John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews Alec MacGillis’ “School’s Out,” a book about the response of schools and teachers to the pandemic. My takeaway: It’s tough to write a book about a pandemic when it’s not over.
When I first read Alec MacGillis’ School’s Out, I worried that he reached conclusions that were too optimistic, but it made me hopeful. After all, it was a co-production by ProPublica and New Yorker, and MacGillis had listened to numerous top public health experts. Upon rereading, and following his links, I’ve reached a more discouraging appraisal. The published research he cites actually makes the case for more caution, and against MacGillis’ implicit call to reopen schools more quickly for in-person instruction.
School’s Out touched all bases in reviewing recent research, but I’m afraid MacGillis didn’t focus enough on the experience of educators. In fact, after discussing recent research with a Baltimore teacher who he respected, he was surprised that she still opposed the reopening for in-person classes. To his credit, MacGillis presented her side of the story but he didn’t seem to understand why school environments would “snowball” the transmission effects.
At first, MacGillis did an excellent job of personalizing the complexity of the threats that Covid brings to already-weakened high-poverty schools. He described a 12-year-old Baltimore student, Shemar, who he had tutored. MacGillis surveyed the technological problems which made it so much more difficult for online instruction to serve Shemar’s needs. Then he explained why technology shortcomings were only a part of the overall situation. Real solutions would require the education system to rebuild personal contacts with students like Shemar.
Also to his credit, rather than embrace the blame-game of the last generation, MacGillis wrote that Shemar’s teachers “worried about him but had a hard time reaching him, given his mother’s frequent changes of phone number. One time, his English teacher drove to his house and visited with him on the small front porch.” Moreover, MacGillis expressed regret that he had not been more helpful, “I checked on Shemar a couple of times during the spring, but, in hindsight, I was too willing to let the lockdown serve as an excuse to hunker down with my own kids, who were doing online learning at other Baltimore public schools.”
This could have foreshadowed a recommendation for caution in the complicated task of restarting in-person instruction. Yes, he could have concluded, the most vulnerable children suffer the most under a virtual education system. If a rushed reopening occurs, however, and it fails, the poorest children of color would be damaged even more.
MacGillis mentioned areas where urban schools have less capacity than affluent American schools or high-performing systems across the world. For instance, a student who was more worried about his mother losing her job than logging in to remote learning made the common, correct prediction, “‘I don’t care if I fail. I’m 14, in seventh grade — I don’t think they’re going to fail me again.’ He was right.” MacGillis then made the more important observation about poor children of color:
Society’s attention to them has always been spotty, but they had at least been visible — one saw them on the way to school, in their blue or burgundy uniforms, or in the park and the playground afterward. Now they were behind closed doors, and so were we, with full license to turn inward. While we dutifully stayed home to flatten the curve, children like Shemar were invisible.
MacGillis then cited Christopher Morphew, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Education, when warning:
“The failure to plan now, to spend the money now, is going to cost us in human resources, in violence, in other ways, for a long time,” he said. He estimated that the closure could result in 18 months of “summer melt,” the term for the educational regression caused by long breaks in schooling. “Eighteen months of summer melt when you’re already three grades behind is virtually impossible to come back from.”
However, I’m afraid that MacGillis failed to thoroughly consider why urban students like Shemar are so far behind. He recalled a great deal of 19thand 20th century education history, while ignoring the 21st century where trust was further undermined by corporate school reformers who imposed quick fixes that educators knew were doomed to fail.
Then, I worry that School’s Out was sidetracked by a simplistic account of the way that President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos undermined the efforts to safely reopen schools in the fall. In July, Trump proclaimed, “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools.” And the “instantaneous” result was, “Teachers who had been responsive to the idea of returning to the classroom suddenly regarded the prospect much more warily.”
The big problem, however, wasn’t teachers’ new fearfulness. The problem was the realities created by Trump, “governors and everybody else” who made it impossible to safely reopen many schools. For instance, a Brookings Institution study “found that districts’ school opening decisions correlated much more strongly with levels of support for Trump in the 2016 election than with local coronavirus case levels.” That reality was bad enough. But, School’s Out didn’t to seem fully consider how much schools in urban areas which voted against Trump are poorer and, often, politically powerless.
