Season 2, Episode 17: The politics of COVID and schools

Foreign. Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. It's great to see you three weeks in a row now. And I'll just report to you that it's the simplest of things. But I confess, for me, getting a haircut over the weekend, some five or six months, I think after my last one has me feeling like spring is in the air. It's time for a fresh start. And I kind of don't care that all my hair is missing. I just feel good with it off.

Well, I think you look fantastic, Michael. And I had forgotten what your normal hair actually looks like. So it's good to see you again. And I'm resonating with those feelings for the first time in a very long time. I've been able to start planning for the future and next year with our team. And what used to be routine that we would plan well in advance now sort of feels like a luxury after this year of being mostly responsive to just constantly changing, totally uncertain day to day realities of being in the pandemic. And while we still have a really long way to go, I noticeably feel a difference in our ability to think long term strategically, which is honestly, I believe, exactly what is needed after the year we've been having. And so, like you, I'm excited to be together three weeks in a row. It's always great to talk with you, Michael. And we get another special guest today. So I'm really excited about that. You know, during these these three weeks, we have really been trying to tap into some experts in key areas in education to talk about their work at a deeper level.

Yeah. And we've obviously, as we mentioned last week as well, we started noticing that a number of topics kept recurring in our discussions. And so we wanted to set aside these weeks to do a deeper dive into them. Last week we had a really rich conversation, of course, with the co founders of Transcend Education, Elon and Jeff, and they really illuminated what it takes for schools to design for the future and why that's so critical, especially right now. And next week, just to preview that for folks, we'll be talking with Marguerite Rosa, who's a leader in the world of education finance. And I'm fascinated personally to hear what she's learning and thinking about when it comes to the significant federal dollars in particular that will be flowing to schools and how they can best be leveraged.

Diane, certainly we heard from Elon and Jeff ways that such funds could be used wisely. And so I'm interested, like you, in connecting those two conversations. And I'm really curious to understand what's actually happening out there in the world of finance. But before we get to that, I'd love to introduce our guest for today. John Bailey is with us. He has been a long time fixture on education and policy on that scene, going all the way back to when he was the director of Education Technology for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, served in the Bush administration for several years in both the Department of Education and the White House.

And Diane, I should make a note here that it was John who actually took me for a meal in the White House mess for the first time. Not even my own brother who is actually serving in the administration at the same time. So always appreciative to John for that.

Well, Michael, I've personally never been to the White House mess even once, but the name does strike me as not the best branding decision in the world. I, however, had the good fortune of sharing a fun meal or two with John over the years, during which I always learn something and I always laugh and John has some of the cutest dogs in the world, I will add. And so there is that.

So this is true. But before we go too far astray, excuse the pun, in seriousness, I'll just add, Diane, that John has also served in several roles with some of the major foundations in education reform, the Gates foundation, as well as currently with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Walton Family foundation, in addition to stints with Excellence in Education, he was one of the co founders of Whiteboard Advisors and currently also the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank. And so he's seen a lot and done a lot of impressive work in the field of education. And John, welcome. It is, it's so good to see you.

Welcome.

Gosh, thank you so much for having me. I'm sorry we're not doing this at the White House mess.

Well, you know, next time right when we're all back in person. But look, over the last year, we found ourselves repeatedly talking about, quote, the science of COVID and often referencing and returning to the CDC guidance for school or for a period of time, the lack thereof and the research behind it. And in fact, you know, we've referenced this stuff so often that we realized we really want to just do a deep dive into it. And so first, thank you for being here to help us think through these issues. But for those listening, it might not be obvious up front why you're the perfect person to help us through this topic. So I'd love you just to actually give your background on that, just by starting to describe the project that you've been working on basically since the pandemic began, of organizing a lot of information for all of us to help make sense of it.

