Education

Would Schools Close in a Future Pandemic?

Published

9 months ago

March 13, 2025

Would Schools Close in a Future Pandemic?

Over the course of 20 days in March 2020, 55 million American children stopped going to school as Covid-19 swept the United States.

What was impossible to anticipate then was that millions of those students would not return to classrooms full-time until September 2021, a year and a half later.

Those children and teenagers, often in public schools in Democratic areas, remained online at home while private schools, child-care centers, public schools in conservative regions, office buildings, bars, restaurants, sports arenas and theaters sputtered back toward normalcy.

Five years on, the devastating impact of the pandemic on children and adolescents is widely acknowledged across the political spectrum. School closures were not the only reason the pandemic was hard on children, but research shows that the longer schools stayed closed, the farther behind students fell.

What would happen if another health crisis came along — a pressing concern, as cases of measles and bird flu emerge? In the face of a new unknown pathogen, how would school leaders and lawmakers make decisions?

“It’s so important for Democrats to do a retrospective on this episode,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, who represents a district in the Boston suburbs where some schools were fully or partially closed for a year. He has argued that during the pandemic, his party “over-indexed” toward the views of teachers’ unions and epidemiologists, who often pushed for a slow, cautious approach to reopening schools.

The extended closures “crystallized how the party has been failing in governance,” Mr. Auchincloss said.

In some ways, moving to online learning would be easier next time, now that nearly all schools give students their own laptops or tablets. And in places where schools remained closed longer, some people in positions of power, including health officials and leaders of local teachers’ unions, say they stand by the decisions they made at the time.

Still, in interviews with more than a dozen leaders in health, education and politics, including some who were key figures at the time, others said they would take a different approach in the future, and try to do more to avoid extended shutdowns for entire school districts.

“Yes, I’ve learned a lot from this,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a powerful force in Democratic politics who at times worked behind-the-scenes to negotiate reopenings. She also stood by locals in places like Philadelphia and Chicago, where union members fought for vaccines, tests, ventilation and other safety measures — even after classrooms in other parts of the country had reopened.

Ms. Weingarten defended her members’ right to work safely and emphasized the importance of ventilation, but said she would strive to be clearer in the future that “kids have to be the priority.” That includes in-person instruction, she said.

“I thought I was pretty loud,” she added. “I would be even louder.”

Conflicting advice in 2020

Few education or health leaders doubt that it was right for schools to close in March 2020, when much about Covid-19 was unknown.

But by early that summer, there was a spate of evidence that pointed toward a careful reopening. Classrooms had reopened abroad, with research showing that there was limited spread of the virus inside schools. It was becoming clear that children tended to be less severely affected by the virus than many adults were, and that young children were less likely to spread the disease.

The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report in June 2020 recommending that schools reopen. Republican-run states like Texas and Florida forged ahead with plans to offer in-person instruction to families who wanted it.

Yet thousands of schools in Democratic-majority states like California, Oregon, Washington and Maryland stayed closed or partially closed for another full year.

Policymakers who had a role in those decisions argue that applying evidence from abroad was difficult because of several factors, including higher U.S. infection rates, less consensus around masking and limited availability of virus tests.

The politicization of the pandemic also played a role. President Trump repeatedly called on schools to reopen, while many Democratic officials and advocacy groups fought for stricter safety measures and more federal aid to schools.

In addition, conflicting advice from health experts caused confusion.

The Centers for Disease Control had, at times, recommended greater precautions than the pediatrics academy did, including maintaining six feet of distance between desks. In the summer of 2020, health agencies in states like California advised schools to remain closed in areas where case levels were high — which was almost everywhere.

The California Department of Public Health declined to respond to questions about their approach to school closures for this article.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, said that following cautious public health guidance was the right approach, and is the one she would follow again.

“What we needed to do was to listen to infectious disease experts,” Ms. Pringle said.

She pointed out that rates of infection and death were higher in low-income communities of color, and that many parents preferred to keep their children at home.

