What the Long School Closures of 2020 and 2021 Taught Parents

Fifteen days to slow the spread. That was the deal in March 2020, and most of us shook on it. Nobody read the fine print, because there was no fine print. There was only a kitchen table, a laptop with a frozen screen, and a seven-year-old asking why the teacher's face kept turning into a rectangle.

Let me tell you what that stretch of American life was, and what it taught the people who lived through it. It was not a lesson in epidemiology. It was a lesson in civics, delivered at the dinner table, and the parents who sat through it took notes.

The first thing the closures taught: schools can close in a day

In March 2020, governors across the country announced that school buildings would shut. The orders came in a rush, state after state, within roughly two weeks of one another. The stated reason was a new virus and a lot of uncertainty, and in those first days, caution was a defensible instinct. Reasonable people, including reasonable conservatives, said so at the time and say so now. Nobody knew what we were facing, and a short pause to find out was not tyranny.

But notice the mechanism, because the mechanism is the lesson. A building that holds hundreds of children, funded by local property taxes and state aid, run by a board that parents elect, went dark by decree. No vote was taken at a school board meeting. No parent was asked. The people who pay for the school and whose children fill it learned, in a single news cycle, that the schedule they believed they shared in shaping belonged to someone else.

Here is the part the coverage kept skipping. Opening is also a decision. Every day a district chose to stay remote, somebody chose it. The word "closed" made it sound like weather. It was not weather. It was a calendar, and calendars have authors.

The long gap: who reopened and who didn't

The pause was supposed to be short. For some districts it was. By the fall of 2020, a large number of districts across the country, many of them in the South and the Mountain West and in smaller towns and rural areas, were holding classes in person, some of them full time, some in hybrid schedules. Private and religious schools often reopened sooner than public ones. Meanwhile, many of the largest urban districts, and districts in states with the most restrictive orders, stayed fully remote well into the 2020-21 school year, and some did not return full time until the following fall.

I want to be careful here about what is established and what is not. It is established that the pattern varied enormously by place. It is established that in-person schooling returned in some places months or even a year before others. It is also established that those who stayed home longest were not distributed randomly. The map of reopening followed the map of local politics, and, as many researchers noted at the time, it followed the map of local union strength at least as closely as it followed the map of local infection rates. I would invite you to look up the datasets compiled by university researchers and by the national education research groups, and judge the correlation for yourself.

Think about what that means. A mother in one county watched her child sit in a classroom in September 2020. Her sister, two states over and in a bigger district, watched hers sit in front of a screen until the spring, and then until the next fall. The virus was the same. The children were the same. The difference was a decision, made by people with a calendar.

If that doesn't make you wonder who is steering the ship, you're not paying attention.

The February 2021 guidance and the role of the union

Now to the part of the story that, in my view, taught parents the most. In February 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its operational strategy for reopening K-12 schools. Schools had been closed for nearly a year. Evidence from other countries and from the many American schools that had reopened was accumulating that in-person classes with basic precautions did not appear to drive community spread. Parents were reaching the end of their rope. And the guidance, when it arrived, set out a tiered system of indicators under which, in many of the most common situations, a district in an area with high community transmission would be steered away from full in-person instruction.

What is documented is this. Through public-records requests and congressional inquiries, correspondence between officials at the CDC and officials at the American Federation of Teachers was made public in the following months. The emails showed the union's leadership was in contact with the agency before the guidance went out, and that language it suggested appeared in parts of the final document. The agency's director at the time said publicly that the agency consulted a wide range of stakeholders. That is true, and I do not suggest it is improper for a government agency to talk to those affected by its rules. Hearing from unions, school boards, pediatricians and parents is what a good agency does.

The question is who else was in the room. Where were the parents? Where was the organization representing the child who was falling a grade behind in reading? The documents showed a seat for the people who work in schools and no comparable seat for the people the schools exist to serve. A union exists to protect its members, and there is nothing sinister in that. It is what unions are for. But a federal public-health guidance that decides whether your child sits in a classroom should not be shaped more by the people with a stake in the workplace than by the families with a stake in the education. Our schools are for the children. That sounds obvious. It stopped sounding obvious in 2021.

Let me be fair to the other side. The unions' defenders argue, with some force, that teachers are workers who faced real uncertainty about their own health, that many were older, and that asking for ventilation, testing and vaccination before returning was a reasonable bargaining position. I agree it is a reasonable bargaining position. It is not a reasonable position to let it set national guidance on whether children learn. Bargaining belongs at the bargaining table, where the board, which represents the public, can say no. It does not belong in the editing of a federal document.