Oh, great. Yeah. It's a weird. Like in my sort of eclectic background, when I worked at the Department of Commerce Back in 2005 and 2006, one of the responsibilities I had was managing the pandemic preparedness strategy for the secretary, the Secretary of Commerce, and participating in the White House working group that included Dr. Tony Fauci. And this sort of laid out the first national strategy and preparedness plan. When Covid hit, it just was oddly familiar because there were a lot of issues that we had been thinking about back then, including the role of school closures and flattening the curve. If you remember this time last year, it's all we were talking about. I was drawing on that experience and plus what grew out of some of the work for Chan Zuckerberg and for the Walton Family Foundation. Again, going back to this time last year, we were all trying to keep track of what states had closed schools. When were they going to reopen? Because if you remember, I mean, it just sounds so foreign right now, but back then it was like we had some schools are planning to reopen at the end of May, some at the end of April. And so just trying to track that, plus track all the resources, led to sort of like a daily email that went out to a couple of the funders and we extended it to another group of funders. And so there's been sort of a daily email summarizing what's been going on with COVID at the federal level, the state level, international research, and just some of the resources that have been coming up.

That's super fascinating. And I didn't even understand all the origins of that initial work, but what has come of it is your work has been really helpful and I will speak specifically for our school network and I know to many others, because you have expanded beyond that sort of daily email and and are giving information to all of us now. I'm not sure if folks realize what the day to day has looked like for school systems over the past year. Perhaps let me just share a quick example that I think will illustrate how this has been helpful. Beginning in late February, early March 2020, where you're taking us back, we formed a small team in my organization that has been monitoring federal, state and local health guidelines as well as the science and the research on from the beginning. And that team literally has worked on this every single day since the pandemic began. They provide our organization, you know, these sort of daily summaries that you're talking about to all of the school leaders and the network leaders. And we literally have people as part of their job following all of this. And even they are often needing to rely on summaries from people like you because the information is so voluminous and it is changing so frequently. And, you know, this is on top of the job that they were already doing that was super busy and crazy. And so I'm wondering, John, given your work on this project and how close you've been to it, can you give us a sense of the scope of what you've been looking at and curating? It's hard for me to even wrap my head around it at this point and sort of, you know, scope that out over the year, how it's evolved and changed over the last year. And I mean, then if you had to summarize your key takeaways from it, what would they be?

When schools began closing and all the shift to remote learning, it just changed. For a lot of the funders that I support and work with and others that I'm just working with more informally, everyone was trying to rush to what is it that they can do. There were immediate digital divide needs, There were immediate sort of resource needs in terms of making sure there were high quality online content. And then there was just trying to understand what was unfolding because, you know, and I feel like we're still in this a little bit. Like there's a Covid fog. Like, it is really hard to see two weeks ahead, much less like a month ahead, much less six months ahead. And that was very true at this point last year, where again, like, we thought, we actually thought that some schools may reopen before the end of the school year. And then all of a sudden that wasn't the case. And then it was like, what happens over the summer? And then what does fall look like? And things are just, we're changing so rapidly. On top of that, you had various federal actions that were happening, including the CARES Act. You had other federal legislation was getting debated and resources were getting put out. You had a lot of decisions getting made too, by governors. Some governors were doing statewide closures. Others were giving a lot more flexibility to schools. Just keeping track of all that was super difficult. The other thing that we were doing is that there were studies coming out around our understanding of COVID and the risks it presented for students. It answers related to whether children transmitted the virus as efficiently as adults do. That's a key issue for reopening schools because if kids are transmitting the virus, reopening schools could lead to a surge the virus in the community. It could put teachers at risk. Then there was a whole nother bucket of research around just lived experience what was happening with schools that were opening and closing in Europe. We were just trying to summarize each of those different studies. What I realized about two months ago is that those studies come out sometimes here in the United States. We get fixated on one study. There was a study that came out of Wisconsin that dominated the debate for a week. But there was no place that was aggregating all the research, just putting it out there because again, evaluating the science and making decisions based on science, it's not, it's not one study. You're often trying to look at a collective body of research. Sometimes it has contradictory conclusions and often conclusions that are far from perfect. There's always exceptions and some caveats to it. It's a lot. It's a lot. Diane, to your point, for a team within a school, for state policymakers to just try to wrap their heads and just try to get a handle on all this. We released a report about three weeks ago now, about a month ago, that just summarized 130 studies. That's what it did. It was an attempt to just list the studies and summarize it so that people could wrestle with the conclusions of each of those studies to come up with their own conclusions. But it had just struck us that no one had done that before, not the cdc, not the Department of Ed. That really put school systems leaders like yourself at a disadvantage. It put state policymakers at a disadvantage because they just were making decisions with incomplete information in many respects.

