Open dystopia
As I'm writing this post, there's a stormy debate about whether keep schools open in the omicron surge. By the time this post goes out, there may have been some resolution, but I thought I'd try to capture this moment from within the din.
There are two sides to the debate: keep schools open or close them. This is all happening in a political-economic context that gets some play in the debate but probably not as much as it should. I'll summarize the various positions and get to this context last, pointing to what I think is the socialist take.
Keep them open
Proponents of keeping schools open show how devastating school closure has been throughout the pandemic. There's a chorus of voices supporting this position, mostly rightwingers and moderates. The moderates point to learning loss and other associated impacts on kids when their schools close. David Leonhardt summarized the premises and conclusion of this case well in a long, devastating thread based on his writing in the New York Times. He points to sinking test scores, suicide, gun violence, and other impacts juxtaposed with studies showing how covid in students is relatively mild. Economist Emily Oster has been an academic voice in this chorus, along with journalists Helaine Olen, Ross Barkan, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, New York's new mayor Eric Adams, and members of the Biden Administration like Ronald Klein and Miguel Cardona. But it was not just moderates. Krystal Ball did a keep-them-open segment on her 'populist' show Breaking Points and Nicole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project, came out with a similar take.
The argument takes different forms. Right now, the big takeaway is that closing the schools hurts kids more than it helps them. A couple things about this position.
To me, bracketing everything else (and there's a lot to bracket, see below), Keep Them Open relies on the premise that kids getting covid is less bad than missing school. If it turned out that kids getting covid was worse, their case falls apart. Lots of data show that kids don't get as sick, true. Fewer of them die, yes. But hospitalizations are getting very high these days which is still scary. For me the sticking point is long Covid, on which we have very little data. In a recent study, researchers found that covid stays in brain tissue even in mild cases. I guess moderates will have to decide if this is worth the risk.
When they say 'closing school hurts the kids' in this case, it's probably a euphemism for what Dr. Fauci, in a recent announcement shortening the quarantine period for those infected, called the structure of society. Those calling for schools to remain open have a clear interest in making sure society (read: capitalism) doesn't shut down. Schools are a key part of this. I bet they're thinking that schools shutting down is bad because they think society shutting down is bad. (Oh, and after sifting through the mess, this whole thread of the debate reads like a national reaction to the Chicago Teachers Union demanding safety protections and the week off given omicron's rise. It's almost like fighting unions can make a big difference!)
Keep Them Open puts a lot on schools. They talk about life outcomes, health, happiness, etc. What they don't mention is that schools aren't a catch-all for good social outcomes. Education might correlate with them, but it doesn't cause them. The jury is still out on whether education actually creates equality, for instance. You need a society with good employment, healthcare, transportation, housing, nutrition, and other amenities to make sure kids have good lives. Keep Them Open presumes a Horace Mann-type vision of schools as the great balancing force of the social wheel.
Close them
As the Keep-Them-Openers keep pushing their case, what's happening on the ground is much messier. People in and around schools are struggling with a dystopian reality. Covid-19 is a novel coronavirus, a disease that we don't really understand fully, whose mutations keep breaking through the alleged barriers of vaccines and boosters. Behind the numbers is a grim chaos. School people have to decide for themselves whether they enter it.
In the omicron surge, teachers and students are testing positive, getting sick, and dying. Kids are getting exposed and then passing the virus to their family members, some of whom may be immunocompromised. Hospitals are still at capacity even though the hospitalization rate from the omicron variant is overall less deadly than delta. When a student passes the virus to a family member, there's a good chance they couldn't get a spot at a hospital. Teachers are quitting. There aren't enough substitutes. Parents keep their kids home.
But these stories are anecdotal. I also know of parents keeping their kids in school, school districts keeping schools open, school leaders opting for quarantines, testing, and case-by-case decisions. The numbers, protocols, and practices vary widely with the decentralized systems used to administer schools in this country.
Thinking about the actual lived experience of students and teachers in the building and what's happening on the ground, the Close Them case makes sense. Even if you don't think the long covid threat is real, if you're going to have sickouts and opt-outs it'll destabilize the schools anyway. So close the schools until omicron passes. Take this threat away.
