The organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes that the New York Times has become a “cheerleader” for reopening the schools as the COVID surges to new heights.
it is strange indeed because there is evidence to support reopening and equally impressive evidence against reopening schools. Yet the New York Times consistently lands on one side: reopen the schools.
Ari Paul of FAIR writes:
We’re still dealing with a pandemic of biblical proportions, and the scientific community is still conflicted about how schools reopening fits into the crisis. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts, favors school reopening (Business Insider, 11/29/20)—as does the American Academy of Pediatrics, though it notes that “the current widespread circulation of the virus will not permit in-person learning to be safely accomplished in many jurisdictions.”
But the idea that children are not vectors, or are merely low-risk vectors, for spread of the coronavirus is in dispute (Healthline, 9/24/20; AP, 9/22/20). The Journal of the American Medical Association (7/29/20) reported “a temporal association between statewide school closure and lower Covid-19 incidence and mortality,” saying that school closures between March 9 and May 7 were associated with a 62% relative decline in Covid incidence per week and a 58% decline in deaths per week.
Nature (11/16/20) cited JAMA’s finding to bolster its comprehensive statistical review of governmental “non-pharmaceutical interventions” against Covid, which found that school closures were one of “the most effective NPIs” in curbing the spread of the disease. A report in US News and World Report (12/2/20) based on data compiled by the Covid Monitorproject on the coronavirus in K–12 schools concluded that “the data suggests schools are NOT safe and DO contribute to the spread of the virus—both within schools and within their surrounding communities.”
And that’s partially why parents and teachers are so worried about de Blasio’s plan. Individual schools in the city have to deal with budget shortfalls, deteriorating buildings and lack of supplies in the best of times, and now they suddenly must rapidly and safely implement in-person teaching. And as many New York schools advocates, like one-time gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, have argued, reopening schools tends to benefit whiter communities, as whiter, more affluent schools tend to have more resources to adapt to the current environment.
Paul identifies Times’ reporter Eliza Shapiro as purveyor of a consistent anti-union, anti-teacher perspective, who consistently supports reopening and ignores the voices of teachers who complain about the lack of funding for protective measures for both students and teachers.
Paul concludes that the New York Times, the newspaper of record, “should be playing a much more balanced and compassionate role.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Historically, the NYT has been anti-teacher, anti-Union, and anti-NYC public schools. Brent Staples’ editorials provide a long record of this –and rarely provided any evidence for his views.
You are right. The NY Times does indeed have a long history of antagonism towards unions and public schools. One person on the editorial board–Brent Staples–wrote every education editorial. In the rare instance when a friendly editorial appeared, I surmised that Brent was on vacation.
Dr. Fauci DOES support the safe reopening of schools IF other parts of the economy are shut down instead. It’s funny how some reporters/journalists only want to report what “they” want the public to hear. Other countries have been able to safely reopen schools because they value children, teachers and education and choose to shut down restaurants, bars, and shopping. The “King of Capitalism” USA will never shut down it’s economy for stupid, little, future meat widgets. “We the People” don’t matter much to the 1%.
The real question is: How many deaths is opening schools worth? Just give us a number so we know. (In the spirit of honesty, my son is attending school, but the circumstances are quite different than NYC. I agree with your comments completely.)
My son attends his private school that adopted a hybrid model. They invested in the filters, erected their event tents on the athletic fields, invested in sanitary measures, have a mask mandate and social distancing. No over crowding at any time. If my son were still enrolled in our public school, I would be fighting to keep the schools closed. Our districted HS runs at 150-165% occupancy, has 15-20 outdoor trailers, mold issues, poor ventilation, faulty HVAC and could never enforce a mask mandate or keep any kind of social distancing.
The current acceptable number is about 60 million or all the student and staff because this is not about education. It is about money.
Schools can be safely reopened if the government provides the resources necessary for social distancing, PPE, ventilation, and other necessary measures. Trump and DeVos urged reopening but never urged Congress to pass the funding to reopen schools safely.
The NY Times: newspaper of broken records.
All the news that’s counterfeit to print.