John, just to follow up on that, I'm curious, you know, now that you've published that a month ago, you're able to sit back a little bit, I think, and look at, you know, sort of what you've gleaned. But you've also been synthesizing a lot of these takeaways and articles for Education Next and elsewhere from almost day one of the pandemic. What are your big headlines or takeaways at this point with what we know now?

So I am still, I think it was absolutely right for us to close schools at this time last year. And that's because, again, going back to 2005 pandemic playbooks have always held school closures as one of the most vital strategies for slowing the spread of the virus. And the reason for that is because kids are excellent vectors of transmitting the virus. We just know this. We know this from influenza. We know this from most respiratory illnesses. We know two things. Kids tend to be the most susceptible to both catching it and having some pretty severe sort of symptoms and consequences from catching that disease. The second, they tend to spread it because they're hugging each other and they're, you know, they're just running around.

Hands are everywhere.

Yep, hands are everywhere. Exactly. And so you close schools that it slows the spread of the virus. That made sense when we knew so little about this coronavirus. What has emerged though, is a very different picture where kids are less susceptible to severe disease. And that has proven out time and time again with almost every single new study that comes out. It's not zero risk, but it's super, super low risk. The people with the highest risk tend to be the elderly and people with pre existing health conditions. Second, school closures do not seem to have slowed the transmission of the virus. It hasn't flattened the curve in the way that we thought it would this time last year. Again, that makes sense, knowing what we know now about the coronavirus. But the thing that I think has been frustrating is that the actions that we're taking from a policy standpoint, from a local standpoint, just haven't kept up with this emerging body of research or from the lessons learned from schools opening or not opening over in Europe. I think if there's anything you've seen a failure, I want to put this totally on the political leadership. It's not totally Trump, it's not totally Biden. This is the regulatory sort of body like the CDC just was, was releasing sort of contradictory guidance at times, or guidance that was like vague, right? Like you saw this with the six foot or the three foot guidance. It's like six feet when possible. Like what does that mean? Like when possible. And so anything that kind of hedges like that makes it really difficult for a school system leader like Diane to sort of operationalize it. But the other thing it's done, and this is where I think we're still living right now, is that it's created this huge trust vacuum that if you're a parent, particularly a parent from a minority family of color, you don't know who to trust. You don't know if you should trust your superintendent. You don't know if you should trust your alarmist teacher union. You don't know if you should trust the federal government. And so when you don't know who to trust, you always do the most conservative thing that's going to Be the most protective of your kid, and that's keeping your kid at home. And so, like, I think it makes sense that we've now had some schools reopening, but you have a lot of parents who don't know what to do because they don't know who to trust. And we still have this massive trust vacuum that I think is beyond just sort of the typical sort of political polarization that we also have. It doesn't make it better, but I think we have, like, a real sort of lack of trust infrastructure in the country right now.

John, I think you've really put your finger on it, and this is something Michael and I have come back to over and over and over again, which is why we wanted to do the deep dive. And I just want to go back a minute because I feel like you just said something more clearly than I've heard any person in America say it to date. And so it's worth going back and underlining and putting exclamation points by, like. I have read a ton of stuff. I have looked at all of this stuff. I have yet to hear someone say, what we know today, a year later, is that our original pandemic strategy, which was sound and smart and should have been put into place to shut schools, did not actually flatten the curve. And I don't know, Michael, have you heard anyone actually say that? I mean, which just kind of changes the whole conversation right now, if you. If you take that and you know, that's your takeaway from looking at the collective body of work and. Wow. I don't even know what to say after that, Michael.

I think it's a big statement. It's a big. Yeah, go ahead, John.

I was going to say, weirdly, what we're seeing, there's at least five studies that have come out and said the opposite, that actually reopening schools is what slowed the spread of the virus. We've seen that in Germany, another study in France, and then more recently, a study in Canada. The reason for that makes a lot of sense again, because where kids are getting infected is in the households where they're not socially distanced. They're not wearing masks, they're not doing a cleaning regiment. But the moment you started reopening schools and putting kids in place, the schools are acting as a little bit of a circuit breaker there, in part because kids are wearing masks. There's a better hygiene that's going into place and things like that. But again, the whole idea that we had that we were operating and closing schools around Last year that's been proven to not be quite as effective.

