A few months ago I took a look at remote learning during the COVID pandemic and concluded that it hadn't made much difference. States that kept schools open did about as well as states that closed schools. The results internationally were similar.
But that was based on partial data and a specific measure of school openness. Today the New York Times points to a study done about a year ago which concludes that school closures did have an effect. Here's the key chart from the study:
There is a difference, but it's surprisingly small: about a tenth of a grade level between the highest and lowest quintiles of school openness.¹ What's more, the variance is huge, which suggests that the results are pretty sensitive to the precise metrics and controls.
Even more interesting is this:
Unfortunately, the authors presented this only for math, but if I'm parsing their tables correctly the effect is even stronger for reading. What it shows is that among white students, remote learning made virtually no difference: a few percentage points with a lot of noise. Nearly all of the effect of remote learning comes from Black and Hispanic students.
Why would remote learning only affect minority students? The same effect is evident when you look at poor students, so the obvious answer is that it's neither race nor remote learning per se that causes problems, but remote learning in places where kids have less access to computers and parental supervision. Here's a chart that shows this:
Remote learning has an impact, but % FRPL (free lunch students) has the biggest effect of all. There's also a large independent effect from "COVID-19 Disruption," which measures the general social disruption from the pandemic.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that remote learning probably had a negative impact, but it was pretty negligible among middle-class students. They did about the same regardless. However, among poorer students the impact was more noticeable.
These results are, of course, politically charged. Conservatives have been blasting liberals for a long time over school closures, so they're eager for any evidence that they were right. And generally speaking, I think they were. However, if you're going to cite the evidence, you need to cite all of it:
- Among middle-class students, remote learning had very little negative effect. Multiple lines of evidence point this way.
- Among poor students the impact was significant.
- Regardless, it doesn't appear that there would have been any harm in keeping schools open since infection rates didn't change much between places that kept schools open and those that closed them. Keeping schools open would have helped some kids and certainly would have vastly reduced the stress on working parents who had no ready way to take care of house-bound children.
That appears to be the current state of our knowledge about this.
¹The difference in math was larger: about a fifth of a grade level between the top and bottom quintiles.
And it is not like that many teachers died from being forced to teach in schools that remained open before the vaccine was available. The kids didn’t get that sick so no big deal. It’s just the cost of teaching these days, like being shot.
Do you have any evidence ANY increased death rate from keeping schools open?
How many deaths works justify closing schools?
Any large scale human activity causes deaths. Teachers die commuting, in school violence, etc. but we do not make all schooling remote to prevent this. We rationally accept that the value of in person schooling exceeds the low number of deaths caused by in person schooling.
There were some. https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-many-texas-teachers-died-covid-19/287-459c384d-5640-47d3-b58e-37b5dca180c4 . There are other studies showing a higher risk, but it depends on many factors. I teach in Texas. We only shut down for about 9 weeks. (we never came back from Spring Break in 2024 and went to all online teaching. In the fall, we opened back up with kids (but not teachers) having the option to return in person. We tought hybrid with both online and live kids each period, which is honestly the worst of both worlds. We lost at least 20 teachers and workers to Covid in our district. (and yes it is hard to prove they caught it at work vs. another vector).
My main point was that at the time, it was not unreasonable to worry about the health of teachers. Too often in the debate about school closings, the risk to teachers was often ignored. Likewise, the debate ignore the fact that a large percentage of schools never had any significant lockdowns.
Wow! You must have a big district!
𝘞𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 20 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘊𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘵.
The death rate in Texas was 3.6 per thousand. This was heavily concentrated everywhere among the extremely old and people with major comorbidities, most of which were incompatible with working. If we assume that the death rate in non-disabled adults was half of 3.6 per thousand - so 1.8 per thousand - then this implies about 11,000 workers in your district. Possible. Are you in Houston? That's the largest district in Texas and has 27,000 workers.
If you lost less than one out of 1,000 over three years that is about twice the expected death rate from car accidents.
