Teachers Unions – Part 10

How teachers unions promoted prolonged school closures during COVID.

Continuing this series of essays on how teachers unions influence America’s public schools, this essay will examine how teachers unions promoted prolonged school closures related to the COVID pandemic.

The large negative consequences of the closing of public schools for in-person learning for prolonged periods of time following the COVID pandemic that began several years ago will follow children well into their adult lives.

A Stanford University study on educational losses caused by COVID-related school closures found the following:

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) now show the significant impact of the pandemic on learning. The abstract nature of test score declines, however, often obscures the huge economic impact of these learning losses. NAEP results indicate large differences in learning losses across states, and this analysis provides state-by-state estimates of the economic impacts of the losses. Students on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income depending on the state in which they attended school. By virtue of the lower-skilled future workforce, the states themselves are estimated to face a gross domestic product (GDP) that is 0.6 to 2.9 percent lower each year for the remainder of the twenty-first century compared to the economic expectations derived from pre-pandemic years.

And that prolonged COVID-related closing of public schools was promoted by public sector teachers unions.  With previous essays in mind, it’s no surprise in retrospect that the teachers unions overreacted to COVID-19 by tending to ignore the science on the pandemic in order to promote their defense of prolonged school closures.

As Forbes reported in April, 2020, teachers unions began responding to the COVID pandemic in the following ways:

Neither the size of the challenge nor the remarkable responses from some teachers and school systems excuse the disappointing responses of others. In Los Angeles, the union and district negotiated a deal in which teachers would receive full pay in return for working four hours a day, at times of their choosing, and with no obligation to provide online instruction. In Boston, the Boston Globe reported that the agreement between the district and teachers stipulates that educators “will receive regular pay” but that they “will not be required to have face time with their students every day” and that, in fact, “video cannot be required.” In Florida’s 73,000-student Brevard County, the New York Times reported that “The union and district agreed in late March to limit teachers’ instructional time to three hours per day,” that the district wouldn’t “require teachers to communicate with families using their personal cellphones,” and that the district wouldn’t “formally evaluate teachers’ online instruction.”   In a particularly dismal display, district officials worried about losing students have prevailed upon state officials in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Oregon to bar new enrollment in virtual charter schools at precisely the time some parents are seeking better virtual options.  And then there are the many districts where, nervous about the rules governing special education and equitable access, system officials have ordered educators not to teach students anything new. In Philadelphia, for instance, back in March, the district forbade teachers from providing remote instruction, telling principals, “To ensure equity, remote instruction should not be provided to students, including through the internet, technology at home, by phone, or otherwise.”

As the Wall Street Journal editorialized in June, 2020:

Teachers unions never want teachers’ performance judged by student achievement, so they’ve lobbied to ensure a lack of accountability and assessment during the shutdowns. They dressed up this demand in the language of social justice: Because the pandemic has not visited the same hardships on all families, the only equitable solution is to deprive all students of for-credit instruction, they claim. Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey said that “customary forms of grading are inappropriate in a global health crisis” and asked “how can such an uneven playing field produce fairness and justice for minority students?” United Teachers Los Angeles lobbied for no student to receive a failing grade, or a worse grade than they had before the shutdowns. The union declared that “we are pressing [the school district] to not mandate summer school for students who earned a D grade,” which they said was “simply an issue of fairness.” … In reality, this “equitable” treatment dooms poor and minority students to a lasting educational disadvantage. In April, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported only 24% of eighth graders scored proficient or above in civics, while 15% showed proficiency in U.S. history. And that was before school districts decided to write off the spring semester as a loss.

In July, 2020, Frederick Hess described the situation as follows:

[Teacher] union leaders have approached reopening as a chance to repackage longstanding demands for more teachers and staff, smaller classes, and community health care. Indeed, local teacher unions including those in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Oakland have joined the Democratic Socialists of America in a coalition calling for a moratorium on charter schools and standardized testing, new taxes on the wealthy, police-free schools, a halt to home foreclosures, and much more ... What’s been more in evidence is unions seemingly resolved to resist flexible solutions. This spring, Los Angeles and the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) crafted an agreement which created heavy restrictions around virtual learning—including provisions stating that teachers could not be required to provide live remote instruction or even to work during the school day. In Brevard County, Florida, the union and district agreed to a memorandum of agreement (MOU) that capped teachers’ instructional time at three hours per day. In Boston, the union-district MOU imposed a two-hour limit on synchronous (live) instruction … Protecting vulnerable students and staff is admirable. Protecting contract provisions while pursuing a big-dollar agenda? Not so much.