“You try to make the best decisions with the information you have,” she added.

Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado and the lead author of the academy’s report, recalled that some teachers pushed back against the report’s recommendations by pointing to crowded classrooms, dated H.V.A.C. systems and sealed-shut windows in their schools, many of them in low-income urban neighborhoods.

The teachers argued that reopening schools would be dangerous, and they organized marches — outdoors and masked — to demand that classrooms remain empty until virus transmission rates fell essentially to zero.

Dr. O’Leary said it was clear even at the time that those demands failed to consider what he called “the bigger picture.”

“What are the downstream consequences of closing schools?” he asked. “Is this the right decision as a society?”

Local officials who wanted to reopen schools sometimes found that their plans were superseded by governors and state health officials.

Heidi Sipe, the superintendent in Umatilla, Ore., a rural district that serves mostly Hispanic and low-income students, remembered releasing a video detailing a complex reopening plan for her district in the fall of 2020, only for the governor to announce shortly afterward that all Oregon schools would be remote that fall based on infection rates.

“It was devastating for us,” she said. “The challenge of that was the organizational trust that was lost — because so many of our families lost faith.”

Oregon’s school strategy mirrored a cautious approach to the virus more broadly in many Democratic states. “I’m proud overall of our response,” said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon’s state health officer, who noted that Oregon had one of the lower Covid mortality rates in the country.

But research now suggests that keeping schools closed was not a significant factor in slowing the virus, particularly after other parts of society were up and running. More people died in some Republican regions, Dr. O’Leary said, “not because the schools were open, but because they didn’t wear masks and didn’t get vaccinated.”

Would leaders make different decisions today?

Almost everyone in education acknowledges that extended school closures were damaging. Academic achievement plummeted and has not recovered. Student absence rates are double their prepandemic levels. And remote learning pushed children further into screens and away from learning and play in the physical world.

But even today there is not broad consensus about whether the lengthy closures were necessary.

Brent Jones, superintendent of Seattle Public Schools, said he was “not apologetic” about his system’s 18-month period of virtual and hybrid learning, one of the longest in the country.

“I saw it as a forced opportunity to step back,” he said. “We were called upon, frankly, to expand our mission to include many other things: nutritional, social, emotional, mental health. There was a cry for support. Schools stepped into that gap.”

Seattle also made investments in ventilation that he said could help keep classrooms open during another pandemic.

In some other cities, ventilation remains a sticking point, particularly in old school buildings.

“We would insist that the buildings be safe before they are occupied,” said Arthur G. Steinberg, president of the teachers’ union in Philadelphia, where dozens of school buildings do not have updated H.V.A.C. systems.

Still, he and others said that they would be more apt to consider school closures on a building-by-building basis, rather than pushing for systemwide shutdowns.

Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, acknowledged that some city schools “could have probably been fine” reopening sooner, but noted that they tended to be the ones in more affluent neighborhoods.

“How do you continue to create a policy that marginalizes people who have been marginalized for years?” she asked in an interview late last year.

Ms. Weingarten, the national union leader, said that in a future crisis, she would urge local unions to come up with their own safety plans, and to be creative in order to educate children in person — an approach many parents were desperate for during the Covid shutdowns.

If school buildings do not have proper ventilation, she said, “then you find other buildings within the city.”

Still, politics, not logistics, may be the biggest obstacle in a future health emergency.

Public trust in science and schools fractured during the pandemic and remains low, especially among Republicans. Governors and state leaders could once again split along partisan lines. If anything, over the last five years, Americans’ views about vaccines, public health and education have only become more divided and politicized.

Some of the mistrust seeded by the pandemic has spilled over into other arenas of education.

Debates about schools now often focus on how race, gender and American history are taught. Republicans are pushing new state laws to provide public money for families to send their children to private schools. The number of children nationwide who are using some form of private-school voucher has doubled since 2019, to more than 1 million.

