Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's
Speaker 1: main story the reopening of schools. It's September seven, and
Speaker 1: by the middle of this month, nearly all teachers, students
Speaker 1: and parents will be back in the school season swing.
Speaker 1: Of course, that will look pretty different from one place
Speaker 1: to the next. Some kids will be back in school
Speaker 1: at their desks, others meeting in special pods with a
Speaker 1: handful of classmates, or they'll be home tethered to their chromebooks. Today,
Speaker 1: with the help of trade Offs, a podcast about our costly, complicated,
Speaker 1: and counterintuitive health care system, we explore how educators and
Speaker 1: families are navigating what we know and don't know about
Speaker 1: the risks of restarting school during a pandemic. From the
Speaker 1: Anna Burke Studio at the University of Pennsylvania. A conversation
Speaker 1: with Brown University economist Emily Auster about the tough choices
Speaker 1: schools and families are facing this fall. Dan Gorenstein reports,
Speaker 1: so Emily, we've seen lots of places, including big districts
Speaker 1: like Philadelphia, Houston, and Chicago, opt to open online this fall,
Speaker 1: while other places and even whole states are opening in person.
Speaker 1: In the broadest sense, what's driving schools to go the
Speaker 1: online route? So I think there's basically two things. So
Speaker 1: one is this decision feels safe from a public health
Speaker 1: standpoint when we are so focused on COVID transmission. It
Speaker 1: feels like, you know, if we open in people around,
Speaker 1: then there will be some transmission, and the safest thing
Speaker 1: is to not open at all, and so they'll be
Speaker 1: less COVID. I think the other piece of it is
Speaker 1: that what a lot of school districts are struggling with
Speaker 1: is the realization that if they do open in person,
Speaker 1: there's a chance that they will have to at some
Speaker 1: point go back to be remote if the situation gets worse.
Speaker 1: And I think thinking about that transition and how one
Speaker 1: could manage that, that's really complicated. And I think that
Speaker 1: for many places, this is the thing which we may
Speaker 1: have to do anyway, so we want to start there.
Speaker 1: So I think I think all of those things are
Speaker 1: going on. Emily has built her career on helping people,
Speaker 1: often parents, making better choices with better data. When it
Speaker 1: comes to schools opening online, Emily worries too many districts
Speaker 1: are focused on COVID concerns and paying less attention to
Speaker 1: the downsides to online learning. Emily keeping schools closed has
Speaker 1: lots of repercussions. That's walked through a couple of them. First, many,
Speaker 1: if not most school districts went remote in the spring.
Speaker 1: What's the data suggest that actually happened to those students?
Speaker 1: Did learning end up suffering? I know in the case
Speaker 1: of my uh soon to be fifteen year old and
Speaker 1: soon to be thirteen year old, it did. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I think certainly if you talk to parents, they
Speaker 1: will tell you that their kids did not learn as
Speaker 1: much in the spring as they think that they would
Speaker 1: have if they had been in school. And you know,
Speaker 1: we do have a little bit of data on this.
Speaker 1: I think the best evidence comes from this company called
Speaker 1: zern Zerne is an online program that walks kids through
Speaker 1: math lessons, and kids across the country used it before
Speaker 1: we all went online. Starting in the spring, lesson completion
Speaker 1: dropped In district's with the lowest income levels, lessons dropped.