𝘔𝘺 𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘶𝘯𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴. 𝘛𝘰𝘰 𝘰𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘰𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥.
If we can expect the worker at the Piggly Wiggly to risk his life to do his job why can't we expect teachers to take comparable risks?
Not sure what your point is here. That traffic deaths are acceptable? That accepting the risk of traffic death means you should accept an additional risk of death from COVID?
That minimal risks comparable to the risk of dying in a traffic accident while commuting do not remotely justify closing schools.
Do you know those teachers got covid at school? They could have contracted it anywhere. My wife is a teacher and our schools were open for the whole 2020-2021 for anyone that chose to go in person. Lots of teachers at her (and my kids') school got covid but none of them got it at school. (A lot of them got it at a wedding.) And, none of them died or were seriously sick.
Let's be fair. Most of the time you have no idea where you got Covid.
Employees at the Piggly Wiggly aren’t expected to share their space with 30 young children who don't wash their hands for eight hours a day.
Obviously one view or another would eventually be vindicated in hindsight. I don’t understand why that implies that the caution exercised wasn't justified.
The focus on the effects of missing school on learning is narrow. And it frames the question about whether or not schools should have remained open narrowly, too. Your comment underscores these points. Districts didn't close their schools in a political vacuum, and they had different constituencies to contend with, including their workers, many of whom had strong union representation. Additionally, HOW schools closed mattered, too. Some, like our local district, cut the schedules in half for some kids and let parents decide to keep their kids home full-time or not. The kids who were not in school were supposed to access instruction remotely.
I think the better question is: What kind of remote instruction will work for different kinds of public school students? And a good initial answer based on the data is: Remote instruction is worse than in-person instruction for the vast majority of students, no matter how it's done.
I spent a year at home teaching all of my students remotely and asynchronously. It worked well enough for about a third of them. It was a cake walk for me and it was fun to try to figure out ways to deliver instruction in new ways. But the teachers who were in the classroom teaching in person and remotely at the same time reported worse results and endured a good deal more stress. It's not easy to spend an entire day teaching while wearing a mask, with half the kids somewhere else supposedly accessing instruction remotely. Morale fell steeply.
If we're going to apply what we learned about education during the pandemic, we have to ask a lot more nuanced questions and examine differences from district to district, not just based on demographics, IMHO.
The NY Times piece has valuable information but the write-up is poor and some conclusions are strained, to say the least. Kevin has done a better job on this than the Times reporters.
How were authorities to know that the infection rate would be so low among school kids? It should not be assumed that things will be the same in the next pandemic.
Last paragraph: important point. Also, it takes time for risk differentials across subpopulations to show up. Covid-19 killed older people at much higher rates; ‘Spanish’ flu, young people.
It was pretty obvious about two months in.
After that closures were performative politics and giveaways to teachers unions.
It seems clear that Covid affected student learning and it would have been better to have attended classes, but, and a big but, this factor alone ignores the teachers and their viewpoint. Many teachers, especially those older and with certain medical conditions, were simply unwilling to teach. Also, like they say, Monday morning quarterbacking is always 20/20. During the the first year of the pandemic there were many unknowns. Perhaps, beginning in 2021, after the vaccine introduction, a large class school model could have been followed.
My sister is a teacher and had to teach at a school that tried to stay open. However the kids had to stay home if they or someone in their family tested positive. And if a kid was at school, then tested positive, their cohort also had to stay home. The net result was 30+% of the student body was home doing "remote learning". Eventually they had to go to fully remote as more and more were staying home. Not to mention staffing issues.
It's not just stay open or stay closed.
Excellent point!
If a teacher has a medical condition that prevents teaching they need to be placed on summer kind of disability and replaced. If a teacher does not want to teach they need to be fired and replaced.
This is true with or without COVID.
How do you suddenly replace a very large number of teachers all at once during a pandemic?
