It is easy to be confused about whether it’s safe to resume in-person instruction. Schools in Europe, which were quick to reopen a few months ago, are closed now due to a resurgence of COVID-19. Experts, including the new head of the CDC, say it’s safe to reopen, even if teachers have not been vaccinated.
Steven Singer does not agree. From the onset of the pandemic, he has worried about reopening too soon. Now he wants to know why Dr. Rochelle Walensky says it is not safe to go to a Super Bowl party, but safe to reopen schools without vaccinating teachers. He says Dr. Walensky is engaged in magical thinking. He asks: Why are schools safer than Super Bowl parties?
Mercedes Schneider deconstructs a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association that has been widely misunderstood as a blanket endorsement of full-time in-person instruction. She pulls the study apart to show its caveats. She is teaching in-person classes. She is prepared. She concludes:
Potential impact of variants aside, the JAMA article does not offer unconditional, blanket support for opening every K12 school nationwide for in-person learning. I can tell you that I would not feel nearly as comfortable in my own classroom if I were not able to arrange my room to keep myself over six feet away from my 17- and 18-year-old students for most of my instruction; if masks were not mandatory in my classroom, and if I did not have two air purifiers in my room.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m very happy you posted this, and I’m very happy to see voices of reason heard above would-be fascists like Mike Bloomberg who advise us to “suck it up.”
“Suck it up”: what Bloomberg says to people while their being stopped and frisked.
Bloomberg always looks like he just got sucked up by a very powerful shop vac. Or maybe a black hole that spit him back out cuz he didn’t taste good.
https://images.app.goo.gl/HkCYZSUxUA1morJ46
Bloomberg always looks like he’s sucking up lemon juice. Bloomberg is as brainless as the autocorrect function that changed ‘they’re’ to ‘their’ in my comment above. Michael Bloomberg, please remind us how many states you won in the primaries. That was inspiring.
a terrible reminder of that reality
Their they’re, LCT.
Everything will be allwrite
Bloomberg’s rant against the teachers and their unions was vicious and vituperative to the nth degree. He is dependably always on the wrong side of any educational issue. The crew at The Majority Report did an excellent job of deconstructing Bloomberg’s propaganda and revealing him for the enemy of public education and the pro-privatizer which he is.
Bloomberg has dropped millions into state and local school board races on behalf of pro-charter, pro-voucher, anti-union candidates. A drop in the bucket for a guy with a net worth of $50 billion plus.
Thank you for this Diane. No teacher should be forced to teach in-person, unless they have the opportunity to be vaccinated beforehand. I wish this could be seen as what it likely is: a 6 month problem, because hopefully by then we will have vaccinated all our teachers. In the interim, why not allow teachers who want to to teach from home to do so, and have all child who want to attend in-person do so. They would have the company of their peers, and be watched by an aide. There’d be a short term expense of aides to cover the classrooms, but this scenario lets all choose what is right for their particular health situations, and keeps children being taught by their teachers, and not by (costly) leave replacements. (Note that it’s critical that class size not increase under this model.)
In Utah, parents can pull their kids to online whenever they want, but teachers have no choice. Even when schools are closed for too many cases, teachers still have to report to the building every day.
Teaching during the Covid pandemic always comes with a certain amount of risk even if precautions are taken. Even after getting a vaccine it is possible to contract a mild case of Covid as vaccines are somewhere between 79 and 96% effective. There is still much we do not understand about this virus. A recent study of asymtomatic people found through diagnostic imaging they had suffered organ damage in the kidneys and lungs. There is no simplistic answer to the issue of teaching during Covid. https://elemental.medium.com/even-if-youre-asymptomatic-the-coronavirus-can-do-damage-4ab22451161a
My teachers union president has a few crisp words for our leaders: “There are some lines being crossed, whether it’s news anchors, radio hosts or frustrated parents who are spewing hate, racism and misogynistic behavior. And we have to call out the privilege there,” Myart-Cruz said. “Not all parents are experiencing this crisis the same way. For too many Black and brown families, this pandemic has meant economic disaster, the loss of their loved ones, their homes.”
She added: “If this disease was disproportionately killing white children, parents and grandparents, the response to COVID-19 from our politicians would have looked very different.”
So true! Well said.
Utah schools have been boomeranging from open to closed all year. One school in the district in which I teach has closed 4 times. The Legislature’s “solution?” Don’t close ANY schools. We’ve had outbreaks involving hundreds of students in just one school. Parents, particularly from minority families, are pulling their kids to online. It’s not just vaccinating teachers, but kids, particularly at the secondary level, and families. Especially with Utah’s ludicrous class sizes, opening fully should NOT have happened.
