This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
Replies
It was never about learning loss, though. It was always "I had to spend too much time cooped up at home with my kids and they're driving me nuts"
sep 1, 2025, 6:15 pm • 1 0 • view
My children went to school in Sweden 2020-2021, and 2021-2024 in Germany. We are back in Sweden now. Sweden schools never closed except with acute outbreaks. German schools by the time we got there had alternating weeks (functionally half closed for any family). /1
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
My children went to school in Sweden before 2020 too, I am just noting that time as roughly the start of the pandemic.
sep 1, 2025, 7:31 pm • 0 0 • view
This is anecdotal, and I won’t claim anything other than my subjective, personal experience: life in Sweden was much better, and German people (esp. parents) were angrier/frustrated/stressed. I saw first hand the rise of the anti vax movement in Germany. The rise of the Querdenkers. The AfD. /2
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 1 0 • view
There were screaming, angry organized (with police escort) marches in my small German city. I could see that they were the same people as those increasing the ranks of the AfD. It’s easier to see these things in a small city maybe. Most Germans went along with restrictions, but a lot were angry. /3
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
I don’t think school closures, forced masking, vaccine passports (certificates to permit you to do things in public) were the sole cause of the German social-political backsliding, but they were a factor. Don’t attribute it to Germans being angrier than Swedes in general, even though it’s true 😘. /4
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
People not in Sweden (and even in Sweden) heavily criticized Sweden’s approach at the time. I lived in a small town before the pandemic. Many people wore masks voluntarily. Nobody had to force us. We practiced social distancing without mandate. We avoided gathering. We stayed home when sick. /5
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
We moved to Germany around when the vaccine was announced but not aviator to the public. My small town in Sweden had it before my small city in Germany. All my friends were voluntarily vaccinated. Germany had to pressure people to get vaccinated because not enough were getting it (vaccine pass). /6
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Aviator/available 🙄
sep 1, 2025, 7:34 pm • 0 0 • view
Nowhere was great. Sweden had lots of deaths. Germany had lots of deaths. Sweden’s economy suffered. Germany’s economy suffered. But wrt society? How things have turned out to this point? I am happy to be back in Sweden. I love Germany. I still own a house there and spend time there. /7
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
I do not know how the USA was first hand, but my children’s cousins who are about the same ages seemed to have it much harder than even we did in Germany. Schools physically closed for weeks (months?) at a time. Children at home forever (seemingly). /8
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
With how much anger, frustration, and resentment was building in Germany, I can only imagine how much worse it was in America. If I prefer the schools-open approach that we had in Sweden to what we had in Germany, I can’t imagine what it was like in the USA. /9
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
I think it is risky to disregard the resentments that policies like school closures caused. Was it the right public health move? Sure, maybe. Was it the right-for-society policy? Again, I would rather be where we are in Sweden today than where Germany or (looking in from the outside) US are. /fin
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Red states blame this for political BS, that is actually a fact red states have lowest school attendance, grades, graduation rates
sep 1, 2025, 6:45 pm • 0 0 • view
I mean all of this is the result of people with the worst possible ideas about health (eugenics + science is a lie) seeing that Covid + Trumpism gave them a once in a generation (or more!) opening to have views that would’ve seemed tinhat bananas 15 years ago go mainstream. Capitalizing on fear!
sep 1, 2025, 6:54 pm • 1 0 • view
they really don't like talking about how the fallout from covid forced disgruntled teachers to go on strike
sep 1, 2025, 5:55 pm • 0 0 • view
I think what angers me the most is the magical thinking that if schools had just stayed open, everything was going to be fine? Children were living through a worldwide pandemic. It was going to mark them no matter what.
sep 1, 2025, 8:47 pm • 0 0 • view
As someone who works to mitigate truancy, there were A LOT of parents who simply refused to assist or require their kids to do their online classes & assignments because it inconvenienced them. Then their kids didn't want to return in person because they were so far behind. Terrible cycle.
sep 1, 2025, 5:46 pm • 5 0 • view
..also, I think the term "Polite Center" is very useful! Sums up the stuff the "Center" ideology does very well.
sep 1, 2025, 6:33 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah because those libs wanted everything shut down as long as possible because… why again? Do these morons think libs don’t have kids in school?
sep 1, 2025, 6:49 pm • 0 0 • view
Brian Schatz and Chris Murphy are best buddies. They also both took up the right's criticisms of D 2024 status quo (Schatz re COVID, Murphy re immigration) and moved the party to the right. Now they are going to rewrite history so they can be the revolutionaries too? 😑
sep 1, 2025, 6:52 pm • 1 0 • view
Biden had nearly every school in america re-opened for in person classes within his first 100 days. Trump's covid response was to let school boards, local units of government, states drive. It was a bad approach.
sep 1, 2025, 6:55 pm • 0 0 • view
Trump wasn't calling for schools to reopen in September 2020. He himself was fighting for his life at Walter Reed hospital, nearly dying of covid.
sep 1, 2025, 6:57 pm • 3 0 • view
Tbh, if it wasn't COVID policy it would be something else. Centrist Dems are always looking for ways to move right, appease the right, & blame anything that could remotely look like "socialism" for their losses. They do this whenever the GOP is in the WH. Case in point ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/sjon...
sep 1, 2025, 6:18 pm • 0 0 • view
How much do dead students learn?
sep 1, 2025, 5:40 pm • 10 0 • view
How much do grieving students learn? (Not much, there’s research on this).
sep 1, 2025, 5:58 pm • 13 0 • view
I live in a blue state, my family avoided catching COVID during the whole time measures were in place. It took 1 week of "okay, no need for masking in schools anymore" for all of us to catch it. One. Week. It's as if basic risk-mitigation measures like wearing masks work, but only when you do them
sep 1, 2025, 8:28 pm • 2 0 • view
Sure, this one data point is anecdotal but you'll never convince me otherwise. We went the whole pandemic without catching it- that's thousands of data points all strung together to show that small things done consistently will improve your odds
sep 1, 2025, 8:31 pm • 0 0 • view
Also, schools that already had online school work integrated for missed days did not fare as poorly.
sep 1, 2025, 5:35 pm • 11 0 • view
Yes. There are many lies taking hold. This is one. It’s not hard to prove false. Dems need a PR campaign immediately. Dems are better for the economy, public health, personal freedom, and even law and order - but no one knows it. I’m begging the party to enact strong messaging & a PR blitz.
sep 1, 2025, 10:47 pm • 1 0 • view
Here's my stupid take. Democrats largely did what they needed to do during COVID. Doing the right thing sometimes has a cost. You have to pay the cost, but you don't have to apologize for it.
sep 1, 2025, 10:15 pm • 0 0 • view
I once had a really intense argument with someone who was banging on about how bad Virginia was for being so late, and by the time we compared the difference between his latest responsible "should return" date and my earliest one, it was like 6 school weeks. We were talking about 6 WEEKS.
sep 1, 2025, 9:55 pm • 0 0 • view
THANK YOU, that narrative is utter bullshit
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Taking it out of blue-red partisanship, the Lancet commission said essentially this. In practice, that means society owes schools all resources needed to open safely. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36115368/
sep 1, 2025, 6:15 pm • 2 0 • view
Key sections. These are hard questions, and inequalities occur in both directions, so community input is essential. The stakes are high: I remember some devastating children being orphaned after bringing covid home from in-person school to their parents.
sep 1, 2025, 6:24 pm • 1 0 • view
We need to start demanding these assholes be ejected from the party.
sep 1, 2025, 6:57 pm • 0 0 • view
Kids aren’t learning properly. “Covid damages brains” Clearly it was leaning from home. “That stopped years ago, covid damages the brain.” It must be those cellphones. “Kids had phones before this. Covid damages brains.” I just don’t get it, what’s wrong? “How many times have you had covid?”
sep 1, 2025, 6:33 pm • 6 0 • view
the real issue was that the government asking (white) americans to make any sacrifices no matter how small in order to protect other people broke a lot of brains. a "me first" country losing its shit at being asked not to kill their neighbours.
sep 1, 2025, 5:54 pm • 0 0 • view
In my blue state, when I returned to in-class teaching, the fact is, few students showed up.
sep 1, 2025, 9:52 pm • 1 0 • view
I have a lot of teacher friends, and I have never heard a single one complain about learning loss
sep 1, 2025, 5:54 pm • 1 0 • view
New York reopened it’s schools to odd even in person learning in the fall of 2020. School were fully reopened with mask mandates for the 2021-2022 school year.