The numbers: what the 2022 NAEP showed

Then came the scorecards. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation's Report Card, is the one test that gives the same exam to samples of students across the country year after year, and so it can show what happened. When the 2022 results came out, the news was ugly.

In the main assessment, fourth-grade mathematics scores fell 5 points between 2019 and 2022. Eighth-grade math fell 8 points, among the largest drops since the assessment began in 1990. Reading scores fell 3 points in both fourth and eighth grade. In the long-term trend assessment of nine-year-olds, math fell 7 points and reading 5 points between 2020 and 2022, the first decline in math since that assessment began in 1973. Those are the figures NCES published, and you can check them at the Nation's Report Card website.

Now, here is where honesty matters. Scores had been flat or slipping in several subjects before the pandemic began, so not all of the decline can be pinned on the closures. The fall started earlier. Anyone who says the shutdowns caused every point is overreaching, and I'd rather you hear it from me than discover it from a critic. What the data do show is that the drops were among the steepest the test has recorded, and that it was concentrated among the students who started furthest behind. Researchers who matched district-level data to the length of remote instruction found that the places that stayed remote longest tended to lose more ground. A child who was reading below grade level in 2019 and spent a year looking at a screen did not catch up by wishing.

If a doctor kept a patient out of treatment for a year and the patient got worse, we would not call it an unforeseeable result of the disease. We would ask what the doctor was thinking. I'm not saying the intentions were bad. I'm saying a year is a very long time in the life of a child, and the bill came due.

Five lessons, stated plainly

Let me do what I like to do, and lay out the argument in order.

1. The schedule belongs to someone, and it should be you. Parents learned that the calendar and the reopening decision were made by a chain of officials, some elected, some not, and that the people closest to the child had the least say. The fix is transparency and local control. School boards should publish, in advance, the standards under which they will close and reopen, and parents should be able to hold the board to them.
2. Evidence moves slowly where interests are strong. The data that in-person school with reasonable mitigation was workable were available well before many districts acted on them. Interested parties had reasons to wait. A parent who understands that is a harder person to persuade with the next "just two more weeks."
3. The people who work in schools and the people who attend them have different interests. Both matter. Only one group had a place at the table in 2021.
4. Learning loss is real and measured, and it falls hardest on the already-behind. Wealthy families bought tutors and pods. Families without that money had a screen and an overworked parent. The closures widened the very gap the education establishment says it exists to close.
5. Exit is a form of voice. When parents have nowhere to go, the system does not have to listen. When they have somewhere to go, it does.

That last point is the one I want to hang the rest of this column on, because it is where the closures changed the country.

What parents did next

Parents did not write angry letters and leave it there. They moved, and they changed the law.

Consider homeschooling. The Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, which began in 2020, found the share of households with school-age children reporting homeschooling roughly doubled between spring and fall of 2020. A good portion of that was emergency remote school at home, and not true homeschooling in the traditional sense, and the survey wording made that blur easy. But state-level data tell a firmer story: in many states the number of registered homeschoolers jumped by double digits in the 2020-21 year and, importantly, did not fall back to the old line when the buildings reopened. Families that had tried it and found it worked, or found they preferred it, stayed. If you want to see what a first year looks like, see Your First Year of Homeschooling, a Practical Playbook for Parents, and for the legal history, Homeschooling Went From Legal Gray Zone to Legal in Fifty States by 1993.

Then consider choice. In 2021, West Virginia passed its Hope Scholarship, an education savings account open to a very large share of its students. In 2022, Arizona made every school-age child in the state eligible for an education savings account. In 2023, Iowa, Utah and Arkansas passed major programs, and Florida expanded its scholarship program to all families regardless of income. Not every one of these was caused by the closures, and several had been in the works for years. But the lawmakers who passed them said, and the parents who showed up to testify said, that the closures had shown them what happens when the family has no alternative. You can read how the idea spread in Arizona Made Every Child Eligible for an ESA, How the Idea Spread So Fast.

Add microschools, learning pods, and charter and private-school waitlists that grew in places where the public system stayed dark. Add the school board races of 2021, which drew candidates and voters in numbers local elections rarely see. And add the rise of curriculum-transparency bills, which many states passed in the following years, and which ask the very simple question of what, exactly, the school is teaching. See Curriculum Transparency Laws, What They Require and Why They Help Teachers.

Here's the thing I find optimistic about all of this. A country that had grown used to being told that the school system was what it was discovered, in a very short period, that it could change it. The parents did it. They did it with their feet and their ballots and their testimony, which is how it is supposed to work.

