Back to School With No Idea What to Expect

On masks and in-person learning, families are again at the mercy of bureaucrats and teachers unions

By Jason Riley. Excerpts:

"The officials in charge of running the nation’s public schools had all summer—and $122 billion in Covid relief funds from Congress—to plan for the first day of school, so naturally chaos has ensued as students begin heading back to the classroom.

San Francisco, Miami and Dallas haven’t decided on a quarantine policy or what infection-rate threshold will trigger school closures. In New York City, home to the nation’s largest school system, principals are wondering how every student can return to in-person learning full-time while still adhering to social-distancing requirements. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a vaccine mandate for all school staff, but teachers unions have vowed to challenge its implementation."

"What these families need is detailed information on the criteria used to determine whether schools stay open. Instead, they’re being kept in the dark by bureaucrats and politicians. And they’re being toyed with by union honchos who don’t mind the uncertainty because it can be used as leverage to negotiate better pay and benefits as a condition of returning to the classroom."

"A New York magazine article last week reported on the findings of a “mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools” that was published in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study matter-of-factly called into question the efficacy of face coverings for children in schools. “These findings cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools,” the magazine reported. “Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.”

The article also noted that many European countries—including Britain, Italy, France, Switzerland and all of Scandinavia—“have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms,” yet “there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

The CDC study comports with the findings of Brown University economist Emily Oster and four co-authors, who analyzed student Covid rates in Florida, New York and Massachusetts during the 2020-21 school year with a focus on the effects of student density, ventilation upgrades and masking requirements. “We find higher student COVID-19 rates in schools and districts with lower in-person density but no correlations in staff rates,” they wrote in a paper published earlier this year. “Ventilation upgrades are correlated with lower rates in Florida but not in New York. We do not find any correlations with mask mandates.”"