MacGillis cited a list of affluent and private schools, and schools in nations that better handled the coronavirus and did what is takes to return to in-person learning. Even after repeatedly using the words community and “community spread,” MacGillis (and sometimes the public health experts he cited) ignored the ways that the reopening of bars, and the rest of the economy; the rush to return to in-person college classes, and football; and the often widespread refusal to even wear masks and respect social distancing made it unlikely that many schools could reopen safely.
MacGillis even cites Texas, Florida and Georgia as hopeful examples, noting that case numbers have declined from their summer highs as schools reopen, but the New York Times lists Texas and Georgia as only having “some” reporting for school districts with reporting “planned” in Florida. Regardless, who would see those state’s tragedies as best public health practices and celebrate the way that infections haven’t gone all the way up to their most tragic levels?
In doing so, MacGillis seems to forget the timing of the political mandates and the publication dates of public health research. Had the comprehensive efforts of March and April, that broke the infection curve in many American cities and European nations, and had federal resources not been cut back so quickly, educators could have prioritized in-person and/or hybrid instruction in the fall, while also working on virtual systems that might be necessary if a “second wave” hit.
By June, however, there was a major pushback by the Trump administration and pro-Trump governors against public health expertise. This was best illustrated three weeks into June when Trump spoke to an indoor crowd in Tulsa. But citing an op-ed in The New York Times on July 1, by Jennifer Nuzzo and Joshua Sharfstein, MacGillis explained, “Nuzzo had supported lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the spring, but by the summer she was arguing that schools should plan to reopen in much of the country.”
Moreover, he added, “A number of experts were beginning to agree with Nuzzo and Sharfstein.” He also drew on Harvard’s Meira Levinson’s article in The New England Journal of Medicine laying out how to reopen primary schools, and Harvard’s Joseph Allen, who co-wrote a 62-page plan listing steps that schools could take to reduce transmission risk.
Being a retired teacher, with too many years of being a consumer of rushed Big Data hypotheses, I read the actual wording of these scholarly papers and connected the dots very differently than MacGillis. Nuzzo and Sharfstein may have disagreed with my synthesis of the evidence but, as they wrote, education decision-makers had to deal with the real world consequences of “the way states lifted social distancing restrictions imposed to fight the coronavirus sadly demonstrates our priorities. Officials let bars, restaurants and gyms open, despite warnings from public health experts that these environments pose the greatest risk for spreading the disease.”
I suspect the Times editor who drafted the Op-Ed’s title would have agreed with me about the key takeaway: “We Have to Focus on Opening Schools, Not Bars.” Yes, “Resuming classroom instruction is crucial. Infection control inside and outside classrooms can let it happen.” But, “political leaders seem to have paid scant attention to safely reopening schools,” and “the consequences of those backward priorities … Covid-19 rampaging through states that reopened quickly — make it even more vital that we extensively prepare to reopen classrooms as safely as possible this fall.”
But what would it take to do so?
In this political climate where increased funding, masks, and even social distancing were being repudiated in so many states, Nuzzo and Sharfstein argued, “Reopening businesses that pose a major risk of community spread should be a lower priority than reopening schools.” They called for building the capacity for “robust tracing, isolation and quarantining;” funding for “finding other buildings and space where they could expand;” in-school “bubbles” or “small groups of students who will learn, eat lunch and have recess together;” a system to protect “staff members who are older or have chronic medical conditions;” a “creative” transportation system; and improved online instruction systems.
Similarly, Meira Levinson’s article said, “Even under conditions of moderate transmission (<10 cases per 100,000 people), … we believe that primary schools should be recognized as essential services — and school personnel as essential workers — and that school reopening plans should be developed and financed accordingly.” But, it also said:
Any region experiencing moderate, high, or increasing levels of community transmission should do everything possible to lower transmission. The path to low transmission in other countries has included adherence to stringent community control measures — including closure of nonessential indoor work and recreational spaces. Such measures along with universal mask wearing must be implemented now in the United States if we are to bring case numbers down to safe levels for elementary schools to reopen this fall nationwide.
