Front Burner - The risks vs. rewards of sending kids to school

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

In September, schools across the country will reopen — many for the first time since the pandemic shut them down months ago. And while provinces have released their plans to keep students and teachers safe, parents are still struggling with whether to send their children to class. Today on Front Burner, Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University and author of parenting books like Cribsheet and Expecting Better breaks down what the data says about the risks of opening up schools.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. I would like to hear a real plan. I'd like to hear what the classrooms are going to look like. How many children will be in a classroom? I want to hear about cleaning protocols. It seems scary

when we've felt so insulated up until this point. Schools across the country are getting ready to open up their doors to students, many for the first time since the pandemic shut them down months ago. Provinces have released their back-to-school plans, which focus on getting students back in the classroom. But many parents and teachers aren't convinced that enough is being done to keep people safe. At this point, I have such little faith in the government's reopening plan that I don't think I even want my child to go back into the school system. Even though it will be stressful and exhausting for me,

I feel like it's in my child's best interest to stay at home. Emily Oster is with me today to talk about those concerns. She's an economics professor at Brown University and the author of books like Cribsheet and Expecting Better, which look at parenting from a data perspective. And she's used that same approach when weighing the risks of sending students back to school. I'm Josh Bloch.

This is Frontburner. Hi, Emily. Hello. Thanks for having me. So let me start with my own situation. You know, we have a five-year-old daughter who's going to enter senior kindergarten in September. And for the past few months, we have been pretty careful about social distancing, about, you know, being calculated about the risks that we take. So I have to say it feels kind of strange and scary to think about dropping her off to go to a class of almost 30 kids. You've actually looked at the data. How scared should we be about sending our kids to school? be about sending our kids to school? I think that the answer to that depends a lot on the viral situation. But in places where the virus is more under control, when we do look at what

has happened when schools opened, and that's true partly when we look at what happened when schools opened in Europe, and maybe we have a bit of evidence also from child care settings that have been open throughout the U.S., The evidence does not suggest that these are, in most cases, major spreaders of the virus. So I think that piece is a little bit reassuring. I think it's quite reassuring. And kids also tend to not get very sick and are less likely to be infected in the first place. So I think all of that is reassuring. I will say, I think that you are experiencing something which we are all going to experience, which is this sort of visceral fear of kind of getting over the hurdle of going in the first day, that somehow we've been so isolated.

It's been like, stay in your house, stay in your house, stay in your house. And all of a sudden, it's like, go out, and there's all these other kids. And I think just that hurdle is going to be really hard. Going back, I'm pretty nervous, actually. COVID is still very relevant, and there's a possibility of a second wave. We don't know whether we're going to be exposed to the COVID more or if we'll be okay.

We don't know that. So I'd rather be safe than sorry. You know, schools in most of Canada are opening up from kindergarten all the way to grade 12. Tell me more about what we know in terms of whether one age group is more of a concern than another. So this is a place where I think that policy has fallen down a bit. It's pretty clear that the virus is least likely in small kids,

and also that those small kids tend to transmit less than older kids. So when we think about elementary schools versus middle schools or high schools, the elementary school is going to be the lowest risk. The high school is going to be the highest risk. I think the other piece that maybe is missing a little bit in these conversations is actually that the benefits to in-person learning are much greater for younger kids than for older kids because it's much less substitutable. So it's really hard for a five-year old to learn on Zoom, whereas for a 16-year-old, you know, that's probably a more accessible thing, at least for many kids in that

category. So I can see the reason to do everything at once. Of course, high school kids want to be back in school also, but I do think that there's also an argument for more age differentiation, for sure. The other thing that really concerns me is about how much information we actually have to make these decisions. I mean, this all, on some level, feels like a bit of an experiment, not just on our kids, but on our community more generally. They said a lot of, I think and I hope and I feel. And he's not an experiment to me.

Not much I know. Are we going to send him back and just kind of hope, think and feel that nobody gets sick that first week and then nobody gets sick? And then what? We're still learning about the virus. Schools only shut down a few months ago. How much information do we actually have about the consequences of sending our kids back to school en masse? You know, I think that we don't have perfect information about this. I think when we can sort of triangulate in, it suggests that schools are not a major

vector. But that comes from, you know, Europe, and Europe is obviously different from Canada. But I think the thing I would push back on you a little bit is that like, I don't think that we have that, that neither of the choice to keep the kids home nor the choice to go to school is one that has no risks. And neither of them is one we really understand the consequences of. Closing of schools has consequences that can be lifelong for some children. We know that there's been an increase in anxiety. There's been an increase in mental health issues with young people. It is a mental health issue because I think the isolation, especially when they're younger and they don't have the rationalization ability, but I know it's impacted him not to be around his friends. So, you know, if you don't send kids to

