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It’s an excellent afternoon to be a treasurer for a private school, or an accelerationist seeking to hollow out public support for the government-run education system.<\/p>\n
That’s because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under pressure from the most teachers-union-friendly White House since at least the 1970s, just\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0its long-awaited school reopening guidelines, which include the core recommendation that all schools\u2014regardless of age level or ventilation standards or community spread of COVID-19\u2014maintain social distancing of at least six feet.<\/p>\n The CDC’s “science-based reopening” guidance includes five key considerations, presented in order of emphasis: 1) mask-wearing, 2) social distancing, 3) handwashing, 4) cleaning, and 5) contact tracing. Director Rochelle Walensky in a conference call emphasized “prioritizing the first two,” which means that in every school\u2014including ones that are already open, using less stringent standards\u2014there should be student distancing of “at least six feet,” accomplished if need be by “cohorting or podding of students.”<\/p>\n This six-feet rule, first\u00a0promulgated<\/a>\u00a0by the CDC at the height of pandemic uncertainty last March, at a time when people were still wiping down groceries and it was hard to even fathom a room full of kids wearing masks, means in practice that adherents will be open in part-time “hybrid” settings indefinitely. It is for that reason that, ever since better research on kids and COVID-19 began accumulating last\u00a0summer<\/a>, pediatricians and infectious disease specialists have been recommending that the rule be relaxed.<\/p>\n “In many school settings, 6 feet between students is not feasible without drastically limiting the number of students,” the American Academy of Pediatrics\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0last June. “Some countries have been able to successfully reopen schools after first controlling community-wide spread of SARS-CoV-2 while using 3 feet of distance between students without increases in community spread\u2026.Schools should weigh the benefits of strict adherence to a 6-feet spacing rule between students with the potential downside if remote learning is the only alternative.”<\/p>\n Professors Joseph G. Allen and Sara Bleich from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health were blunt about the negative effects of distance-mandated hybrid and remote learning in a November\u00a0Washington Post<\/a><\/em>\u00a0op-ed: “The requirement for six feet of distancing has forced many schools to limit the number of students attending in person due to space constraints and thus has become a key factor keeping millions of kids home. That’s a mistake.”<\/p>\n The authors continued:<\/p>\n Six feet is not a magical cutoff. It has a weak scientific basis, coming from a fundamental misunderstanding going back decades that the tiny droplets we exhale when we breathe and talk will fall to the ground within six feet.<\/p>\n A recent evaluation of\u00a0172 studies from 16 countries<\/a>\u00a0found a significant reduction in risk with distancing of at least three feet, but no additional benefit at six feet\u00a0so long as baseline risk is low enough<\/em>\u2026.<\/p>\n The risks from covid-19 in schools are manageable. The risks to kids being out of school, however, are escalating rapidly. For the sake of our children, it’s time for more scientifically justified distancing guidelines in the classroom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Two-thirds of the 175 pediatric disease specialists polled by\u00a0The New York Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0just this week said that making schools hybrid to fulfill distancing requirements is a bad idea. “School transmissions will remain close to zero and cohorts are unnecessary” as long as everyone stays masked, U.C. San Francisco Director of COVID Response Jeanne Ann Noble told the\u00a0Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n Added University of Colorado pediatric emergency physician Lisa Abuogi: “Children’s learning and emotional and, in some cases, physical health is being severely impacted by being out of school\u2026.I spend part of my clinical time in the E.R., and the amount of mental distress we are seeing in children related to schools is off the charts.”<\/p>\n So if infectious disease and pediatric scientists are heavily in favor of relaxing the six-feet requirement, and if thousands of schools in the United States and around the world are already providing in-school instruction with smaller social distancing without becoming the kind of “superspreader events<\/a>” that American teachers unions have repeatedly scaremongered about, why did the lead infectious disease research agency in the federal government come out with guidelines so indifferent to science and harmful to children?