The New Yorker Radio Hour - Emily Oster on Whether and How to Reopen Schools

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

The decision about whether to reopen schools may determine children’s futures, the survival of teachers, and the economy’s ability to rebound. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, reviews what we do and don’t know about the dangers of in-person classes. How likely are children to transmit the coronavirus? Will teachers spread it to one another? Oster talks about the data with Joshua Rothman and opens up a knottier question about this upcoming school year: How do we measure the trade-off between the lives that will inevitably be lost if schools open against the long-term negative effects of learning loss if schools stay closed? What will a school do when, inevitably, somebody dies? “We’re going to have to accept that there isn’t actually a right choice,” she says. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As summer marches on and fall comes into view, the question of schools is coming into sharp focus. A debate, a full-on battle, really, is raging about whether schools should reopen their doors for kids. Yeah, the president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open, and I was just in the Oval talking to him about that. And when he says open, he means open and full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this. But if you're the teacher standing face to face with 35 kids, or if you're a principal for that matter, or an education official, or a governor, you may want to consider the science.

But that gets tricky. This pandemic is not much more than half a year old, and there's no definitive set of data to guide us. So what do we know about this seemingly imposterous? possible problem. The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman talked last week with Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University. Auster has written bestsellers on pregnancy and parenting from a database perspective, and she co-authors the website, COVID Explained. So maybe we should start with the first of three questions, which is, how dangerous is the coronavirus to children? I think the answer is that this is the least affected group.

So that's different than saying it's not dangerous. And some of the things you will hear are people saying, oh, kids can't get it, kids don't get it, no kids ever get it. That's not true. Kids can get very sick. There have been pediatric deaths. We now have a lot of data from a lot of different locations that really suggest that kids tend to have mild illness

and they are less likely to get sick. So I think that piece of it is pretty reassuring. And does anyone know why? Why would that be? So there's some discussion, and now we're like a little bit beyond my science skills, but there's some discussions about ACE2 inhibitors and like different levels of ACE2 enzymes. But I don't think we really have an answer to that question yet. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, one thing I've been like low-key freaking out about for myself, I have a two-year-old son, and we were, you know, our version of this debate was sending him to pre-K. and I had read the papers about how, you know, like basically the kind of scary, scary version of COVID is something that kids don't really seem to get in any kind of significant numbers. But then I was starting to, you know, learn about like, you know, there are things that happen decades after you get a virus, like shingles is a consequence of chickenpox or there are like various weird things that happen like 10 years after you get the measles. I mean, how do you think about it being an unknown virus, I guess is what I'm asking, or a new weird, creepy. virus. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's, that is part of what's hard is that people are sort of constantly running through their heads.

Well, what if in 20 years we find out that this had this long-term impact that we didn't know about it? And I think, yes, you know, you're right that that's really scary. Now, that's always true, right? So there's, you're kind of frequently experiencing things where we don't, we don't really know, or experiencing things where we do know that there are potentially long-term consequences like the flu. Flu is actually way more dangerous than COVID for kids based on the data.

And so you're already kind of taking some of these risks. And I think that they're just not really salient every day. But the fact that there could be something bad that happens later is hard to factor into your decision making because, of course, there could always be something bad that happens later. And you cannot wait 20 years to decide whether to send your two-year-old to daycare. Yeah. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So what about kids being vectors or giving the virus to each other? So this is a place where I think we have sort of growing data, but it is actually more complicated and less,

like it's less obvious than the case of how sick kids get. So for a while there were some discussion like kids don't transmit, like they don't transmit at all. So we shouldn't like worry about that. I think what is true is they do seem to transmit less. We have a number of, I would say examples that are reassuring. So cases where there was an infected kid and they, interacted with a lot of other people and nobody got sick.