As of August, 2020, the Wall Street Journal summarized teachers unions’ posture toward school reopenings this way:

For most Americans the coronavirus is a scourge. But teachers unions seem to think it’s also an opportunity—to squeeze more money from taxpayers and put their private and public charter school competition out of business. That’s the only way to read the extraordinary effort by national and local union leaders to keep their members from returning to the classroom. Last week Randi Weingarten, leader of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, declared support for “safety strikes” if local unions deem insufficient the steps their school districts are taking to mitigate Covid-19. And on Monday an alliance of teachers unions and progressive groups sponsored what they called a “national day of resistance” around the country listing their demands before returning to the classroom. They include: “Support for our communities and families, including canceling rents and mortgages, a moratorium on evictions/foreclosures, providing direct cash assistance to those not able to work or who are unemployed, and other critical social needs; Moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing; Massive infusion of federal money to support the reopening funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street.”  The phrase for this is political extortion. Rather than work to open schools safely, the unions are issuing ultimatums and threatening strikes until they are granted their ideological wish list. Children, who would have to endure more lost instruction, are their hostages. These public unions are also lobbying their political allies to keep public charter and private schools closed. On Friday the chief health officer for Maryland’s Montgomery County, Travis Gayles, ordered private schools to remain closed until Oct. 1. The order came in spite of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that reopening schools with in-person instruction is a step toward improving public health—especially for low-income and minority children. The order was a slap to the many schools that are moving heaven and earth to reopen within the CDC guidelines. The good news is that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Monday overruled the commissioner. In an amended emergency order, he limited the ability of local health officials to impose “blanket closure” mandates, emphasizing that Maryland’s plan is built on local flexibility. He also took a stand for equal opportunity: “Private and parochial schools deserve the same opportunity and flexibility to make reopening decisions based on public health guidelines.” This is a victory for common sense, but it’s also too rare … The teachers unions have a cynical interest in forcing their competitors to shut down. What a humiliation it would be if charter and private schools reopen and demonstrate that in-person education can be done with the right risk mitigation. Or if parents unsatisfied with the public schools’ response to the coronavirus decide a private school would be better for their child. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Americans are getting a closer look at the true, self-interested character of today’s teachers unions … No political force should have veto power over the education of America’s children.

Indeed, President Biden changed his own goal of opening schools earlier after meeting with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.  As Franklin Foer of the Atlantic Magazine writes in his book The Last Politician:

For the sake of avoiding conflict [with the teachers unions], especially conflict with an ally, the Biden administration trimmed its goal of returning kids to school to a fraction of what had been promised on the campaign trail … He was, in effect, conceding that for thousands of students, the rest of the school year would be lost to the pandemic.  It was the price of peace … “I am not abandoning you on schools. I want you to know that,” Biden told Weingarten on the phone.

And as explained in September, 2020, by the Wall Street Journal:

The main obstacle to reopening schools isn’t the virus. It’s the teachers’ unions. The virus has been under control in New York City for months, yet the teachers union this week threatened a strike unless classroom instruction was delayed. Mayor Bill de Blasio naturally surrendered, though state law prohibits teachers from striking.

