Learning As We Go

handful of classmates, or they'll be home tethered to their chromebooks. Today, with the help of trade Offs, a podcast about our costly, complicated, and counterintuitive health care system, we explore how educators and families are navigating what we know and don't know about the risks of restarting school during a pandemic. From the Anna Burke Studio at the University of Pennsylvania. A conversation with Brown University economist Emily Auster about the tough choices

schools and families are facing this fall. Dan Gorenstein reports, so Emily, we've seen lots of places, including big districts like Philadelphia, Houston, and Chicago, opt to open online this fall, while other places and even whole states are opening in person. In the broadest sense, what's driving schools to go the online route? So I think there's basically two things. So one is this decision feels safe from a public health

standpoint when we are so focused on COVID transmission. It feels like, you know, if we open in people around, then there will be some transmission, and the safest thing is to not open at all, and so they'll be less COVID. I think the other piece of it is that what a lot of school districts are struggling with is the realization that if they do open in person, there's a chance that they will have to at some point go back to be remote if the situation gets worse.

And I think thinking about that transition and how one could manage that, that's really complicated. And I think that for many places, this is the thing which we may have to do anyway, so we want to start there. So I think I think all of those things are going on. Emily has built her career on helping people, often parents, making better choices with better data. When it comes to schools opening online, Emily worries too many districts are focused on COVID concerns and paying less attention to

the downsides to online learning. Emily keeping schools closed has lots of repercussions. That's walked through a couple of them. First, many, if not most school districts went remote in the spring. What's the data suggest that actually happened to those students? Did learning end up suffering? I know in the case of my uh soon to be fifteen year old and

soon to be thirteen year old, it did. Yeah, I mean I think certainly if you talk to parents, they will tell you that their kids did not learn as much in the spring as they think that they would have if they had been in school. And you know, we do have a little bit of data on this. I think the best evidence comes from this company called zern Zerne is an online program that walks kids through math lessons, and kids across the country used it before

we all went online. Starting in the spring, lesson completion dropped In district's with the lowest income levels, lessons dropped. So we're seeing even in something where it was already a computerized experience, you would think it would be relatively straightforward to poured into doing it at home, but it really tanked. How comfortable and confident are you to site Zerne and say, yeah, this probably is a leading indicator to suggest learning really did suffer across the country. That

is the sharpest piece of data. What's useful about it is it aligns with a lot of what people are saying anecdotally if you talk to teachers in school districts, or if you look at numbers like what share of kids logged on to online learning, it's not and it's not close to the share of kids who are showing up in person. So I think we have a bunch of these pieces of data, and almost everything we see

suggests that learning suffered during the spring period. So if we accept the Zerne findings as indicative of what's actually happening, the downside to online learning comes into sharper focus. Not only is coursework getting stunted, but the class and race inequities and schools are wide needed. The question are those downsides worth the public health benefits? Emily says, based on research she's done this summer looking at camps and childcare programs,

this may be a false choice. We actually really kind of need to know what happens when we bring people together. Um, and so I I, at some point early on in the pandemic said, you know, I think we can probably learn something from summer camps because the age range is sort of similar. There are other things that are not similar,

but there's you know, something potentially we can learn. So I've been collecting some data, which is I just want to be clear, not random, And in the camps and childcare settings that I have data on, and we actually have very very low infection rates, we can sort of talk and we should talk about kind of counter examples, but I think there are certainly examples of places that have kind of been open with kids that have been saved. Okay, so the summer camp data suggests that maybe outbreaks aren't

as threatening as some people think. But we've seen schools open over the summer and there are cases of people getting infected and then the schools shutting down. Doesn't that sort of buttress this argument that maybe we're safer just

going online and not even sort of opening Pandora's box. Yeah. So, I mean, I think one thing that's very frustrating about this is that we don't have a systematic data on the school so it is definitely true that as places have opened, there have been cases, multiple cases in schools, places where it looks like there is some spread pretty

clearly going on in the school. One of the things we've learned, for example, from Georgia is if you bring back a high school full on basically no precautions, you don't require people to mask, there's no distancing, you have football, and the positivity rate is you know, fifteen percent in the area, then it seems like that's a way to get some COVID spread. That's not actually the same as opening a socially distanced, fully masked kindergarten or first grade

in New York City or in New Hampshire. And it's not the same because of the differences in prevalence rate. It's not the same because of the differences in precautions,