sep 1, 2025, 5:58 pm • 2 0 • view
We had a virtual start for 6 weeks or so and then went to hybrid during 20-21. The vast majority of parents in my school kept their kids home. Schools were “closed” for like two-three months if you exclude summer where I live and folks still act like it lasted years.
sep 1, 2025, 7:52 pm • 2 0 • view
📌
sep 1, 2025, 6:14 pm • 0 0 • view
turns out "planned closing" and "unplanned closings when there literally aren't enough teachers to show up" both close schools and "general chaos of the pandemic" didn't help across the board, who could've guessed!
sep 1, 2025, 6:24 pm • 8 0 • view
Weird how everyone around you getting sick and dying could be a distraction from learning
sep 1, 2025, 5:53 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah maybe it was the trauma of a pandemic even blue states didnt take seriously enough and knowing people who died that caused students concentration to plummet. Just a guess.
sep 1, 2025, 6:21 pm • 1 0 • view
I still see people spreading the narrative that those early school closures are responsible for the uptick in diseases generally, and for them being more likely to result in serious outcomes. STILL, this "immunity debt" bs keeps on going.
sep 1, 2025, 6:52 pm • 0 0 • view
Not that anyone really cares but a bigger and mostly forgotten scandal was COVID funds to schools being redirected to non-mitigation related equipment and repairs that significantly delayed school reopenings
sep 1, 2025, 6:05 pm • 169 16 • view
they ended up giving a lot of the money to cops
sep 1, 2025, 6:12 pm • 1 0 • view
partly because the Fed gov't keeps passing these spending bills with no strings attached to the states so the latter had no obligation to actually get HVAC filters or better windows, etc.
sep 1, 2025, 6:06 pm • 6 0 • view
Those "centrists" must have been living in a parallel universe - for me the biggest scandal during Covid was the GOP's cynical politicization of the pandemic.
sep 1, 2025, 6:26 pm • 3 1 • view
I'm still mad that we spent a gazillion dollars on all sorts of stuff and we don't have HEPA filters in every school classroom.
sep 1, 2025, 6:08 pm • 15 0 • view
THIS
sep 1, 2025, 6:37 pm • 1 0 • view
Can't wait to discover in like 5 years, that the 'learning loss' was actually because students were stressed the fuck out by the pandemic, and that it was obvious the people in charge were, at best, incompetent or knowingly making it worse for political reasons.
sep 1, 2025, 5:56 pm • 17 2 • view
IIRC, there is data showing that test scores were already on the decline before the pandemic?
sep 1, 2025, 6:57 pm • 0 0 • view
There were schools where multiple teachers died. That has to be a fun learning experience. Cafeteria workers, bus drivers tend to be older. People thinking 8 year olds would be fine seem to ignore this.
sep 1, 2025, 5:47 pm • 16 0 • view
After the reopen, we had cancellation days sporadically for over a year where there were too many staff calling out sick with not enough substitutes to transport and/or staff the building safely.
sep 1, 2025, 6:01 pm • 9 0 • view
In my district all the high schools had to close for a week because there weren’t enough teachers or subs.
sep 1, 2025, 10:17 pm • 0 0 • view
It’s wild for anyone to make the argument that a bar and a school are the same thing. How many bar patrons are sitting around the same group of people for 8 hours? Are we truly making the argument that bars are vectors of contagious illnesses like schools are?? Christ.
sep 1, 2025, 6:05 pm • 0 0 • view
And I simply am done with the blaming of covid or school closures for how students are performing on standardized tests. There are many other factors that have a stronger correlation than covid shutdowns.
sep 1, 2025, 6:05 pm • 0 0 • view
Not to mention that in the 19-20 SY students missed about 45 days due to shutdowns. Then the 20-21 SY was corrupted (shutdowns, hybrid, online, whateverthefuck). We’re now on our 5th year past this which puts current 8th graders at about 3rd/4th grade during the situation.
sep 1, 2025, 6:24 pm • 0 0 • view
Imagine making the argument that 3rd graders were more harmed by witnessing adults trying to make them safe versus repeatedly doing lockdown drills because the adults care more about guns than their safety.
sep 1, 2025, 6:24 pm • 0 0 • view
Or how come no one wants to mention that covid is where fully 50% of the country lost their fucking minds and decided it was cool to spit on produce at the supermarket, physically fight check-out girls at Walgreens or storm state capitols? Those things may have harmed our students.
sep 1, 2025, 6:24 pm • 1 0 • view
But it's such a nice "explanation" to hold onto to let you do something different. Honestly it's no different than evangelicals switching to abortion when they realized they had lost at segregation. (And weird how the moment abortion is killed, segregation reappears, but that's another thing)
sep 1, 2025, 5:36 pm • 12 1 • view
It’s a stupid narrative at any time in any way. No one was eager to teach in-person during COVID. I don’t care how pissed people were or are. You can’t run a school without teachers. Unless you were actively calling your district headquarters to volunteer as a teacher in 2020, shut the fuck up.🤬
sep 1, 2025, 5:48 pm • 3 0 • view
What makes me incandescent with rage is the "COVID wasn't that bad for kids" justification. Closing schools was never about protecting kids, it was about protecting their TEACHERS and school STAFF, who should not have been forced into rooms with dozens of germy kids who can't reliably wear masks
sep 1, 2025, 5:37 pm • 60 1 • view
And the kids' *families*. Can you imagine the trauma-induced learning loss from bringing home the illness that kills your grandma?
sep 1, 2025, 9:52 pm • 3 0 • view
Anyone who has gotten the annual "back to school funk" should inherently understand why schools had to close.
sep 1, 2025, 10:40 pm • 0 0 • view
And also to keep it from spreading among kids who would then give it to their parents, grandparents, & disabled neighbors.
sep 1, 2025, 9:36 pm • 1 0 • view
Of course, COVID is actually quite bad for kids, and a whole whack of kids now have permanent health struggles they wouldn't have had if we'd protected them better. We didn't know the full extent of the damage COVID could do to the body, but we knew it was potentially serious.
sep 1, 2025, 6:55 pm • 18 0 • view
Yeah that multi inflammatory syndrome in kids was known about pretty early on, too. Not immediately but by 2021 I believe.
sep 1, 2025, 7:28 pm • 8 0 • view
And the rest of society - every transmission stopped saved everyone down the line it would have been transmitted to, and this is the kind of beyond-oneself thinking that is truly anathema in American individualism.
sep 1, 2025, 7:09 pm • 2 0 • view
Yes! Children don’t live alone!
sep 1, 2025, 7:26 pm • 2 0 • view
RFK JR WAS LIKE THIS LONG BEFORE 2020.
sep 1, 2025, 10:40 pm • 8 0 • view
What a fucking stupid thing to say and only childless, low T soy boys like yourself could come to such idiotic conclusions.
sep 1, 2025, 9:03 pm • 0 0 • view
“during covid” lol it never ended
sep 1, 2025, 8:08 pm • 0 0 • view
The right is pushing this narrative because it’s the only place they can blame liberals — their actual goal — and gain purchase among elites. The *actual* mistakes during the pandemic all originate on the right: lax lockdowns, weak mitigations and low vaccine uptake
sep 1, 2025, 5:36 pm • 1,173 191 • view
Biggest mistake was not promoting masks early and often (and free supplies of masks for everyone)
sep 1, 2025, 5:49 pm • 9 0 • view
I'm still bitter that the post office had a whole "mask up" campaign planned and were going to send every mailing address masks, and Trump just nixed it. We could have been in it together and looking out for each other but Trump's ego couldn't take bad news on his watch.
sep 1, 2025, 6:03 pm • 10 0 • view
Trump wouldn't wear one because it would smudge his makeup.
sep 1, 2025, 5:58 pm • 3 0 • view
Yet, off camera, he's testing visitors and making people wait over a week if they or someone in their household tested positive. And getting all his vaccinations.
sep 1, 2025, 6:03 pm • 3 0 • view
I blame 500,000 excess Covid deaths on Trump's poor roll modeling.
sep 1, 2025, 5:59 pm • 2 1 • view
Yes, the fact that the bars were still open was the problem.
sep 1, 2025, 5:41 pm • 9 0 • view
The failure to improve ventilation in schools was bipartisan, but only because nobody in mainstream politics or media talked about it at all. (you know, a policy that would’ve helped us open schools earlier, employed people, AND improved childrens’ longterm cardiovascular health)
sep 1, 2025, 6:15 pm • 7 1 • view
Don't forget holding massively attended, church services, business conferences, motorcycle rallies, etc in defiance of covid precautions.