As Philip Howard writes in his book Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions:

American Federation of Teachers [union] president Randi Weingarten in 2020 said that the union planned to stop school reopenings “until we get the virus under control.” “Nothing is off the table,” Weingarten threatened—“not advocacy or protests, negotiations, grievances, or lawsuits” or even “safety strikes.” Indeed, most public schools remained closed during the 2020–2021 school year, while most parochial and private schools reopened. The unions also resisted distance learning, arguing that it wasn’t specified in their contracts. American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick M. Hess followed the trail of union resistance with disbelief: [The Los Angeles union imposed] heavy restrictions around virtual learning—including provisions stating that teachers could not be required to provide live remote instruction or even to work during the school day. In Brevard County, Florida, the union and district agreed to a memorandum of agreement (MOU) that capped teachers’ instructional time at three hours per day. In Boston, the union-district MOU imposed a two-hour limit on synchronous (live) instruction. As the COVID closure continued, studies confirmed that the harm to students and families was substantial, especially the poor and minorities. As New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait reports, “Many of the poorest students with the least stable home lives—one analysis estimates the figure at around 3 million—never logged on or performed any schoolwork at all over the last year … While COVID was considered too dangerous to reopen schools, it was not so dangerous that teachers could be required to be vaccinated. Union leader Randi Weingarten: “Vaccinations must be negotiated between employers and workers, not coerced.”

As Nat Nalkus of the American Enterprise Institute reports, Weingarten was involved with counseling the Centers for Disease Control to weaken its recommendations regarding school reopenings:

In February 2021, before the CDC released its 2021 school-reopening guidance, Walensky exchanged friendly text messages with Becky Pringle and Randi Weingarten, presidents of the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions. Weingarten complained to Walensky about the forthcoming guidance and that

"we heard something from a NYT leak that seemed at odds with discussion … Here is the language the NYT sent me “At any level of community transmission, all schools can provide in-person instruction (either full or hybrid), though [sic] strict adherence to mitigation strategies.” Soon after, the CDC changed its recommendation from “all schools can provide in-person instruction” to a far weaker version: “All schools have options to provide in-person instruction.” Regardless of whether Weingarten effected this change in the CDC guidance, Walensky should not have been consulting about it via text messages with heads of teachers’ unions in the first place. The CDC’s mission is not to appease teachers’ unions or other stakeholders. Indeed, it should not try to appease anyone as it does its job, which is to provide solid evidence and rationales to help state and local leaders make good policy decisions.

The President of the American Academy of Pediatrics said back in January, 2021, that “New information tells us that opening schools does not significantly increase community transmission of the virus … Children absolutely need to return to in-school learning for their healthy development and well-being, and so safety in schools and in the community must be a priority.”  But teachers unions insisted on keeping schools closed long after that.

As reported in the New York Times magazine in April, 2023:

The A.F.T. [American Federation of Teachers] had issued its own reopening plan in late April [2020], calling for adequate personal protective equipment, a temporary suspension of formal teacher performance evaluations, a limit on student testing, a cancellation of student-loan debt and a $750 billion federal aid package to help schools prepare to reopen safely and facilitate “a real recovery for all our communities.” … [T]he A.F.T. passed a resolution supporting local strikes if schools were forced to reopen in areas where a variety of safety conditions hadn’t been met. As if to underscore the point, some teachers took to the streets in protest with mock coffins.”

Rather than focusing on the number of hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID, the American Federation of Teachers union insisted that schools should remain closed based on stringent conditions related to the virus’ “spread,” regardless of lowered incidence of hospitalization and death.  The AFT’s first two points in its official document placing conditions on school reopenings listed the following requirements: “1. Maintaining physical distancing until the number of new cases declines for at least 14 consecutive days. Reducing the number of new cases is a prerequisite for transitioning to reopening plans on a community-by-community basis. 2. Putting in place the infrastructure and resources to test, trace and isolate new cases. Transitioning from community-focused physical distancing and stay-in-place orders to case-specific interventions requires ramping up the capacity to test, trace and isolate each and every new case.”