Over 3,000 deaths a day now, more than from the Twin Towers. And this new careful study from Korea indicating that one can become infected indoors within 5 minutes from 20 feet away: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-minutes-from-20-feet-away-south-korean-study-shows-perils-of-indoor-dining-for-covid-19
Opening our schools during an airborne pandemic was insane. One wonders whether, had Trump not been president, the CDC would have said so, flat out, months ago.
I have, courtesy of SomeDAM, this to say to people who want schools open:
Death and severe consequences from what people are now calling “long Covid.”
Once those terrible tolls have been exacted and measured and more is known about transmission, people will be saying, well, it was pretty obvious all along, wasn’t it? The disease was airborne. The masks people had available, while better than nothing, weren’t very effective. The virus lingers in the air for a long time and travels far. Very little testing or contact tracing was being done. A lot of transmitters were asymptomatic, and those were almost never tested, so almost no one, anywhere in the US, had any clear idea who was actually getting the disease from whom. And the Executive Branch was pressuring health authorities to pretend that nothing much needed to be done and that it was safe to reopen everything, so those authorities came up with a lame compromise involving wearing those lousy masks and staying 6 feet apart, as if even those poor protections were going to be perfectly observed in schools. The “science” became the sort of bad joke one saw with Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union.
And under these conditions, people decided that the brilliant thing to do was to have teachers, kids, and administrators crowd into tiny spaces for hours on end and rebreathe one another’s virus-laden air.
and I didn’t even mention the millions of supporters of the scientifically ignorant, denialist President who refused to follow even the minimal guidelines that the scientists WERE allowed to promulgate.
The part that people keep missing about all this is not about the kids getting sick, the bigger concern is…..what are they going to take home with them? What high risk people (grandparents) live in their homes?
Here are some of my thoughts.
https://davidrtayloreducation.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/to-close-school-or-not-close-schools/
Nice piece, Dr. Taylor!
I’m with Bob. Thanks!
I keep hearing this idea that “schools are safe” Really?
Everyone in my family has been COVID tested more than once….for all sorts of reasons.*
Except me.
And, I’m in a school all day long surrounded by adults of all ages and lots of students. Been in a classroom now for 70 school days straight, just an hour-and-a-half, easy ride from NYC.
How can that be?
Because the plan never included testing us at school.
So where is all this “data” about teachers and students being safe at school coming from?
routine medical procedure, fever from Lyme tick bite, going to college, stuck in quarantine in college, traveling out of state etc… Those are some of the reasons my wife and kids have been COVID tested. And, sure, I could go get a test this morning. But shouldn’t there be some organized system to do that with teachers? And, I have to wonder…why not test a lot of us in schools to see if we have the COVID antibodies? To see if we’ve already had the damn virus?
ANSWER: because America does not care about children and the people who teach and care for children.
And, anyone who doubts that fact should grab some coffee, a good snack and spend a few hours diving deep into the “older posts” on this blog.
MY ” * ” got left off the addendum. So, here’s a P.S. to that! And everyone have a great day -despite it all.
1) The NYT editorial board (“Opinion”) supports school reopening- reporters report, hopefully reflecting all sides, there is a distinct difference.
2) Eliza Shapiro, is a superb reporter, to say she is “anti-union” is absurd, she is neither pro nor anti, she reports
3) COVID in-school rates are extremely low, one can argue schools are safer than communities
4) Yes, the percentage of parents opting to return to school is heavyweight white, is this a reason NOT to reopen schools?
5) The largest danger, remote learning is highly effective and school districts decide to integrate remote into normal instruction sharply reducing the need for as many teachers… the plans are already afoot
Five things one might say when one ignores observable realities.
I now have data from three teachers in Hungary. Two teach low grades and 20% of the teachers got sick. The third one is teaching in high school, and the sickness rate is 5%. Which rate does sound low to you? (As far as I know, schools are now again closed in Hungary)
The thing that is really low is the science and math acumen of people who actually believe claims like ” 0.2% positivity” in schools being made by economist Emily Oster and others when the false negative rate of even the best covid test (PCR) can be greater by 1 or even 2 orders of magnitude. (That’s factors of ten to the innumerate)
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/which-test-is-best-for-covid-19-2020081020734
People like Oster obviously believe that the tests are perfectly accurate and that they can therefore claim positivities of 2 tenths of a percent (oblivious to fact that the associate uncertainty completely swamps the result)
The state of math and science knowledge in the US, even among otherwise fairly intelligent and knowledgeable people (which most certainly does not include Oster) is just very sad. Pathetic, really. And the worst part is many seem to revel in their innumeracy and some won’t listen even when you try to explain it to them.
