Thread by @j_g_allen

Make no mistake, the costs of closing schools is high. Too many have gotten casual about this.

A thread.

nytimes.com/2021/12/20/opi…

"Even short-term closings have steep consequences. Schools are the place where we first detect trouble at home, including neglect and abuse."

"An analysis of data from New York City found a drop of nearly 8,000 in expected reports of allegations of child maltreatment. When researchers extrapolated that to the rest of the country, they estimated that more than 275,000 cases would have otherwise been reported."

"As pressures to close schools again grow, we should recognize that the patterns of school closures and reopenings last year were defined by racial inequality. Black and Hispanic students were twice as likely as white students to be remote and...

"... were 2x as likely to have no live access to a teacher. This disparity persisted into the spring as schools reopened: Whereas 2% of majority white districts stayed closed, 18% of majority Black schools stayed remote, and nearly 1 in 4 majority Hispanic schools stayed closed."

"Online learning isn’t the same as in-person learning. A report by McKinsey examining Covid-19 effects on the 2020-21 school year found that the pandemic left students five months behind on math and four months behind in reading."

"Schools with majority Black and brown populations saw deeper losses: six months behind in math and five to six months behind in reading."

"A separate study analyzing the impact of remote learning found that math and reading passing rates were lowest in poor areas and that going from fully virtual to fully in person counteracted the low math passing rates by 10 percentage points."

"And that’s for students who were in school. One million students expected to be in school didn’t show up in person or online at all, with the largest declines in the youngest learners and in families living below the federal poverty line."

"school closings were preventing 14M kids from getting the food they need. Low-income children get more than 1/2 their calories from school meals. Kids with food insecurity are 2x as likely to be in poor health as kids who are food-secure and are more likely to be hospitalized."

"And it’s not only children who suffer when there is no school. Kids doing school at home also meant many parents couldn’t be at work. This additional home work disproportionately fell on women..."

"...and differences in labor force participation between women and men, already stark, grew 5 percentage points from 2019 to 2020 in states offering primarily remote instruction."

"All of these effects were predictable and, in fact, predicted. And they must not be repeated."

Let's put a marker out right now and say that these are all being predicted right now again, as schools close.

"The risk of severe outcomes to kids from coronavirus infection is low, and the risks to kids from being out of school are high. They are accumulating. And they could last for decades."
nytimes.com/2021/12/20/opi…