sep 1, 2025, 5:37 pm • 15 0 • view
Not to mention the insane conspiracy theories and pushing quack remedies before the vaccines were available.
sep 1, 2025, 5:46 pm • 7 0 • view
And it is about the elites! What people seem to fail to understand is that these decisions were often made at the district level–districts that were run mostly by elected school boards responding to their constituents!
sep 1, 2025, 7:57 pm • 0 0 • view
Since when are bars "liberal-coded?"
sep 1, 2025, 5:47 pm • 0 0 • view
Exactly, the entire argument for this narrative is that kids rarely die of COVID. That’s true, but it wasn’t the justification for the policy. Teachers *do* die of COVID and kids *do* spread COVID. Some studies find school closures were the most effective intervention for preventing cases!
sep 1, 2025, 5:48 pm • 926 107 • view
I have lost my mind countless times over the fact educated people have tried arguing that schools are not vectors for respiratory illnesses. Just admit you wanted your kids out of the house to get some peace and quiet.
sep 1, 2025, 5:54 pm • 26 1 • view
But the American right is a death cult and expects everyone to die to keep the parents free of their kids to work, and the elderly to die rather than burden caregivers and caregivers to die rather than burden families so they can work
sep 1, 2025, 5:53 pm • 2 0 • view
Kids also die of COVID and have died of COVID.
sep 1, 2025, 7:54 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeahhhhh my hometown school district lost teachers and bus drivers. Just logistically teachers were getting sick all the time and couldn't work and there weren't subs to take over. And kids did get sick! And have long term issues! Death isn't just the only thing to avoid.
sep 1, 2025, 6:27 pm • 7 0 • view
Because subs got sick too
sep 1, 2025, 6:58 pm • 0 0 • view
My friend got COVID three times in a single school year, pre-vaccines, because his school kept taking the kids who refused to wear masks and putting him in a room with them. (???) He has long term heart issues now—he was fine until Fall 2020.
sep 1, 2025, 6:55 pm • 1 0 • view
Kids also get long covid with repeated infections
sep 1, 2025, 6:15 pm • 12 0 • view
It’s like everyone has a convenient collective amnesia - this article JUST came up in my FB memories:
sep 1, 2025, 6:53 pm • 2 0 • view
🎯 And as I just commented elsewhere, everybody has memory holed the NOVEL part of “novel coronavirus”! Officials were doing the best they could in uncharted waters full of dead bodies.
sep 1, 2025, 5:53 pm • 18 0 • view
And 'the schools are closing' was the signal a lot of people seem to have been waiting on to take things VERY seriously. My husband was in the grocery when the word came here and basically put back the few things he'd already put in the basket and got out of there because of the crowd vibe shift.
sep 1, 2025, 6:03 pm • 9 0 • view
Omfg I remember the day that everything went on alert in Greensboro in March. You could *feel* the tense atmosphere in Harris Teeter. I've never encountered an obvious *off* vibe like that before and it was really unsettling. I wanted to leave right after walking in. Felt very wrong.
sep 1, 2025, 6:57 pm • 3 0 • view
We were texting back and forth and I'm pretty sure me reminding him that he did not want to be holding *bread* if panic-cleared shelves suddenly became a *food riot* was the final deciding factor.
sep 1, 2025, 7:09 pm • 3 0 • view
And the kids' family
sep 1, 2025, 5:56 pm • 1 0 • view
As the mother of a child who was functionally disabled for 15 years post-H1N1 , I'll point out that death is NOT the only bad viral outcome. 15 years . In bed. At home. Desperately trying to get an education. All because our school district wouldn't close that week when 40% of kids were out sick.
sep 1, 2025, 6:59 pm • 5 0 • view
And for the fools thinking "probably he had a preexisting condition and that'd never be us", you think again. Do you know the suicide rate for chronically ill teen boys? I do. Guess why? Now he's in remission, getting a PhD in math, and TAing freshman DURING another COVID wave. Stupid. Stupid.
sep 1, 2025, 7:06 pm • 4 0 • view
The universal policy also meant employers couldn't try to force parents back to in-person work. If everyone's kids are at home, it's clear why everyone can't come into the office. Also, there are loud voices still, but *everyone who has kids experienced this,* yet it's not the universal opinion!
sep 1, 2025, 11:06 pm • 0 0 • view
But Long Covid.
sep 1, 2025, 6:53 pm • 1 0 • view
Everyone's forgotten by now but back when schools were trying to open up again it was very common for them to be closed again a week or two later because whoops looks like half the staff are out sick and we literally don't have enough people to run the place!
sep 1, 2025, 5:55 pm • 62 2 • view
Also cancellations or 'so we're not actually getting ahead in the curriculum today' situations because there just weren't enough kids. Ever since swine flu, the schools where my parents live close for disinfection and transmission breaking if enough kids are already out with the same illness.
sep 1, 2025, 6:06 pm • 16 0 • view
I've got a mass card for a 12 year old that died of Covid. She was in my daughter's CCD class.
sep 1, 2025, 7:20 pm • 2 0 • view
Especially when nothing was really going to be done to mitigate in-person risks in schools (reducing class sizes, improving HVAC systems) - just going back to like 30 kids crammed in a small space where the windows don't open.
sep 1, 2025, 6:05 pm • 13 0 • view
And the door typically locked because of school shooters.
sep 1, 2025, 6:14 pm • 7 0 • view
But acknowledging that would mean treating teachers as valuable, and worse, treating educating kids as *more* valuable than the work calls that were “disturbed” by having kids at home. We couldn’t do that! [sarcastic]
sep 1, 2025, 7:10 pm • 3 2 • view
Also about protecting elderly family members. It is not a coincidence that urban school systems were often the last to reopen, since those were the districts with the largest numbers of multi-generational households!
sep 1, 2025, 7:31 pm • 3 0 • view
Obviously super early to make any conclusions, but is there any data yet about the effects on teacher population/supply and recovery of learning loss? [Not sure where to even start looking to see if the research exists.]
sep 1, 2025, 5:58 pm • 2 0 • view
We still haven't learned: One of the most effective ways to mitigate an airborne virus, like Covid, is to remove the virus from inside air. Simple Corsi–Rosenthal boxes were very effective; revamped HVAC even more so. Vaccines reduced mortality, but we really dropped the ball on preventing spread.
sep 1, 2025, 6:19 pm • 11 1 • view
bsky.app/profile/crfo...
sep 1, 2025, 8:33 pm • 1 1 • view
My teacher daughter stopped testing herself because her classes were full of sick kids and there was nothing she could do anyway. And now teachers need an Rx for a booster!
sep 1, 2025, 6:00 pm • 11 0 • view
California and Florida are on opposite ends of the school-closure spectrum and the differences in test scores are a wash. Some individual schools and districts definitely stayed closed too long but it just isn’t the case that this is some huge, obvious, foreseeable blunder.
sep 1, 2025, 5:55 pm • 615 80 • view
“Foreseeable”… Exactly. The truly defining aspect of COVID response *in real time* was the “groping in the fog.”
sep 1, 2025, 6:03 pm • 3 0 • view
The “schools were closed too soon, too late, too long” school of ranters want you to believe there should have been expertise in place to prescribe the exact correct response. Same folks want to demolish current expertise in public health.
sep 1, 2025, 7:26 pm • 0 0 • view
Just going to look at the studies on learning loss for children experiencing traumas like family members dying of COVID
sep 1, 2025, 6:57 pm • 3 0 • view
The school closure impact on test scores is just total nonsense. They point to national scores and then never talk about how there is no effect at a state-level. It was a natural experiment that they just ignore.
sep 1, 2025, 7:21 pm • 1 0 • view
This point is not super convincing. The costs of school closure were about more than learning loss that is easily measurable on standardized test scores, it also included stunting social development, reducing access of poor kids to school lunches, imposing childcare costs on working parentsz etc.
sep 1, 2025, 6:09 pm • 0 0 • view
*parents
sep 1, 2025, 6:48 pm • 0 0 • view
Like yes, reactionary ghouls pushing yhese thingd do not actually care about these things and are only using this concern trolling as a shallow bad-faith "Gotchya" for Machievellian political reasons.
sep 1, 2025, 6:09 pm • 0 0 • view
*these things I hate typing on mobile
sep 1, 2025, 6:48 pm • 0 0 • view
And yes, this blunder by some overly risk sensitive democrats at the state and local level pales in comparison to right wing vaccine hesitency, refusal to follow stay at home orders and other curve-flattening measures in its pervasiveness and damaging impact.