It’s no exaggeration to say “it will be the death of us” because it quite literally already is.
“A woman in Oklahoma with worsening cold-like symptoms tested
negative for Covid-19 three times before receiving a positive test. Now, she wants others to know to not solely rely on test results..”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/08/us/tulsa-woman-covid-test-false-negatives-trnd/index.html
The last 2 false negative tests were actually PCR, which are supposedly the “gold standard” for covid.
I actually have a friend, who works in an ER in Hungary, whose husband tested negative twice with the PCR test. He was first tested in the ambulance as he was taken in with bad COVID symptoms. The third test was positive.
Fool’s gold?
AOster even stated back at the start of her “dashboard” project that “Once we have a dashboard for these data, the media could use these sources to drive their coverage. Even if they chose not to—because ‘Day 45 with infection rate below 0.01 percent’ doesn’t generate a lot of clicks—citizens would be empowered to analyze the relevant information themselves”
https://prospect.org/coronavirus/why-reopening-schools-has-become-the-most-fraught-debate-of-the-pandemic
With her hypothetical, Oster implied that one could determine that the infection rate was actually below 0.01% .
Oster must have a Magic Covid Ball that gives her the infection rate accurate to the nearest hundredth of a percent because she sure as hell could not know the infection rate to anywhere near that accuracy based on current covid testing technology.
The most accurate covid test (PCR) has an uncertainty (based on false negative rate) that is estimated to be between 200 and nearly 4000 times as large!!
Emily Oster:” Magic Covid Ball, is the infection rate in schools below 0.01%?”
Magic Covid Ball: “It is certain.”
Eliza Shapiro is not a superb reporter. She spins a biased narrative – blame the few white mc and umc NYC public school parents for everything and anything as a distraction from the issues disadvantaged and vulnerable student populations face to give politicians and the uber-wealthy an excuse not to do anything about them.
In one of her articles during this past year she excoriated a 12 year old boy who started a petition asking the DOE to keep a number grade as the final grade for the 2019-20 school year (as opposed to Meets Standards/Does Not Meet Standards). She published his name, what school district he lives in, and where he had taken test prep courses. She also published a picture of him. This child is a MINOR and she publicly excoriated him in a publication, which has a circulation of over 2M, with no effort to present his side of the situation. SHE IS A HORRIBLE PERSON!
Eliza Shapiro blocked me on Twitter.
100% agree, Beth. Shapiro’s beat is essentially writing the same story about “desegregation” and stoking racial division. Most recently, she framed the limited school reopenings as inequitable because the students returning to school were disproportionately white and not not enough black students were returning. (Ignoring that the most under-represented “group” returning to schools are Asian, that the largest “group” returning are Latinos, and that most of the students returning are black and Latino.) She gets things right occasionally, a la a stopped clock, but she is horrible.
Shapiro became furious at me when I challenged her story that black and Hispanic parents were angry at the Democrats for their growing wariness about charter schools. The story appeared because a Walton-funded group of black activists interrupted Elizabeth Warren at a campaign event in Georgia, where she was speaking about a laundry workers’ strike in the 19th century, led by black women. The protestors were led by Howard Fuller, who has received many millions from Bradley, Walton, and other anti-labor, anti-public school billionaires. Among other points of contention: the source for her claim that one million children were on charter waitlists was a five year-old press release from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. I asked to meet with her, and she refused my invitation. Not a judicious temperament. .
@dianeravitch I remember you posting at another time that Shapiro had blocked you on Twitter. You’d think that a journalist would want to learn from your expertise.
They want to reopen schools so that parents can work. So don’t make going back to school mandatory., and either don’t teach at all just take care of the kids or teach but turn on zoom so tjat those who stayed home can learn that way.