As the pandemic shifted, pundits revised our understanding of an important tool to keep kids safe.
The headlines were alarming. “Students Lost One-Third of a School Year to Pandemic,” proclaimed the New York Times, adding that “school closures set student progress in math and reading back by two decades.” “Online school put US kids behind,” explained the Associated Press. Pundits, politicians, and much of the media describe school closings as producing a crisis: Closing schools was a “disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision,” proclaimed FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief and statistical wiz Nate Silver. School closures were a “moral catastrophe,” wrote University of California philosophy professor Shamik Dasgupta. It’s a “national crisis,” opined former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And for what? A congressional hearing in March concluded that the “ ‘science’ promoted by our federal health officials never justified the prolonged closing of schools.”
Schools are magnets for “moral panics.” Moral panics are widespread irrational fears over perceived, but exaggerated, threats to social values and interests, fanned by media and politicians. In the past few years alone we have had efforts to generate hysteria over trans kids using the wrong bathrooms, the perils of the “woke” curriculum, school libraries having books about LGBTQ+ people, the danger of demanding that children wear face masks as a novel virus spreads, and the threat of school shootings, among others. This year the panic over the consequences of keeping schools closed during the pandemic loomed large.
Calling the distress about children’s learning losses a moral panic is not simply a way of dismissing arguments one disagrees with. Concern over the effects of school closures is certainly justified. It makes sense to ask what the costs and downsides of the policy were, and how to mitigate them. But the school closing critics wildly exaggerate or distort the losses, describing them as nothing less than a generational threat. They draw on beliefs, now discredited, that COVID posed no risk to children and that schools were not sources of the spread of COVID in the community. As has often been the case with school-based panics, while the underlying concerns cross political lines, it has been especially right-wing politicians and media figures who have waged a campaign to convince Americans that school closures were, in the words of conservative columnist Alex Gutentag, an “unforgivable crime.”
The panic matters. It’s not just a matter of overblown newspaper headlines and yelling pundits. For the critics, the evidence of school closings is reason to discredit pandemic mitigation efforts, ignore the sources of America’s abysmal performance during the pandemic, and promote traditional right-wing agendas about schools. By understanding how school closings went from being seen as a sensible measure to an outright failure,