VERY INTERESTING. “It’s Time to Face the Facts on School Closings.”
If you were a school superintendent considering whether to keep your district open in-person or move to online, how would you decide? Most people would suggest you look at COVID-19 case numbers in your community. Perhaps you would consider the vaccination rate, and if you had students with auto-immune disorders or other risk factors, maybe you would consider that. Most Americans would find these sorts of considerations reasonable.
As it turned out, this was far from what happened in American schools last year. An analysis of school-closing data on the nation’s 150 largest school districts reveals something entirely different. Rather than the progress of the disease in a local community, the most important predictor of remote schooling was a school district’s historical propensity to prioritize the interests of its teachers over the competing interests of its students.
We looked at specific ways districts favor teachers over students, such as prioritizing teacher seniority over new teachers and teacher performance, granting teachers more days off, and limiting the number of hours students spend in school each day. Districts that had historically scored high on these metrics were significantly more likely to opt for the remote-learning format last year. In aggregate, these measures of district-level teacher favoritism do far more to explain remote vs. in-person school decisions than every other variable we tested, including the COVID-19 infection rates in the community. When investigating the demographic features of school districts, we found that student-favoring districts were significantly different from teacher-favoring districts. Student-favoring districts were wealthier, whiter, and less urban and had a higher percentage of families who spoke English at home. However, even controlling for these demographic variables, teacher-favoring districts were far more likely to opt for remote learning.
Turns out the children from poorer, multi-ethnic backgrounds were screwed, basically, by those places that had strong teachers’ unions. I recommend that you read the whole thing.