Its like you're not even thinking about the topics you comment on. But I do appreciate your transparency and consistency in this regard. Your other comment about being peformative politics and viewing this topic as all about punishing teachers is brilliant projection, good work!
lol, train wreck
1. If you tell these teachers "If you do not work and you cannot prove an immune disorder or other disability you will be fired for cause and not receive unemployment" then you will suddenly have a lot of them back in the schools.
2. A teacher who does not teach is not delivering value anyway. You replace them. For those with a bona fide disability, you can perhaps keep some teaching online for the time it takes to replace them.
If you cannot replace them you increase the salary until you can.
Troll be trolling.
Easy solutions abound when you dont bother to consider the problems/issues facing any of the parties involved.
ITS ALL SO EASY!!
Please don't feed the troll. It only leaves its droppings to get attention. Starve the troll.
I get a little tired of Monday-morning quarterbacking when it comes to public health measures taken during COVID. And I would hope that both the appalling levels of death and suffering -- which seem to have gone down the memory hole, especially in the minds of "conservatives" -- as well as the CLEAR differences in deaths between states that took generally more stringent measures (mostly "blue" states) and those that didn't (mostly "red" states) would convince them to shut their ignorant pie-holes, but I suppose that's like wishing they would start to pay attention to other "facts" and to "logic," which of course are just librul ee-leetist tricks to shove lies down their throats.
I wish there were some way for "conservatives" to feel the full consequences of their own idiocy when it comes to things like COVID, but alas, (1) public health is by nature a public matter -- you can't tell the virions who's behaving and who's not, and have them infect only the idiots -- and (2) there's this whole matter of caring about humanity generally, even if they're MAGAts.
Do we actually know that there would have been no harm in keeping all schools open?
Many people made this assumption very early in the pandemic before there was any information and stuck with this assumption to this day.
The massive surge in childhood diagnoses of diabetes post-pandemic is just one piece of evidence that makes you wonder if this blind assumption is in fact a good one.
The educational impact overall seems minor.
Many (but not all!) of the people most likely to complain about the impact of school closures dont seem to be interested in other variables that impact educational outcomes, so its hard to assume that these are good faith arguments.
Chicken pox was known for a long time before the virus was discovered to be the cause of shingles in later life. We already have seen ‘long covid’; we won’t know for some time how late effects may be seen.
The fact that shingles was a chicken pod relapse was obvious long before we had modern science. Among other things, people with shingles can infect others with chicken pox.
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/flawed-body-of-research-indicates-true-long-covid-risk-likely-exaggerated/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52656-6
Long COVID seems to be another instance of mass hyperchondria and malingering.
First, we don't even know that NOW, and second and more importantly, we didn't even suspect that THEN, quite evidently since the schools were closed.
The ONLY WAY one can complain about schools being closed, or speculate about whether it might have been better to decide AT THE TIME to keep them open, is if one assumes that public health officials were NOT acting in the public interest. That seems to be the default position of MAGAts, and it's beyond despicable. Even stupidity doesn't excuse it.
"Conservatives have been blasting liberals for a long time over school closures, so they're eager for any evidence that they were right. And generally speaking, I think they were...it doesn't appear that there would have been any harm in keeping schools open"
What this is forgetting is that in March of 2020, _nobody knew what was going to happen_ or how Covid was going to play out, so unless right-wingers are willing to admit that this was all unknown territory and closing schools was the right thing to do _given the available information_, then there's no reason to give them credit for anything.
Given that we conservatives said at the time that it was obvious that schools could stay open and that we were proven correct it seems we had better judgment.
LOL. "We conservatives SAID it would be ok for the plane to fly with a few stoopid flaps missing, but NOOOOO, all those know-it-all librul PILOTS and ENGINEERS with all their DEGREES said everyone had to get off and WAIT, and what happened? Was anybody hurt? NO!"
There's a difference between reasoned opposition -- eg based on virology, epidemiology, infectious-disease medicine, which was conspicuously absent from "conservatives" at the time -- and simple ignorant stubbornness.
