Education

Would Schools Close in a Future Pandemic?

Published

1 year 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.”

Click to comment

Education

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Education

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”

Education

Today, In Short

Published

2 days ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

One of my favorite podcasts is “So True With Caleb Hearon,” hosted by Hearon, a comedian. He recently appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. Having grown up, as Hearon put it, “fat, gay and poor” in rural Missouri, he never dreamed of booking the role “a million girls would kill for.”

Here’s what you need to know

Middle East: Iran said yesterday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Washington is still awaiting Tehran’s response.
California: Last night was the final televised debate before the primary for the state’s governor. The face-off between seven candidates was tame at first, but they eventually furiously attacked one another. See what went down.
Hantavirus: Should you worry? Public health officials say the threat to the general public remains low based on what we know. Read more about the hantavirus.
Jeffrey Epstein: A federal judge released a suicide note believed to be written by the convicted sex offender that had been sealed for years.
Ted Turner: Turner, the media mogul, yachtsman and creator of CNN, died yesterday at his home in Florida. He was 87.

On an online note …

A few things you didn’t really need to know but now do:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Guy Goma’s BBC appearance became an early viral internet moment. Goma thought he was interviewing for a job when he suddenly he found himself on air. He pulled it off much better than I could have.
How are people getting their information about health and wellness? For at least half of U.S. adults under 50, it’s through influencers or podcasters, according to a new analysis.
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, has been charged with shooting at an alligator during a livestream.

The New York Knicks hung on to the series lead in a 108-102 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers. Game 3 is set for tomorrow in Philadelphia.