What the hell are we doing to America's kids? New pod with the NYT's David Leonhardt about covid, schools and indifference to the fate of our children
Happy Wednesday,
We swear this isn’t a daily email. But we wanted to start up with Jon Karl yesterday, and Wednesday is pod day, so… If you’re parents like Marc and me, or kids who are in school, or just care about public policy, there’s no doubt you’ve been wondering whether anyone in the government or the ed community is asking about the impact of school closures, remote learning, masked everything, social distancing, audience-free sports, teachers’ unions walking out… And the answer is: Not enough.
David Leonhardt writes the Times’ The Morning Newsletter for subscribers (I confess, I am one), and had one of the first MSM pieces on the devastating impact COVID schooling has had on America’s children; and of course, those hardest hit have been those who can least afford it — the poor, minorities, the handicapped. It’ll break your heart and make your hair stand on end.
BLUF (bottom line up front for those who haven’t encountered the Pentagon), we invited David onto the pod, and he’s balanced, fair, and thoughtful. We didn’t always agree, but that’s the reason we have the pod. To talk about What the Hell is Going On. Share thoughts, impressions and questions here or over email… thanks for reading!
HIGHLIGHTS
David: … my guess is kids will never recover, never fully recover from it in terms of lost learning and other issues. I mean, when you go down the list, it's clear kids are far behind in school. …The losses have been greater among Black students, Latino students, and students in high poverty schools. We also see a lot of signs that there has been damage to kids' mental health. Suicide attempts among adolescent girls are way up.
David: …I'm just trying to say, look, at the same time that we can say "It's really hard to justify the idea of schools being closed right now." And there are teachers and teachers unions and school administrators who are nonetheless arguing for that, even though it'll hurt kids. And who I think are sometimes misrepresenting the science about what this disease, this virus means for vaccinated people. I agree with you on all of that, I just think it's also important to note the incredibly difficult job that teaching is. It's not simply the binary question of is school open or is school closed. It's also the quality of the experience in the school.
David: To me at a time when we have cases surging right now, and for older people and for people in vulnerable health, there are some risks, even if you're vaccinated. …at a time when we have these unbelievably high caseloads, that's an argument for turning the dial up on mitigations, right? Maybe we'd say if we weren't wearing masks before we'd wear them more now. But instead, what we've often done is we've imagined that these mitigations have no costs, and we've just kind of kept them on, without any sense of when we're going to remove them. And every single one of these mitigations has costs. If we can just talk about masks for a minute, I mean, I don't understand why so many political conservatives in our country are so hostile to masks, the evidence is clear that they do make a difference. But I also don't understand why so many liberals have embraced masks as more powerful than they really are.
David: … COVID mitigation is regressive. I think that, again, the closest I can come is I do think my friend and colleague, Ross Douthat, refers to it as safetyism. …there's kind of become a lot of safetyism in parts of America, probably disproportionately in blue America, where we imagine that we can reduce all these risks to zero and we imagine they don't have costs. … I know I keep bringing this up, but I think if conservatives are trying to figure out, "Wait a second, how can those liberals be thinking this?" And I think that's a good question to be asking, because I don't think it's particularly scientific views that many liberals have on this.
David: I would encourage conservatives to also look inward. How is it that conservatives have persuaded themselves that masks have no benefit? How is it that so many conservatives, millions of them, are refusing to take the vaccine or inventing stories about how the vaccines don't work or harm kids? And the answers to those questions are almost certainly the same as the answers to how are liberals diluting themselves about what this is doing to kids? And I think as a society, it'd be a lot healthier if instead of just asking, how are those other people who are our normal political opponents, so misled about all this, we also spend a little bit of time reflecting on our own tribe. And that's why I keep trying to compare these two forms of delusions that the country has.
David: [A]s a society, we owe it to [our kids] them not to simply say, "Hey, you're behind, sorry you didn't measure up." I think we owe it to them to invest in them. And if we had a better functioning government, I think we'd be doing huge crash summer school stuff, real summer school. I think we'd be doing a whole bunch of things. But I really hope that we can remember that we've basically taken everyone who was a child in 2020 and 2021, and done a lot of damage to them, almost everybody.
TRANSCRIPT
WTH are we doing to America's children? The New York Times’ David Leonhardt on the devastating impact of school shutdowns and why American kids are starting 2022 in crisis
Episode #133 | January 12, 2022 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and David Leonhardt
Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
Marc Thiessen: And, I'm Marc Thiessen.
Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, “What the Hell Is Going On?” Marc, what the hell is going on in 2022?
Marc Thiessen: Well, what the hell is going on is we have gone back to the future, and we're dealing with school closures again. The Chicago Teachers Union walked off and left 330,000 kids locked out of their classrooms. As we record this, it appears that they've finally settled, come to some sort of agreement, and the schools will open again. But Chicago's not alone. Over 5,000 schools shut down in-person learning in the first week of January because everyone has their hair on fire over Omicron. The reality is Omicron and COVID is not seriously dangerous to most kids. There is no reason to keep these kids out of school, and we have done just so much irreparable damage to the children by keeping them out of schools during this pandemic. It might have been justifiable at the beginning when we didn't know much about the virus and what kind of damage it did or who it targeted, but we now know that children are not the most vulnerable or even highly vulnerable to COVID, and yet here we are two years later, and we're shutting down schools again. What the hell's going on, Dany?
Danielle Pletka: So I think at the root of this is this great divide over what to do about COVID. There are people, the Head of our CDC would be one of those people, who desperately want to hold on to the disease and the power that comes with it. Tony Fauci is another favorite. Rochelle Walensky, the Head of our CDC, who was on the Sunday shows this last weekend unwilling to admit that there aren't, in fact, 100,000 kids in the hospital for COVID.
Marc Thiessen: Well, she was forced, by the way. I mean, let's review the facts. Justice Sotomayor said during oral arguments over a vaccine mandate that there were 100,000 kids in hospitals and that many were on ventilators. And Bret Baier had Rochelle Walensky on, and he pressed her, and he pressed her, and he pressed her, and he finally got her to acknowledge that it was less than 3,500. There's a big difference between 3,500 and 100,000. And on top of that, the CDC can't tell you how many of those are people who are in the hospital because of COVID or in the hospital for something else, and, oh, by the way, they tested positive for COVID.
Danielle Pletka: Right.
Marc Thiessen: Which is probably the majority of them.
Danielle Pletka: So because we have elevated "the science" to the stratosphere and we have elevated people who are highly politicized "scientists" to the stratosphere, we are in a place where a lot of people don't trust what they're hearing, a lot of people are exploiting what they're hearing in order to do less, and we have an environment that really feels like it was a year ago. It's a misery, and who is it a biggest misery for? Not you, not me. No, it's our kids in school who are either not in school or are being tested every three minutes, who are wearing 16 masks and staring straight ahead with all of their windows open or doing all their work outside. It's 23 degrees here, guys. That's insane.
Marc Thiessen: Well, this is the thing. Marty Makary was on the podcast with us a few weeks ago, and one of the things that he said is that as bad as the data we have on the impact of COVID is and how bad the CDC has been about that data, the lagging indicators are the damage that the lockdowns and other restrictions have done to learning losses, mental health, to kids in poverty, the food insecurity, and all the rest of it, the damage is far worse from those things to our children than the risk of COVID. And yet we don't have a lot of that data yet because it takes a while to accumulate it, and it takes a while for the long-term impacts of these things to play out.
Marc Thiessen: But we're starting to get some of that data now, and we've got a great guest who's done, I think, the first major piece in the New York Times, starting to compile the data and the information about how much damage these lockdowns have done just in the past year and a half in terms of mental health of our kids, in terms of child abuse, all the other things that have happened because of the lockdowns. And it's staggering, it's worrisome, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. We're going to be learning more and more how much damage we've done, and now we're continuing to do because we're starting to do lockdowns again.
Danielle Pletka: Right, we're starting to do lockdowns again as if there is no cost to those lockdowns. So some of the stats with our guest today, David Leonhardt, who's a senior journalist at the New York Times, are just devastating. Suicide attempts slightly among adolescent boys, sharply among adolescent girls are up. The number of ER visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12 to 17-year-old girls rose by 51% from early 2019 to early 2021. And I think any of you who are listening, we all know these stories. I know very few people who haven't been touched by or heard a story like this. Gun violence against children has increased as part of a broader, nationwide rise in crime, for sure.
Danielle Pletka: But there are 101 residents in the infamous Chicago under age 20 who were murdered last year, up from 76 in 2019. School shootings have gone up. And as far as test scores are concerned, what we have seen is dramatic declines and declines in places where kids can't afford it, where kids are getting less of an education, where they're getting less parenting, minority communities where their opportunities are just missing. Those people are being crushed.