It thus offered little practical advice to those schools in states that rejected the wisdom of public health experts.
And Joseph Allen’s position sounded like it was even more opposed to the caution of educators, but the disclaimer at the beginning of “Risk Reduction Strategies for Reopening Schools” said the guidelines were “intended to offer guidance regarding best practices regarding the general operations of buildings in an effort to reduce the risk of disease transmission.” The report:
Is in no way intended to override or supersede guidance from government and health organizations, including, without limitation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the United States Government, and or any States. The information contained herein reflects the available information at the time the report was created. User recognizes that details and information are changing daily.
In other words, in July, it would have been difficult, or impossible, for educators in many states and most urban districts to see the evidence that was “changing daily” as enough to justify in-person instruction by September. Then, on July 18, the New York Times reported that a massive study by South Korean experts found that “children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.”
MacGillis cited researchers who “immediately found problems with the study’s conclusions, pointing out that the sample of children who had become sick was exceedingly small,” and “it was not clear whether older children had passed the virus to adults or had got it at the same time and shown symptoms earlier.” I also was reassured by their pushback. But then I followed MacGillis’ link to Alasdair Munro, a clinical research fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton, and found it was a Twitter debate. I became more concerned that he was engaging in an academic debate, as opposed to evaluating what decision-makers need to know about the dangers of reopening and when did they need to know it in order to make plans and implement them.
On Twitter, Munro criticized the Korean study saying that he had seen unpublished data to the contrary and that “it was a mistake to rush to use this study as high quality evidence that children are highly infectious (even more so than adults!) once they reach 10 years old.” It wasn’t until August 10, however, that such evidence was reported.
My reading of the debate was that Munro didn’t make the case for schools in high-transmission areas not taking the Korean study seriously when deciding whether to reopen. But, even if Munro made the case, he was doing so on the eve of the reopening dates proposed in many high-risk areas. How could educators implement plans, based on that continuing debate, in a few weeks?
Rather than get into the weeds of the Twitter exchange which School’s Out drew upon, I’ll just cite Munro’s latest positions. First, he argues “Careful reopening of schools in areas of low community prevalence with good, basic infection prevention measures can work.” And his summary of the evidence is: “If prevalence [is] high in the community, it will be high in schools and some will transmit; Isolated cases result in low transmission; and Infection prevention works.” But he never seems to touch the question of how prevention can work in schools in communities that won’t invest in it.
And that brings me back about what was excellent and what was misguided by School’s Out. MacGillis was eloquent about the disaster which is likely unfolding and which is most damaging our poorest children of color. He correctly concludes that huge numbers of disadvantaged students like Shemar need to get “out of the home and into school, every day.” But the battle against the isolation these children face is “on hold.” This is the tragic reality:
For the foreseeable future, Shemar would be spending his days as he had spent the spring and the summer: in a dark room, in front of a screen, with virtually no direct interaction with kids anywhere close to his own age. Sometimes the screen would hold Minecraft and Fortnite; sometimes, if he got the hang of the log-ins, it would hold Zoom.
And we must welcome the guidance of public health experts who are calling for holistic instruction, recognition of the effects of poverty, segregation, and trauma, and acknowledging that schools alone can’t overcome these interconnected challenges. We should be thankful that public health experts have done such a great job of laying out realistic advice and plans for reopening our schools. It’s not their fault that Trumpism undermined their contributions.
Moreover, our failure to reopen in a safe and timely manner will almost certainly prompt the flight of middle-class and affluent families from traditional public schools, resulting in the loss of per-student funding. MacGillis concludes with the prediction by Jon Hale, of the University of Illinois that “the consequences could be tragic. It will decimate the system for those who rely on it.” In other words, the hard facts are even starker than acknowledged in School’s Out. We are heading for a disaster for many, many students. But, it would have been worse if our most vulnerable urban districts had given into pressure and rushed the return to in-person instruction.
https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/ateacherstale704189778.wordpress.com/33
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Science by the Book
Like single glass of wine per day
To child in the womb
To open schools is A OK
The columnists assume
The published research he cites actually makes the case for more caution, and against MacGillis’ implicit call to reopen schools more quickly for in-person instruction.