Partisans on both the right and left say those trends might not have taken off without the widespread anger and frustration arising from how the education establishment handled Covid-19.

Public health experts caution that their guidance in a future health crisis would depend on the particular disease. A future pathogen could be far more dangerous for children or teachers than Covid-19 was.

“We don’t know what could be coming,” said Sean Bulson, the superintendent of schools in Harford County, Md., outside Baltimore. But based on what was learned over the past five years, he said, “our threshold for closing probably got higher.”

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Education

Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift

Published

2 days ago

December 12, 2025

Press Room

Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift

The U.S. military
is broken. Young
Americans want
to fix it.

Bailey Baumbick traded a
career as a national security
consultant to build tech
solutions
for the challenges
she saw at the Pentagon.

Elias Rosenfeld left a job
in social
impact consulting
to start a career aimed

at revitalizing America’s
industrial base.

Lee Kantowski spent
eight years in the
Army before
switching to defense tech,
where
he hopes to fix the
military’s outdated tools.

Opinion

The Editorial Board

a New

Definition of

Service

By The Editorial BoardThe editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Bailey Baumbick knew she wanted to serve her country when she graduated from Notre Dame in 2021. Ms. Baumbick, a 26-year-old from Novi, Mich., didn’t enlist in the military, however. She enrolled in business school at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ms. Baumbick is part of a growing community in the Bay Area that aims to bring high-tech dynamism to the lumbering world of the military. After social media companies and countless lifestyle start-ups lost their luster in recent years, entrepreneurs are being drawn to defense tech by a mix of motivations: an influx of venture capital, a coolness factor and the start-up ethos, which Ms. Baumbick describes as “the relentless pursuit of building things.”

There’s also something deeper: old-fashioned patriotism, matched with a career that serves a greater purpose.

In college Ms. Baumbick watched her father, a Ford Motor Company executive, lead the company’s sprint to produce Covid-19 ventilators and personal protective equipment for front-line health care workers. “I’ve never been more inspired by how private sector industry can have so much impact for public sector good,” she said.

Ford’s interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic hark back to a time when public-private partnerships were commonplace. During World War II, leaders of America’s biggest companies, including Ford, halted business as usual to manufacture weapons for the war effort.

The Covid-19 pandemic drove public-private partnerships, such as Ford’s decision to produce ventilators needed by patients and hospitals.

For much of the 20th century, the private and public sectors were tightly woven together. In 1980, nearly one in five Americans were veterans. By 2022, that figure had shrunk to one in 16. Through the 1980s, about 70 percent of the companies doing business with the Pentagon were also leaders in the broader U.S. economy. That’s down to less than 10 percent today. The shift away from widespread American participation in national security has left the Department of Defense isolated from two of the country’s great assets: its entrepreneurial spirit and technological expertise.

Recent changes in Silicon Valley are bringing down those walls. Venture capital is pouring money into defense tech; annual investment is up from $7 billion in 2015 to some $80 billion in 2025. The Pentagon needs to seize this opportunity, and find ways to accelerate its work with start-ups and skilled workers from the private sector. It should expand the definition of what it means to serve and provide more flexible options to those willing to step in.

The military will always need physically fit service members. But we are headed toward a future where software will play a bigger role in armed conflict than hardware, from unmanned drones and A.I.-driven targeting to highly engineered cyber weapons and space-based systems. These missions will be carried out by service members in temperature-controlled rooms rather than well armed troops braving the physical challenges of the front line.

For all the latent opportunity in Silicon Valley and beyond, the Trump administration has been uneven in embracing the moment. Stephen Feinberg, the deputy secretary of defense, is a Wall Street billionaire who is expanding the Pentagon’s ties with businesses. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, his “warrior ethos” and exclusionary recruitment have set back the effort to build a military for the future of war.

America has the chance to reshape our armed forces for the conflicts ahead, and we have the rare good fortune of being able to do that in peacetime.