What about "Kids aren't dying except for ones with significant pre-existing co-morbidities and teachers' lives are no more important than those of any other front line worker who can't work from home and it is obvious to any parent that remote schooling is hurting kids, especially those who are younger or less privileged so open the fucking schools!"
IF YOU STOP CARING ABOUT THE HEALTH IMPACT OF COVID, IT PROVES I AM A GENIUS!
truly a special thinker.
Please don't feed the troll. It only leaves its droppings to get attention. Starve the troll.
I would like to see a lot more of in-school remote learning. As it is now, a school had to have at least enough kids to fill a classroom in a school to offer an advanced class - if they are willing to even bother. With a lab classroom with PC's and headphones the school disctrict could offer such classes once they had enough students in the entire disctrict - and they could let younger students take more advanced classes than are offered in their school - say advanced junior high students taking classes in high school. I had to take my 7th grader to the high school for the first class period so that she could take the High Scool Algebra class and then take her to the junior high school to take her other classes.
The current system does not adequately support advanced students - frankly, and never has. My grandfather over a century a go cut a deal with his Principal in high school - they would give him his class and homework assignments ahead of time and after he turned them in, he could spend his time in the hich school library. He worked ahead and did his work in the library between his other reading.
Depends on where you live. Back in the '70s, the high school my wife and I attended had several courses certified for college credit. Too late for me, but my wife got the credit, which enabled her to finish college in three years and go on to a PhD program in microbiology, which she completed at the age of 25.
Logged in to make a comment but see that others already made great ones, probably clearer than I would have.
Thanks exlitigator! Thanks skeptonomist! Thanks raoul! Thanks golack and bbleh and jdubs and kenschulz and jeffreycmcmahon!
Nice work! I suggest reading these above. And of course thanks Kevin. Good analysis here.
Get over it. The school closures happened, for whatever reasons. And not shockingly they had a bigger impact on poorer kids - like every other problem (gun violence, malnutrition, etc) does in our society.
The MFs of the world aren’t pushing now for increased funding of public schools so they can be open all year long or private after school tutors to help all the kids catch up again, so it’s clear the MFs of the world aren’t arguing in good faith about their concern for the kids who fell behind. They hated public schools and/or teachers’ unions before and this is just another club with which to beat both over the head. Arguing with the MFs is pointless. Tell them to fuck off and be done with it.
In hindsight, there are always mistakes that can be readily seen. Expecting everyone to make perfect decisions in every moment of a crisis is frankly unrealistic. Schools really did have issues with fear from parents that their kids would catch Covid and die + fear from teachers who skew elderly that they would catch Covid and die. Until there were vaccines, which is to say the entire first year or so of Covid, there would have been massive absences of both kids and especially teachers in states where they’re allowed to unionize (and thus have some power to actually take sick days).
Constantly litigating this and the issue of “where exactly did the virus come from” is increasingly pointless as time moves on. Nothing can be done to undo it and nothing will be done to mitigate it (thanks to conservatives opposing all funding requests for mitigation) so we just need to move on.
At worst, the US will have to suffer 18 years of graduates being permanently 1-2 grades dumber than the rest of the population. But considering that people start forgetting everything they learned in school as soon as they’re out of it, that the country survived just fine with most adults having little more than a sixth grade education up through roughly the 1960s, that we can just import all the smart people we need to run everything if we would just fix our immigration system to favor skills, and that the whole situation will go away in 18 years when eventually the babies born during the pandemic get (hopefully) an uninterrupted K-12 experience… all the arguing over whether schools dropped the ball in 2020-22 really seems super pointless. (Especially if Kevin Drum’s prediction of AI comes true: practically nobody will need their brains for anything anyway.)