As Nat Malkus reports, the Biden Administration, which came into office in January, 2021, promptly caved to the teachers unions and disregarded the science:

In Tuesday’s [February 9, 2021] press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki walked back President Biden’s pledge to reopen schools within 100 days. Psaki announced the new goal is to have “teaching at least one day a week in the majority of schools by day 100.” That’s a dramatic shift from what Biden was promising just a few weeks ago. In December, Biden made the sweeping pledge that “my team will work to see that the majority of our schools can be open by the end of my first 100 days,” suggesting an appetite to show leadership on the issue. But on his first day in office, Biden walked back that goal to include only K-8 schools, not high schools. And then on Tuesday, Psaki narrowed it much further, stipulating that a school could be considered “open” if it offered only one day of in-person instruction per week, and that 51 percent of schools would constitute a meaningful “majority.” That significant retreat moves the goalposts on reopening and shows the administration has far less ambitious expectations for schools this year. Given that Biden’s first 100 days end in April, Biden would count schools offering about 5 to 7 days of in-person instruction before the end of the school year as “open.” … Biden’s diminished ambition is a stunning abdication of his main tool to get schools open: the bully pulpit. With no direct power to force any school district to close or reopen, Biden could be showing the leadership he promised by using his perch in the White House to cajole and persuade sluggish districts that safe reopening is possible … Biden’s abdication of the bully pulpit is especially unfortunate because the people most receptive to hearing his voice — his base in blue states and blue cities and among reopening-resistant teachers unions — are also the most likely to have their local schools remain closed. An October AEI report found that blue states were twice as likely as red states to offer only remote instruction and about four times less likely to offer full-time, in-person instruction. These broad trends have remained stubborn over the course of the year.

And as Reason magazine reported in March, 2021:

They got their vaccines, they got their $200 billion federal stimulus, they got $122 billion of that stimulus fast-tracked, plus an additional $12 billion out the door for coronavirus testing, but now the teachers unions that have been the single biggest obstacle to reopening K-12 classrooms in Democrat-run cities and states have come up with yet another reason to stay home from school: They do not much care for the dominant global scientific view that 3 feet is enough distance between students during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We are not convinced that the evidence supports changing physical distancing requirements at this time,” American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten declared in a letter Tuesday to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky, in response to the CDC last Friday revising its school-distancing guidelines from 6 feet to 3. Among the institutions that do not share Weingarten's lack of conviction: The American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Walensky herself (prior to joining the Biden administration), most of the 50 states, the vast majority of school districts in the industrialized world, plus one of the research teams whose work the CDC had erroneously sourced when formulating guidance for the agency's controversial February 12 recommendation to keep the 6-foot rule intact. Opined those latter scientists at the time: "No science supports mandating 6 feet of distance with children wearing masks. A 6-foot distance between students creates space constraints for schools to open in entirety. There is data supporting at least 3-foot distancing." The 6-foot rule allowed teachers unions—whose Biden-friendly leadership directly influenced the February 12 guidance—to remain in favor of school reopening on paper, while sadly shaking their heads when it came time to, you know, open schools. This dance, about as subtle as an elephant mating ritual, has nonetheless been treated credulously by the media and Democratic political class. So it is that Weingarten got feted in a New York Times profile ("She spends 15 hours per day on the phone, she says—with local labor leaders, mayors, the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—trying to figure out how to reopen the three-quarters of school systems that remain fully or partly closed") in the same week that she tried to make Washington, D.C., school reopening contingent on a ludicrously strict security-theater standard of shutting down schools automatically for 24 hours after just one positive COVID test so that the entire building could be scrubbed down.

Researchers have found that teachers unions’ argument that schools weren’t reopening because they lacked necessary funding for reopening safely is false.  As explained by the researchers:

