Lessons Learned from the Effort to Reopen Schools During COVID-19

As the start of the 2021–22 school year approaches, the United States faces an urgent national challenge to help tens of millions of children recover from learning losses due to prolonged school closures from the pandemic. But the nation’s policy responses for K-12 education revealed significant barriers to equal opportunity that must be overcome to ensure that all children can reach their potential.

The principal obstacle was that the governance of K-12 public school systems remains dominated by teachers unions and administrators whose primary focus was protecting the interests of adults working in school systems, rather than the children they are supposed to serve. This fact was revealed by school leaders choosing to ignore public health evidence that justified reopening schools, state and local education agencies failing to quickly use federal emergency education aid to directly help students, and disadvantaged children suffering unprecedented disruptions to their education that could have been avoided if they had better options.

At the same time, the K-12 education policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic also provided promising examples for how American schooling can be changed to better serve at-risk children. Some states thoughtfully used new federal aid to provide emergency assistance to directly help disadvantaged children while schools were closed. Local organizations improvised to help at-risk children during the pandemic and created new and better education options that should continue long after COVID-19 becomes a memory. And in 2021, state policymakers have responded by enacting new policies that will give disadvantaged parents the resources to ensure their child receives a high-quality education.

Looking forward to the 2021–22 school year and beyond, expanding choice in education by giving parents greater control of their children’s education is critical to promoting equal opportunity in K-12 education. To understand why this is the case, let’s look at what we’ve learned over the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schools remained closed despite the low risk of COVID with children

A year ago, my colleagues and I released a FREOPP report recommending that K-12 schools reopen to provide in-person learning while providing high-quality outside-of-school learning options for children who could not attend school in-person due to their families’ risk preferences. In July 2020, we pointed to empirical evidence that children were at a very low risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19. In fact, children aged were more likely to die from influenza than COVID-19, according to a FREOPP analysis of available data as of October 2020. Of course, potential exposure to influenza is a risk that all American school children take every year.

While the personal health risk of COVID-19 appeared to be low as of last summer, the serious risks of prolonged school closures for children was apparent. As the American Academy of Pediatrics warned at the time, school closures harm children academically and create social isolation that can result in “sexual abuse, substance use, depression, and suicidal ideation.”

But despite the clear evidence about the relative risks of school closures, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued stringent guidance last summer that effectively discouraged school reopenings. Public school teachers unions strongly opposed reopening schools to provide in-person learning. The majority of the nation’s largest school districts began the 2020–21 school year closed, providing remote learning options of varying quality. As the school year progressed, schools and school systems across the country did not experience significant COVID-19 outbreaks.

Earlier this month, the CDC released updated information about the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in K-12 schools. “Although outbreaks in schools can occur, multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than — or at least similar to — levels of community transmission, when prevention strategies are in place in schools,” the CDC reported. Moreover, the most recent guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reiterates that the risk to children is low:

SARS-CoV-2 appears to behave differently in children and adolescents than other common respiratory viruses, such as influenza. Although children and adolescents play a major role in amplifying influenza outbreaks, to date, this does not appear to be the case with SARS-CoV-2. Although many questions remain, the preponderance of evidence indicates that children and adolescents can become infected and are less likely to be symptomatic and less likely to have severe disease resulting from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The APP “continues to strongly advocate that all policy considerations for school COVID-19 plans should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.”

Over $100 billion in federal emergency education aid remains unspent

Congress’s response to the pandemic’s effect on K-12 schooling was to provide unprecedented emergency federal education aid. In three separate emergency spending bills, Congress awarded nearly $190 billion to state education agencies to help school systems during the pandemic. But as of May, only $6 billion had been spent.

It’s not clear why state education agencies and local school districts have been slow to spend these funds, particularly given the disruptions that occurred during the pandemic. As I argued last fall, Congress has a responsibility to conduct oversight over how these federal funds are being used as well as the cost of prolonged school closures. In December, House Republicans wrote to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office requesting an audit of how states were using federal funds that were intended to reopen schools. In March, GAO issued findings from its review of how state and local education agencies were using federal relief funds. GAO found that states had only spent a small fraction of the funds provided in 2020, but noted that there may be gaps in when funds were budgeted or counted as spent, which may partly explain why so much is still categorized as unspent. GAO recommended that the Department of Education collect and report information about funds obligated or spent to improve transparency about how these funds are being used.

A key question that national and state policymakers must now answer is how currently available funds will be used during the 2021–22 school year and beyond. Resources should be used to ensure that schools are open during the upcoming school year and that disadvantaged children recover from learning losses and other setbacks caused by prolonged school closures.