school and they lose out on learning and particularly, you know, lower income kids are going to lose more and kids lose on socialization, you know, lower income kids are going to lose more and kids lose on socialization. You know, they're going to be hungry because we don't have, at least in the US, school lunches are a major source of food for many kids. So I think that we are unfortunately in a situation

where there isn't a good solution. And I think it's tempting to say, okay, well, everybody just stay home. Like that's the safest thing. But I'm not sure that putting everything in, that that's really true. And so I think it's tempting to say, OK, well, everybody just stay home like that's the safest thing. But I'm not sure that putting everything in that that's really true. And so I think it's important to acknowledge that that other side is there also. So you talked a little bit about the degree of risk. But in your view, when should parents choose to keep their kids at home?

So I think there's a few situations for that. One is I would draw some line around level of community spread. And, you know, I people have suggested different things like, you know, 5%, like if there's a 5% test positivity rate, you know, schools shouldn't be open immune compromised grandparent, then the risks associated with a family spread of COVID are very different than if it's just, you know, two relatively young parents with no health problems and, you know, two small children. So I think that there's a kind of within family set of choices, which really have to do with who else is around in the household and, you know, maybe your kids have any health issues. I guess the last piece I'd put on there is just how much do you think your kids will benefit from being in person? There's clearly a lot of variation across kids in how easy they find it to learn online and how emotionally costly it is for them to not be in school. And so I think all of those things are kind of something that parents should have in

their decision model about what's the right choice for their kids. Well, in terms of online learning, I mean, clearly it doesn't work for everyone. It's just how much easier school is when you're actually there with the teacher and not like behind a screen. You know, it's just a screen there and you're just at home, sitting at home. When you have to get up in the morning to go to school, you have more motivation and drive to actually do the work. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't work for everyone. And in fact, we see in the data, at least in the U.S., when we moved to remote learning in the spring, there were huge losses in objective measures of learning, like how many math badges are kids earning in these various things. So we saw just massive, massive reductions

in that. Now, I think people have pushed back to say, well, that was sort of at the last minute, like if we can design really good online learning platforms, things will be better. I think there's some truth to that, although I haven't seen a lot of efforts to really do a great job with this. And I think for many kids, this is simply not gonna be feasible because they don't have internet at home, because they don't have a stable home life. There are a lot of groups for whom this is just really, really not gonna be feasible basically at all. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. Industry Connections. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Because, you know, it's much easier to quantify the possible harm in terms of infections, you know, in terms of the rate of infection or even death. It seems much more difficult to try and measure the possible risk of keeping kids away from school and the kind of harm that they might face by not having the opportunity to learn in a classroom or to socialize with their peers.

or to socialize with their peers? Yeah, I mean, I think part of the issue is that things like, you know, illness and from COVID are very salient, as they should be. And we can really see those things. And we don't maybe see the kid who's, you know, still living in an abusive household and for whom school would have been a place

where you recognize that abuse and, you know, and help them. We don't see that. That's that's kind of hidden. And so I think that there are there are real like immediate consequences, not even the sort of long term education completion, the kinds of things that, you know, economists like to talk about, but there are real like immediate things, but we're not going to see them. And so I think it's very hard, as you say, for policymakers to kind of draw on those almost draw on those anecdotes, like you'd like to sort of fight case with case, but we can't really. And I think that that's part of what's made this conversation so challenging to have. And you have to decide how much, you know, how much reward justifies

how much risk. Yeah. And there's no good answer. And I think there's no good answer for policymakers and no good answer for parents. And I think we're not used to that. We're not used to kind of saying we're going to make a decision and we're not going to feel good about it. And it doesn't matter which one it is. It's the decision to send kids to not send kids. We're going to feel bad about either of those decisions. And maybe that one of them is the right one, but none of them are going to feel good. And I think that that's that hard. And we just are not used to, we're not used to that. So, you know, it's interesting what's happening across Canada. And I know it's happening across the states as well, is that there is this patchwork of policies that different jurisdictions are putting in place to try and address the risks of reopening schools. And I want to hear your take on some of these. You know, in some provinces like Ontario, they aren't reducing class size until high school. The Ontario government's

plan for schools this fall is being met by criticism from teachers unions and some parents groups. They say it doesn't do enough to keep everyone safe. The premier and the minister of education have promised people in this province that they would spare no expense to ensure the safety of people, including kids in this province. And today they broke that. And a very good example of that is the fact that they have chosen not to decrease class sizes. Does the number of students in a class, you know, at an elementary school level, does that greatly elevate risk? I think the reason to have smaller classes is twofold. One is to have sort of more distancing. And so some of that sort of interacts with the size of the classroom.

