The Hidden Costs of School Closures—Hadley Manning | American Thought Leaders

After 18 students committed suicide in Las Vegas, the Clark County School District decided to reopen for in-person learning. The youngest of the students to commit suicide was a nine-year-old. In Chicago, home to the nation's third largest public school district, teachers' unions have rejected calls by Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot to reopen, citing concerns about health and safety. In this episode, we sit down with Hadley Manning, Director of Policy at the Independent Women's Forum to understand what recent studies have to say about schools reopening and what the sometimes hidden costs are of keeping children and teenagers isolated. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. And with YouTube having recently demonetized us, we want to make sure that we stay connected. Please sign up for our mailing list in the description below, and you won't miss an episode. Hadley Manning, so great to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me. We've been talking offline about school closures, or more importantly, school reopenings. I came across this clip just from recently, February 3rd, a Bronx public school student, a senior at a press conference. Let's take a look. Hadley, I've been in school almost a year. For me, as an athlete, as a student, but most importantly as a person, because I haven't had any live instruction classes for almost a year. We were told that, oh, in the fall, if you've got social distancing, you've got to stay safe, you've got to work hard, you will get a safe school. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. I looked at the public school kids and was like, you know what? They're not really that important. It really hurts because your senior year is the most important year. Right now, I have friends who have not been able to apply to college because there's no leadership. They don't have the guidance counselors helping them. They don't have the teachers helping them. They don't have recommendations. They don't have this. They don't have that. I was able to take my SATs through Coach Lannessi, who showed me the way I signed up for his classes. It was really helpful. I couldn't take my SATs in the city. I had to go to a meet-me with Shell to get out of the city to take my SATs. I feel like it just isn't fair because I have friends who have registered in the city numerous times. The city shut down on them every single time. I just feel like it's really unfair because you work so hard for your senior year, and it just gets taken away from you. You wake up in the morning. You just look at the screen from the morning until 3 o'clock and not visit the school. I feel like that's not enough. Virtual school is not real school. Okay, so what are your impressions here? My heart just breaks for this young man and for so many other students across our country who have been in a similar situation the past year, almost, now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They're missing not just those educational opportunities, but really, especially since this young man is a high school senior, rites of passage in our society and in our culture, graduation, prom, football season, basketball season. These are things that are really important to young people, and they're important to their parents. They're important just in terms of the experience, the socialization, the time with peers. Those are things that those students will never get back. So let's dive into this issue. Here, he's talking about a number of the drawbacks that he's feeling. One of the things he says is, I kind of feel like we've been forgotten about, like we've been neglected. We're a year in right now. We're almost a year in. I think all of this started around March of last year. And you've been arguing for school reopenings. So tell me about this. Pretty early on, we started to learn that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 doesn't behave the same way that some other viruses like the influenza virus behaves in children. That is to say that children are actually at higher risk for severe disease related to the flu, whereas they're at lower risk when it comes to COVID-19. And what a blessing, really, that children have been one of the groups least impacted from a health perspective from the virus itself. So the school reopening debate quickly became less about what is most safe for students. Of course, there are concerns about especially older high school age students and the way that they can transmit or develop disease related to the coronavirus. But ultimately, I think the debate began to hinge on the adults in the school system. And what were the risks associated with being in a classroom if you're a teacher or if you're school staff or if you're a bus driver? And those things are very important. And of course, we have had this debate and discussion about the risk benefit analysis of keeping schools open. And the problem is, ultimately, from my perspective, that in our public school system, we have a set of perverse incentives. If the school system is dedicated to keeping teachers on payroll at the same levels of pay, regardless of how they perform or what level, what type of instruction they offer to students, then there's very little leverage in terms of, for example, offering hazard pay to teachers who are willing to get back into the classroom and reducing the pay of teachers who might want to work from home. Because maybe they have a health issue or maybe they simply are more risk averse than other teachers. And so that is a limitation on the public school system and has created this sort of incentive problem. So what are studies saying about the actual costs and benefits and risks of reopening? Of course, from the beginning of the pandemic, we've been studying not just how the disease is transmitted, but what the risks are specifically associated with school closures and school reopenings. And the findings in that regard, in terms of papers that have been published in Pediatrics and the Lancet Health Affairs, these are widely respected medical and health policy journals, suggest that school closures have more risks, more downsides, more harms to students and are not justified, that schools should be reopened for in-person learning. These are reliant on studies that have followed students throughout real school reopenings. They followed the transmission risks, and this is for first level transmission within the school and also secondary transmission outside of the school. And they've concluded that that risk is exceedingly low, especially compared to other activities that people might do socially and otherwise. While the CDC says the rate of infection from students to teachers has been low, the Lancet say that school closures might lead to a greater number of deaths than school openings or than school closures might prevent. The Journal of Pediatrics suggests that school closures do not reduce the spread of COVID-19 and that, you know, that modeling is confirmed by studies from other countries. Other countries say that their school closures didn't help control the pandemic. There's studies from Ireland and Australia in particular that found no evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from school children. There's a study in Sweden. Sweden largely kept their schools open even when many other European countries and the United States had school closures. Swedish schools were even open last spring, in the spring of 2020. And what they found was that zero deaths resulted. All of these things do suggest that there are, to varying degrees, you can reduce the percentage growth rate of COVID-19 with sheltering in place being the most successful from the terms of, in terms of reducing the spread as much as 8 or 9%. Now, on the other hand, school closures have not been shown to reduce the growth rate of the spread of the virus. In fact, this health affairs paper suggests that school closures actually led to a higher growth rate for the COVID-19 virus in a community. And I suppose we could speculate that that's because in school students are being very cautious. They're wearing masks, they're washing hands, their desks are seated, you know, six feet apart. In some cases, there's, you know, face shields for teachers or plexiglass for teachers. So some of these measures that schools are taking to mitigate the risk of transmission are very successful. That's why the CDC, under both the Trump administration and the Biden administration, suggests that schools should reopen safely, even if vaccination for teacher is not a prerequisite for reopening. And we've also seen, you know, groups like the Academy of American Pediatricians have said from the very beginning, at least with their initial statement about this, that schools should be open for in-person learning. Does the virtual learning actually work? How close is it to the norm in terms of getting people educated? And so it's been enormously frustrating for those parents who have had to step aside, typically from their work and their focus and their jobs and their vocations to help become really online instructors or online proctors for their children. So these private schools, they've actually kind of been a crucible of sorts to figure out how to deal with the pandemic while keeping schools open. Tell me about what they found. So what's the bottom line right now? Are there examples where school reopening doesn't make sense at this point that you're aware of, or is it just something that everybody should be seriously considering? You mentioned the really terrible Nevada example that basically spurred the system to act. Who's doing it right out there in your mind right now? And so when you don't have that sort of infrastructure in place to take your children to a daycare, take your children to school, or have a caregiver come to your house, that can be a very equilibrium upsetting phenomenon in many families. And so what women have found is they're really feeling this tension between their desire to work or their desire for income versus the sort of necessity of watching over their children or caring for children who are doing virtual learning at home. Hadley, any final thoughts before we finish up? Hadley Manning, such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you. Thanks for having me.