We are only beginning to understand the long-term costs of school closures

When the vast majority of American schools closed during the spring of 2020, many education and public health experts warned that prolonged school closures would negatively affect children, particularly children from lower income households. For example, McKinsey analyzed the effects of prolonged school closures last summer and warned that low-income children would lose more than a year’s worth of learning if schools remained closed during the fall. An OECD analysis projected that prolonged school closures would reduce nations’ and individuals’ long-term earnings. The AAP warned that school closures had placed children and adolescents “at higher risk of morbidity and mortality from physical or sexual abuse, substance use, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.” I provided an overview of these risks in depth in prepared testimony for the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus crisis last August.

In 2021, we are still only beginning to understand the short- and long-term cost of prolonged school closures have had on American children. But the initial evidence corroborates experts’ fears. In June, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a report that found:

“Emerging evidence shows that the pandemic has negatively affected academic growth, widening pre-existing disparities. In core subjects like math and reading, there are worrisome signs that in some grades students might be falling even further behind pre-pandemic expectations.”

Beyond the negative academic effects, evidence suggests that children may have suffered greater harm over the past year even though reported incidents of child maltreatment are down compared to prior years.

Some states are responding with new and better learning options

During the 2020–21 school year, some states used emergency education aid to directly help children affected by school closures. For example, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt used $8 million of the state’s federal “Governors Emergency Education Fund” awards for “bridge the gap digital wallets,” providing $1,500 grants to low-income students to “to purchase curriculum content, tutoring services and/or technology.” Oklahoma also used $12 million to provide expanded access to virtual learning. Governors in Florida, New Hampshire, and South Carolina also used GEER funding to provide choice options during the pandemic.

In Las Vegas, a new microschoolig program was created to provide in-person learning to disadvantaged children while Clark County schools were closed and achieved impressive learning gains, according to Don Soifer of Nevada Action for Education Options (which runs the program). Many parents across the United States acted on their own to create “pods” or small groups of children learning together with a tutor or teacher.

The pandemic has also spurred the creation of new education options for school children. For example, seven states enacted new school choice programs in 2021, according to the American Federation of Children, and altogether more than a dozen states created, expanded or improved existing school choice programs. For example, West Virginia and New Hampshire created sweeping education savings account programs that will let parents choose alternative education providers for their children.

It is possible that the expansion of new education options reflects growing support for alternatives to traditional public schooling among American parents in response to school closures. For example, a Real Clear Education poll (sponsored by American Federation for Children, a group that advocates for school choice policies) found that “65% [of voters] support parents having access to a portion of per-pupil funding to use for home, virtual, or private education if public schools don’t reopen full-time for in-person classes.”

Outlook for the 2021–22 school year

With the upcoming school year just weeks away, the outlook for in-person learning across the country is bright thanks to widespread vaccinations and reduced community transmission of the coronavirus. However, the emerging spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 may result in new or increased risk to young children and other unvaccinated people. The CDC’s recently-updated guidance recommends in-person learning and mitigation strategies, such as continued mask wearing for unvaccinated children, to protect against the virus.

American parents and children should look forward to a more ‘normal’ school year in 2020–21. But the lessons of the national K-12 education policy response during the first year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic should not be forgotten.

Despite available evidence that SARS-CoV-2 posed a low risk to children that was well-known last summer, many of the nation’s public school systems did not provide in-person learning throughout the 2020–21 school year even though the risks of prolonged school closures were widely understood. Moreover, most state education agencies and local school districts did not immediately use their shares of emergency federal K-12 education funding provided to safely reopen schools or provide direct assistance to students while schools remained closed.

In short, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that many of the nation’s public school systems do not act in the best interest of the children that they serve. Instead, decisions were driven by school administrators and the public school teachers unions which continue to exercise outsized-influence over K-12 education policy. This harsh reality underscores the importance of giving American parents and children, particularly those from lower-income households, options beyond traditional K-12 education to ensure that children have access to high-quality learning opportunities.

Over the past half century, national policymakers have attempted to promote equal opportunity in American K-12 education by establishing federal laws and rights, as well as by addressing past inequalities in school funding. However, a fundamental difference remains: children from lower-income households remain less likely to have the power to attend a school of their parents’ choice. They are also less likely to have resources to learn outside of school, such as through tutoring or access to other educational enrichment experiences.

To promote equal opportunity in 2021 and beyond, national and state policymakers should enact policies to give low-income children greater control of their share of public education resources to ensure they have a real chance to succeed.