Many Americans still believe Trump won the election and websites roll out conspiracy theories, nonsense, he lost, the CDC. now run by a highly respected Biden appointee supports reopening schools, with caveats, Mercedes and Steven challenge the CDC, neither is a scientist, everyone is entitled to opinions, who do we believe? the AFT supports “safe” reopenings, we cannot agree on a definition of “safe,” Trump lost the election, no matter what Trumpers say, no matter what the conspiracy theorists claim, he lost. Dr. Wilensky, the CDC head supports “safe” reopenings, is Dr Wilensky wrong?? Who defines “safe”?
Not a bad summary.
We’ve had more than enough of scientific organizations bowing to the wishful thinking of our politicians.
I don’t think it’s a matter of believing the science. It is how much of the science you consider. Schools in communities where the infection rate is high are more likely to have infections. Schools in many communities do not have the resources and/or the will to put in place the necessary mitigation protocols. In a city like Chicago, how do you mandate blanket policies when the environment in neighborhoods is substantially different. What are the chances that the virus can spread in a community of low income “essential” workers living in multi-generational households with many vulnerable members living in close proximity. Does anyone in their right mind think the risks associated with such a community do not pertain to what could happen in their schools? Why is Chicago insisting that some teachers return to the classroom when their students are opting for remote instruction? Teachers who are living with or caring for vulnerable family members have been denied the option to work from home. All we hear from the city is that they have put in place all the necessary mitigation strategies as if their blanket mandates meet the needs of all of their staff.
After years of buying our own supplies, are teachers across the country supposed to believe that school districts are now providing all the necessary mitigation supports? Of course the counter is the what about all those workers who are essential workers who are out there doing their jobs? You mean the ones who choose to eat rather than end up on the street?
I often think of the meat packing workers who were forced to work for so long under unsafe conditions. What has their martyrdom gotten them? They are off the radar now, which really makes me wonder how their “service” has been recognized.
We hear a lot of stats these days about the rate of infection as if those averages define the reality across a region. How do you get an accurate read in a community with scarce public health resources and/or little reason to trust government agencies right now?
I could go on in this stream of consciousness mode for a long time, but I will keep it in my own head as I am beginning to hear “yadda, yadda, yadda…” invading my own thinking. I’m glad I don’t have to make these decisions, nor will I be directly impacted by them. If I was still teaching, it might be awhile before I even considered any expressions of gratitude for my service as genuine.
I’ve spent time with Mercedes, and read her work extensively. While she’s not a scientist, she’s a painstaking researcher and one of the brightest people I’ve ever met. In fact, she is quite clear as to what she considers a safe opening, and I agree with her. Frankly, Mr. Goodman, if we ought only to listen to scientists, and if opinions are so unreliable, I’m at a loss as to why we should pay attention to yours. And like it or not, here’s mine–a single teacher, student, or family life lost because we failed to vaccinate is unacceptable.
Every school situation is different, so there is no way to say reopening all schools is safe. There are different numbers of students, different classroom sizes, different ventilation systems, different mask rules, different community infection rates, etc. It all depends. Just look at Utah’s situation from the previous posts.
Hope Joe Biden sees this bro.
Is it safe to reopen without first vaccinating all adults in the school? Of course it isn’t. It’s freaking insane.
The histories of this period that discuss the reopenings will begin with the body counts. Then they will go on to discuss the breathtakingly horrific consequences of “long Covid.”
Back in April, on this blog, based on numbers from Europe back then, I predicted that the US death count from Covid would be 500K by the beginning of February, 2021. Some derided my prediction, pointing to pieces put out by the Trump-strong-armed CDC. Well, I was off. It’s February 7, and the death count is 462. I really wish I had been wrong about this.
Without first vaccinating all adults in the school AND providing N95 masks to everyone in schools–students, teachers, administrators, and staff.
yes
Knowing that Florida understands how to enact harmful policies better than most states, I see that the state senate is proposing a bill that will allow parents to hold students back from the pandemic. https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2021/02/03/florida-parents-could-let-children-repeat-grade-after-covid-disruption-under-senate-b
Mixed feelings about this whole, colossal mess that we are living through in school and everywhere.
But if my feelings weren’t mixed, I guess I’d be a machine, ha, ha.
One thing I’ve learned since last March is that I’m much tougher than I thought I was.
I’ve also learned I’m not as tough as I thought I was, ha, ha.
Yeah…it’s more important than ever to find whatever humor I can unearth -especially when it was a rough week like the last one….