<\/p>\n A\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0first published Thursday\u00a0<\/strong>gives some background on how the scientific method has been laundered through the political process:<\/p>\n In a sign of how carefully the administration is tending to the many stakeholders, the CDC met with more than 70 organizations as it crafted the upcoming guidelines, according to a person familiar with the outreach who was not authorized to discuss it. Groups ranged from the country’s two major teachers unions \u2014 whose presidents met directly with Biden’s CDC head \u2014 to organizations focused on children with disabilities, parent groups and even a group focused on charter schools.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Stakeholder science<\/a>\u00a0it is!<\/p>\n The federal government is not in charge of local schools. Institutions, especially in the private sector, that are already open five days a week are not likely to ratchet back as a result of today’s guidance. But the six-feet rule will likely have an outsize influence, particularly in Democratic-controlled, big-city public school districts that have been disproportionately shuttered. Why?<\/p>\n Because teachers unions say so, that’s why.<\/p>\n American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten\u00a0turned on a dime<\/a>\u00a0after the November victory of President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump, going from being a staunch,\u00a0doom-mongering<\/a>\u00a0opponent of reopening, to a\u00a0we-can-do-this-if-we-spend-a-lot-of-money<\/a>\u00a0advocate. Notably, despite impressing the credulous likes of\u00a0The New York Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0with her pro-opening bravery, when the rubber has hit the road in local union refusals to reopen schools, she has been\u00a0steadfastly<\/a>\u00a0on the\u00a0side<\/a>\u00a0of the shutterers.<\/p>\n Weingarten and National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle, both of whom met with First Lady (and NEA member) Jill Biden on\u00a0day two<\/a>\u00a0of her husband’s presidency, have been foreshadowing the CDC guidelines as a key step in getting teachers back in school buildings. “I think if we don’t have a more contagious variant, if we get the funding, we get the guidance, we could safely reopen the majority of K-8 schools in the first 100 days,” she told\u00a0T<\/em>he Washington Post<\/em>. “That’s April. I think that goal is doable.”<\/p>\n While that very conditional timetable is itself a\u00a0significant backsliding<\/a>\u00a0from Biden’s original 100-day vow (for instance, public high schools simply no longer exist in the reopening vision of the administration or its union allies), pay special attention to the one-two punch of social distancing guidelines + money. Here’s Weingarten giving up the game this week in a\u00a0USA Today<\/a><\/em>\u00a0CDC pre-write:<\/p>\n If the guidelines include physical distancing, as she expects, that means full schooling can’t happen this school year unless schools can find 20% to 30% more space and more educators, Weingarten said.<\/p>\n “What you will have is, you’ll have less and less remote full time and you’ll have more and more kids come in for a certain portion of time,” she said. “Will we see this year that everything is back to what we saw in September 2019? I don’t see that happening.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The\u00a0$200 billion K-12 package<\/a>\u00a0that the administration seeks in its $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill includes around $160 billion, or 80 percent, for personnel. Social distancing requirements make extra hiring necessary. The nifty\u00a0political dance<\/a>\u00a0that Biden and the unions are attempting to pull off is to be hailed as empathetic allies of families even while leveraging\u00a0urgent parental reopening desire<\/a>\u00a0into a\u00a0massive union payday<\/a>\u00a0without strings attached.<\/p>\n It’s a taxpayer heist in plain sight, while kids suffer massive educational and emotional setbacks from a virus that isn’t\u00a0on balance<\/a>\u00a0making them sick.<\/p>\n Public sector unions have long enjoyed the job-creating utility of the ratio\u2014patients per nurse, kids per teacher, prisoner per guard, and so on. The CDC, whose scientific pronouncements about schools have twice been\u00a0trimmed back<\/a>\u00a0by the administration’s\u00a0political appointees<\/a>, has delivered to teachers unions one of the cleverest ratios yet.<\/p>\n By suggesting that desks be six feet apart instead of three, even as infections and hospitalizations continue to recede, this scientific body has openly disregarded science and smoothed the way for the government to hire more staff into a system\u00a0hemorrhaging students<\/a>. Unless this guidance is revoked, and soon, public schools in big cities likely will not be open full time even by September 2021. For many families, perhaps including my own, the prospect of having three consecutive school years disfigured by the pandemic response will be the final straw.<\/p>\n