I would have never favored school choice before.
I didn't think that it was equitable.
I didn't think it was good for the public school system.
But now that they've been through this personal experience where they've witnessed their public school district acting in ways that they think are not in the best interest of their child, they've taken their children out of the public school system, put them in private schools or put them in some other learning situation, typically having to self-fund a tutor or a learning pod.
They said, now I see that school choice is actually the great equalizer.
That school choice, whether that's offering every family An education savings account, giving them some of the funding that the public school would have received on their behalf to go in search of other educational tools, tutors, private school tuition, however the family wants to direct that funding or use that funding.
They're saying this has really opened my eyes to the fact that school choice can be something that Offers opportunities to people who don't otherwise have those opportunities, whereas absent school choice, the only people with a choice are the people with financial resources.
And so I think that's an interesting change that I've witnessed in the mindset of many parents, and I'm curious how it's going to impact our politics.
I think many states have live proposed legislation in this legislative session related to school choice, and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
You mentioned the really terrible Nevada example that basically spurred the system to act.
Who's doing it right out there in your mind right now?
You know, I think any district that has recognized that schooling is essential.
Schooling is more essential than recreational activities for adults.
As much as I Love going to restaurants and bars and appreciate that that is a source of livelihood for so many people, including so many women who work in those industries.
We've got to put schools at the very front of the line in terms of essential services that we have to keep open, even if it means putting more restrictions on other industries, because education is just A backbone of our society and feeds really the workforce of the future.
So I think that that's been a very difficult thing for policymakers to navigate.
I appreciate how the virus has been received differently and navigated differently in different states, depending on their populations, their mix of rural and urban.
I don't know that there's really a one-size-fits-all When it comes to the right state or local policy, but I think, you know, schools that have managed to stay open have done a great service to their students, and they've really avoided some of these terrible outcomes in terms of the mental health impact.
You did mention that there seems to be a disproportionate, I guess, challenge for women due to the pandemic, kids being at home, and so forth.
And in this December jobs report, we saw that it was predominantly women that were losing their jobs.
I mean, it was quite stark, actually, how significant that was.
So why is that happening?
And what is the impact here?
You know, it's kind of a kitschy term, but I've heard people talk about a she-session that we're having as a response to the pandemic, and that's twofold, I think.
Number one, the reason is that women do tend to congregate and dominate professions that are public-facing.
This is, of course, painting with a very broad stroke, but women have generally good people skills.
They like being in jobs where they're doing caregiving, where they're working directly with other people, and they're really putting A lot of their social and emotional intelligence to their advantage to work.
And so hospitality, retail, certainly the social sector caregiving, we see a lot of women in those jobs and those jobs because of the nature of the pandemic and the social distancing that we've all been trying to do in response have taken enormous job losses And that impacts women.
On the other hand, there's this issue of childcare, and women have, even outside of this pandemic, traditionally taken on the lion's share of childcare responsibilities within their own homes and in the childcare profession and the caregiving profession, for example, for elderly and disabled communities.
And so when you don't have that sort of influence, Infrastructure in place to take your children to a daycare or take your children to school or have a caregiver come to your house, that can be a very equilibrium upsetting phenomenon in many families.
And so what women have found is they're really feeling this tension between their desire to work or their desire for income versus the sort of necessity of Watching over their children or caring for children who are doing virtual learning at home.
And for this reason, we've seen surveys of women showing one in three or one in four women say, I've thought about quitting my job, leaving my job, or asking for some kind of downshifting in my career so that I can take care of all these additional responsibilities that I feel now absent the services, childcare and school-wise, that we had before.
So there's also this question, this is something I've been thinking about.
We seem to live in an incredibly, incredibly risk-averse society.
And the intersection of that, if I'm right, and I haven't been reading studies about this per se, that's just my sense, the intersection of that and coronavirus seems like a really bad combination.
It does.
And that would be a hard thing to study and sort of quantify from a scientific perspective.
But certainly, I've heard people sort of reexamining other eras of history saying, you know, what if they had applied the same logic that, you know, it's always better to be safe than sorry.
What about the people who came across the Atlantic on the Mayflower or the people who spread across the United States as pioneers to the West or the gold rush to California?
What if Americans during those periods of history had had the same mentality that it's always better to be safe than to take any risk?
I think history would have played out very differently.
We've put men on the moon and certainly would have been safer for them to stay here on planet Earth.
But we thought that the risk was worth taking for the sake of progress, for the sake of doing great things.
And there are so many things that we have foregone as a society.
Of course, in many areas, we have tried to navigate some middle ground where, for example, we can have The NBA, playing basketball games.
We can't let high school students play sports, but we can let the NBA play so that people can have some outlet for sports entertainment.
However, we've lost so much, in my opinion, when it comes to concerts, art, just being together as humans in our communities for a variety of social gatherings.
It's been a very hard thing for people to navigate in terms of what the The cost benefit or the risk benefit analysis has been.
In many cases, in the United States at least, we have given people the personal freedom to make 1,000 of those risk benefit analyses on their own.
In other ways, we've seen states and localities and even the federal government to a certain degree step in with a mandate and say, you cannot do this thing.
And so, yes, I'm concerned about what is lost when we put safety Above everything else, because certainly it doesn't come without a cost.
You know, focusing so much on, for example, the risk of this particular disease, I'm afraid, has taken our eye off of the risks of so many other things that come from social isolation, whether that's mental health issues, which I've mentioned many times, but also substance abuse or delayed health care for Other, you know, elective procedures or chemotherapy for cancer patients.
When we put those things on hold because we're concerned about the risk of this particular virus, that comes with a cost, not just in terms of human progress or money for the economy, but it comes with a cost for our human lives, for our life expectancy, for our enjoyment of life.
So that's a very serious miscalculation, I think, that we have made almost at every level that we've Hadley, any final thoughts before we finish up?
You know, I think that we've seen the status quo in American life shaken up in so many ways, and my particular interest is how this impacts families.
I'm very curious to see how this We'll impact other issue areas, for example, the issue of paid family leave, universal childcare, childcare subsidies, the ways that people make decisions about marriage and about family, about fertility.
And so I think it's very important that we as a society, whenever it is safe to do so, come back into our communities and show support for one another.
Through civil society, through organizations, through churches, through charities, through any means that we can so that people feel that social support that they feel has been I'd
love to see the economy really take off, but I'd also like to see sort of a A raging re-engagement of our social interactions and what that might look like for families could be something really wonderful, or it could be that having now depleted many of those sort of casual ties or relationships in our society, it may be very hard to bring them back.
So that's something that I'll be watching with great interest.
Well, Hadley Manning, such a pleasure to have you on.
Thank you.
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