School’s Out Forever

‘Five years after the global COVID pandemic was declared, there is widespread agreement that closing classrooms was devastating for children,” read a March 16 article in the New York Times titled “What We’ve Learned About School Closures for the Next Pandemic.” The piece includes interviews with a variety of public health experts and officials in the education sphere, who all seem to agree that the strategy of school closures during the pandemic was misguided, and that the social and educational harms from remote learning and hybrid schooling were not properly taken into account at the time.