sep 1, 2025, 6:09 pm • 1 0 • view
But the normative policy question of when schools should have been reopened is not easily answerable by some state bureaucratic legibility metric like test scores alone.
sep 1, 2025, 6:09 pm • 0 0 • view
Compare the murky, indeterminate data on school closures to the stark, decisive findings on vaccine hesitancy. Republican policies and rhetoric killed hundreds of thousands of people! We don’t need to bolster this fake narrative. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
sep 1, 2025, 5:59 pm • 637 104 • view
Seventy seven September 11s!
sep 1, 2025, 10:36 pm • 3 0 • view
No one is "disregarding" this, it has been the subject of relentless coverage from media and politicians since 2020. Everyone knew school closures were going to be very hard on kids. The trade-off was that not closing them was going to result in mass death. No win-win scenario was on the table.
sep 1, 2025, 6:41 pm • 700 76 • view
Every major news publication has spent countless pages on the subject
sep 1, 2025, 7:55 pm • 1 0 • view
I think it’s fair to be sad that Covid happened at a pivotal time in your child’s life but deciding not to close schools would not have fixed this. There was no way to have normal classes during Covid.
sep 1, 2025, 7:34 pm • 3 0 • view
My friend who was a teacher had a senior who graduated during the lockdowns. When somebody asks him about it he says, "Well I missed Prom and graduation and stuff, but my mom dying would have been worse..."
sep 1, 2025, 7:02 pm • 21 0 • view
The pandemic itself is what affected an entire generation - and everyone else - and not for the better. What about that very basic fact is so hard for people to understand? The once-in-a-century global health catastrophe was going to fuck shit up, no matter what
sep 1, 2025, 6:46 pm • 12 1 • view
Exactly. This wasn't like 'leaded gasoline' where there was actually a reasonable *alternative* to losing a generation of kids....and we still didn't do it for a very long time
sep 1, 2025, 8:52 pm • 3 0 • view
Let's also not forget that to a very large degree extended school closures were *driven by parents*.....
sep 1, 2025, 8:46 pm • 1 0 • view
So many people mischarcterize the choice as between closure and normality, but a world with everything open and humming smoothly was never in the cards! The alternative was school closures with waves of 20% absences.
sep 1, 2025, 6:52 pm • 26 0 • view
And all the at-risk staff dying.
sep 1, 2025, 7:14 pm • 16 0 • view
And vulnerable family members of the school kids
sep 1, 2025, 7:37 pm • 9 0 • view
Mmhmm nod nod nod.
sep 1, 2025, 7:40 pm • 5 0 • view
Uh, they did not "miss" a "pivotal time in their lives." They had an unexpectedly different experience, due to a worldwide event. Their lives will be different because of it. The trick now is helping them assimilate that experience and mitigate the trauma and social and educational losses.
sep 1, 2025, 7:10 pm • 18 0 • view
Your comment reminds me of how much the phrase "changed the course of history" drives me nuts. It didn't change the course of history, it *was* the course of history!
sep 1, 2025, 8:55 pm • 6 0 • view
💯
sep 1, 2025, 10:38 pm • 1 0 • view
Also, the solution is prevention. Meaning stronger public health institutions run by experts and, when available, better access to vaccines.
sep 1, 2025, 6:44 pm • 4 0 • view
My kid's school district closed schools. I had my youngest start school (TK) on zoom which wasn't great, and my oldest did 4th grade on zoom. They're both doing fine - small one is in accelerated groups now in 4th grade and the big one started HS in the IB program.
sep 1, 2025, 6:45 pm • 6 0 • view
cont. I am glad they were closing schools, it was a super spreader - not just for the kids but teachers, faculty, etc. People who didn't experience it and are hand ringing make me crazy - was it hard? Yes. Did it suck? Also yes. Did we have less people die? Yes!
sep 1, 2025, 6:46 pm • 7 0 • view
Never underestimate middle-class anxiety over getting into a good college.
sep 1, 2025, 8:19 pm • 3 0 • view
You know whats really hard on kids? Their teachers and parents dying.
sep 1, 2025, 6:44 pm • 29 1 • view
Turns out that also gets kids out of school
sep 1, 2025, 6:47 pm • 6 0 • view
Yep a good-faith critique of learning loss would lead to proposals for a massive, New Deal-scale investment in public education. The people pushing the narrative are doing precisely the opposite.
sep 1, 2025, 6:46 pm • 1,624 305 • view
I kept waiting for Emily Oster to just admit “I am comfortable with teachers dying if it means my kids aren’t bothering me on work calls”
sep 1, 2025, 6:52 pm • 31 1 • view
I’m really glad the people who never want a respiratory virus pandemic to close schools again decided to fund a massive modernization of the HVAC systems of every public school in the country.
sep 1, 2025, 7:27 pm • 16 1 • view
Or, at the VERY least, putting air filters in every classroom.
sep 1, 2025, 7:30 pm • 7 1 • view
Right, running school year round to make up for lost learning, increasing the number of teachers and resources. Instead we have been seeing cuts to public education and gutting of higher education.
sep 1, 2025, 7:30 pm • 9 1 • view
Is there solid research comparing learning loss I. states where schools were closed longest had greater loss than those closed shortest?
sep 1, 2025, 8:11 pm • 0 0 • view
In 2020 (probably late 2020), I thought there should be a general messaging campaign like, "Some of us are working from home, but all of us (kids, parents, the rest) can all be learning from home!" Then like, forgive student loans and give adults money for tuition.
sep 1, 2025, 11:18 pm • 0 0 • view
(Which could've been a universal $2000/month that people were encouraged to use on tuition.) Right now, they could increase the child tax credit, fund research into catch-up programs, increase stable/reliable federal funding for K-12 schools *and* universities, increase part-time college options,
sep 1, 2025, 11:27 pm • 0 0 • view
create/fund bridge programs between community colleges and public colleges, offer 0% interest federal loans, and/or forgive student loans and give people direct grants of money for tuition. There are a lot of options!
sep 1, 2025, 11:34 pm • 0 0 • view
Exactly. It’s not a “good faith” critique at all. The opposite is true: it’s just a convenient pretext for justifying an underlying agenda that includes outlawing all public health (including vaccines) and completely eliminating public education.
sep 1, 2025, 6:50 pm • 53 1 • view
It also always strikes me as super weird and unhelpfully obsessed with the status quo that people always frame it as "let's get kids back in in-person schools" and never "let's try to address all the ways online education struggled". But I have an immune compromised fianceé, so what do I know?
sep 1, 2025, 7:20 pm • 16 1 • view
Right? “Remote schooling is an impossible failure!” is not the thing you should learn from being given 2 weeks & no training or tools to develop a remote program & learn entirely new class management strategies. A supported effort to collect learnings & train for remote class would pay out forever.
sep 1, 2025, 11:17 pm • 0 0 • view
Were the ppl objecting to school closures supporting action that could have reduced the need for them? Gov'ts could have spent the summer of 2020 investing in massive upgrades of school ventilation/air cleaning systems. Or in 2021. If they cared about kids' welfare, they would be calling for it now.
sep 1, 2025, 6:55 pm • 36 1 • view
You probably know this, but they absolutely were not. They were positively indignant at the thought of doing *anything* to prevent kids from getting or transmitting Covid. Some of them even wanted as many kids to get Covid as soon as possible.
sep 1, 2025, 10:18 pm • 2 0 • view
The lowest hanging fruit in America, the biggest bang for your buck, is universal lead abatement and universal air quality and air conditioning for all schools and daycares. We could invest $100B and get back $15T in health and wealth.
sep 1, 2025, 7:10 pm • 25 3 • view
People will never stop conflating the effects of the pandemic with the effects of the attempt to stop it.
sep 1, 2025, 7:10 pm • 23 1 • view
“Learning loss” happened because we were in a novel world wide pandemic, where in the US alone over 1.1 million deaths, refrigerator trucks full of corpses, over flowing hospitals, in a shared global trauma. Blaming it solely on school closures is a right wing attack against social good.
sep 1, 2025, 8:45 pm • 7 0 • view
You have the best threads on this
sep 1, 2025, 6:50 pm • 3 0 • view
At best they want public schools to be a daycare so parents are able to go toil at the workplace, but not a place where children might get big ideas about civics or basic science. But also, fuck those kids. Send them to the mines? I don't care, that's your problem. Get to work.
sep 1, 2025, 7:41 pm • 8 1 • view
I wonder what they effect of teacher's deaths, retirement and quitting is causing the learning losses? One teacher in my extended family left the profession during this time.
