US’s school closing costs differ by ZIP code

As communities prepare to reopen their public schools, many parents, students and teachers alike worry that it’s still too soon. But the evidence tells us that the longer that physical classrooms stay closed, the less students will learn, and the gap between haves and have-nots will grow even wider.
The governor of Florida is being sued by the teachers’ union on the ground that the order to reopen schools violates the state constitution’s guarantee of a “safe” education. In the state of Connecticut, the teachers union has called for schools to remain shut until funding is available for weekly Covid-19 testing for all students, teachers and staff. Although the safety concerns are understandable, they’re not the whole of the story.
“Safe” is a relative, not an absolute, term. It’s always a measure of risks versus benefits, as when we climb confidently into our car despite the possibility of an accident. There’s no point arguing that reopening in the midst of a pandemic carries no risks; but there’s not enough time spent weighing those risks against potential benefits. We might still decide that schools aren’t ready to reopen, but only when we have considered both sides can we make a reasoned decision.
Let’s start with the bottom line: The shift to remote learning has made education worse. Although we don’t yet have good results for the chaotic semester just past, a May report from the Brookings Institution, based on previous research, warned of a likely performance decline in grades K-12. Student progress in mathematics appears to have slowed significantly, particularly for children from lower-income ZIP codes.
And a new paper from Carycruz Bueno, a researcher at Brown, finds a significant reduction in achievement test scores for middle-school students who attend classes online.
A June report from McKinsey offers a dire prediction if schools do not reopen until January of 2021:
We estimate that students who remain enrolled could lose three to four months of learning if they receive average remote instruction, seven to 11 months with lower-quality remote instruction, and 12 to 14 months if they do not receive any instruction at all.
If schools remain closed for the entirety of the 2020-2021 academic year, the consulting firm’s forecast is even more baleful.
None of this should be surprising. Overall, students seem to learn more when the schools are open than when they’re not. It’s long been understood that unanticipated school closures tend to reduce scores on standardised tests. The more missed days, the greater the effect. The link seems particularly pronounced for students in lower grades.
It’s no response to say that coronavirus took educators by surprise. Experts have been warning schools for years to prepare for the possibility of online teaching should a pandemic strike. Yet levels of preparation turn out to have varied, largely along the lines one would have guessed.

—Bloomberg