Looking back on Covid closures

Dear global education leader,?

We are in the throes of getting a dog (wish me luck) but, owing to timing issues related to travel and life, the puppy project has been delayed. This has annoyed my children, who insist we should have got a dog during lockdown, along with the rest of London. We’ve explained, repeatedly, that we had no idea that Covid would last so long, and that work as we know it would be upended forever.

Hindsight can be illuminating but, more often, it’s distorting. Look at the very strange set of conversations happening right now in the UK about how schools should not have shut down when they did. Inquiries are necessary for accountability. But the idea – floated first by Rishi Sunak and later by his rival Liz Truss – that the UK botched school closings when the virus was raging, when there were no treatments and no vaccines, is political drivel. It discards the fear that gripped us in the earliest days of the pandemic and the reality that children should not be the guinea pigs in a life-or-death experiment.

“What hindsight does is it blinds us to the uncertainty with which we live. That is, we always exaggerate how much certainty there is,” Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences and perhaps the world’s leading expert on behavioural biases, told the Wall Street Journal. “Because after the fact, everything is explained. Everything is obvious. And the presence of hindsight in a way mitigates against the careful design of decision making under conditions of uncertainty.”

Politicians trying to project certainty now by pretending they were certain then undermines the work doctors, scientists, teachers and administrators did to weigh trade-offs involving imperfect and incomplete information in a crisis. Could we have done better? Sure. Government communication with schools was messy. But the government opened schools and, for the most part, issued guidance that was sensible (preschoolers never wore masks; students in secondary schools, which are more crowded and where teens pose higher infection risks, did).

The US is another story altogether. Why did US schools stay shut for so long? Why were bars open and schools closed? What role did teachers’ unions play in keeping schools shut? Why were two-year-olds wearing masks last spring? This week, the gold standard of education testing in the US, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that for the first time since the 1970s, nine-year-olds lost ground in maths; scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years. “Two decades of growth for American students in reading and maths were wiped away by just two years of pandemic-disrupted learning,” the 74 wrote. Parents in many states are suing the government for services denied to their children in the pandemic.

I applaud efforts to investigate how governments managed school closures during the pandemic. But in looking back, we risk missing the very real disregard these same governments are showing for the needs of children and families as different crises start to bite. Hindsight is 20/20, but that doesn’t mean we can’t see what’s in front of us right now.

Welcome back from summer and into the new school year!

Stay curious,

Jenny Anderson