Why did schools stay closed during COVID?

The evidence for open schools arrived early

In June 2020, before the school year began, the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote that "all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school." The pediatricians warned that the harm of keeping children home was outpacing the health risk of opening.

In October 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford published the Great Barrington Declaration, which said schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching.

The data soon backed them up. A CDC study of 17 schools in Wood County, Wisconsin, co-authored by Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, followed 4,876 students and 654 staff from August to November 2020. Of 191 cases, seven came from spread inside school. Case rates in the schools were 37 percent lower than in the county around them.

In North Carolina, researchers followed 11 districts with about 90,000 students and staff for nine weeks of in-person school. They found 773 infections caught in the community and 32 caught in school, and no case of a child infecting an adult.

Sweden never closed its schools for children under 16. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that among 1,951,905 children ages 1 to 16, 15 were admitted to intensive care with COVID in the spring of 2020 and none died. Teachers were not at higher risk of intensive care than people in other jobs.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reviewed the research and concluded that closing schools should be a "last resort" because the harm to children and society would likely outweigh the benefit.

Much of America stayed remote anyway

At the start of January 2021, the Return to Learn Tracker found that slightly more than one quarter of U.S. districts offered five-day in-person school. By mid-March 2021, a full year after the closures began, 38 percent did, and 9 percent were still fully remote.

The cost landed on children. Researchers at Harvard and Stanford studied test results from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools and found that remote instruction was the main driver of widening achievement gaps. In districts that stayed in person, math gaps did not widen at all. Our page on learning loss has the full record.

The decisions followed politics, not case counts

Political scientists Michael Hartney of Boston College and Leslie Finger of the University of North Texas studied reopening plans across the country. They found that partisanship was the strongest predictor of whether a district opened its doors. Districts with stronger teachers unions relied more on remote learning. The severity of the virus in the area had little connection to the decision. Districts in counties with more Catholic schools, where families had somewhere else to go, were more likely to open.

Economists Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis reached the same conclusion in a separate study. Union strength predicted remote learning; local COVID numbers did not.

Federal guidance shifted with the politics

On February 3, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters that "vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools." The White House said the next day that her words were not official policy.

Nine days later the CDC issued its operational strategy for K-12 schools. It tied how schools could operate to community case counts. At the highest level, it said middle and high schools should stay virtual unless they met strict conditions, and it moved sports and activities online.

A 2022 interim report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis found that the CDC shared the draft with a national teachers union at least two weeks before release and adopted the union's suggested language nearly word for word, including a trigger that would send schools back to remote learning. A career CDC physician told the committee that this level of outside involvement was "uncommon."

The doctors who said open the schools

In early 2022, a group of physicians and scientists, including Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, published The Urgency of Normal, a toolkit for parents that set out the evidence for ending restrictions on children. Many of these voices appear in 15 DAYS, our documentary on how the closures happened and who paid for them.