I actually want to take it from there, John, because you mentioned it before that when you were working in the Department of Commerce and with the Bush administration, you know, you were working on plans for pandemics. And so, you know, I'd love you to actually just sort of. You've sort of taken how one key assumption I think in that proved false, but was still the right move that we should have made. But I guess I'm curious, like, you know, other lessons learned that did not get applied, things that you'd like us to see, you know, prepare for going forward now? I mean, you mentioned another jaw dropping one, which is that, like, it's not necessarily the political class. It's like our institutions themselves have not done the right things in terms of how they've expressed themselves and given guidance and reacted and so forth. So I'm just sort of curious, like, where do we go from here if we're trying to prepare ourselves to not have yet, you know, another major disaster on our hands in five years from now if something else breaks out?

It's a great question. I think a couple of different things. One of the first, if you go back to some of the first original sins, if you will, of the early pandemic response, if you remember this time last year, we had problems with testing. We still have problems with COVID testing, but we had problems with some tests that were bad and they couldn't scale up testing. Testing is just super important because that tells us a lot about the virus itself. It tells us how it's spreading. It tells us if there are people who are super spreaders or vents that are super spreaders. Key differences there, because your strategies for mitigating it make a big difference. And so the lack of testing and how long it took to scale up testing is something that slowed our response. But it not just slow the response, it also slowed our ability to change the various types of mitigation measures that we needed to put in place. I think secondly to that, there was just a lack of data and information coming from the federal government. You had these amazing volunteer projects that stood up. The COVID tracking project over at the Atlantic. You had Emily Oster set up a survey with superintendents. You know, you had me with like my sort of like little mini, like very poorly designed, like Covid email update. And like, none of that should happen like you should. We shouldn't in the midst of a pandemic, be relying on volunteers. Volunteers should be complimenting a federal Response, not replacing it. And I think that if anything, going forward, you just need better data and you need better information. Because at the end of the day, these decisions are super decentralized. We saw that with our pandemic preparedness, just gaming it out back in 2005. And it's proven to be true that governors make a lot of these decisions, mayors make a lot of the decisions, but they can only make good decisions based on the data and the information that they have available. And we just need better.

Yeah, a quick question on that, which is, so is that a resource problem or is it a process problem? Does that. Does that make sense? Like, do we need more resources to get a better response, or do we need to have, like, better processes in place to centralize some of that or at least, you know, create the proper reactions?

It's a little bit of both, but I think it's a lot of process. Right. Like, again, you know, cd, if you go back to some of the early CDC guidance, the vague. The vagueness of it isn't a resource problem. That's just that. That's a problem of how they sort of communicated it. Creating independence for some of these health organizations, I think is important too, because again, when you're in a polarized country, politically, whatever President, it means 50% of the country is going to instinctively not trust what's coming out of an administration. We had that supercharged because of Trump, but it was going to be there regardless of who is a Republican or a Democrat in office. The more independence that I think some of these organizations can get, the better. But a lot of it, I think, is like, process. And some of this is not terribly expensive. Like, the fact that in October 2020, no one could tell you what percent of schools were open isn't a resource question. Like, the Department of Education has the capability of doing that over at ies, they had resources that were given to them by CARES act and other federal funds to do it. That's a process question. It's just a leadership question. And I think it's something that can be fixed going forward. The last thing, which I'm like, super glad we've seen this coming out of the American rescue plan. And also the Biden administration has put more resources behind. It is like forecasting, if you think about it. So much of our Covid data is retroactive. It's looking backwards. It's not like, which is like sort of getting a hurricane forecast of where the hurricane's been, not where it's going. And the good news is that There's a number of research groups that are trying to do better forecasting to kind of get a sense of, of if you think about, like, how Covid spread across the US it was in the Northeast this time last year, then it moved down south, and then it sort of moved up into the heartland region. We need better forecasting, the way we have forecasting for weather, to kind of help people again, like Diane, with like, planning and just trying to get some preparations in place.

