A sign about Covid safety at a high school in Jefferson, Ga., July 31.
Photo: elijah nouvelage/ReutersYou can go to a tattoo parlor in Georgia, but in much of the state you can’t send your children to school at the start of the fall semester. Nine Georgia school districts have announced that they will begin the school year with remote learning. Some 584,000 youngsters, or one-third of Georgia’s public-school students, have to stay home. So will their peers in many states.
Some states prioritized the opening of bars and tattoo parlors over the need to control Covid-19 in time for the start of the school year. In many places, local officials aren’t opening up schools because transmission is so intense. The country’s political leadership at all levels failed to carry out plans to manage the epidemic that would allow society to preserve what is most important.
In many states, the spread is limited enough that schools should open, even though some may not because parents and teachers don’t want to return until a vaccine removes the threat of an outbreak. But parents and local school leaders have understandable concerns about opening classrooms in places where the virus’s spread is uncontrolled. Schools and local government should try to address these concerns. The social and educational costs of keeping children out of the classroom is enormous. Lost learning can translate into fewer opportunities and lower incomes later in life.
Economists estimate that an additional year of schooling increases earnings by about 9%. If students learned little this spring and won’t learn much in the fall, their future earnings will take a hit. For a worker who graduated high school but didn’t attend college, our rough calculation suggests earnings will drop by more than $30,000 a decade if schools don’t reopen in the fall.
Virtual learning is especially hard on low-income children who may not have devices or reliable internet service. These students may also have parents who can’t monitor their progress because their parents must work. These are the children whose futures will suffer most from keeping schools shut. The country chose the short-term benefit of reopening unessential businesses over the long-term benefit of ensuring children could be educated properly.
Recent guidance on schools from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ducked hard questions: What would trigger schools closing again? And how would schools implement an orderly shutdown? Many schools will look at the lack of guidance and conclude the best route is to stay closed. In Montgomery County, Md., where public schools are set to remain closed, local officials forced private schools to shut as well.
Yet trying to open schools doesn’t mean pretending Covid poses no risk to children, a move that only sows distrust among parents. Closed schools in the spring protected many children from Covid. This deliberate sheltering means we don’t know all the consequences of the virus spreading widely in children.
Children appear less likely to contract the virus and less likely to develop symptoms. But some data suggest that when they develop symptoms they may be as likely, or even likelier, to spread infection. An outbreak in a school could become a source of community spread into households and more-vulnerable populations. The goal should be to open schools with reasonable measures to prevent outbreaks.
Teachers and students can limit spread by wearing masks. When weather permits, classes can meet outdoors, where the risk of transmission is lower. Children should be kept in pods. Intermingling among groups should be limited to prevent one instance of the virus from infecting a large group. Social distancing should be maintained as much as possible.
The community also has to manage outbreaks. People should wear masks indoors. State and local governments need more federal funding to take precautions in schools, and enough testing capacity to detect outbreaks in schools and trace the source of an infection. Professional sports teams have far more access to testing than public schools do. What does that say about what’s most important to American society? Our children’s safety and development should be the highest priority, and public policy ought to support these values.
Dr. Gottlieb is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, 2017-19. He serves on the boards of Pfizer and Illumina and is a partner at the venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates. Mr. Strain is director of economic policy studies at AEI.
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