The new Covid-19 relief plan, passed by the Senate over the weekend, includes $123 billion for K-12 public schools, supposedly to help them reopen. That’s almost the amount the U.S. dedicated, in real terms, to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. And it’s on top of the mostly unspent $54 billion federal bailout for public schools from December and the $13 billion allocation from last spring. Major teachers unions have claimed repeatedly that public schools need gobs of cash to reopen in person. American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten protests that “countless places lack the resources to implement the necessary safety provisions.” But our new analysis suggests funding isn’t the reason teachers unions are keeping schools shut. In fact, our prior work has found that union influence, rather than scientific concerns about the spread of the virus, is the primary driver behind reopening decisions … Many teachers unions … have been fighting to stay at home. The difference is one of incentives. Public schools get their funding regardless of whether they open their doors. A study published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found that public schools with more Catholic school competition nearby were more likely to reopen in person in 2020. It also found, and three other studies confirm, that public school districts with stronger teachers unions are substantially less likely to reopen in person. Our new analysis throws another wrench in the teachers union narrative. We examine data from more than 12,000 school districts nationwide, covering more than 90% of school-age children, and find no evidence to suggest that higher revenue or expenditures per student are associated with a higher probability of reopening schools for in-person learning. Instead, we find that public school funding is either uncorrelated or even negatively correlated with in-person instruction. Some models suggest that schools that went fully remote were better off financially than their in-person counterparts in the same state. These results hold across various analytic techniques and specifications that control for district size and a rich set of county-level demographics such as political tendencies, Covid-19 risk, household income, educational attainment, and race and age distributions … Another analysis, from researchers at Georgetown University, found that public school districts that decided to teach remotely generally had financial surpluses. The researchers estimated that Los Angeles public schools, which opted to keep their doors shut, had a more than $500 million funding surplus, or about $1,100 a student, for the 2020-21 school year. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only about 5% of the $123 billion in school “relief” funding will be spent this fiscal year, while the rest would be paid out through 2028. If the goal is to reopen schools in person now, and the relief money is urgently needed, then why spend up to 95% of the money after the pandemic? … This suggests that the school reopening debate has always been more about politics and power than safety and the flourishing of the next generation. For that, children have paid the consequences and will continue to pay in the decades ahead. Parents haven’t had it easy either.

Researchers, including an MIT professor, have concluded that teachers unions, rather than public health criteria, were the dominant factor in whether schools reopened in-person or not.  They concluded:

The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K-12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers’ unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in-person instruction. Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semi-parametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, and a further disaggregation to the county level. We also do not find evidence to suggest that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions.

Joshua Coval, a Harvard Business School professor, examined:

the differences in characteristics between U.S. public schools that opted for virtual instruction because of COVID-19, and schools that did not. Much of the variation can be explained by measures of the degree to which districts favored teachers over students before the pandemic: Districts that chose virtual instruction exhibited a far greater willingness to prioritize teacher interests over those of students and the interests of teachers with seniority over younger and/or higher-performing teachers. We provide evidence that this prioritization is associated with significant costs in terms of student test results and graduation rates.

Professor Coval concluded:

Schools that opted for virtual instruction during the 2020-2021 year were schools with a history of favoring teachers over students and teachers with seniority over teachers that are new and/or high-performing. Online schools also tended to be schools in urban settings, schools with more minorities, schools with more students from low socioeconomic status households, and schools located in low Covid rate counties – all of which are also characteristics of schools that favor teachers. However, teacher-favoring schools continue to strongly opt for virtual instruction even in the presence of these controls for demographics and geography. The costs borne by students in districts that prioritize teachers are significant. In elementary school, they test at a level that is over a year behind those in districts that favor students, and roughly a half-year in the presence of controls. Their high-school graduation rates are also significantly lower.

As reported in the New York Times magazine: “A study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found that Democratic districts, with correspondingly strong teachers’ unions, returned to in-person learning more slowly and gradually than Republican districts with weaker unions.”

The American Federation of Teachers union and others demanded the use of resources for schools that mis-allocated resources.  Eric Hanushek said the following regarding their studies during an American Enterprise Institute podcast:

Eric Hanushek [on grading schools’ use of COVID relief funds]: F. This is one of the real problems today. We have huge learning losses because of the pandemic.  The federal government put a large amount of money into schools, and they could use it to try to alleviate the problems that were created by COVID.  They did it largely by air conditioning systems and various physical things that had little to do with trying to recover the learning loss that the COVID cohorts suffered.

Indeed, in the local school district where I live, as of 2023 there are still some $8 million in federal COVID-related funds yet to be spent on air conditioning systems and other related mitigation systems.

