(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s pretty easy to imagine what a responsible plan to reopen schools might look like. Districts would find out what all the people involved — the educators, the parents, the students — considered prudent. They would attempt in-person teaching only where the pandemic was more or less under control. They would take consistent safety measures, closely track infections and pull back if things didn’t go well.
I know a lot of educators. These are professionals, utterly dedicated to their students. Judging from our conversations — and given the lack of good data, there’s not much else to go on — the U.S. is in no way going about this responsibly, and the consequences will be disastrous.
Consider a principal I know in New York City. She’s in favor of phased reopening, starting remotely and moving gradually toward in-person instruction. Yet she now faces the daunting task of preparing to welcome students on Sept. 10, the city’s planned first day of school. Some of those students come from parts of Brooklyn where “positive test rates” exceed the standard that Mayor Bill de Blasio set for closing schools citywide. She’s supposed to designate teachers to oversee contact tracing, even though she doesn’t know which teachers will be present. The process of collecting students’ remote and in-person learning preferences left her three days to fill out schedules – a task that usually takes months.
A math teacher in Tennessee is deeply concerned about safety — of both teachers and students. His efforts to talk to his principal about plans for ventilation and social distancing have gone nowhere. At planning meetings, some board members consistently fail to wear masks. Officials commonly dismiss or downplay people’s concerns while saying they are working to address them. Information and accountability are lacking: For example, the school district cancelled football practices and games with no explanation, leaving the public to speculate about whether Covid-19 was involved and how authorities were assessing risks.
In Florida, Governor Rick DeSantis has likened reopening schools to a Navy Seals operation — “all in, all the time.” An English-as-a-second-language teacher is terrified. Some schools near her have already registered outbreaks even though students have yet to return – a situation she attributes to teachers and administrators who refuse to take measures because they see the pandemic as a hoax. She lives with her sister, who has comorbidities that would be life-threatening with a Covid-19 infection. But she’s afraid to complain, because she has already been reported multiple times as “inappropriately negative” for asking her colleagues to wear masks.
All three educators had initially hoped reason would prevail. They thought administrators were simply playing along with President Donald Trump, who threatened in July to withhold funding from schools that didn’t reopen in the fall. They assumed nobody would be irresponsible enough to keep going — certainly the higher-ups were merely offering nominal reopening plans until horror stories from places such as Georgia and North Carolina made it obscenely obvious that learning would have to be remote.
But now, they’re not so sure. Absurd plans are actually coming into force, rendering teachers and students into pawns in a much larger political game. Information on the repercussions of reopening is hard to get, as officials find excuses such as “medical privacy” to withhold data. Teachers are reduced to finding their own ways to keep track of what’s happening — for example, in this Google spreadsheet started by a teacher in Kansas. Such homegrown data might miss the success stories, the schools that demonstrate how to proceed safely and well. But it’s getting pretty clear that reopening without good planning for masks, social distancing and ventilation isn’t going to work.
In the short term, the result will be more infections, more deaths and severely impaired instruction. There will also be longer-term damage, as the most disadvantaged students fall permanently behind and some of the best and most experienced professionals quit or retire early — something the ESL teacher reports is already happening in Florida. As all three educators put it to me: We could have done so much better, if only we had used this time to plan responsibly.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Cathy O’Neil is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a mathematician who has worked as a professor, hedge-fund analyst and data scientist. She founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, and is the author of “Weapons of Math Destruction.”
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.