sep 1, 2025, 8:25 pm • 4 0 • view
As a teacher who lived through remote-learning, I think we missed a huge opportunity to restructure & rethink public education post-Covid.
sep 1, 2025, 6:51 pm • 30 1 • view
As a _________, we missed a huge opportunity to ___________ is pretty much MadLibs at this point
sep 1, 2025, 7:30 pm • 7 1 • view
Also so many children lost parents during the pandemic and for some reason no one seems to think grief and upheaval due to the loss of a caregiver might also impact their lives and ability to focus on school. Turns out kids bringing home a virus and killing a family member has emotional impacts.
sep 1, 2025, 9:58 pm • 4 0 • view
We absolutely could use New Deal-scale investment in public education and to triple down on "we aren't banning books, especially harmless gay books, to cater to a bunch of religious freaks who don't even use public schools."
sep 1, 2025, 8:17 pm • 2 0 • view
Not only that but finally dealing with the ever-present problem of "why isn't indoor ventilation better" is sitting right there if anyone wants to tackle it.
sep 1, 2025, 7:34 pm • 10 1 • view
Our youngest was in second grade when we had some of the world’s longest lockdowns here. They discovered that they could knock out their entire day’s remote schoolwork in a couple of hours. Now in Year 7, and is literally above all expected results in all NAPLAN (Aust national assessment) results.
sep 1, 2025, 10:39 pm • 2 1 • view
Cookers make the same arguments about “learning loss” here. Maybe my child is an outlier. The arguments don’t convince me that it’s as much of an issue as they want it to be.
sep 1, 2025, 10:40 pm • 1 1 • view
It drives me insane when people don't acknowledge that this was a new global pandemic that was spreading wildly and no one knew how to mitigate it. Mistakes were made, but they're only obvious in hindsight. You can't look at 2020 knowing what we know now and say everyone was so dumb!
sep 1, 2025, 7:44 pm • 3 0 • view
So much of the language surrounding "learning loss" drives me nuts. "A once-in-a-century disruption means a cohort of kids won't hit a bunch of benchmarks we made up. But we can't adjust the benchmarks to accommodate that once-in-a-century disruption because...reasons...??"
sep 1, 2025, 7:04 pm • 109 7 • view
And bizarre claims like 8th grade reading levels would take 20 years to recover, because somehow children yet-to-be conceived would suffer from learning loss...
sep 1, 2025, 11:41 pm • 0 0 • view
They also get very, very upset when you tell them dead kids can't learn.
sep 1, 2025, 10:12 pm • 3 0 • view
Thank you! This drives me insane! Let's pretend there's no solution to this completely made-up problem!
sep 1, 2025, 8:49 pm • 1 0 • view
I do think it’s actually a problem that the pandemic seems to have permanently lowered the potential of an entire cohort. The problem is all the evidence suggests it’s the pandemic that caused it, not our response being too aggressive.
sep 1, 2025, 7:24 pm • 47 3 • view
I would also argue that AI, and people's apparently lax attitude toward AI being used to essentially replace critical thinking in children and young adults, is also a contributing factor to the ceiling being lowered here. Still nothing to do with the pandemic response, of course.
sep 1, 2025, 10:41 pm • 0 0 • view
Yes this is the important part. We're failing this generation of kids while adults argue stupid shit about why instead of looking at the evidence
sep 1, 2025, 7:34 pm • 23 1 • view
The pandemic cost them a year but kids have lost years of education before, to teacher strikes and such, and managed. LLMs (and the rest of the attention algorithms) being perversely sold as the solution to learning loss salted the wound so it wouldn’t heal.
sep 1, 2025, 9:08 pm • 9 1 • view
We don’t know and won’t know for decades and we should be studying that. I bet Trump killed a bunch of studies on the topic
sep 1, 2025, 10:00 pm • 0 0 • view
These kinds of things have happened all over the world, happen on smaller scales across the US. There is no evidence of long term learning loss, only delays. Aka hitting arbitrary benchmarks. Only the kids whose lives were uprooted- caregiver death or permanent disability- have long term effects.
sep 1, 2025, 9:18 pm • 3 1 • view
My local schools have very limited HVAC and (rightfully) didn't reopen until September 2021. Laptops were allotted one per household unless the family had 4 or more kids, and most of the parents were essential workers. It wasn't just that the kids were all a year behind, they came back _feral_.
sep 1, 2025, 7:34 pm • 11 0 • view
I don't know that they could have done better, but I get cranky when people minimize the effects. They were bad. My (autistic) kid missed the end of sixth grade and all of seventh. Eighth grade was a nightmare, and we ended up transferring for high school.
sep 1, 2025, 7:39 pm • 9 0 • view
The "every kid is falling behind" thing made me feel nuts, too. If every kid is "falling behind" their peers, then no kid was actually falling behind!
sep 1, 2025, 10:25 pm • 4 0 • view
This is it! It's like everybody believed there were secret schools that every child but theirs was attending.
sep 1, 2025, 11:07 pm • 0 0 • view
Much of the language also strongly suggests that they will never be able to “catch up.” This is the underlying absurdity.
sep 1, 2025, 8:12 pm • 7 0 • view
As someone who suffered from both educational neglect and social isolation due to homeschooling, it is fucking crazy-making witnessing the right suddenly pretend to be mad about the terrible effects of keeping kids away from public school
sep 1, 2025, 10:28 pm • 9 0 • view
Or just start installing fucking air filters in every classroom in the country. But yeah, much easier to pontificate about the “lost generation”
sep 1, 2025, 7:27 pm • 14 1 • view
Ezra Klein, to someone on his podcast, probably: "Help me out here. It seems to me that much of the discourse on the Right has been anti-public education. So I'm having a hard time understanding this compliant." GOP bullshitter: "We need to tear it down and build it back up." E.K. "Oh, OK."
sep 1, 2025, 7:33 pm • 2 0 • view
I will never understand how and why so much of the educated political class, from elected Dems to the Ezra Kleins of the world, consistently treat Republicans as operating in good faith.
sep 1, 2025, 7:28 pm • 6 1 • view
Mostly the revisionists want us to forget how well giving people money, tax credits, child care, and health care worked for many families.
sep 1, 2025, 10:38 pm • 1 1 • view
I 100% believe that if we have to do this all over again sometime soon, it will be managed much better. Much of the problem was that we didn't have any good prior examples of what works and what doesn't, with COVID, and social distancing measures. For months it was feeling around in the dark.
sep 1, 2025, 8:22 pm • 0 0 • view
Well we did once have a forward thinking POTUS who, in light of other pandemics, planned and produced a pandemic playbook to guide policy - but his successor just threw it out and ignored it when it was needed.
sep 1, 2025, 9:58 pm • 3 1 • view
States will have to do it. Feds won't. They can use the Biden playbook.
sep 1, 2025, 10:28 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm not optimistic, the backlash has included rejecting attempts to avoid transmitting other infections as well. A lot of missteps during the early pandemic were due to arrogant leadership being unwilling to listen to domain-specific experts.
sep 1, 2025, 10:28 pm • 2 0 • view
I also don't think we can just flatly say "and not for the better" - I am sure many children quite liked home schooling, I am sure many were indiferent. There is an entire spectrum of human experience to consider you can't just lump it all into "this = bad" because it is your one opinion.
sep 1, 2025, 6:44 pm • 5 0 • view
Yes. I seem to remember that (on average) children's mental health improved when they were at home, and worsened once normal schooling resumed. sphr.nihr.ac.uk/news-and-eve...
sep 1, 2025, 9:25 pm • 3 0 • view
As a parent with two kids in school during the pandemic, it was hard on the kids, parents and teachers and we all worked to make the best of it. But the media almost exclusively dug up the worst people for the discourse.
sep 1, 2025, 7:03 pm • 8 0 • view
you know what's missing from this discourse? how we just passively accept school shootings and shit like lockdown/active shooter drills.
sep 1, 2025, 6:59 pm • 6 0 • view
Seems like a lot of these takes are forgetting we didn’t know what was going to happen. It was a very bad situation! No, it wasn’t ideal for teens but it wasn’t ideal for anyone. I mean, millions of people died. Trying to prevent actual death seems like it needed to be a priority.