Teachers unions insisted on prolonged school closures, which led to large student learning losses, whereas no measurable differences in learning were recorded among private Catholic school students.  As the Wall Street Journal adds:

“National Assessment of Educational Progress scores decline” is a familiar story; the last installment was in May, with a report that 8th-grade U.S. history test scores hit an all-time low. The latest dispiriting data from the Nation’s Report Card is more evidence that learning loss from public-school closures won’t be easily recovered. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds declined by nine points in math and four in reading between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported. The math decline is the largest ever for this NAEP assessment. For the lowest-performing students, math scores were the worst since the 1970s, and reading scores were lower than the first data collection in 1971 … NCES reports that Catholic school scores “were not measurably different” between 2019-20 and 2022-23. The reasons for the difference can’t be proven, but Catholic schools reopened much faster while teachers unions kept public schools closed.

As the New York Times reported in March, 2024:

Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting ... Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow Covid’s spread ... “Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid," said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

The terrible long-term effects of the extended public school closures demanded by teachers unions also includes continuing increased absenteeism and increased disruptive behavior among those students who have returned to school.  As the Wall Street Journal states:

“Getting back to normal, and having children learn at the same pace as they were before, will not result in students catching up,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard professor of education and economics who has researched pandemic effects on learning, in an email to us. “For the many districts where students lost a year of learning, students would have to learn 150 percent of what they would normally learn for two years in a row. That is simply not going to happen without additional learning time.” But absenteeism remains high, NCES reports, with the share of students reporting five or more days of missed school in the last month doubling to 10% since 2020.

In my own city of Alexandria, Virginia, chronic absenteeism rates are about 17 percent generally, and over 24 percent among Hispanics.

The extended school closures developed absentee habits in many students that dramatically increased school absenteeism rates even after schools reopened.  As researchers at Stanford University recently concluded:

The broad and substantial educational harm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has motivated large federal, state, and local investments in academic recovery. However, the success of these efforts depends in part on students’ regular school attendance. Using newly collected data, I show that the rate of chronic absenteeism among U.S. public-school students grew substantially as students returned to in-person instruction. Specifically, between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, the share of students chronically absent grew by 13.5 percentage points—a 91-percent increase that implies an additional 6.5 million students are now chronically absent … Figure 1 illustrates, for each location, the chronic absenteeism rates for the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years.  Notably, every state experienced increased chronic absenteeism with the magnitudes varying from 4 to 22 percentage points.

As Frederick Hess reports, in the winter of 2024, University of Southern California researchers asked parents why their kids are missing so much school. The most common reason was their kids were “oversleeping or not being able to get out of bed in the morning.”

And again, from the Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Carr [Peggy Carr, the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics] also cites “alarming changes in school climate.” NCES reported last year that 84% of public schools said student behavior worsened after Covid, citing incidents of student misconduct, rowdiness outside the classroom, and acts of disrespect. Classroom disruption hurts learning.

The use of drugs for depression and other forms of mental disorder also rose significantly during the pandemic, including among teenagers.  According to the New York Times:

In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 15.8 percent of American adults took prescription pills for mental health. During the pandemic, the National Center for Health Statistics teamed up with the Census Bureau to carry out quick online “pulse” surveys and tracked mental health prescription pill use. The numbers they turned up echo what we already sense: We are depressed, anxious, tired and distracted. What’s new is this: Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions. More specifically, according to data provided to The Times by Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits manager, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen since the pandemic began. But they have done so unevenly, telling a different story for each age group and each class of medication … But for some age groups, that change has been more pronounced. Since 2017, there has been a 41 percent increase in antidepressant use for the teenagers included in the Express Scripts data (which consists of roughly 19 million people.) For this same 13- to 19-year-old bracket, in the first two years of the pandemic, there was a 17.3 percent change in anxiety medications. It had been a 9.3 percent rate of change between 2017 and 2019.

Yet our local school board isn’t devoting time on its agenda items to any of these major issues, but is instead making many of these issues, including lax discipline policies that result in increases in students’ disruptive behavior, worse. (The American Federation of Teachers, who employs one our local school board members, supports lax student discipline policies. (Even so, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, was selected by the Biden Administration to serve on a Department of Homeland Security safety board.)

