You know, I'm someone who felt that school closures were certainly justified in the spring of 2020,

but we should have done a lot more to get schools back open for kids by the fall of that year.

And I thought that we could have done a lot more that we didn't do.

We didn't replace the ventilation systems of schools.

We didn't do pool testing.

We didn't do outdoor classrooms, like a lot of stuff that we could have done to make it easier to make sure the kids were back in school that fall. But half of schools were open that fall and all schools were open the following fall. And so what we're talking about is a period of time in which many American kids had their schooling interrupted for somewhere between a half a school year and one and a half school years.

And that's important in the life of a young person.

But when I look at the political discourse over the last few years, I find myself really frustrated with how

simplistically that has been presented. To begin with, like, the majority of parents,

when polled in the fall of 2020, didn't want the schools to reopen or thought at least not

enough had been done to keep their kids safe. The retrospective consensus that the country now

has that schools were closed too long was not real or public at the time in question. They were

real debates about how safe it was to open schools. This was a period of the fall of 2020 before

anybody had been vaccinated. And there were real hard choices to be made there.

Similarly, like we've heard a lot about pandemic learning loss, the effect of school closures

on kids' academic achievement as measured by testing. And I'm skeptical of testing as a measure

of much, but even assuming that we really do get a clear sense of how

everybody's performing, what we see in that data is, I think, a pretty measured decline.

But the declines actually started in 2016, and in some cases you can't even see the pandemic

break of the trend. And where it landed was that the median scores were

about what, say, fourth and eighth graders doing reading and math had been testing at in the year

2000 or 2002 or 2004. So the experience of school closures was to sort of briefly at least,

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