That so resonates with me. I just had a conversation this morning where, you know, in California, our cases are going down. We're looking pretty good here. But in Washington state, they're on the rise. And this is the third week in a row that they're on the rise. And we're back in school there. We're trying to. But we have no visibility into the future, no guidance whatsoever. Oh, my goodness. You know, the other thing I'm thinking, Michael, we've, we, we did a bunch of conversations about the new secretary of Ed and like, what the role of that department is and how people. One of the big things they do is collect and share data. It's interesting that you're tapping back into those conversations we had. You have touched this in a couple of ways, but I'm just going to ask it a little bit more directly. John. One of the observations Michael and I have been making around the health guidance, the science and the research is that they have become very political political. During the pandemic, my board chair calls these bgos a blinding glimpse of the obvious. So I didn't just say something really brilliant or anything, but you're a political guy. Are these things actually political? I mean, you've sort of referenced some other regulatory parts. Can you just help us unpack this a little bit? I don't even. I care less about the why, but more about is it possible for science and research and expert guidance to be pulled back from that political realm? Like, how do we build back some of that trust? How can we actually do good work as a country? You know, what are your thoughts?

It's a great question. I mean, it did not help us that it was Trump. I mean, Trump who, like, does not know nuance and does not know, sort of had a message in a way that is sort of bipartisan, in a way that I think almost any other president would have. Like, I think we've seen this in the past, right? Like with response to Haiti or response to Katrina, you had presence that assembled sort of previous presidents in a bipartisan way to Help rally support or to kind of rally a country's energy and to unite us. I think we like when Trump. The demarcation point, I think, for me was back in July when Trump had a reopening schools event at the White House. And it just lacked a nuance and messaging. And people are so hardwired that if Trump said X, people go to Y automatically. And I think that just set us back in some ways tremendously. I think there's that. The second is that the New York Times just had an amazing survey that they did a story on about how your partisan leanings do impact how you filter information, that Democrats tend to overestimate the risks with COVID and Republicans tend to underestimate the risks. They do that just by asking people what is the risk of hospitalization and deaths, and then they compare it to the actual numbers. That orientation means you have very different sense of risk tolerance with incomplete information and what to do in terms of school reopenings. I think it's one of the reasons why you have Florida that really rushed to reopen schools very quickly. California, that has taken a very sort of slower approach to it. Is it possible to get out of these political ruts? I would say absolutely, but we're not going to naturally gravitate to that. It's going to require leadership that is constantly cultivating that sense and making sure we have messengers that are trusted across the political spectrum. That is so key. It's key right now with vaccine hesitancy, it's going to be key. With reopening schools, it's going to be key for anything else. Covid related is having trusted messengers across the political spectrum that people. People trust.

No, it's. It's helpful, John. I mean, I'm. I'm also thinking sort of the narrative that we tell in the. Why you take certain actions. Right. Even you saying, and Diane called it before, like, closing schools did not flatten the curve. How many people today would say that A lot of the actions we're taking are around flattening the curve as opposed to trying to stop Covid completely. Like we've sort of lost, I think, sight of even the original purpose for certain actions. So with that as prelude, I'd love to end with sort of a magic wand question, if you will, which is given everything you've seen and all that, you know, at the moment, standing here right now with still in the fog of COVID and I guess that's on a double meaning. But if you had a magic wand, you know, what would schools look like, and be doing right now and into next year?

Well, I think that the most important thing is that many of us are assuming schools are going to be able to reopen five days a week in mostly sort of normal school like conditions at the beginning of the fall. I think we should keep that assumption. We need to be also, if anything has taught us over the last year, is to plan for the worst case scenario. And we're seeing two worst case scenarios. One in which that there is a group of parents who are still very fearful and very concerned. They don't know who to trust and they are not going to feel comfortable until there's a vaccine available for their kids. And we know that a vaccine may be available for certain teenagers this summer, but for younger populations, probably late fall, maybe early winter. And so there's a group of parents that are going to just need a longer on ramp to feel comfortable before they start sending their kids back to school. That could be everything from a vaccine all the way into other things. But we have to understand what's making them hesitant and what are the ways to sort of build trust with them. That's going to be super, super key. I think one of the facets there is COVID testing. COVID testing. Because like, at the end of the day, if you just think about it, like, think about Diane and she has teachers and parents and she could say, like, look, like we've read all this research, we've done all these things, we're totally compliant with the cdc. The teacher's like, yeah, but like, how do I really know it's safe for me to come in? And it turns out, like, COVID testing. I love, like Austin Independent School District calls it assurance testing. Like it just gives, gives numbers that parents and teachers can say, okay, I see that it's working. I see that the incidence cases are low. I see that it's not spreading. I feel safer going back into school. We might need something like that for going back to school too. I also worry because, like, we as school systems have to start thinking about are we going to make the vaccine mandatory for kids? How do we deal with parents who don't want to get their kids vaccinated? There's that issue.