Speaker 1: So we're seeing even in something where it was already
Speaker 1: a computerized experience, you would think it would be relatively
Speaker 1: straightforward to poured into doing it at home, but it
Speaker 1: really tanked. How comfortable and confident are you to site
Speaker 1: Zerne and say, yeah, this probably is a leading indicator
Speaker 1: to suggest learning really did suffer across the country. That
Speaker 1: is the sharpest piece of data. What's useful about it
Speaker 1: is it aligns with a lot of what people are
Speaker 1: saying anecdotally if you talk to teachers in school districts,
Speaker 1: or if you look at numbers like what share of
Speaker 1: kids logged on to online learning, it's not and it's
Speaker 1: not close to the share of kids who are showing
Speaker 1: up in person. So I think we have a bunch
Speaker 1: of these pieces of data, and almost everything we see
Speaker 1: suggests that learning suffered during the spring period. So if
Speaker 1: we accept the Zerne findings as indicative of what's actually happening,
Speaker 1: the downside to online learning comes into sharper focus. Not
Speaker 1: only is coursework getting stunted, but the class and race
Speaker 1: inequities and schools are wide needed. The question are those
Speaker 1: downsides worth the public health benefits? Emily says, based on
Speaker 1: research she's done this summer looking at camps and childcare programs,
Speaker 1: this may be a false choice. We actually really kind
Speaker 1: of need to know what happens when we bring people together. Um,
Speaker 1: and so I I, at some point early on in
Speaker 1: the pandemic said, you know, I think we can probably
Speaker 1: learn something from summer camps because the age range is
Speaker 1: sort of similar. There are other things that are not similar,
Speaker 1: but there's you know, something potentially we can learn. So
Speaker 1: I've been collecting some data, which is I just want
Speaker 1: to be clear, not random, And in the camps and
Speaker 1: childcare settings that I have data on, and we actually
Speaker 1: have very very low infection rates, we can sort of
Speaker 1: talk and we should talk about kind of counter examples,
Speaker 1: but I think there are certainly examples of places that
Speaker 1: have kind of been open with kids that have been saved. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the summer camp data suggests that maybe outbreaks aren't
Speaker 1: as threatening as some people think. But we've seen schools
Speaker 1: open over the summer and there are cases of people
Speaker 1: getting infected and then the schools shutting down. Doesn't that
Speaker 1: sort of buttress this argument that maybe we're safer just
Speaker 1: going online and not even sort of opening Pandora's box. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think one thing that's very frustrating about
Speaker 1: this is that we don't have a systematic data on
Speaker 1: the school so it is definitely true that as places
Speaker 1: have opened, there have been cases, multiple cases in schools,
Speaker 1: places where it looks like there is some spread pretty
Speaker 1: clearly going on in the school. One of the things
Speaker 1: we've learned, for example, from Georgia is if you bring
Speaker 1: back a high school full on basically no precautions, you
Speaker 1: don't require people to mask, there's no distancing, you have football,
Speaker 1: and the positivity rate is you know, fifteen percent in
Speaker 1: the area, then it seems like that's a way to
Speaker 1: get some COVID spread. That's not actually the same as
Speaker 1: opening a socially distanced, fully masked kindergarten or first grade
Speaker 1: in New York City or in New Hampshire. And it's
Speaker 1: not the same because of the differences in prevalence rate.
Speaker 1: It's not the same because of the differences in precautions,
Speaker 1: it's not the same because of the differences in age groups. Emily,
Speaker 1: based on the conversations you're having with WOOL officials, are
Speaker 1: you getting the sense that people are making decisions based
Speaker 1: on the outbreak level in their communities, or do you
Speaker 1: find that most school districts are just responding with this
Speaker 1: sort of worst case scenario fear and saying, you know what,
Speaker 1: let's just go dow online learning. The people that I
Speaker 1: have talked to in school districts are incredibly thoughtful about this,
Speaker 1: and they are trying to do everything they can to
Speaker 1: simultaneously serve their students and also do it safely, and
Speaker 1: they are really really confused about what to do, and
Speaker 1: the guidance that they get is really variable. So you know,
Speaker 1: people in Iowa have been told basically, you need to
Speaker 1: be fully in person unless the positivity rate is above
Speaker 1: and then there are people who are being told, you know,
Speaker 1: you absolutely cannot be in person and all of the
Speaker 1: positivity rate is above two. So I think that it
Speaker 1: is just a tremendous amount of frustration and kind of
Speaker 1: feeling of being like a little abandoned honestly in making
Speaker 1: these decisions. Of course, opening up physically or remotely is
Speaker 1: all new. There's little specific guidance at the federal level,
Speaker 1: meaning there's no clear path forward, leaving schools, teachers, parents
Speaker 1: and students groping in the dark. But Emily hopes to
Speaker 1: change that. In August, Emily announced she was partnering with
Speaker 1: schools superintendents and data wongs to begin gathering evidence on
Speaker 1: schools that do reopen to help the Chicago's, Philadelphia's, Houston's,
Speaker 1: and everyone else who's opening online. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of places that are opening online that are hoping to
Speaker 1: open in person later. They're waiting to see what happens
Speaker 1: with the places that are open in person, so they
Speaker 1: can try to figure out is it safe to open
Speaker 1: in person? And win is going to be safe to
Speaker 1: open in person. But they can't figure that out because
Speaker 1: they don't know what's happening with the places that are open.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the meta point of we've sort
Speaker 1: of fallen down on learning the kind of information that
Speaker 1: we would need to make good choices here. Both my
Speaker 1: folks were teachers, and my mom, who's still with us,
Speaker 1: would not be psychedific. I didn't ask a question about
Speaker 1: the safety of teachers. What do we know about the
Speaker 1: risk that teachers and other adults in the building are
Speaker 1: taking with in person learning. We don't have a lot
Speaker 1: of data. But what I will say is probably the
Speaker 1: best day I've seen is from Sweden. I think there's
Speaker 1: a bit from Denmark too, So in Sweden they kept
Speaker 1: schools open the whole time, and so you can look
Speaker 1: at given that that happened. Our teachers a high risk group.