it's not the same because of the differences in age groups. Emily, based on the conversations you're having with WOOL officials, are you getting the sense that people are making decisions based on the outbreak level in their communities, or do you find that most school districts are just responding with this sort of worst case scenario fear and saying, you know what,

let's just go dow online learning. The people that I have talked to in school districts are incredibly thoughtful about this, and they are trying to do everything they can to simultaneously serve their students and also do it safely, and they are really really confused about what to do, and

the guidance that they get is really variable. So you know, people in Iowa have been told basically, you need to be fully in person unless the positivity rate is above and then there are people who are being told, you know, you absolutely cannot be in person and all of the positivity rate is above two. So I think that it is just a tremendous amount of frustration and kind of feeling of being like a little abandoned honestly in making

these decisions. Of course, opening up physically or remotely is all new. There's little specific guidance at the federal level, meaning there's no clear path forward, leaving schools, teachers, parents and students groping in the dark. But Emily hopes to change that. In August, Emily announced she was partnering with schools superintendents and data wongs to begin gathering evidence on schools that do reopen to help the Chicago's, Philadelphia's, Houston's,

and everyone else who's opening online. There are a lot of places that are opening online that are hoping to open in person later. They're waiting to see what happens with the places that are open in person, so they can try to figure out is it safe to open in person? And win is going to be safe to open in person. But they can't figure that out because they don't know what's happening with the places that are open.

And that's kind of the meta point of we've sort of fallen down on learning the kind of information that we would need to make good choices here. Both my folks were teachers, and my mom, who's still with us, would not be psychedific. I didn't ask a question about the safety of teachers. What do we know about the risk that teachers and other adults in the building are taking with in person learning. We don't have a lot of data. But what I will say is probably the

best day I've seen is from Sweden. I think there's a bit from Denmark too, So in Sweden they kept schools open the whole time, and so you can look at given that that happened. Our teachers a high risk group. So there are some groups where they make up a pretty large share of the hospitalizations relative to their size in the labor market. So for example, bus driver and food service worker in Sweden were very high risk professions,

but teacher was not. That data kind of suggests that, you know, teaching is not an especially high risk profession. But you know, I think that we have a huge uphill battle in trying to work with teachers and with unions to try to both convince them but also you know, make them make people feel safe. I don't think we want people coming into schools feeling unsafe and anxious. We need to figure out how are we going to make clear the ways that they are going to be protected.

How do you think we should be dealing with this situation, Emily, where there's just a lack of good evidence, there's a lack of guidance, there's a lot on the line, and there's a ton of emotion. What have you learned as an academic, as a researcher, as a writer, as a thinker about how to juggle things that are going on

right now. One of the things people are really struggling with is once they make a decision, they rarely feel good about it because no decisions are good, and that I think has been a very valuable thing to name for people. Then I think that knowing that may actually make it easier for people to move forward because they are not continually expecting that somehow the next moment, but they'll feel great about the choice understanding that the trade

offs exactly that there are trade offs. Somebody should have a podcast about that, I think. So that seems like a really great name, really good name. Amazing. So to wrap this up, Emily, I'm curious what you're expecting to see over the first ten twelve weeks of the fall when it comes to school. So I would say what I suspect will happen is that some places will open in some places will not. The places that open will

stay open pretty much regardless. I think the places that do not open will not open for the whole semester. So I think it will be very difficult for places to transition from remote into in person. It sort of feels like, in some ways the worst of both worlds, that we have a bunch of places open that kind of shouldn't be. From a public health stamp point and a bunch of places that don't open that could from a public health standpoint, So we're losing the learning but

not really protecting public health. Emily hopes by working with superintendents and principles, data will finally start to make its way to school leaders in the hopes of arming these districts with reliable information to make incredibly difficult decisions about whether to physically open up schools. Again, the project may lack the heft that comes with federal guidance, but it beats more than thirteen thousand school districts making decisions with

very little data. I'm Dan Gorstein and this is Trailers. That was Dan gost on, a segment brought to us by the podcast trade Offs. If you like this story, you can hear more from the trade Offs podcast by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts, or by going to trade offs dot org. Trade Offs is produced by Sabrina Ms, Ryan Levy, Vicki Stern, Andrew Parella, and Leslie Walker. Music by Thy Siderman, unheard music concepts, Blue Dot sessions, and miscellaneous.

And that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one D and twenty bureaus around the world. Visit Bloomberg dot com, slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Tophor foreheads Jordan Gaspoure, Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our

editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.