The starkly political attitude of teachers unions to school reopening during the COVID pandemic is demonstrated by a timeline showing how teachers unions began to oppose reopening schools only after Republican President Trump publicly supported opening schools. As reported in the New Yorker:

Among Hopkins’ experts is Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist whose work focuses on outbreak detection and response. Nuzzo had supported lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the spring, but by the summer she was arguing that schools should plan to reopen in much of the country. In an op-ed in The New York Times on July 1, Nuzzo and Joshua Sharfstein, a pediatrician who has served as Baltimore’s health commissioner and Maryland’s health secretary, wrote that the coronavirus had mostly spared young people: children made up nearly a quarter of the American population but accounted for just 2% of known COVID-19 cases; they had been hospitalized at a rate of 0.1 per 100,000, compared with 7.4 per 100,000 in adults between the ages of 50 and 64. The authors mentioned studies from France and Australia suggesting that children were not major transmitters of the virus. And they noted that the American Academy of Pediatrics favored school reopening. “The disruption of learning can have lifetime effects on students’ income and health,” they wrote. A number of experts were beginning to agree with Nuzzo and Sharfstein. According to reports, the rate of infection among teachers in Sweden, which as part of its less restrictive response to the virus had left most of its schools open, was no greater than it was in neighboring Finland, which had closed all its schools. “They found that teachers had the same risk of COVID as the average of other professions,” said Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School who develops statistical and epidemiological methods for disease surveillance. In July, Meira Levinson, a professor of education at Harvard, co-authored an article in The New England Journal of Medicine laying out how to reopen primary schools. Levinson told me that she worried about what students would lose without in-person instruction. “Education is about learning to trust others and being vulnerable with others. If you are learning, you are doing something — at least for a while — you don’t know how to do,” she said. “That’s a vulnerable position to be in, and as human beings we need to have relationships with some level of trust to be able to do that.” Joseph Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s school of public health, wrote a 62-page plan with a dozen colleagues listing steps that schools could take to reduce transmission risk. To improve ventilation and air quality, schools with air conditioning could upgrade their air filters, while schools without it could make sure that their windows opened and set up fans to circulate fresh air from outdoors; when it got too cold for that, they could install portable air purifiers. Notably, the recommendations did not include a hybrid model, with students in school a limited number of days per week to allow for social distancing — students did not need to be spaced out much more than usual, Allen said, as long as they wore masks. “There’s certainly no such thing as zero risk in anything we do, and that is certainly the case during a pandemic,” he said in a conference call to present the plan. But, he added, “there are devastating costs of keeping kids out of school. When we have this discussion about sending kids back to school, we have to have it in the context of the massive individual and societal costs of keeping kids at home.” Santelises found many of the claims persuasive. Baltimore worked on a plan to bring students into school two days a week, while allowing families the option of full remote learning if they preferred. Teachers with health concerns would do online instruction for kids who stayed home. As the Harvard report recommended, the schools would upgrade air conditioners with better filters; schools lacking them would finally get windows that could be opened. On July 7, President Donald Trump held a series of events at the White House with Betsy DeVos, his secretary of education, to demand that schools open. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools,” he said. “It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the fall.” The effect of Trump’s declaration was instantaneous. Teachers who had been responsive to the idea of returning to the classroom suddenly regarded the prospect much more warily. “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe,” Randi Weingarten, the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. “Then Trump and DeVos played their political bullshit.” … A week later, the Baltimore Teachers Union and the Maryland State Education Association sent a four-page letter to the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, a Republican, and the state superintendent of schools, Karen Salmon, calling on them to bar any in-person instruction for the first semester. They noted that, by one count, nearly a quarter of teachers nationwide were considered especially susceptible to the virus and cited the lack of funding for personal protective equipment and testing. They questioned whether students could be counted on to wear masks, wash their hands and maintain social distancing. Most strikingly, they argued that reopening schools would be riskiest for the families of precisely those disadvantaged students whom proponents of reopening said they were most concerned about: “the significant numbers of Black and Brown students ... and their families who unjustly face healthcare disparities that have made them more likely to be infected and killed by the coronavirus.