I think our best data on this probably just came out, and it's like a little bit mixed. So there's a big study from South Korea, which looked at a bunch of cases and then looked at their contacts. So South Korea does much better contact tracing than elsewhere. So they had traced, you, they have like 6,000 cases and 60,000 contacts. Right. So to put some numbers on it, so if you have a little kid in the study who has COVID, that's a kid under 10, they find only.

about 5% of their parents or people they live with get COVID. So that's a really low transmission rate. It's much lower than other groups. So adults look like the transmission rate there would be something like 11 or 12%. So that would say adults would transmit to 11 to 12% of people in their household. For kids in their teens, that's the 10 to 19 age group, they were still much less likely to be infected than other people in the population. But conditional on being affected, they transmitted to their household context at a rate that was sort of similar to adults. So there's a little bit of a mixed bag for the older kids and suggest there's an important difference between the younger and the older age groups within kids.

So, I mean, does that suggest that we should be having two pretty distinct conversations, like one about high school kids, essentially how to keep those schools closed, and then one about elementary school kids and essentially how to open those schools? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that we should privilege different groups differently for this reopening conversation. One of the ways we could do that is with age. And we could say, basically, we should be thinking about how to open for elementary school kids and maybe about how to use space in high schools or in middle schools to, like, de-densify

our elementary school classrooms. The other piece of this that lines up well with that kind of plan is that the kind of distance learning losses, like how good is distance learning, is pretty different for little kids and for older kids. So it's not that easy to teach a five-year-old on Zoom. And also some of what you're trying to convey is sort of like how do you interact with other five-year-olds. Whereas for high school kids, of course, like socialization is important. It's easier for them to socialize on their own. And also the learning piece, it's easier to do on the computer. So I think that that's not crazy. That's not crazy. I'm

I think the other place that we should sort of be talking about prioritization is to just recognize that people have different resources. And so, you know, within a bunch of sixth graders in an large urban school district, you're going to have kids where, you know, their parents can be home with them and, you know, they are capable of like supervising them doing online learning. And then you're going to have cases where kids, you know, live in homeless shelters or in other kinds of unstable environments with no internet. And we should prioritize those kids for in-person education if we have to choose, I think.

And then on the third question, which is adults who work in schools giving it to one another. What do we know about that? So I think that what we know about that is kind of the same as what we would know about this in any kind of office setting. And I think we have to think the same would need to be true about schools. You know, we can't have faculty break rooms. We can't have faculty kitchens. You know, we're going to need to think about PPE. I mean, there's a lot of those kinds of things.

of considerations that are going into opening offices that I haven't seen it talked about as much in the cases of schools. So we've spent a lot of time in schools on sort of thinking about the protections that have to do with interactions between teachers or between staff and students and much less about the interaction between staff and staff, which of course probably are the highest risk interactions because those are the people who are, you know, most likely to spread it to each other. Economist Emily Oster talking with the New Yorker's Joshua Rothman. We'll continue in a moment.

So I imagine you as a person who's just at the center of a huge amount of communication from parents, from teachers, from education people about this problem, this question. I guess part of it is a lot of places thought, well, there were a lot of people thinking that in a sort of wishful thinking a way that this would just automatically be over by, you know, at some point in the summer. And maybe this is just one of those decisions that's so hard to make, you can't guarantee anything to anybody. I think one of the things places thought that they were going to be able to somehow think about this in a sort of like cost and benefit tradeoff way. And then it became like very

emotional in a way that maybe wasn't expected and makes it very hard to make decisions like that. So, you know, when you announce that you're going to reopen schools and then people are like, do you want me to die? You like, you know, basically when the teachers union comes and they say, like, do you want me to, do you want me to die? Like you want me to die. Like you want. want me to go, you're going to make me go to work so I can die. And then you realize as an administrator, like if you reopen schools, in fact, even if you don't reopen schools, in general, there will be some people who are teachers who unfortunately will die because a lot of people are going to die of COVID because it is a terrible disease that we really need to like be addressing more aggressively.

But like what's going to happen if you open schools is that some people are going to, you know, are going to get this and some of them may, may die. And then what are you going to, like, what are you going to do. And so I think that was the thing that sort of people came up against that they maybe weren't, weren't expecting. Right. Like normally, this is in fact, on some level, it's a life and death decision, even though on another level, it's an education. It's about, well, let me frame it a different way. I mean, how much do we know about what it means for kids to miss a year of school? Is that something we know about, like what the impacts are on children who are out of school for a year? Yeah, so I think we know that it is really bad for kids to lose out on schooling.