Friendly Advice
Drawing the conclusion
Before pandemic’s end
Bound to bring confusion
Really not your friend
a mental connection: A relative drinks her “one glass of wine per day” out of a VERY, very large wine glass. The kids who used to get one half-day of standardized testing per year now may be facing standardized testing for two weeks.
The single glass of wine per day is not safe for pregnant mothers no matter the size of the glass.
That was a reference to this
Click to access astley-oster2013.pdf
The central problem is that claims are being made in newspaper columns, magazine articles and books that are simply not backed by the relevant science.
Science by Media might have been a better title.
The proper place to publish scientific results is in scientific journals, not magazine articles and books.
Any one who publishes their results in a magazine article is not doing science and undoubtedly knows it (and undoubtedly chose NOT to go the journal route because they knew their analysis and conclusions would not pass the scientific muster of a scientific journal)
I haven’t read the book School’s Out, but I did read the long article published in ProPublica on the topic. My takeaway was that Shemar’s plight greatly affected MacGillis, but was also a revelation. He came across to me as suffering a bit from savior syndrome, which left me uneasy. He describes himself as Shemar’s tutor, but is not an educator.
“The biggest challenge was not technological. No one made sure that Shemar logged on to his daily class or completed the assignments that were piling up in his Google Classroom account. His grandmother, who is in her 70s, is a steady presence, but she attended little school while growing up in a sharecropping family in South Carolina. She was also losing her eyesight. One day, she explained to me the family’s struggles to assist Shemar: Though three of his four older siblings lived in the house, too, they had jobs or attended vocational school, and one of them had a baby to care for; Shemar’s mother was often absent; and his great-uncle, who also lived in the house, had dropped out of school in South Carolina around the age of 8 and was illiterate.
“Shemar’s teachers worried about him but had a hard time reaching him, given his mother’s frequent changes of phone number. One time, his English teacher drove to his house and visited with him on the small front porch.
“I checked on Shemar a couple of times during the spring, but, in hindsight, I was too willing to let the lockdown serve as an excuse to hunker down with my own kids, who were doing online learning at other Baltimore public schools. So I was startled when I received a text message in May from Shemar’s fourth sibling, who worked at an Amazon warehouse and lived with his girlfriend and baby, asking for the link to the day’s class. Shemar had moved in with them.
“The following Sunday, I dropped by the house with some groceries. Shemar’s mother, who had been evicted from her row house, was there, too, and Shemar was in good spirits. But, the next afternoon, he was alone in the living room, the lights off, the blinds drawn and the TV on. He had stayed up very late the night before, watching TV with his mother, and had slept past noon, missing that day’s class. For breakfast, he had eaten some Nutella that I had brought by the day before. I asked what he would have for dinner, assuming he would eat with his brother’s family. In fact, they usually ate on their own, upstairs. ‘Nutella,’ he said.”
Um, yeah. Teachers in our poorest school districts know all this. It’s their daily interactions with many of their students. Calling for teachers to return to unsafe classrooms in buildings lacking adequate ventilation, hot water or sufficient PPE hardly addresses the challenges of the vast number of students like Shemar in our public schools across the country.
The school system in question is Baltimore, whose superintendent is Sonja Santelises. She previously worked in Boston’s public schools, has a degree from HGSE and has been an editor at The Education Trust, (untrustworthy in my opinion). Her husband is a hedge funder. Santelises has been pushing for schools to reopen, which puts her at odds with the teachers union in Baltimore – not a surprise there.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-students-left-behind-by-remote-learning
(Incidentaly, MacGillis’ father, Don MacGillis, a journalist who was an editor of The Berkshire Eagle and the Boston Globe, died this week of injuries suffered in a 50 foot fall from Maine’s Mt. Katahdin.)
I really don’t know how anyone could read MacGillis‘a Propublica/New Yorker article and not come away absolutely devastated at what’s happening to children. If your immediate reaction if anything but that — whatever else your views are about school shutdowns — then I just don’t know what to say.