Elias Rosenfeld had been at Stanford for only a month and a half, but he already looked right at home at a recent job fair for students interested in pursuing defense tech, standing in a relaxed posture, wearing beaded bracelets and a sweater adorned with a single sunflower. Rather than use his time in Stanford’s prestigious business school to build a fintech app or wellness brand, Mr. Rosenfeld has set his sights on helping to rebuild the industrial base on which America’s military relies.

It’s a crucial mission for a country that is getting outbuilt by China, and Mr. Rosenfeld brings a unique commitment to it. Born in Venezuela, he came to the United States at age 6 and draws his patriotism from that country’s experience with tyranny and his Jewish heritage. “Without a strong, resilient America, I might not be here today,” Mr. Rosenfeld says. Working on industrial renewal, he says, is a way to “start delivering as a country so folks feel more inclined and passionate to be more patriotic.”

Not on Mr. Rosenfeld’s agenda: enlisting in the military. In an earlier era, he might have been tempted by a wider suite of options for service. In 1955 the U.S. government nearly doubled the maximum size of the military’s ready reserve forces, from 1.5 million to 2.9 million, in part by giving young men the chance to spend six months in active duty training. Today the U.S. ready reserve numbers just over a million.

The Pentagon should broaden its sense of service as fewer younger Americans meet the military’s eligibility requirements.

Other countries provide a model for strengthening the reserves. In Sweden, the military selects the top 5 percent or so of 18-year-olds eligible to serve in the active military for up to 15 months, followed by membership in the reserve for 10 years. The model is so effective that recruits compete for spots, and according to The Wall Street Journal, “former conscripts are headhunted by the civil service and prized by tech companies.”

America’s leaders have argued for a generation that the military’s volunteer model is superior to conscription in delivering a well-prepared force. The challenge is maintaining recruiting and getting the right service members for every mission. There are some examples of the Pentagon successfully luring new, tech-savvy recruits. Since last year, top college students have been training to meet the government’s growing need for skilled cybersecurity professionals. The Cyber Service Academy, a scholarship-for-service program, covers the full cost of tuition and educational expenses in exchange for a period of civilian employment within the Defense Department upon graduation. Scholars work in full-time, cyber-related positions.

The best incentive for enlisting may have nothing to do with service, but the career opportunities that are promised after.

It was a foregone conclusion that Lee Kantowski would become an Army officer. One of his favorite high school teachers had served, and his hometown, Lawton, Okla., was a military town, a place where enlisting was commonplace. Mr. Kantowski attended West Point and, in the eight years after graduating, went on tours across the world. Now he’s getting an M.B.A. at U.C. Berkeley, co-founded a defense tech club with Ms. Baumbick there and works part-time at a start-up building guidance devices that turn dumb bombs into smart ones.

The military needs recruits like Mr. Kantowski who want to support defense in and out of uniform. Already, nearly one million people who work for the Department of Defense are civilians, supplemented by a similar number of contractors who straddle public and private sectors. Both paths could be expanded.

A rotating-door approach carries some risk to military cohesion and readiness. The armed services are not just another job: Soldiers are asked to put themselves in danger’s way, even outside combat zones. America still needs men and women who are willing to sign up for traditional tours of duty.

The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps serves as the largest source of commissioned officers for the U.S. military. For more than five decades, R.O.T.C. has paid for students to pursue degree programs — accompanied by military drills and exercises — and then complete three to 10 years of required service after graduation. In 1960 alone, Stanford and M.I.T. each graduated about 100 R.O.T.C. members. Today, that figure is less than 20 combined. The Army has recently closed or reorganized programs at 84 campuses and may cut funding over the next decade.

This is exactly the wrong call. R.O.T.C. programs should be strengthened and expanded, not closed or merged.

The U.S. Army is closing or reorganizing Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs across the country.

It remains true that the volunteer force has become a jobs program for many Americans looking for a ladder to prosperity. It’s an aspect of service often more compelling to enlistees than the desire to fight for their country. In the era of artificial intelligence and expected job displacement, enlistment could easily grow.

