School Closures in 2020/21: What really happened?
Josh Stevenson kicks of his Substack with an excellent article
With the permission of Josh Stevenson (@IfIHadAStick on Twitter) we publish an excerpt of his most recent post on his new Substack:
Check it out!
Setting the Record Straight: An analysis of School Closures in 2020/21
- Data Source: Burbio.com
It’s no secret that political polarization within our country has affected policy response to the pandemic. The first year of the pandemic was smack in the middle of an election, where every single issue facing the nation was portrayed as a this vs. that, us vs. them, the left vs the right. Public health messaging was appropriated by politicians for the purpose of making political promises. Politicians on both sides made bold claims1 about their policies effects on the pandemic, and the bureaucracies within our Federal and State governments were often left to either pickup the pieces, or left carrying the flag of the “official messaging” of executive administrations by closely aligning their policies with political goals. The appropriate role of public health: a-political, advisory, driven by research and data, was almost completely dismantled. Who suffered the most from this petty political polarization? The children.
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So here we are in 2022, and the prevailing public & expert opinion2 is that virtual school was a failed experiment3, that open, in-person school is unequivocally the most effective mode of learning (shocker). Socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority children were affected disproportionately by virtual learning. The data are clear on that issue, despite the attempt at some to misrepresent the issue and inject dubious claims of nefarious racial motivations within the debate.
The most tragic part of school closures was that the science and research on the risks of open schools has corroborated on these few simple facts: that schools were not responsible for community spread4, that schools could operate in-person safely even during periods of high community spread5, and that burdensome mitigations actually had little to no significant effect upon transmission within schools6.
Now that we have higher certainty about schools minimal effects on spread, the reality of the criticality of in-person learning to provide the best outcomes7, and the disastrous consequences that closing them caused8, we should be asking ourselves: why? While most of Europe kept their schools open9 (even during times of severe restrictions on adult social life), the US continued with school closures throughout about half the country.
Why did we allow schools to close? Answering this question is critical to preventing collateral damage to our children, and to learn how we balance competing harms when enacting policy. We must face the evidence, learn from our mistakes, and do better for our children’s sake.
If it wasn’t already abundantly clear that politics explains school closures more than any other factor, this paper10 from Brown University explores the evidence and sums up their research findings on the factors influencing school closures:
“Contrary to the conventional understanding of school districts as localized and non-partisan actors, we find evidence that politics, far more than science, shaped school district decision-making. Mass partisanship and teacher union strength best explain how school boards approached reopening”
Compare the chart on the left, which shows cumulative in-person learning by state (more red= more open schools, more blue = less open schools) with the election map on the right. The correlation is unmistakable.
Source: https://cai.burbio.com/school-opening-tracker/
Another figure from the Brown Study makes the relationship even clearer.
“As Figure 1 shows, the decision to return students to in-person classes this fall was strongly correlated with the county-level share of the vote won by Donald Trump in 2016”
School Openings by State over Time
… read the rest of his excellent article over at Josh’s new Substack:
It helps to realize that elites weren't trying to close schools, they were trying to push Covid panic because it gained them power and control. But in over-pushing certain narratives (lies) in mainstream media, the result was their most devoted followers believed it all. That created terrified parents and teacher's unions.
At that point they had to go along with it because to do otherwise would be to undermine their own story. But school closures were just collateral damage.
(Red states had more folks less willing to believe the Covid lies, so schools there opened more quickly.)
Ultimately, Global elites are happy to have schools reopen though because schools have long been indoctrination centers that help them keep their power.
Think back to one-room school houses where communities pooled their money to hire teachers and kids arguably received more comprehensive educations vs now when money given to schools is controlled by powerful groups.
Government has too much power over education and elites have too much power over government for kids to get an education that isn't constantly a power struggle over who gets to dictate the brainwashing they receive.
Homeschool groups often operate like one-room schools of old because families will pool their money to hire teachers for specific classes that are harder to teach at home. It's done very economically and the kids get a better education that fits families' values.
I highly recommend this video linked below in order to understand that schools are peanuts to these elites. They gain power by controlling schools, but financial benefits from schools are negligible. Teacher's unions are merely tools for elites' control of schools and they simply had less success in keeping their unruly panicked teacher's unions in control than they expected. This is my take, but I'm interested to hear other's views.
https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/monopoly-who-owns-the-world-documentary-by-tim-gielen/
You will see an extreme jump in violent crime/crimes where violence is used in a few short years. If this is not aggressively and forcefully combatted the absenteeism will create a sefl-perpetuating snowballing effect.
As the issue is ideologically understood rather than pragmatically, your politicians regardless of party affilitions will do nothing.
From the outside using western Europe as a pattern you are headed for a perpetual racial civil war inside twenty years, being optimistic.