And then Third, what's your 22nd take on that?

I think there's. First of all, again, this is like going back to original state of not having data. We haven't been polling on this. We haven't been polling on how many parents want to have their kids vaccinated and how many people parents are Hesitant. We knew it was like about 30% of parents with just normal vaccines. So I think it's going to be a higher percentage of parents than what. What we're acknowledging right now. Again, how to win over their trust and support. What those policies should look like, I'm not really sure. The last thing, which is Michael, right up your alley and Diane too. But we need to be thinking about not just reopening schools, but using this as a catalytic moment. How do we use this at a chance where now so many kids have devices, we have better connectivity than before. We've pushed teachers to get comfortable with zoom and all these technologies. Like, how do we use it as a moment to catalyze new models around blended learning and online learning and improve that going forward. And I wish I was hearing a little bit more sort of conversation around that too, because I think there's a lot of districts and teachers now hungry for that kind of guidance and support and want to do sort of right by doing a new model going forward.

Well, you have the same magic wand we have on that one for certain. We couldn't agree with you. You more. And. And so. Wow, thank you as always. I just learned a whole bunch. Super grateful. We could. We could spend hours, I think, talking. But we'll invite you every episode. Michael and I end by just sharing a few words about something we're reading, listening to, watching. So if you're up for it, we'd love to. To hear what. What's got your attention right now.

Well, the one book that I've been reading is called the how to Change Anyone's Mind by Jonah Berger. And I just started reading in part because like so much of public policy is about changing and persuading people, but also at this moment with COVID you know, with vaccine hesitancy, with helping to sort of understand how to communicate. And it's just a fascinating book, talking a lot about sort of our sort of built in confirmation biases, how when people try to convince you of something, it actually can make you dig in more. And so it's just been sort of fascinating. It's a mix of psychology and sociology and science and just other things. But it's been good to challenge me a little bit and thinking about how to. It's not just persuading with facts and book reports like I just did, but it's also listening to people and engaging people as human beings and, and giving them room to grow and persuade themselves. In essence.

Oh, I might be persuaded to move off my fiction kick as Michael knows I've been turning my attention to fiction this year, but that sounds pretty fascinating. I've really been craving stories and connections and a reprieve, quite frankly, from all of the nonfiction news I'm doing as my job, basically. But that said, one of the things fiction does for me is pique my curiosity. And I often find myself diving in to learn more about times and events depicted in the novels I'm reading. And so this week I found myself watching Ken Burns series on the Dust bowl. And we could do an entire episode, Michael, on how we teach history in the US the short answer is not well, as you know. So what I can't get out of my mind is that other than a few dates and random facts, I never learned about this. I never really learned about this period of history. And it has such relevance to what we're going through today. And I just keep wondering what if we all had learned history in a way that it was useful and helpful to our daily lives? You know, where would we be potentially in a better place? So, to be continued, some point.

That's a that's a good one, Diane, Both of you, I'm feeling inadequate with whatever I'm going to say, but the so I so I actually polished off a couple things this past week, but I'm going to stay actually on your theme, Diane, because my wife and I finished Doris Kearns Goodwin's class on Masterclass last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. And of course, she actually gets into the topic of how do you teach history? And what really matters, both in the teaching of history, but also, frankly, how you take that for lessons of leadership and electing presidents and things of that nature. But she's such a good storyteller that I always take things away from her insights. And I think storytelling is obviously a big piece of these narrative shaping work that we do. And so I enjoyed it quite a bit. But but good place to wrap us up for this time. As you said, we could have John pestered you with questions for quite a while, but we'll let you go because it's been a great conversation. Thanks for joining us. And to all of our listeners, thanks for joining us on class disrupted. We'll see you next time.