Statewide School Closures in the time of Covid-19

It is no exaggeration to say that the US's covid response has been a disaster. Science denial has mixed with poor medical infrastructure to create a crisis at a scale none of us could have predicted when the pandemic began last year. One of the most obvious, and contentious topics of debate has been the closure of public schools. With no federal guidance or support, different state governments have taken wildly different approaches to educating huge numbers of students.

As I began this project I wanted to look at whether or not school closures reflected the status of covid in their states. In other words, I wanted to find out whether or not state governments were rational entities, closing when schools when covid cases were high and erring on the side of caution. I had a hunch that, especially in Republican controlled areas, there would be no correlation between rising or falling covid cases and school closures or openings. Of course, in the states with no guidance (the vast majority in both of the time periods I looked at) the lack of a statewide order does not actually tell us anything about how many schoolchildren are receiving their education in person or online. Instead, I wanted to look at this as a question of when and how legislators' choices lined up with the reality of covid in their states.

I decided to make two maps, to look at two different times. The first, which is above, is for August of 2020. As one can see, New Mexico, Arkansas, North Carolina, West Virginia and Virginia all had state-wide school closures while California had partial closures and Texas, Florida, and Iowa were ordered open. If one uses their mouse to click on each state, specific information about the policies appear. Because this map is from August, many of the state policies are about reopening, not about students currently in classes. The green bubbles on top of the states show the total covid cases that have been recorded in those places. I was hoping to find information on the trends at this time (where was covid rising and when?) but struggled to find the data. However, it is clear from this that statewide orders did not correspond to the number of cases in a specific state.

Much of the concern about school closures has, reasonably, focused on the unbearable catch-22 that parents and policymakers find themselves in: to send children to school and risk exacerbating an out of control crisis; or to keep them home, stunting their emotional growth and intellectual development. Parents have anguished online about the lack of clarity about what will occur week-to-week for their children, and policymakers have responded to their pressure in myriad, contradictory ways.

This second map is, in my opinion, a more succesful version of the first. This is because I was able to find data on the covid trends occurring right now. Because school closure mandates often change quickly--even week to week in some states--knowing the trends in covid-19 cases is helpful in evaluating the decisions policymakers are making. It is striking that, for example, New Mexico's schools are still shuttered with 54 cases for 100,000 people, while Texas' schools are ordered open with 78 cases per 100,000 people. The answer to the question I started this project with becomes clear: state-wide school closures are not a reflection of case counts or death rates in the states where they are located.

In all, the most striking thing about these maps are the number of states that received no guidance on a state-wide level around school closures. The incoherency of the US's response to covid-19 has, as of today, killed 400,000 people. Not all of these deaths would have been preventable by better policy, but it is hard not to look back on the carnage of the last year and wonder what would have happened if there was a competent presidential administration or a Republican party that was not dedicated to the denial of science.