The teachers union The American Federation of Teachers explicitly stated that reopening schools would be tantamount to furthering “Republican talking points,” tweeting “Teachers, staff, and the unions behind them are not a barrier to schools reopening.  We are a barrier to staff and students being put in danger for Republican talking points.”

Finally, we know now, despite all the previous fuss, that wearing masks turned out to be an essentially useless exercise. As John Tierney writes:

We now have the most authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero. The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses … Before the pandemic, clinical trials repeatedly showed little or no benefit from wearing masks in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses like flu and colds. That was why, in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a viral pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and other national public health agencies did not recommend masking the public. But once Covid-19 arrived, magical thinking prevailed. Officials ignored the previous findings and plans, instead touting crude and easily debunked studies purporting to show that masks worked. The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomized clinical trial, and the gold standard for analyzing this evidence is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collaboration), the world’s largest and most respected organization for evaluating health interventions. Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and other nations’ health agencies, it’s an international network of reviewers, based in London, that has partnerships with the WHO and Wikipedia. Medical journals have hailed it for being “the best single resource for methodologic research” and for being “recognized worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.” It has published a new Cochrane review of the literature on masks, including trials during the Covid-19 pandemic in hospitals and in community settings. The trials compared outcomes of wearing surgical masks versus wearing no masks, and also wearing surgical masks versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness. It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason that surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly—and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs. Whatever theoretical benefits there might be, in clinical trials the benefits have turned out to be either illusory or offset by negative factors. Oxford’s Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.” … [T]here’s [also] no doubt, from dozens of peer-reviewed studies, that masks cause social, psychological, and medical problems, including a constellation of maladies called “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.” … The CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, remains determined to ignore the best research on masks, as she made clear in a congressional hearing earlier this month. “Our masking guidance doesn’t really change with time,” she said, when asked how the new review from Cochrane would affect the agency’s policies. “This is an important study,” she conceded, “but the Cochrane review only includes randomized clinical trials, and, as you can imagine, many of the randomized clinical trials. . . were for other respiratory viruses.” It was a statement remarkable for its chutzpah as well as its scientific incoherence. One of the worst mistakes of the CDC and other lavishly funded federal agencies was the failure to conduct randomized clinical trials to determine whether their policies were effective. The Cochrane review had to rely on pandemic mask trials conducted in other countries—and now Walensky has the gall to complain that other countries didn’t do enough of the research that U.S. agencies shirked. She’s right that some of the trials involved other viruses, but why dismiss them as irrelevant to the coronavirus? And while one can always wish for more studies to include in a meta-analysis, that’s no excuse to ignore the best available evidence in favor of the shoddy science peddled by her agency to defend its policies … In his book Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates, data analyst Ian Miller devotes an entire chapter to graphs exposing the CDC’s statistical malfeasance. He also prepared a graph for a previous City Journal article that is worth showing again, because it’s a visual confirmation—from nationwide data, not clinical trials—of the conclusions in the Cochrane review. The graph tracks the results of the natural experiment that occurred across the United States in the first two years of the pandemic, when mask mandates were imposed and lifted at various times in 39 states. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in states without mandates. As you can see, the trajectories are virtually identical, and if you add up all those numbers, the cumulative rates of Covid cases are virtually identical too. So are the cumulative rates of Covid mortality (the mortality rate is actually a little lower in the states without mask mandates).

A November, 2023, systematic review of the evidence regarding the benefits of mask wearing to children during COVID found “Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence”:

The six observational studies reporting an association between child masking and lower infection rate or antibody seropositivity had critical (n=5) or serious (n=1) risk of bias; all six were potentially confounded by important differences between masked and unmasked groups and two were shown to have non-significant results when reanalysed. Sixteen other observational studies found no association between mask wearing and infection or transmission. Conclusions — Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence. The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.

Another study, wrongly touted as showing that masks reduce the spread of confirmed COVID cases, actually states “No statistically significant effect was found on self- reported … or registered covid-19 infection.”

In the next and final essay in this series, we’ll sum up some of the main points presented in the previous essays in the series.