sep 1, 2025, 9:36 pm • 1 0 • view
I love the whole bullshit "you DESTROYED the development of CHILDREN" vs what we were looking at at the time: "so I wish to chance my kid might die because of some awful shit we don't understand?*
sep 1, 2025, 9:04 pm • 2 0 • view
*do I wish to
sep 1, 2025, 10:39 pm • 0 0 • view
As a parent, I was good to go on that trade off because I don't want anything to happen to my kids that I could plausibly prevent. But I guess lots of people are mad they were slightly inconvenienced.
sep 1, 2025, 9:06 pm • 2 0 • view
"should've kept the schools open in April 2020 so kids wouldn't have missed algebra" is some wild shit People were dying
sep 1, 2025, 6:42 pm • 32 0 • view
Am I saying this person said this? No. But you didn't say "fuck that learning!" Either. Sometimes things are hard and nuanced!
sep 1, 2025, 6:43 pm • 10 0 • view
That’s the thing. ⬆️ “It’s going to be shitty” is the starting point. All kids’ milestones were and will be thrown off by a pandemic. The only choice is how shitty & how much damage accrues. We decided to do a whopping amount of damage for years and years instead of take 2 months to stop it.
sep 1, 2025, 11:08 pm • 0 0 • view
My kid missed her junior year of high school, but she is ALIVE and thoroughly enjoying college now, so all in all, she says it was totally worth it
sep 1, 2025, 9:59 pm • 1 0 • view
This is what irritates me about all these opinions. You can't compare closing schools to business as usual because business as usual wasn't an option during the pandemic. Open schools where most of the teachers were out sick would also have lead to learning loss.
sep 1, 2025, 7:50 pm • 4 1 • view
School-open teacher here: teachers and classes were on a rotation. Kids had to be distanced and masked. Everyone was scared all the time. There were huge waves of teachers and kids getting Covid anyway. So the kids got something out of socially but not a lot educationally.
sep 1, 2025, 8:26 pm • 0 0 • view
I think it’s more accurate to say that “there was no way to keep schools reliably open for in person instruction” and to emphasize that few of the “open the schools” cranks gave or give a flying fvck about making schools open reliably.
sep 1, 2025, 6:43 pm • 6 0 • view
I vaguely remember earlier studies showing that COVID impacts, regardless of local policies, were mostly dependent on student family incomes. With income disparity stratification of educational outcomes deepening.
sep 1, 2025, 6:04 pm • 8 0 • view
A large part of that is because the more poor a family is, the less likely they are to avoid going to a doctor for preventive care. So they would hold off going to the hospital until they were really sick and could go to the ER. And by then the options were limited at best.
sep 1, 2025, 6:30 pm • 2 0 • view
The problem is that the narrative of government overreach during COVID is right wing propaganda. And pundits and politicians (Schatz et al) just can’t believe that *they* would fall for propaganda.
sep 1, 2025, 6:39 pm • 2 0 • view
I don't know if schools stayed closed too long. Absent vaccinations for teachers, workers, and students, they SHOULD have stayed closed for as long as possible.
sep 1, 2025, 6:14 pm • 2 0 • view
It was pretty foreseeable though? Lots of people were worried about it at the time, and were advocating for low-cost effective things like HEPA filters + box fans. Bars/restaurants being open but schools being closed was pretty galling and felt backward, at the time, to a lot of people.
sep 1, 2025, 7:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Broader studies than just these two states show a different and meaningful pattern: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/b...
sep 1, 2025, 7:52 pm • 0 0 • view
I always wonder what 'too long' actually means for some. Returning to in person (no hybrid option), would have to factor in vaccine rates, staff availability, and local health conditions. That was going to change according to locale.
sep 1, 2025, 6:26 pm • 5 0 • view
The argument drifts so far into a nihilist perspective that it almost feels like people are saying “We should have been more aware of conservatives not taking Covid seriously and just let them get their way.”
sep 1, 2025, 6:01 pm • 10 1 • view
ultimately I think the issue here is less about test scores and student performance and more about "the government forced me to manage my kids 24/7 for several months and I didn't like it"
sep 1, 2025, 6:06 pm • 17 2 • view
Bingo
sep 1, 2025, 6:13 pm • 3 0 • view
Also kids’ parents and grandparents *do* die of COVID. I keep saying that these people seem to imagine a world of self-educated, well-adjusted orphans.
sep 1, 2025, 11:07 pm • 0 0 • view
Also it’s wild that people just fail to recognize that little kids…. Have families? Siblings, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, etc… attempting to protect kids (and teachers) was just as much about protecting anyone adjacent to the kids
sep 1, 2025, 5:53 pm • 37 0 • view
If I remember er correctly, the greatest spread was by kids 10-19. I expected it to be toddlers. (I love them, but they're gross). Teachers and school staff (many of whom had their own familiesto care for) were treated like shit for not magically making everything work.
sep 1, 2025, 9:41 pm • 0 0 • view
I am fairly certain I was infected in a classroom
sep 1, 2025, 6:51 pm • 2 0 • view
Washington and Arizona rank 13th and 14th in population. Demographically these two states have a lot in common (urban/rural population percentages, educational attainment, etc). In the first 2 years of Covid AZ had roughly twice as many covid deaths as WA. The diff - Dems ran WA and GOP ran AZ.
sep 1, 2025, 6:12 pm • 3 0 • view
Typhoid wasn’t bad for Typhoid Mary, so I guess they’d argue she should have been allowed to roam freely among the population
sep 1, 2025, 7:43 pm • 3 0 • view
And, uh, parents and grandparents. It’s not great for learning or trauma if a kid brings home Covid and then realizes that illness killed a family member.
sep 1, 2025, 7:39 pm • 1 0 • view
This is so awful that they are rewriting history this way. Kids were taking COVID home and killing or disabling their caregivers. Bet that's great for learning and mental health. Schools that opened just had to close again, or were basically warehousing kids with a few minders.
sep 1, 2025, 6:50 pm • 2 0 • view
Not entirely sure how you could have kids and not understand this. Kids being colds home on a regular basis.
sep 1, 2025, 6:49 pm • 3 0 • view
Flu deaths plummeted then because kids weren’t bringing it home to kill their family members!
sep 1, 2025, 6:20 pm • 9 0 • view
Similarly, it makes me really angry that they would have us believe we stumbled into closing schools by accident; that it was a careless choice. We knew there would be, and so did the students! There just wasn't a harmless option. We made the decision soberly, and with intent.
sep 1, 2025, 7:08 pm • 1 0 • view
We all collectively said, "We know the kids will fall behind, but this will save lives." Reality is not obligated to give you a harmless, totally beneficial option in an emergency. It drives me bananas.
sep 1, 2025, 7:10 pm • 0 0 • view
We had a point the year after where we had so many cases of covid that our school actually had to close for a week because there weren't enough adults. A teacher in my district died and one of my close friends was hospitalized.
sep 1, 2025, 6:48 pm • 2 0 • view
There are studies that show not closing schools led to tens of thousands more deaths in the places that stayed open. I am sure the hundreds of thousands of kids whose primary caregiver died would have rather learned a bit less math that year.
sep 1, 2025, 6:35 pm • 7 0 • view
not only do kids spread covid, they spread it to people who do die a lot more than the kids do! like mee-maw!
sep 1, 2025, 6:06 pm • 3 0 • view
I would hasten to add that while Covid was rarely fatal to kids, if the number of children infected with it had continued approaching "all of them," the number of dead kids would have quickly passed the benchmark of "utterly horrifying."
sep 1, 2025, 6:07 pm • 7 1 • view
As a parent, I very much appreciated not being sick every two days.
sep 1, 2025, 9:02 pm • 0 0 • view
I have a friend whose teen has terrible Long Covid. I know you know that dying is not the only bad outcome. I have Long C too but I can manage as an adult. It’s awful to see teen’s struggle. So much loss - learning loss, social loss, etc. Also:
sep 1, 2025, 11:39 pm • 0 0 • view
I got Covid at school (work) and so many staff were sick, school had to shut. That’s the reality. Learning loss would have happened anyway! Choice: keep school open until too many are sick and has to shut; OR managed closure and support for students from staff who are not sick.
sep 1, 2025, 11:41 pm • 0 0 • view
I imagine losing your parents and grandparents isn’t great for learning either!
sep 1, 2025, 7:22 pm • 0 0 • view
Not to mention that Long Covid has now passed Asthma as the most common chronic health problem in children. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
sep 1, 2025, 6:10 pm • 14 1 • view
Not to mention that kids would have been bringing COVID home to parents & grandparents who would *not* bounce back.
sep 1, 2025, 6:05 pm • 20 0 • view
I agree on the initial mistakes originating with the Right. But I do feel that the communication from Biden’s people on the vax limitations and allowing the Delta CEO to halve a quarantine time of ten days to five were mistakes that the Left could have avoided.
