Emily Oster on Whether and How to Reopen Schools

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Books, Society & Culture, Remnick, Storytelling, Wnyc, News, David, Yorker, Arts, Politics, New

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.1	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As summer marches on and fall comes into view,
0:16.6	the question of schools is coming into sharp focus. A debate, a full-on battle, really,
0:22.3	is raging about whether schools should reopen their doors for kids.
0:26.6	Yeah, the president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open,
0:30.6	and I was just in the Oval talking to him about that.
0:32.6	And when he says open, he means open and full,
0:35.0	kids being able to attend each and every day at their school.
0:38.3	The science should not stand in the way of this.
0:41.3	But if you're the teacher standing face to face with 35 kids,
0:45.3	or if you're a principal for that matter, or an education official, or a governor,
0:50.3	you may want to consider the science.
0:52.3	But that gets tricky.
0:59.7	This pandemic is not much more than half a year old, and there's no definitive set of data to guide us.
1:03.5	So what do we know about this seemingly impossible problem?
1:09.6	The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman talked last week with Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University.
1:14.6	Oster has written bestsellers on pregnancy and parenting from a database perspective,
1:18.1	and she co-authors the website, COVID Explained.
1:23.1	So maybe we should start with the first of three questions, which is,
1:27.3	how dangerous is the coronavirus to children?
1:33.2	I think the answer is that this is the least affected group.
1:36.5	So that's different than saying it's not dangerous.
	...

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