Bottom line though: the students I see in my classroom are wonderful and all these kids deserve a much, much better deal than the multiple disasters our nation is leaving them.
Thank God we have a new president now.
The MSM is the biggest proponents of opening ALL schools to in-person instruction, NOW!
WaPo and the Times run articles and op-eds calling for in-person instruction. CNN has hourly reports on the need to fully re-open schools. In between, they sandwich in medical experts warning that due to new COVID variants; we are literally standing on the shore of a calm beach on a warm, sunny day as a Category 5 hurricane, currently 400 miles away, is due to strike sometime in March.
At this point, let’s get everyone vaccinated so we can have a safe reopening in the fall.
Mainstream media “journalists” love advising everyone else what to do.
And why shouldn’t they? After all, they are the experts — at everything.
Its an absolute scandal that the Nobel committee has not given any journalists the physics, chemistry or medicine prize, since so many of them have been so clearly deserving.
And economists too.
Economists love advising everyone else what to do even more than journalists.
PBS interviewed a public health expert from John’s Hopkins on Friday who said that the CDC was right, teachers don’t need to be vaccinated, schools should open.
“Teachers don’t need no stinking vaccinations” — Johns Hopkins Public Health Expert
Dr. Walensky was interviewed by Rachel Maddow. She did say schools can reopen safely as in this post. But she added the physical plant requirements to do so. These don’t exist in thousands of schools especially in poorer districts serving minority student bodies. It seems journalists and news commentators ignore this as part of the equation. Absent the pandemic, thousands of these buildings are unhealthy to begin with. In Philadelphia the PFT is right to tell teachers not to return to in school classes when almost all the schools are unhealthy and temporary fixes won’t work. I’ve seen the argument about supermarkets being open with their employees at work. A ridiculous opinion to compare this to schools. These are typically well constructed, well ventilated, buildings, healthy for employees and customers. The schools are not. I wonder if Dr. Walensky and others simply don’t realize the extent of the problem or just choose to ignore or minimize it. Online instruction is much more demanding than being in the classroom where teachers would much rather be. Illness, especially COVID, is terrible. Death is permanent. PFT President Jerry Jordan is doing the right thing and others need to listen and follow.
Thank you, bpollock42, for your succinct description of the problems.
Dr. Walensky has said that the US can meet the Biden goal of “100 million vaccinations in 100 days” (an average vaccination rate of 1 million per day.)
I have no idea if that is realistic, but let’s assume it is.
There are about 4 million k-12 teachers in the US (public and private), so, by Walensky’s own vaccination schedule, it should take only about 4 days to vaccinate all the teachers with the first dose.
It would seem that Walensky is actually not of the opinion that vaccination of teachers cannot be done quickly before schools open (with the first dose, at least) .
If would seem that she is simply of the opinion that it is not a priority.
And by the way, even if the average rate of 1 million a day is an overestimate, unless it’s waaaaay off, the time to vaccinate all k-12 teachers with one dose will still be measured in weeks, not months.
Hi Diane, my name’s Grace Traylor and I’m a junior at George Washington University. I’m a history major and I plan on doing my thesis around the history of education, which I know is your specialty. I was wondering if you’d be available to chat? You can contact me at graceatraylor@gwu.edu if you’re interested. Thank you!
This is so infuriating. It confuses personal risk with social spread. Opening the school might not create a super-spreader event, but it does pose an individual risk to the teachers and students involved. It assumes that schools are all well ventilated & spaced out, not the small portacabins with 40 kids crammed into one space, which is what most are.
Also, Zoom teaching might be pretty awful, but it’s better to Zoom consistently than to re-open, then close because a kid has tested positive, then re-open, then close because a kid has tested positive.
I was worried I would be the only person who critically read JAMA (cough cough chock) article.
Sorry:
(cough, cough, choke)
Except for the occasional outliar, you are in good company here when it comes to critical reading.
NO!
And anyone who thinks differently is a stupid idiot!
I just cannot believe that states and some school representatives think it is really safe to get students back to school for in-person teaching in this very moment of undying COVID spike. I’m just appalled at what Chicago Public School just did regarding the reopening. This is kind of like ordering local resident to get back to the town nearby the nuclear power plants that are still being irradiated.
Speaking of which, I just got sad news.
It looks like Former Chicago Teacher’s Union Karen Lewis just passed away. Confirmed it via twitters and local news. RIP.
Moment of silence.
Doltish Joe Biden can say he “listens to science” all he wants, but at the end of the day he only listens to the ruling class, and they’re willing to sacrifice public schools and the lives of teachers.