sep 1, 2025, 5:56 pm • 9 0 • view
In fact, almost all my biggest domestic disagreements with Biden were about his lackluster follow-through on what he said his platform wanted on covid and what he did. Actively moving to saying there would be no further mask mandates instead of “we’ll follow science & keep benchmarks.”
sep 1, 2025, 5:59 pm • 10 0 • view
Promoting Hot Vax Summer as a fun time for all adults while us parents with small children were still waiting on vaxes, and terrified and overwhelmed. That wasn’t a Trump administration thing, that was the left’s messaging at that point. The left did better in the initial stages tho.
sep 1, 2025, 6:01 pm • 5 0 • view
And I think it’s absolutely fair to look askance at “blue state closed the schools too long,” when what they mean is they resented ongoing remote schooling. (I personally would have liked to open schools AFTER vax + retrofitting ventilation systems & keep everything else possible remote.)
sep 1, 2025, 6:07 pm • 2 0 • view
And why centrists are largely just Republicans. You have a litany of examples of how Republicans are making lives worst for children. Going on a rant to legitimize something they say instead of attacking back is insane unless you are also a Republican
sep 1, 2025, 6:05 pm • 1 0 • view
We didn't have proof that Covid was airborne but it didn't take long until that was clear to scientists. But not politicians whose main job, apparently, was to reopen so the economy didn't suffer. Pay people to stay home. Masking. Robust air exchanges and filters in schools and other public places.
sep 1, 2025, 6:06 pm • 4 0 • view
The head of public health in BC took YEARS to admit Covid is airborne and she still chooses misinformation about masks. I understand not wanting to arm the delusional but when you have access to researchers, at a certain point, denial becomes eugenics.
sep 1, 2025, 6:08 pm • 3 0 • view
There were a lot of places where school wasn't stopped, it was just remote. The pivot to other instruction types happened, it was just thwarted by the fact that a lot of schools rely on a lot of specialized skills an underpaid labor. Kids don't magically learn by computer.
sep 1, 2025, 10:40 pm • 1 0 • view
That's because it's not some deficit of learning hours to be made up, it's collective trauma, stress and disease to be treated. But we won't talk about that. Just keep swimming, kids!
sep 1, 2025, 8:03 pm • 1 0 • view
I mean, if blue states have better schools you’d expect somewhat greater losses from closing them, right? Because they do more educating?
sep 1, 2025, 6:49 pm • 0 0 • view
Former FL school RN here, forced to return to schools, immediately got COVID from anti-masker parent. Multiple teachers & family of kids died from COVID. Our students are finally recovering from academic delays. Do not believe anything desantis says-his team alters data to prove they were right.
sep 1, 2025, 6:36 pm • 15 0 • view
this is just a bunch of pissed-off parents who wanted their babysitting services without any concern for the teachers, admin, or the families of the kids. I've never seen so much privileged selfishness in my life.
sep 1, 2025, 6:30 pm • 5 0 • view
📌
sep 1, 2025, 7:22 pm • 0 0 • view
i think you’re disregarding a generation of older kids and teenagers who were forced to miss a pivotal time in their life and pushed into online spaces. regardless of your opinion on whether it was right or not, it affected an entire generation and not for the better.
sep 1, 2025, 6:33 pm • 1 0 • view
And what exactly are these "liberal-coded institutions" that were allegedly kept open? Grocery stores?
sep 1, 2025, 6:17 pm • 0 0 • view
Regardless of the accuracy of the underlying position the types of people pushing these arguments today, well after it's a practical issue, are just looking to normalize other far right talking points. It's not about learning about how we should handle future pandemics.
sep 1, 2025, 5:36 pm • 3 0 • view
Among everything, they ignore how much easier it is to open a bar (and run it) vs a school. For a bar, you might need the owners, a few relatives, a few stalwart employees, and that’s it. For a school, you need dozens of teachers, dozens of support staff, bus drivers, admins, etc. It’s a lot harder!
sep 1, 2025, 8:18 pm • 0 0 • view
You know how I know that Republicans are winning? Bc they successfully bait the country into endless loops of debating stories from 5 years ago. Democracy is going away today and arguing about COVID is participating in a diversion.
sep 1, 2025, 6:30 pm • 1 1 • view
COVID still exists (a Catholic school in Kansas had to close due to it last week) and the stuff Michael is talking about is part of what got us to "only people over 65 and super-sick people can have the COVID vaccine." It's all part of the same process.
sep 1, 2025, 7:10 pm • 0 0 • view
the narrative about COVID is a significant driver of the cuts to public health they're doing now! Follow it or don't follow it — and feel free to block me if you don't enjoy my posts — but I strongly disagree that historical revisionism doesn't matter.
sep 1, 2025, 6:44 pm • 10 0 • view
Plus: "You made us vote for the destruction of science and health care" is a slightly bigger self-own than kids losing half a year of school.
sep 1, 2025, 5:50 pm • 0 0 • view
A supposedly serious person agreeing with the "omg closed too long" narrative, but adding details which would have, AT BEST, meant we could open schools less than half a year earlier, given that the vaccine EUA was issued in December 2020 and it took months to get high risk/príority vaccinated.
sep 1, 2025, 6:40 pm • 4 0 • view
“Appropriate ventilators” is carrying a huge amount of weight there. Most districts didn’t have funding.
sep 1, 2025, 8:30 pm • 1 0 • view
"I wish people reckoned more heavily with the consequences..." there were dozens of think tank reports and public health debates about this at the time! We absolutely reckoned with it, we just decided preventing death was worth some learning loss.
sep 1, 2025, 6:55 pm • 16 0 • view
So any open-sooner who isn't an antivaxer is claiming there would have been a huge benefit to sending kids back to physical class for 2-3 months after doing the first 6-7 months from home. An absolute hoax contrarian position.
sep 1, 2025, 6:45 pm • 2 0 • view
'blue states closed too early' is said by the same people who are working to close public schools, so you know it's not that they care about children's education.
sep 1, 2025, 6:29 pm • 279 34 • view
“So go with my unaccountable AI charter school instead!”
sep 1, 2025, 9:31 pm • 0 0 • view
Also said by the folks who forget Trump almost dying of Covid in October 2020
sep 1, 2025, 7:25 pm • 14 0 • view
"closing too early" misunderstands exponential growth and is how Texas and Florida had higher death tolls than NY or CA despite seeing how bad it was in NY and CA. Of course the measures to avert a disaster are always "overreaction".
sep 1, 2025, 10:02 pm • 3 0 • view
What they really care about is *controlling* children’s education
sep 1, 2025, 7:51 pm • 4 0 • view
It's not like these kinds of centrists were going to agree to things that would've made schools safer (like mass air filtration improvements or mask mandates) either! No, they want to live in a fantasy land where doing nothing would be a totally non-disruptive solution to a global pandemic.
sep 1, 2025, 10:27 pm • 0 0 • view
China had 95% fewer deaths but they had an actual quarantine and did things like deliver food and medicine door to door. We'll have a bloody revolution before our government admits it could do that
sep 1, 2025, 10:12 pm • 2 1 • view
Michael, I cannot tell you how badly I want you to write a book about COVID. I mean, it's probably mostly written already! Your episodes on "In COVID's Wake," feels like 80% of a book.
sep 1, 2025, 6:01 pm • 5 0 • view
Am I insane? What is a liberal-coded institution? If we are pretending those exist, wouldn't schools literally be on the top of that list? lol
sep 1, 2025, 5:57 pm • 0 0 • view
Never understood why Dems don’t go harder on Republicans for the aftermath of COVID. Fact is all of these GOP governors (many of which will prob be running for president soon) are indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths in their respective states.
sep 1, 2025, 6:28 pm • 1 0 • view
I can only speak for my kids and their friends, but...they might have actually learned MORE in 2020-21 because being at home meant 0 classroom distractions. And it is the disruptive classroom of 30-40 kids, many of whom have behavioral problems, that has been the ongoing issue in schools, not COVID
sep 1, 2025, 6:09 pm • 0 0 • view
Totally had nothing to do with Politico manufacturing consent after being bought by right wing shitheads.
sep 1, 2025, 6:21 pm • 0 0 • view
Were bars really open before schools though? This sounds like one of those talking points people latch onto without thinking.
sep 1, 2025, 5:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Because you are posting about COVID I'm taking the opportunity to post this for your followers. COVID is airborne, we must clean the indoor air. A DIY quieter, repairable air cleaner. Parts list and instructions within the article.