It is absolutely devastating.
It’s been absolutely devastating for the last two decades to teach in schools deprived of resources, with overcrowded classrooms, facilities that don’t pass code, emergency credentialed Teach For Awhilers and reformster leaders in a revolving door waiting to head to their next assignment, as charters and voucher schemes drain away funding and cream off the kids most easily served.
Those most hurt have been the same kids most damaged by school closures because all the auxiliary structures provided by the school system beyond instruction have fallen away with their closure.
The majority of children who have died of covid are Black and Brown.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/16/913365560/the-majority-of-children-who-die-from-covid-19-are-children-of-color
Until the pandemic is contained and teachers can be assured of safe working conditions, schools cannot be widely reopened. Educators cannot be martyrs. We’ve been plugging up all the holes in society’s dike for far too long and cannot do it any longer.
When governing officials want to play games to keep schools open, they lose our trust.
” All three guardrails crushed, school buildings stay open
“No matter how you calculate COVID stats — citywide or with a weighted average that reflects BPS families — the pandemic has now pushed past all the guardrails officials said they would use to decide if it is safe to keep buildings open”
https://schoolyardnews.com/all-three-guardrails-crushed-schools-stay-open-89d2801d6f6
Thompson’s analysis is a needed corrective to the article at ProPublica. I questioned MacGillis’ assumptions based on one statement I actually have researched in the past, that other countries had reopened in-person schooling despite much higher rates than we’re seeing (in Baltimore et al cities). That’s misleading at best. Reopenings in Spring were puny; UK got a total of 10% kids back in bldgs, France 17%, Germany some high schools here & there, Italy & Spain none. At the time of the MacG article [9/28], the reporting stats were preliminary from Europe: the most complete were from Germany one month in [little to no transmission in schools so far]. Primary differences from US: (a)testing/ contact tracing is extensive (as indicated by the fact they have full details) so they’re right on top of identifying/ managing clusters; (b)when Germany reopened in-person their ave daily new cases were ¼ of ours [25 times, adjusted for pop diff]. Also: successful reopening in a couple of Scandinavian countries started when community spread was far lower than ours, and– school reopening was prioritized BEFORE bars/ indoor dining – which get shut down if school stats go up!
So I was not surprised to learn that when Thompson actually read MacGillis’ links, he found the research indicated far more caution than MacG took from them. MacG mentions the lack of anything parallel to the precautions those Euro countries are implementing, but seems to brush them aside for the sake of kids like Shemar. Ignoring that poor kids of color [& their families] are at multiple times higher risk from consequences of reopening regardless. Christine Langhoff’s links above indicate that perhaps the most significant risk factor is the actual community spread in the poorest neighborhoods. Stats in Boston show that a city-wide average under 3% is made up of a few white neighborhoods considerably lower than that plus poor nbhds of color at triple the average rate.
Any argument for reopening in-person has to be based on actual statistical risks, plus safety measures actually in use, both in the school bldgs and in their communities.
Jacobin Magazine has published a critique of MacGillis’ post at the New Yorker.
“In-person reopening during COVID-19 has become the latest — and perhaps most consequential — battle for the neoliberal educational reform movement. It’s a topsy-turvy world, in which pro-opening pundits and activists are cast as the (usually white) saviors of low-income students and students of color, while the teachers who actually dedicate their lives to working with those students are portrayed as the uncaring bogeymen, particularly if they’re unionized.
“As soon as it became clear that COVID-19 would not be contained by the fall, writers of a certain disposition began gearing up for the fight to come. As Politico writer Michael Grunwald tweeted with almost palpable glee in June, ‘This spring, the protests have sparked an uncomfortable debate about who police unions look out for, and this fall, COVID might spark a similar debate about teachers unions…’
“Like all neoliberal reform narratives, there’s a paradox at the heart of MacGillis and Chait’s stories. Teachers are so deserving of scorn precisely because they’re so essential in a society that places almost all of its anti-poverty eggs in the education basket.”
Worth the read.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/neoliberal-education-reform-scapegoat-teachers-covid-19-reopening-school