Marc Thiessen: So just some data, McKinsey examined the COVID effects of the 2020-2021 school year shutdowns and found the pandemic left students five months behind on math and four months behind on reading. Schools with majority black and brown population saw deeper losses, six months behind in math and five to six months behind in reading. And one million students who were expected to be in school didn't show up in person or online at all. Black and Hispanic kids were twice as likely as white students to be remote and twice as likely to have no live access to a teacher. And the disparity persisted in the spring of '21 when schools reopened. Whereas 2% of majority-white districts stayed closed, 18% of majority-black schools stayed remote. Nearly one in four majority Hispanic schools stayed closed. So this is a problem that is affecting all children, but it's disproportionately affecting minority children, poorer communities. The learning losses are devastating.
Marc Thiessen: McKinsey also estimated that lifetime learning losses for these kids are going to result in as much as $61,000 in lost lifetime income and more for the poorer minority kids. I mean, we are doing so much damage to these children. We've already done it because this is baked in now. When you're six months behind in reading and six months behind in math, you're not going to catch up unless we do some sort of remedial work like summer schools, which the teachers unions will never allow. So we've already done this damage, and now here we are at the start of 2022, and we're starting it all over again.
Danielle Pletka: It's wrong. I mean, I don't think there's any other word for it.
Marc Thiessen: It's child abuse.
Danielle Pletka: Yeah, it is.
Marc Thiessen: Any teacher who refuses to go into the classroom and do their job at this point is guilty of child abuse because you signed up for a job. You signed up for a responsibility. 75% of the teachers in Chicago voted to walk out. 75%.
Danielle Pletka: They are a disgrace to their profession. I don't think there's anything else to be said about that. But one of the reasons why we invited David Leonhardt on the show is for the simple reason that this national conversation hasn't been happening. People who have been furious about their children's lack of learning, people who have been frustrated, been desperate—and I say that even if they're not as angry as I know I am and I think Marc is about this—people who have been desperate have not been allowed to complain because the science tells us that our schools have to be closed and that your kid has to have asynchronous, worse yet, learning in which they do nothing, have one class a day, learn, fall behind, get involved in all sorts of trouble.
Danielle Pletka: And David Leonhardt, I think, has done a wonderful job in helping to foment the national conversation about what the facts are that you laid out, an excellent McKinsey report as well, and there have been several other excellent reports on this as well in the last couple weeks. Starting the conversation, but then also beginning to talk about how we solve these problems. It's not just money, people. You can't just throw money at schools and then say to yourself, "I've done what I needed to do for kids." There need to be real solutions for it.
Marc Thiessen: The thing is, they say follow the science until the science contradicts their preferred outcome. Right? If you're concerned with safety, and the data doesn't back up your safety-ism, then you just throw out the data. One of the things David mentions in his piece is that, for kids, COVID is basically the flu. And the data shows it's actually less dangerous than the flu. So let me give you a piece of data. This is from Joseph Allen, writing in the New York Times, Harvard Professor of Public Health. He points out that the weekly hospitalization rate for school-aged children with COVID is approximately one in 100,000 in Britain. The hospitalization rate for five to 14-year-olds was 1.4 per 100,000, the lowest hospitalization rate of any age.
Marc Thiessen: I went to the CDC website. You know what, in 2018, the hospitalization rate was for kids with the flu? 7.7 per 100,000. And it was even more in 2020. I think it was above eight. So, literally, COVID is dramatically less dangerous for these kids than the flu is. We don't shut down the schools for flu and, especially, it would be one thing if all this damage that we've done to kids in terms of mental health and learning losses, "Yes, but we're keeping them safe." No, you're not. You're doing more damage to them by keeping them out of the classroom. They're more likely to get COVID at home than they are in the classroom, and they are more likely to suffer all these learning losses and all this lifetime damage, lack of socialization, mental health crises because you're keeping them out. You're hurting kids by keeping them out of school, and it's got to stop.
Danielle Pletka: Amen to that. So you've heard our rant. Now maybe you'd like to hear a little bit from our guest today. And I will say he's very passionate about this, and rightly so.
Marc Thiessen: But he doesn't rant. He comes with facts.
Danielle Pletka: David Leonhardt writes the Morning Newsletter every weekday. I actually really like the Morning, I have to confess. You know I say a lot of bad things about the New York Times, but, really, I read the Morning every morning. He's been at the Times since 1999. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2011, and Marc will be happy to hear he also helped found a new sports column at the New York Times. But for us today, he is a simple senior writer at the New York Times.
Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview. Well, David, welcome to the podcast.
To read the whole transcript, hop over here…