I got the feedback today that my views on schools were too confident

I will die on this hill; hold to me to it

School closure will be the absolute worst public policy decision for the generation to come

The most discriminatory, net neg & cruel

It will be found to have made nearly no dent in the spread of the virus

The risks to teachers and staff will be found to be modest & modifiable

But the damage to kids and the very institution of public schools will be cataclysmic
The stories of undetected child abuse will be so powerful that every person who thinks it is reasonable to close schools, in this irrational way we have done in the US, will change their tune overnight
The damage to upward mobility will fall along class and racial lines, and this country will be more feudal
The fate of the nation itself-- democracy and those who participate in it-- will be made vulnerable.
And the teachers unions will be held responsible for their irrational demands and stonewalling, and I am not sure they will survive the public reckoning

I am confident in these predictions. Screenshot it.
I will be more specific. There will be just a single 60 minutes episode where just 4 kids describe the abuse they were subjected too, while trapped with the abuser, and public schools refused to open, in a place with low covid positivity, & every American's blood will boil over
I am willing to bet one kid will say
"no one came to help me"

and the show will talk about how the case positivity rate was low, and quote some repentent person, and the public sentiment will shift overnight
Someone will say "it made no sense to close these schools" "If we had opened them, this might not have happened"

And it will be like the Iraq war.
Many will be on the wrong side of history.
You only support closed schools
You only think it is reasonable
Because of availability bias
When that is broken, your spirit will break

More from Education

We've been falsely told 'schools are safe', 'don't drive community transmission', & teachers don't have a higher risk of infection repeatedly by govt & their advisors- to justify some of the most negligent policies in history. 🧵


data shows *both* primary & secondary school teachers are at double the risk of confirmed infection relative to comparable positivity in the general population. ONS household infection data also clearly show that children are important sources of transmission.

Yet, in the parliamentary select meeting today, witnesses like Jenny Harries repeated the same claims- that have been debunked by the ONS data, and the data released by the @educationgovuk today. How many lives have been lost to these lies? How many more people have long COVID?

has repeatedly pointed out errors & gaps in the ONS reporting of evidence around risk of infection among teachers- and it's taken *months* to get clarity on this. The released data are a result of months of campaigning by her, the @NEU and others.

Rather than being transparent about the risk of transmission in school settings & mitigating this, the govt (& many of its advisors) has engaged in dismissing & denying evidence that's been clear for a while. Evidence from the govt's own surveys. And global evidence.

Why?

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