Most military benefits have never been more appealing, with signing and retention bonuses, tax-free housing and food allowances, subsidized mortgages, low-cost health care, universal pre-K, tuition assistance and pensions. The Department of Defense and Congress need to find ways to bolster these benefits and their delivery, where service members often find gaps.

Standardizing post-service counseling and mentorship could help. Expanding job training programs like Skillbridge, which pairs transitioning service members with private sector internships, could also improve job prospects. JPMorgan has hired some 20,000 veterans across the country since creating an Office of Military & Veterans Affairs in 2011; it has also helped create a coalition of 300 companies dedicated to hiring vets.

When veterans land in promising companies — or start their own — it’s not just good for them. It’s also good for America. Rylan Hamilton and Austin Gray, two Navy veterans, started Blue Water Autonomy last year with the goal of building long-range drone ships that could help the military expand its maritime presence without the costs, risks and labor demands of deploying American sailors.

Blue Water Autonomy, founded and staffed by Navy veterans, is building fully autonomous naval vessels capable of operating at sea for months at a time.

Mr. Gray, a former naval intelligence officer who worked in a drone factory in Ukraine, said Blue Water’s vessels will one day do everything from ferrying cargo to carrying out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. This summer, the company raised $50 million to construct a fully autonomous ship stretching 150 feet long.

Before dawn on a Wednesday morning in October, military packs filled with supplies and American flags sat piled on a dewy field near the edge of Stanford University’s campus. Some of the over 900 attendees at a conference on defense tech gathered around an active-duty soldier studying at the school. The glare of his head lamp broke through the darkness as he rallied the group of students, founders, veterans and investors for a “sweat equity” workout.

“Somewhere, a platoon worked out at 0630 to start their day,” he said. “This conference is all about supporting folks like them, so we are going to start our day the same way.” The group set off for Memorial Church at the center of campus, sharing the load of heavy packs, flags and equipment along the way.

A group of students, founders, veterans and investors participate in a run during a defense tech conference at Stanford University.

That attitude is a big change for the Bay Area, not just from the days of 1960s hippie sit-ins but also from the early days of the tech revolution, when Silicon Valley was seen as a bastion of government-wary coders and peaceniks. Now it’s open for business with the Defense Department. “The excitement is there, the concern is there, the passion is there and the knowledge is there,” says Ms. Baumbick.

There are some risks to tying America’s military more closely to the tech-heavy private sector. Companies don’t always act in the country’s national interest. Elon Musk infamously limited the Ukrainian military’s access to its Starlink satellites, preventing them being used to help in a battle with Russian forces in 2022. Private companies are also easier for adversaries to penetrate and influence than the government.

Yet in order to prevent wars, or win them, we must learn to manage the risks of overlap between civilian and military spheres. The private sector’s newly rekindled interest in the world of defense is a generational chance to build the military that Americans need.

Portraits by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times; Carlos Osorio/Associated Press; Mike Segar/Reuters; Maddy Pryor/Princeton University; Kevin Wicherski/Blue Water Autonomy; Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times (2).

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Published Dec. 12, 2025

Education

Video: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

Published

5 days ago

December 8, 2025

Press Room

Video: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

new video loaded: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

transcript

One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

One hundred children who had been kidnapped from a Catholic school in northwestern Nigeria last month were released on Sunday. This is part of a larger trend of kidnappings in Nigeria, where victims are released in exchange for ransom.

: “Medical checkup will be very, very critical for them. And then if anything is discovered, any laboratory investigation is conducted and something is discovered, definitely they will need health care.” My excitement is that we have these children, 100 of them, and by the grace of God, we are expecting the remaining half to be released very soon.”
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One hundred children who had been kidnapped from a Catholic school in northwestern Nigeria last month were released on Sunday. This is part of a larger trend of kidnappings in Nigeria, where victims are released in exchange for ransom.

By Jamie Leventhal

December 8, 2025