And we know that there were very large learning losses in the spring. Those learning losses are concentrated in students of color and low-income students. I mean, they're concentrated in low-income schools. You can see this in the data. It's comparable. You know, it's the same thing we see when we look at summer learning loss. If we go online for a school year and, you know, things are anything like they're in, they were in the spring.

There are going to be a bunch of kids who drop out. Those are going to be from particular demographic groups. We're going to see basically an exacerbation of some pre-existing inequalities. I mean, we saw this today. Like all of my Twitter feed today is about educational pods. Oh, we're going to have a learning pod. We're going to have a learning bubble. Guess who's having learning bubbles?

It's the rich. Or at least, you know, people who are like relatively better off than the average. And so I think all of this stuff is going to be very bad in the long term. And we know that people who get less education have worse health outcomes later, make less money, have all kinds of other sort of long-term impact. And I have made this point in various ways. And one of the pieces of pushback you get is, you know, well, it would be worse to be dead. If you open schools and even one kid dies of COVID as a result of school openings,

then that's worse than all of these learning. learning losses. We don't really have a way to talk about how we trade those things off. We have, I mean, economists have a framework, but it's the kind of reason that people hate us, right, because we're going to go out there and say, well, you know, the like the long run, like mortality, higher mortality among this entire cohort of students outweighs the like life years loss of one, you know, of one student dying of COVID, but nobody wants to be out there saying them. I don't want to be saying that. Nobody wants to say that. And I think that's part of what makes this just really hard to talk about.

So, I mean, would it be better for school districts to just decide now very clearly, you know, to avoid being, you know, the flat squirrel and just decide we're going to pursue opening and then there's certain consequences that flow from that in terms of decisions that need to be made or to decide we're going to sort of be as conservative as possible and then, you know, pull all your resources into making it work that way? Is flip-flopping bad here? Yes, flip-flopping is bad. And I think this is something, like a lot of school districts

had this attitude of we're just going to wait as long as possible to have as most information as possible. And I think it was driving parents crazy. And there actually are like a number of people, even in California, so I texted a friend of mine the other day. I was like, I'm so sorry that L.A. is decided not to open. And she was basically like, you know, like I just am glad that I know. because now I can like, yes, I wish we could be in person,

but now at least I understand what I'm up against. Parents were like, okay, let me try to think about, like, how am I going to make this work? The piece that I'm worried about, just to tell you about what is keeping me personally up at night about my life, is that I live in a place where there's currently the plan is to open schools in person, like more or less full time, at least for elementary schools.

But I am worried that we're going to get two weeks in and there's going to be a case in my kid's school. And realistically, that's even a low problem place. Like, that's going to happen. And then I'm not sure what the plans are in terms of, like, the reaction, right? So it would almost be worse to send the kids back for two weeks and then have to pull them out again because I wouldn't be prepared for that. Now, what if you lived in a state, like a state where you just didn't trust the decision-making about coronavirus?

I mean, I think that's a situation a lot of parents around the country are in, or worry that they may be in. This is one of these weird moments where everyone is making their own judgment calls about what's safe, what's acceptable, I guess. So I think that, you know, I think that in that case, a lot of people are going to be thinking about it as, it's not a good idea to send my kid. And I suspect that I would be in the same boat.

You know, I'm pretty into school. and so I would really like my kids to be in school, but I'm not sure that from a public health standpoint, I could really decide to send them, even if I wasn't worried about them at all. And that sure it would be a good idea to decide to send them in a place where a lot of people are being infected every day, partly because I would just feel like that was not like socially the choice

that I would make. But I also think we're going to have to accept that there isn't actually a right choice in that people are going to differ in what they think, is what they think is the right thing to do. And that we probably, it's not going to help any of this discourse for people to yell at each other and tell them they're doing it wrong. It's just hard to, it's hard to put yourself in other people's shoes on those kind of choices.

Emily Oster, an economist from Brown University. She's also the author of Cribsheet and Expecting Better. She spoke with the New Yorker's Josh Rothman. I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour

is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby,

Calalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gofen and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.