The Founding view: who owns the child's education

Whenever someone tells you parents have no business questioning how schools run, ask what they think the republic rests on. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Encouraged. Not monopolized. Madison, in a letter of 1822, wrote that a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. Those are not the words of men who thought the schoolhouse door should be locked from the outside by officials whom parents cannot reach.

The Supreme Court spoke to the question in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, striking down an Oregon law that required children to attend public schools, and holding that the child is not the mere creature of the state. In Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923, the Court held that the liberty the Fourteenth Amendment protects includes the right of parents to have their children taught. In Wisconsin v. Yoder in 1972 it said the primary role of parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition. You can read about that last case in Wisconsin v. Yoder and the Amish Fathers Who Stopped School at Eighth Grade, and about the Oregon fight in The 1922 Oregon Law That Tried to Abolish Private Schools, and Lost.

That is the constitutional background to the closures. The state has a legitimate interest in an educated citizenry and, in an emergency, in public health. The question is who carries the burden of justification when it overrides the family for a long time. And it is the burden, not the principle, that went missing in 2020 and 2021. In March, the burden was obvious. By the fall of 2020, the burden belonged on the officials, and for many of them it was never carried.

The strongest objection, answered

The best defense of the closures goes like this: in March 2020 nobody knew the risk to children, to teachers or to families. Caution was prudent. Some of the districts that reopened early saw outbreaks. Teachers were not being irrational. And hindsight is cheap.

I accept most of that, and I will answer it in three parts.

First, the March decision is not the question. I said so at the start. The question is the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021, when evidence from other countries, from private and religious schools in this country, and from public districts that had reopened with masks, spacing and ventilation suggested that in-person school was workable. A decision that was prudent in week two is not automatically prudent in month twelve.

Second, prudence has to weigh both sides of the ledger. A closure is not a zero-cost default. It carries costs in learning, in mental and emotional strain, in lost routines, in missed services for children with disabilities, and in working parents forced out of the labor force. The costs of being open are more visible, so they were counted. The costs of being closed were spread across millions of kitchens, so they were not. A sound decision counts both.

Third, and this is the key point, even a defensible decision has to be one that the public can see and review. That was lacking. Parents were told what would happen, and rarely why, and almost never what would end it. A rule without an exit condition is not a precaution. It is a permanent arrangement with a polite name.

What a sensible policy looks like

Here is the practical takeaway for a school board, a legislature, or a parent with a pen.

• Define the trigger and the exit in advance. If a district may close schools for health reasons, the policy should say in writing what conditions justify it, who decides, and what ends it.
• Seat parents at the table. Any body that advises a district on closing or reopening should include parents of enrolled students, not only staff.
• Publish the data. The districts' own attendance, remote-instruction hours and assessment results should be public, on a dashboard a parent can read.
• Make exit possible. Families should be able to take their share of education funding to a school that is open. That is what education savings accounts and open-enrollment laws do. See Your ZIP Code Picks Your Child's School, the Case for Open Enrollment.
• Measure what was lost, and fix it. High-dosage tutoring and a clear plan to recover reading and math are the minimum owed to the children who lost the most.

None of this is exotic. It is a list of the things that, in a normal year, a parent would assume were already in place.

Parents are the story

I'll end where I started, at the kitchen table. The great discovery of those years was not about a virus. It was about the relationship between a family and its school. Many parents learned something uncomfortable: that the school they funded, whose board they elected, and whose teachers they trusted, could be shut and kept shut by forces they did not control, and that when they asked questions, they were sometimes treated as the problem.

They learned it the hard way, and they did something about it. In my view that is the most American thing that came out of an awful stretch of history. The people who were told to be quiet and wait did not wait. They organized, they ran for the board, they voted, they moved, they built alternatives. They turned a lesson into law.

That's why I am optimistic. A country in which ordinary parents can look at a system and say "this belongs to us" is a country that still has its self-government in working order.

The case in brief

1. The school closures of 2020 and 2021 showed parents that the calendar is a decision, made by identifiable officials, not a natural event.
2. Districts that reopened early and those that stayed remote faced the same virus; the difference followed local decisions and local politics.
3. The February 2021 CDC reopening guidance was shaped in part through contact with a teachers' union, with no comparable seat for parents.
4. The 2022 NAEP showed some of the steepest drops the assessment has recorded, falling hardest on the students who began furthest behind, though scores had been sliding before the pandemic.
5. Parents responded with homeschooling, choice laws and school board races, and the sound remedy is clear triggers, open data, parents at the table, and the freedom to leave.

What you can do: Ask your school board, in writing, for the district's current policy on when it may close buildings and what ends a closure, and read it at the next public meeting.