Newsom must push harder to open schools
Gov. Gavin Newsom must continue to push for the earliest reopening of schools that is possible. While it means standing up to members of his own party and big-spending teacher unions, it’s ultimately the right thing to do.
Last week, Newsom indicated his opposition to Senate Bill 86, a legislative proposal that would allow some degree of school reopenings if positive countywide cases per 100,000 fall below a particular amount. “I made it crystal clear. I can’t support something that’s going to delay the safe reopening of schools for our kids,” he said. “We would be, if we adopted that proposal, an extreme outlier.”
Newsom has indicated that California will be setting aside a portion of vaccines for school staff, which is a positive development, but negotiations are ongoing. According to Politico, while the governor indicated some progress had been made, legislators have characterized the negotiations as being “still mostly at a standstill.”
In a statement issued Thursday, Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron called out both Democratic state lawmakers for insisting on stricter conditions for reopening and Newsom’s tiered reopening system, which she described as “causing hardship for parents and, most importantly, is causing irreparable harm to students.”
To that point, while it will be some time before we learn the full extent of the harm of school closures, there’s good reason to believe that the longer schools are closed, the more that students will fall behind.
CalMatters columnist Dan Walters recently noted a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that estimated “that heavy loss of classroom instruction could slice years off the lives of students” by depriving them of a quality education that brings with it advantages that follow them for the rest of their lives.
“Based on the existing evidence regarding the limited role primary school-aged children play in transmission of COVID-19 and the heavy burden of decreased educational exposure on their health, we believe that restoring access to in-person primary school education should be an immediate national priority,” the authors of the study argued.
Likewise, in September, economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann estimated that school closures will have global economic impacts for years to come, harming the economically disadvantaged the most.
“While the precise learning losses are not yet known, existing research suggests that the students in grades 1-12 affected by the closures might expect some 3 percent lower income over their entire lifetimes,” they wrote. “For nations, the lower long-term growth related to such losses might yield an average of 1.5 percent lower annual GDP for the remainder of the century.”
On top of all of that, as anyone reading this is aware, in-person education isn’t just about learning various subjects. It’s about learning how to collaborate with others. It’s a critical time for young people to socialize with others their own age.
Depriving California’s students of in-person learning is doing more harm than good. It’s of course imperative for officials to get things right and mitigate potential harms. But stalling for months longer is simply untenable.