Hundreds of teachers have died from Covid-19.
More than 1 million children have been diagnosed with the disease.
Yet a bipartisan group of seven state Governors said in a joint statement Thursday that in-person schools are safe even when community transmission rates are high.
Safe – despite hundreds of preventable deaths of school employees.
Safe – despite mass outbreaks among students.
State Governors must have a different definition of safety than the rest of us.
The message was signed by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, Delaware Governor John Carney, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, and Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker.
Only Baker is a Republican. The rest are all Democrats.
We expect such blatant untruth from the Trump administration, and Vice-President Mike Pence was quick to add his voice to the septet.
But the facts remain.
More than 300 teachers and other school employees have died across the country from the virus, according to the Associated Press.
In fact, 72 school employees died of the virus in New York City, alone, according to the city Department of Education.
More than 1 million children have been diagnosed with Covid-19 according to a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics released Monday.
More than 250,000 people have died nationwide.
More than 11 million Americans have been diagnosed with the disease at an ever increasing rate. One million of those cases came about over just six days last week.
In many states like Pennsylvania, hospitalizations have passed their peak in April.
That is not safety.
And it is beyond reckless that these Governors would make such a counterfactual statement.
FACT: It is NOT safe to have in-person schooling in any community where infections are high.
FACT: It is BETTER to have remote education unless the virus has been contained.
But these are inconvenient truths that business leaders, politicians and policymakers are doing everything in their power to ignore.
The Governors’ statement begins:
“Medical research as well as the data from Northeastern states, from across the country, and from around the world make clear that in-person learning is safe when the appropriate protections are in place, even in communities with high transmission rates.”
This is just not true.
It is based not on research by epidemiologists, not on studies conducted by doctors, scientists or pharmacologists.
It comes from the work of an economist – Emily Oster.
The Brown University professor analyzed data from all 50 states over a two week period in September and came to the conclusion that when students or teachers get Covid, they rarely catch it at school.
And her analysis has become the Gospel truth for supply-side marketeers all over the country.
However, Oster has been wrong before.
Notoriously wrong.
Oster is infamous for publishing a paper advising women that drinking alcohol during pregnancy is safe. WRONG, says the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. WRONG, says a slew of recent studies from the University of Bristol, Oxford, the British Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
She wrote her dissertation explaining that there were less women in China not because of the one child policy and traditional attitudes toward girl children, but instead because Hepatitis B skewed sex ratios.
And then after that paper made her famous, she published another one proving herself wrong.
Oster is not a serious academic. She is someone who constantly says something controversial to court the media and public opinion.
She is a contrarian, an attention seeker, a celebutante – the economist version of someone who shouts “fire” in a crowded movie theater and then sells fire extinguishers to those rushing for the exits.
It is because of people like her that Mark Twain is reported to have remarked, ”There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
She was shopping her thesis around about people not catching Covid at school back in May before there was any data one way or another.
Moreover, she homeschools her own children. She has nothing to lose getting us to believe her latest economic whopper.
Since providing this cover story, various county departments of health have claimed that contact tracing rarely indicates students or teachers catch the virus at school. However, these conclusions are based on voluntary anecdotes, not hard data. At the local level, there is often a lot of pressure to find the cause of an outbreak somewhere else when childcare is at stake or administrative coercion involved.
There has, however, been actual science done on the matter that sheds increasing doubt on Oster’s findings and those like her.
A study of more than a half-million people who were exposed to Coronavirus suggests that the virus’ continued spread is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.
Moreover, children and young adults were found to be potentially much more important to transmitting the virus than previous studies had identified, according to the study by researchers at Princeton, John Hopkins and the University of California at Berkeley.
This was the largest contact tracing study for any disease ever conducted.
It suggests the role of schools in the spread of the virus is also much greater than previously believed.
The evidence is so convincing that the CDC took down controversial guidance pushing for schools to remain open during periods of increased infections.
This is a lot more important than what some dipshit economist said.
However, the Governors’ statement continues:
“In-person learning is the best possible scenario for children, especially those with special needs and from low-income families. There is also growing evidence that the more time children spend outside of school increases the risk of mental health harm and affects their ability to truly learn.”
Talk about overstating the issue!
So kids can’t learn if their instruction is interrupted? It’s a good thing we never take any time off school, say during the summer months.
And way to use poor and special needs kids as props to drum up support. Funny how you never seem to care so much about them when issuing budget priorities or school funding formulas.
But it’s the callousness with which these governors paper over health concerns that really sounds like Oster, herself.
“There are people who would say if even one teacher acquires COVID at a school and dies, then it would not have been worth it to open schools,” Oster said. “I think that argument is complicated because people are going to suffer tremendously from schools being closed, but that is a tricky calculus.”
One would have hoped only an economist would weigh people’s lives vs the cost of health care and boosting standardized test scores. But apparently Democratic Governors feel the same way.
In-person schooling IS preferable to remote instruction if everything else is equal. But everything else is not equal right now.
What kind of mental health issues do children experience whose teachers die suddenly and preventably? How do kids suffer with the loss of a loved one knowing full well that they may have inadvertently been the cause of that person’s death?
What is the longterm cost to children or adults who have their lungs, digestive system or brains suffer irreparable damage as a result of Covid complications?
This disease was only discovered two years ago.
We cannot make bold statements of certainly about its effects without being deeply dishonest. There’s a lot we don’t know about it and how it affects people. And in light of that uncertainty it makes more sense to be extra cautious than reckless.
The fact is remote learning can be done effectively.
We can focus on ensuring that all students have the technology, infrastructure and training to access instruction on-line.
We can prioritize virtual curriculum created by classroom teachers and taught synchronously over video platforms like zoom instead of canned ed tech credit recovery programs like Edmentum.
Administrators and academic coaches can be of more use helping struggling students stay on track than endlessly spinning their wheels about how best to reopen schools.
Bottom line: No one should have to go to school in an unsafe classroom.
Students shouldn’t feel like the only way to get a quality education is to risk their health and put their families in jeopardy.
Teachers shouldn’t be bullied into working in unsafe environments where they or their loved ones may get sick – especially since educators are more susceptible to the virus and often suffer worse consequences of getting ill.
But despite all these arguments, it is the daily reality of schooling during a pandemic that is winning the argument.
Schools simply can’t operate in-person when large segments of the staff are sick and/or quarantined.
No one is buying the argument that in-person schooling is safe when whole kindergarten classes are quarantined as happened at my district this week.
The problem of childcare and other economic hardships are very real. But we will not solve them by closing our eyes to reality and putting our kids and teachers into unsafe classrooms.
It’s high time our government passed a new round of Covid relief. We need to pay people to stay home so they don’t spread the virus. We need mortgage protection, universal healthcare and a host of services to help people weather the storm.
It is embarrassing that so many Governors don’t have the courage to do that and instead indulge in the deranged fantasies of an economic death cult.
It sad that so many Governors lack the courage to issue real Stay-at-Home orders, close schools, bars and restaurants, and issue stiff penalties for those who disobey them.
We do not need in-person learning while Covid runs wild.
Until the danger has passed, we need quality remote learning conducted, planned and supported by educators.
And we need Governors with the guts to listen to science, not B.S. economists.
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