July 14: revised for clarity and to acknowledge recent developments:

The editorial (“Reopening Schools Will Be a Huge Undertaking. It Must Be Done”) begins:

American children need public schools to reopen in the fall. Reading, writing and arithmetic are not even the half of it. Kids need to learn to compete and to cooperate. They need food and friendships; books and basketball courts; time away from family and a safe place to spend it.

Parents need public schools, too. They need help raising their children, and they need to work.

I agree that schools are essential. Our society and several generations of students will be irreparably harmed if our schools remain closed. So, how do we reopen safely?

Here is what it’s going to take: more money and more space.

The return to school, as with other aspects of pre-pandemic normalcy, rests on the nation’s ability to control the spread of the coronavirus. In communities where the virus is spreading rapidly, school is likely to remain virtual. The rise in case counts across much of the country is jeopardizing even the best-laid plans for classroom education.

We need money — and lots of it: “To maximize in-person instruction, the federal government must open its checkbook.” The editorial advises that districts need “hundreds of billions of dollars” to reopen safely. And, “even in places where the virus is under control, schools lack the means to safely provide full-time instruction.”

I contend that, while an out of control coronavirus spreads across the country in two-thirds of our states, our primary focus should be on communities, not schools. That’s how to keep us safe.

A feature in the Atlantic (“These 8 Basic Steps Will Let Us Reopen Schools”) written by three past federal officials in education and health policy (Thomas R. Frieden, Arne Duncan, and Margaret Spellings) anticipates my objection. Before introducing their eight steps, the authors acknowledge:

The single most important thing we can do to keep our schools safe has nothing to do with what happens in schools. It’s how well communities control the coronavirus throughout the community. Such control of COVID-19 requires adhering to the three W’s—wear a mask, wash your hands, watch your distance—and boxing in the virus with strategic testing, effective isolation, complete contact tracing, and supportive quarantine—providing services and, if necessary, alternative temporary housing so patients and contacts don’t spread disease to others. [Emphasis added.]

Boxing in the virus is job number one. We need to get this done before we bring students back to campuses.

Embedded in step number eight in the Atlantic piece — “prepare for cases” — is this: “All contacts of new cases must be traced and quarantined.”

That’s a task for the broader community, not just schools. From my vantage point in Los Angeles, we are still failing at testing, tracing, and quarantining. We’re not even close to getting this right. (New York State may be another story.) The Los Angeles Unified School District agrees with this judgment (“L.A. Unified will not reopen campuses for start of school year amid coronavirus spike”). But there is great resistance to making the call to keep campuses closed.

Texas is requiring all schools in the state to have on-campus instruction. Other states will likely follow unless the infection rates and deaths rise to a level that makes this unsustainable. In other words, the decision about on-campus (vs. remote) learning may be made by outsiders, not leaders nearest students, teachers, and families. The Trump administration is pushing schools to reopen to get students out of the house, so parents can go back to work. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is pushing for reopening without an inkling of how to keep students safe.

School districts may also put aside principles of public health in a rush to reopen. By a 4-1 vote, the Orange County Board of Education endorsed the conclusion that neither masks, nor social distancing were necessary on reopened school campuses.

The white paper the board released in support of this stance asserted: “Requiring children to wear masks during school is not only difficult – if not impossible to implement – but not based on science. It may even be harmful and is therefore not recommended.”

The final sentence is absolutely not based on science, though it may be a rightwing talking point. We have much to learn about coronavirus, but we know enough – based on public health authorities, rather than political figures – to regard the unequivocal rejection of masks and social distancing with skepticism.

If, with rising infection rates in the community, schools reopen, the number of cases and resulting deaths will continue to rise. Just as communities differ, not all school districts are created equal. The NYT’s editorial board advises us that there are 13,000 schools districts in this country. To accept their demand that we reopen schools would have highly inequitable consequences from place to place. The impact on poor and minority communities, which are already experiencing disproportionate harm from coronavirus, is likely to be especially severe.

I have other qualms with the NYT editorial. Advocacy for public spending to secure “among other things, the installation of physical barriers in common areas, increased cleaning and daily health checks” and to find “twice as much room” for classrooms to ensure physical distancing, makes sense if community spread is not out of control. (This may be true in New York, though if it’s not true in two-thirds of the country, states in the Northeast — including New York — continue to be vulnerable.)

As a country, spending “hundreds of billions of dollars” for plexiglass barriers and assembling classrooms in gymnasiums may not be the best use of federal dollars. Shouldn’t we focus first and foremost on putting a national plan in place to defeat the coronavirus across the country (even if New Yorkers believe they’re safe enough right now), and on securing funding to that end, before trying to reopen schools, most of which are in or much too near to hotspots to be safe?

Trying to manage around a raging epidemic is highly risky (and extraordinarily expensive), though I grant that we have no choice. (Perhaps changing ‘misguided’ to ‘parochial’ in my headline would have better represented my visceral, and perhaps parochial, objection to the Times’ editorial.)

In my view, doing our utmost to snuff out the epidemic is a higher calling than reopening schools. It affects the whole country (even places where the virus has receded for a time), not just a relatively few fortunate school districts.

It’s tempting – with Trump in the White House – to give up on defeating the coronavirus. But until we succeed, we have no prospect for putting an end to rampant, senseless illness, suffering, and death.

It must be done, or we have failed as a nation.

(Image, which accompanied NYT editorial, by Nicholas Konrad.)