sep 1, 2025, 10:23 pm • 0 0 • view
By theory about leaning loss is actually more related to how the pandemic ramped up the use of technology in schools faster than it would have which led to less effective strategies for a bit until it leveled back out
sep 1, 2025, 5:40 pm • 11 1 • view
And let's be honest...many teachers were heroically trying to educate throughout the difficult time...some checked out. I had kids in college in HS...it was bumpy. This was not unlike all the jobs, tbh.
sep 1, 2025, 6:05 pm • 2 0 • view
Yeah it’s not really anyone’s “fault” which I think is another big part of this. Large disruptions have ripple effects but that doesn’t mean original choices were wrong. I think the messiness is easy to pick apart, but you can’t control for everything and cost benefits for this stuff are messy
sep 1, 2025, 6:08 pm • 6 0 • view
Like what’s the comparison of a three year learning loss vs more deaths. How much social upheaval after shutdowns is worth flattening the curve etc. this are not easy answers and your data isn’t just going to all be about what happened 1-3 years out but also 5-10 years
sep 1, 2025, 6:10 pm • 1 0 • view
This is driving me insane. I was locked in a hotel room with my kids for three weeks, had to mask outdoors for 2.5 years, and my three-year-old had to do a daily nasal swab test to attend preschool—in addition to school closures—yet neither I nor anyone I know in HK became a weird reactionary.
sep 1, 2025, 7:39 pm • 1 0 • view
the closed schools too long crap is mostly "waaa i had to actually interact with my family"
sep 1, 2025, 5:36 pm • 17 0 • view
it feels to me like a lot of that "outrage" was just confirmed priors. Where's the blue state that dramatically shifted to the right because "normies" in the middle were outraged by Dem "excesses" during covid?
sep 1, 2025, 6:40 pm • 3 0 • view
This whole thing grinds my gears so much. Like, my blue state still prioritizes education much more than a lot of red states, and our kids do much better, even with "learning loss." And also, who fucking cares about "learning loss" when lives have been at stake.
sep 1, 2025, 5:58 pm • 1 0 • view
But more than that, I taught at the college level for almost a decade before the pandemic hit, and a lot of what we're seeing now, with kids struggling and being several grade levels behind in reading comprehension, etc., started well before the pandemic.
sep 1, 2025, 5:58 pm • 2 0 • view
My mom just retired from teaching 1st grade and couldn't believe how many of her students in her last few years couldn't read compared to years before. But these 7-year-olds weren't in school during the school closures! They didn't have "learning loss!" Something else is going on!
sep 1, 2025, 5:58 pm • 1 0 • view
if people lost trust in public health then that seems like a them problem
sep 1, 2025, 5:54 pm • 0 0 • view
I get the sense this is mostly being pushed by corporate types annoyed they had to give their employees flexible work from home schedules because their dumb weiner kids were home, and the ones in blue states had to do it for longer and resent it
sep 1, 2025, 7:33 pm • 0 0 • view
Why is this all coming up again now?
sep 1, 2025, 6:17 pm • 0 0 • view
As a blue state mom with kids who flourished during school closures, I have one caveat: If we are going to offer so many life changing educational and social support services to children through school, WE MUST find a way to continue services even when schools are shut. We have to. We just have to.
sep 1, 2025, 5:53 pm • 17 0 • view
I know of children who used those services, and within 7 months of losing access to them they lost the ability to speak. Some haven’t regained abilities. These are tragic stories.
sep 1, 2025, 5:55 pm • 8 0 • view
Well you see the right don't see the death of children as a bad thing
sep 1, 2025, 10:56 pm • 0 0 • view
The bars were open because adults were insanely selfish. I worked in the hospital in the winter of 2020-2021, I saw the selfishness firsthand. Our communities simply did not care that schools were closed because of how much disease they were spreading by their refusal to stay home.
sep 1, 2025, 6:59 pm • 4 0 • view
I wonder what sort of long term effects we might see from "a bunch of teachers dying or quitting because you demonstrated you don't care about their safety" for Republican managed states.
sep 1, 2025, 7:45 pm • 1 0 • view
They're also arguing that any closures related to weather (heat or cold) is because the schools are manipulating the kids in thinking it's caused by climate change. Just wild stuff!
sep 1, 2025, 5:55 pm • 0 0 • view
On good you saw my emergency beacon
sep 1, 2025, 6:07 pm • 1 0 • view
QTing myself bsky.app/profile/publ...
sep 1, 2025, 5:43 pm • 5 1 • view
We still don't know all of the long term risk those kids avoided. I had mono, and now I'm at increased risk of MS and several cancers. Boomers joked about HPV and Herpes, and now they are seeing the cancers and dementia they cause. We know kids get long covid, maybe we should feel lucky we acted.
sep 1, 2025, 6:24 pm • 4 0 • view
Why do we continue to entertain the lies of conservatives? Let's maybe shove them in a locker where they clearly belong.
sep 1, 2025, 5:47 pm • 4 0 • view
Also if this theory of radicalization was true we’d see blue state Republicans careening right while pragmatic red states would have both better outcomes and saner Republicans. Trende has lived in either Ohio or Virginia for the past decade!
sep 1, 2025, 5:39 pm • 16 0 • view
It was really striking in the first summer of vaccination that maps of hospitalizations/deaths quite often looked like they followed the Mason/Dixon line Even in areas where blue state crowds acted contrary to social distancing directives (ie. BLM protests), norms about masking stayed in place ...
sep 1, 2025, 5:48 pm • 16 0 • view
... and crucially, the protests were kept outdoors The red state violations of norms during this period amounted to, "hell, screw masking, screw meeting outdoors, screw distancing during eating," and consequently there were stark differences in outcomes
sep 1, 2025, 5:48 pm • 15 0 • view
Jim Tressel will straighten the state out, don't you worry
sep 1, 2025, 5:44 pm • 0 0 • view
1/50 people in CA has covid TODAY. We are still DURING COVID. We are not still “during covid protections”.
sep 1, 2025, 11:02 pm • 0 0 • view
The real thing was that parents can't do their laptop jobs from home with little kids around and this threatened to break everyone's delicate capitalist equilibrium.
sep 1, 2025, 6:55 pm • 0 0 • view
Tired of Dem cowards eager to sell out our medical institutions. Incalculable my ass. There was no perfect answer, let alone was every answer perfect for YOU. So yeah that makes for a lot of whining. On balance, they did pretty good, saving lots of whiny asses from themselves. Mostly.
sep 1, 2025, 8:56 pm • 0 0 • view
A whole bunch of white suburban liberal wine moms will never forgive anyone for taking away their free childcare.
sep 1, 2025, 5:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Why does nobody seem to care that it was unconscionable to ask teachers to hold in person instruction prior to the vaccine being available
sep 1, 2025, 5:36 pm • 96 1 • view
Since when has anybody cared about teachers? As a feminine profession they are expected to sacrifice their well-being for everyone else and to be poorly compensated for the privilege.
sep 1, 2025, 5:45 pm • 35 1 • view
Exhibit A: Active Shooter Drills
sep 1, 2025, 6:52 pm • 11 0 • view
Some of them are idiots, others are just murder enthusiasts
sep 1, 2025, 5:48 pm • 0 0 • view
One of the big reasons there was such a strong push to reopen before the vaccine rollout was specifically that certain people saw it as an opening to attack teachers' unions and try to get the public on their side to crush them.
sep 1, 2025, 6:10 pm • 5 0 • view
the premise from virtually everyone who talks incessantly about schools throughout Covid is that the staff who work there don't matter - at all; not so surprising that the same people want to defund and abolish public schools lol
sep 1, 2025, 8:13 pm • 1 0 • view
Seriously… teachers are unionized and did not want to experience in-person risk when there was an (admittedly not great) alternative available
sep 1, 2025, 5:44 pm • 5 0 • view
yeah virtually everyone who participates in these conversations could not have cared less if the staff at a school got Covid and died from it
sep 1, 2025, 8:14 pm • 3 0 • view
They don’t come out and say this bc it sounds bad, but it’s exceptionally obvious.
sep 1, 2025, 8:22 pm • 1 0 • view
I was back to teaching - in a blue state - just after Columbus Day 2020. I never know what these people are talking about.
sep 1, 2025, 7:44 pm • 2 0 • view
TBF if you actually grapple with trade offs and data you don’t get to write the opinion you already had in your oped/tweets and get fewer clicks
sep 1, 2025, 5:38 pm • 3 0 • view