Any parent couldtell you that learning at home during covid required a significant amount of patent involvement. Fir younger grades that meant a lot of direct instruction and for older grades it was a lot of just riding their you-know-what to get the work done. Kids were stir crazy and parents were trying to do everything at once. Parents with flexible jobs and high levels of education were going to be able to do all that more easily.
As for schools being open, at least at the elementary level, the biggest risk to teachers was other teachers. Adults transmit covid more effectively, and people let their guard down among friends. The kids boarded the buses, teachers took off their masks, and the chitchat began.
One of the most frustrating things about the pandemic was the lack of any sort of tracing within schools to determine actual factors that influenced in-school transmission. Having been a school volunteer at an elementary school throughout the pandemic and spending half a year being the person recording school absences, I can say that in-school transmission seemed very rare (this was a school that enforced masks, had decent levels of vaccination, and kept classes apart from each other at lunch and recess). Plenty of kids and teachers got covid, but it didn't run in classrooms. Teachers and kids frequently got sick over breaks (people let down their guard with family) and siblings spread it at home. But I didn't see waves go through classrooms. I led a girl scout meeting with 12 masked girls - one kid looked symptomatic by the end of the meeting, and none of us caught it from her. I was exposed to every kid in school every week without getting ill. Younger kids in masks just don't make good superspreaders.
I wish we had some real data to see what measures provide the best protection. The next pandemic will likely happen in decades, not centuries, and it's quite possible it will be another coronavirus pandemic.
I wish my cold-weather state had reacted by having closed high schools, hybrid middle school, but open elementary. And we should have shifted the school year to be open in summer (open window season) and fully shut down schools from Thanksgiving to Valentines.
Now, if the next pandemic is flu, closing elementary schools will likely be the best option. Babies are at extremely high risk from flu, and little kids have lots of younger siblings.
Once the vaccines came out, and nearly everyone had had covid, it was a POLITICAL disaster for anyone to propose keeping schools closed. I had a neighbor (single mom, four kids, apolitical) turn into a raging Trumper. In Oregon, my most liberal friends sent their kids to a religious school as their kids were losing their minds at home. I understood closing schools the first spring and following fall, but after that, it was lunacy.
My hot take is that this really shows that middle class kids can take a year off from school without it mattering much in the long run. This was my experience, when in 9th grade I lived in a school district much inferior to what I had attended in 8th grade, and would attend in 10-12. I spent the year in a middle school that had little to offer me. (The exception was typing class, which has served me well ever since.) They literally put in me an algebra class that was the same as what I had passed with good grades the year before, because they didn't have anything higher, and lacked the imagination to come up with anything helpful. Did this harm my education in the long run? Not really. This this mean that I was super smart? Not really. I was above average, in the Lake Wobegon sense.
Intermittent fasting linked to 91% increased risk of heart-related death,
https://www.livescience.com/health/food-diet/8-hour-intermittent-fasting-tied-to-90-higher-risk-of-cardiovascular-death-early-data-hint
I used to joke, early in the pandemic, that no one had ever gotten a case of COVID and lived for an entire year. The idea was to say it as portentously as possible. No one knew all that much about COVID. As it turned out, it was much more infectious but much less virulent than its cousin SARS, but no one knew that in 2020. People could just guess, and some guessed closer to the mark. I'll pick a number from one to ten and see how well you understand my thought processes.
Choosing the reopen the schools meant accepting a higher level of risk. As it turned out, the risk was relatively low, at least for some people. This study shows that the educational impact was also relatively low. Apparently, the problem with remote learning is that our capitalist economy is unable to provide everyone with high speed, reliable internet access.
There was a Canadian study which found that getting a COVID vaccine not only cut the likelihood and virulence of a COVID infection, but also cut the chances of being admitted to the hospital for an automobile related injury. I am pro-vaccine, but I do not believe that COVID vaccines improve one's driving or ability to withstand the stresses of a car crash. My guess is that the kind of people who don't get vaccinated have a higher tolerance for risk than most of us. This is all fine and dandy unless you are a vaccinated car crash counterparty.