Speaker 1: So there are some groups where they make up a
Speaker 1: pretty large share of the hospitalizations relative to their size
Speaker 1: in the labor market. So for example, bus driver and
Speaker 1: food service worker in Sweden were very high risk professions,
Speaker 1: but teacher was not. That data kind of suggests that,
Speaker 1: you know, teaching is not an especially high risk profession.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think that we have a huge
Speaker 1: uphill battle in trying to work with teachers and with
Speaker 1: unions to try to both convince them but also you know,
Speaker 1: make them make people feel safe. I don't think we
Speaker 1: want people coming into schools feeling unsafe and anxious. We
Speaker 1: need to figure out how are we going to make
Speaker 1: clear the ways that they are going to be protected.
Speaker 1: How do you think we should be dealing with this situation, Emily,
Speaker 1: where there's just a lack of good evidence, there's a
Speaker 1: lack of guidance, there's a lot on the line, and
Speaker 1: there's a ton of emotion. What have you learned as
Speaker 1: an academic, as a researcher, as a writer, as a
Speaker 1: thinker about how to juggle things that are going on
Speaker 1: right now. One of the things people are really struggling
Speaker 1: with is once they make a decision, they rarely feel
Speaker 1: good about it because no decisions are good, and that
Speaker 1: I think has been a very valuable thing to name
Speaker 1: for people. Then I think that knowing that may actually
Speaker 1: make it easier for people to move forward because they
Speaker 1: are not continually expecting that somehow the next moment, but
Speaker 1: they'll feel great about the choice understanding that the trade
Speaker 1: offs exactly that there are trade offs. Somebody should have
Speaker 1: a podcast about that, I think. So that seems like
Speaker 1: a really great name, really good name. Amazing. So to
Speaker 1: wrap this up, Emily, I'm curious what you're expecting to
Speaker 1: see over the first ten twelve weeks of the fall
Speaker 1: when it comes to school. So I would say what
Speaker 1: I suspect will happen is that some places will open
Speaker 1: in some places will not. The places that open will
Speaker 1: stay open pretty much regardless. I think the places that
Speaker 1: do not open will not open for the whole semester.
Speaker 1: So I think it will be very difficult for places
Speaker 1: to transition from remote into in person. It sort of
Speaker 1: feels like, in some ways the worst of both worlds,
Speaker 1: that we have a bunch of places open that kind
Speaker 1: of shouldn't be. From a public health stamp point and
Speaker 1: a bunch of places that don't open that could from
Speaker 1: a public health standpoint, So we're losing the learning but
Speaker 1: not really protecting public health. Emily hopes by working with
Speaker 1: superintendents and principles, data will finally start to make its
Speaker 1: way to school leaders in the hopes of arming these
Speaker 1: districts with reliable information to make incredibly difficult decisions about
Speaker 1: whether to physically open up schools. Again, the project may
Speaker 1: lack the heft that comes with federal guidance, but it
Speaker 1: beats more than thirteen thousand school districts making decisions with
Speaker 1: very little data. I'm Dan Gorstein and this is Trailers.
Speaker 1: That was Dan gost on, a segment brought to us
Speaker 1: by the podcast trade Offs. If you like this story,
Speaker 1: you can hear more from the trade Offs podcast by
Speaker 1: subscribing wherever you get your podcasts, or by going to
Speaker 1: trade offs dot org. Trade Offs is produced by Sabrina Ms,
Speaker 1: Ryan Levy, Vicki Stern, Andrew Parella, and Leslie Walker. Music
Speaker 1: by Thy Siderman, unheard music concepts, Blue Dot sessions, and miscellaneous.
Speaker 1: And that's it for our show today. For coverage of
Speaker 1: the outbreak from one D and twenty bureaus around the world.
Speaker 1: Visit Bloomberg dot com, slash Coronavirus and if you like
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Speaker 1: edition is produced by Tophor foreheads Jordan Gaspoure, Magnus Henrickson
Speaker 1: and me Laura Carlson. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our
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Speaker 1: Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.