I think that's the socialist position: be on the side of workers and their communities, teachers and students, and don't make them make this decision. They're going to opt-out anyway and they've got a wisdom we should follow. Of course, it'll be hard on families with less space, fewer technical resources for online learning, and even nutrition. But you know what's worse? Getting covid. (As a parent, that's how I think too.) As a final point, as the heat of the debate died down over the course of the week, people remembered that education is totally decentralized in the US. Even if there were national policy, there's very little that federal government can do to 'keep schools open'. Each district, sometimes each school or classroom, will decide for themselves what's needed. So the debate feels a little pointless in retrospect.
Maybe in one way it wasn't pointless though. It drew attention to some things. Drawing from my research on school buildings, the debate shined a light on the fact that schools are not in good shape in this country. We actually don't have very good data on it, but we have to assume from what we do know that ventilation systems and windows aren't safe. Nearly 41% of school HVAC systems need repair or replacement. We know the virus spreads in the air. As I've written before, if we can't trust the air, then we should shut down the schools until we do (or at least have a plan for how to make it better). Anything else is structural ignorance.
Different capitalisms, different approaches
Let's zoom out. Sometimes, the Close Them camp get philosophical and talk about how American capitalism and its protectors won't do more shutdowns to keep things going. This perspective gets us thinking about the wider situation here; the context in which we're forced to make a decision about closing the schools or keeping them open and all the risks involved with both.
Look at China, for instance. They've taken a polar opposite approach to the pandemic than the US: strong shutdowns. If we believe their numbers, they have exponentially fewer infections and deaths. The government shuts things down fast, hard, and doesn't let people out. The trade-off is obviously a lack of freedom of movement. In some cases it gets intense, like the Xi'an province recently, where people weren't even allowed to go out for food and public services brought them groceries. Sometimes this delivery failed and people didn't get food.
These are anecdotes of course. Some people are reporting that the groceries were delivered on time and the system works well. In general though, this contrast a good illustration of the difference between what economist Branko Milanovic calls political capitalism and meritocratic-liberal capitalism in his book Capitalism, Alone. (I actually asked him about this and he said it was a good example.) The book has some shortcomings, but I can't get the distinction--so far as I understand it--out of my head. I think we're seeing it play out in this open/close debate.
Political capitalism, he says, gives the state autonomy and has rule by law rather than rule of law. There's still ownership, competition, etc but these aren't guaranteed in principle. These only exist at the pleasure of the state in political capitalism, which is less democratic. Charitably, given the pandemic and other crises, we should understand that political capitalism isn't state authority for its own sake. It's to take care of people.
On the other hand, there are two kinds of liberal-meritocratic capitalism, one more liberal and the other more meritocratic. Meritocratic capitalism, like in the US, is "where social functions are limited, [and] satisfied with only legal equality of citizens and [where things like] inheritance and private-for-profit education flourish." Everyone merits equality under the law, but that's kinda it. The second, more liberal capitalism (like in Europe) "takes equality of opportunity and social mobility more seriously."
Of course, the political-capitalist system prevents individual freedom at the expense of the collective (as determined by the state). That's not democratic and not great. But it also means that the state can shut things down if, say, its people were getting sick and dying in a pandemic (or decommodify education if it wasn't really working for people). I think we have to wrestle with the fact that the Close Them position trends towards political capitalism and away from meritocratic capitalism. Rather than favoring everyone's equality before the law and letting private activity flourish, we want the state to intervene and shut institutions down. Market socialism, my idea of a good society, would probably go the shutdown route--but would it?
Postscript: Keep them open (rightwing)
The rightwing argument about shutdowns has been the same since the start of the pandemic: this isn't a big deal, we won't stop our lives, the government is manipulating us, etc. The newest version of their position is notably weird. It draws from a distinct tradition of mass psychology to say that pro-vaccine, scared-of-covid ideology is creating a hypnotized mass of people who can no longer think for themselves. There's currently a kerfuffle around this line, as Joe Rogan interviewed the person, one Dr. Robert Malone, who wrote a now-viral substack essay on this. YouTube took down Rogan's interview. It's a madhouse.
Mass psychology is actually a pretty interesting framework to think about social problems. Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism is still a great way to think about the rise of Trump and tons of other stuff. I actually used it to understand classroom discussion for my dissertation research. To me the theory is just as helpful to understand how the rightwing operates, but the right is mobilizing the concept against the center and left.