I think the other reason is because if you have a smaller group, then if someone becomes infected in the group, there's a smaller set of people that they are influencing. And I think that's the big reason to have these kind of pods, I guess we're calling them. British Columbia has released plans to open schools in September full-time. High school students will be limited to cohorts of 120, elementary and middle school children to learning groups of 60. The principle behind these learning groups is to create groups of student and staff who will remain together throughout the school year or term

and who primarily interact only with each other. That does kind of make sense in part because it affects the disruption. So if you sort of said our policy is that when somebody is infected, when somebody has a positive test, their pod is going to quarantine for 14 days. Well, if your pod is 50 people, that's a lot of people out of school. If your pod is 10 people, then that's a much

smaller group of kids who are affected. So I think that there are kind of reasons to do it for just practical value. We're also seeing these really creative solutions, which look good on paper. I imagine they're difficult in practice. In Quebec, they've created a system of subgroups where six students form a subgroup where they don't have to practice social distancing, but every subgroup can only come within a meter of another subgroup, and teachers have to stay two meters away from all the students. And this is preschool to grade nine. In Ontario, they're requiring all students from grade four to grade 12 to wear face masks. they're requiring all students from grade 4 to grade 12 to wear face masks.

Our policy is to mandate masking from grade 4 up. The evidence presented to cabinet overwhelmingly was it is less effective in the earliest years, that kindergarten to grade 3 constituency. It may have counterintuitive elements if they don't know how to wear it or they touch their mask more. But the evidence coming to the cabinet was clear. Masking in schools in combination with other actions will help reduce the risk in schools. I mean, how difficult is it going to be for teachers to enforce these kinds of guidelines? So I think I would say sort of two things. First, you know, even if people do not do all of these things perfectly, if they do some of them,

that will lower the spread. So I think there's a reason to sort of articulate these things, even while we recognize that, yes, it will not be perfect. I think on the particular issue of masks, I see a lot of people say, well, it's impossible to require these for small children because like they can't do it. I just don't think that's that is consistent with reality. I think for, you know, very little kids, two and three, it's a little bit harder. But you might my five year old wears a mask to camp all the time. And it's been fine. I think the kids are probably way more adaptable on this than we than we expect them probably to be, frankly, more adaptable than than adults. So I think part of it is just modeling and being like, yeah, this is what we're doing. And you know, it'll be a little

bit annoying, but but they'll make it work because they actually are pretty adaptable people. It's obviously not just parents who are concerned about their kids. Teachers are really worried too. And I know in Ontario, the teachers union says that teachers are anxious about being back in the classroom when the class sizes are not being reduced.

The BC Teachers Federation is asking the province to delay the start of the school year. What kind of risks do teachers face who go back into the classroom now? Yeah, so I think this is, to me, this is the most significant concerns. You know, there isn't that much data on this. I will say that, you know, some of the data we have is, again, somewhat reassuring. So Sweden kept their schools open the whole time and actually had a pretty significant outbreak. But when they look at hospitalizations, they actually are able to look by occupation, and they don't find that teachers are a high-risk occupation. So actually, the hospitalization rate looks similar to basically any other job. That's kind of reassuring.

to basically any other job that's kind of reassuring. But, you know, I think we really need to be recognizing this fear and investing in things that are protective. And I think if we're going to ask teachers to go back to the classroom, you know, we need to classify them as essential workers and we need to give them the protections that they need. And if that means surgical masks and extra cleaning supplies and all of those things, you know, I think that that's the direction that we really have to go.

I mean, it seems like even following these guidelines, it is likely that there's going to be cases of COVID in schools. What, in your view, needs to happen when a COVID case does pop up? So, I mean, I would say not likely, but certain. There will be COVID cases in schools for sure. And as you say, I think that there needs to be a plan to address that. And I think that there are sort of two pieces of that. One is kind of in terms of preventing spread, there needs to be a very clear plan of exactly what happens with this with a sick kid, or a sick teacher, you know, that teachers don't have to come in when they're sick, the kids are kept out of school when they're sick, that if they become sick at school, they're sort of immediately like isolated and then and then tested. We need good testing infrastructure. We need good testing infrastructure. I also think schools will need to articulate some plan for what will happen with other people at the school.

And so to what extent, you know, if there's a positive case, is the classroom quarantined? Is the whole school quarantined? Is the school shut? You know, there's different ways to exactly articulate that. But I think in some ways, the most important thing is to actually articulate a plan to teachers, to parents, both to make them feel better and also so they can they can plan for, you know, what will inevitably be some cases and, you know, possibly some some school shutdowns. Right. I mean, this is one of the really tough things as a parent is that,

you know, we might be sending we thinking we're sending our kids to full time care in September, but then two weeks in the whole school needs to shut down or quarantine because of a COVID outbreak. No, I mean, my husband the other night was like, you know, let's sit down for an hour and talk about our, you know, new version of our pandemic resilience plan because the school says they're going to open. But, you know, how do we know how long they're going to stay open? And we need to figure out, you know, like, what are we going to do if they if they close? And I think that that is something many households are probably talking about right now. Right. And especially if we were to see a cycle of that where it doesn't happen once, but, you know, several times or many times over the course

of a school year. You know, the way that I would put it is, you know, if my kid's school articulated that, like, every time there is a case in the school, the whole school shuts for two weeks, I'm not sure there would be any point in sending them back. So we've talked about the risks to kids and the risks to teachers. But what do we know about the public health risks of keeping schools open, especially if the number of cases in the community starts to go up? So this is the place where we probably have the least good data. So we have a bunch of places in Europe open their schools. For the most part, it does not seem that the opening of schools, you know, kind of started the epidemic up again.

You know, places, some places saw a little bit of an uptick. Some places saw kind of not much of not much of an uptick. But these are all places where they kind of the virus was on its way down. It was already at a pretty low level. That is a very different question than, you know, what happens when you open schools in a place with a 15 percent positive testing rate, which is what we have in some places in the U.S. right now. I think we just unfortunately do not have any information that would tell us, although I think it's pretty clear it's not a good idea. So, you know, I just want to ask before I let you go. I mean, you've talked about all these guidelines.

You've talked about the limited risks that younger kids face. I think, you know, even despite that information being out there, obviously a lot of parents are very nervous about sending their kids to school in September. And it's so emotional. I mean, the stakes are so high. We have some classrooms with 30 students. And to say one meter apart, that doesn't work. I'm trying to measure my anxiety and fear with the world has to go on. And it's not feasible for all of us to stay home forever. And it's not. But I don't necessarily think sending my kid back should be contingent to an economic decision either.

And not just in terms of the risk, but I have to say as a parent, the thought of having full-time child care is incredibly enticing and it's certainly an attractive offer. So what advice do you have for parents who are still struggling with whether or not to send their kid to school in September? I mean, I think that really I would tell parents, you know, you really need to sit down and and think about what is the right choice and think about it, you know, rationally and try to, you know, it's know in in the evidence and how likely is it really that your that your kid will get sick and and kind of really work it through um and think about the and think about the benefits don't sort of ignore the ignore the benefits um and then try to make a decision and and try to stick with it and try to sort of follow through and recognize that you're not going to probably feel great about whatever decision it is. But I think the other thing to recognize is there is

this sort of, there is really this hurdle that we're all going to face on kind of day one, which is like, oh my gosh, what, like, what am I doing? But I think that probably particularly in low prevalence areas, what is going to happen is school is going to open and it's going to be okay. And, and, you know, sort of that, and then you were going to realize how good it is for your kid. So I think just trying to make the decision in a thoughtful way, and then try to try to stick with the decision you made, I think is probably the best advice I could give. Emily, thank you so much for this. It does put my mind at ease somewhat. Somewhat. That's what I'm here for putting your mind at ease. Thank you for having me.

Before we go, I want to give you an update on a story that we've been covering. According to Chinese state media, Hong Kong police have ordered the arrest of six pro-democracy activists living abroad. All are wanted on suspicion of violating the national security law, which was imposed on Hong Kong by the Beijing government at the end of June. State media has said it would criminalize acts of secession, subversion, and terrorism. Critics argue it could undermine the city's civil and political freedoms. One of these activists is Nathan Law, who was on our show just a few weeks ago. He's in the United Kingdom right now.

And upon finding out this news, he posted on Twitter that it affirms his decision to continue his activism on a global stage. Nathan wrote, quote, What I now face is far greater than my own gains and losses. The price of displacement is what I'm willing to pay. You can find my full conversation with Nathan Law on our feed. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.