Fact-Checking the School-Closers
As various governors try to deny their decisions to close schools, we come bearing receipts.
Special thanks to Josh Stevenson for creation of these incredible dashboards.
The day of reckoning is nearly upon us, and as it nears, blue state governors across the land are trying to deny the length of school closures, their role in it, and to distance themselves from the catastrophic results.
Fortunately, we knew this day would come, and we had our receipts well-prepared.
In the image below, I highlighted Michigan, since Gretchen Whitmer is the most recent to blatantly lie about the length of school closures in her state. But you can click into the interactive dashboard to see your state.
Tabular form is equally interesting. It gives us a sense for just how very skewed by political party these decisions were. The only states that break the streaks are purple states. For example, Vermont, a reliably democratic presidential vote has a Republican governor. Conversely, North Carolina and Kentucky—the only “red” states to find themselves caught up in the blue wave of bad policy—have democratic governors.
This is not news. I and many others have now been screaming this into the algorithmic void that is Twitter’s left-wing censors for approaching two years.
The image that this article leads with is 100% in-person schooling. But fear not, we also have hybrid and virtual for every single week of the year, for every single state. Unfortunately, even these weekly averages obscure the very punctate nature of the harm. A state might end up showing a relatively larger proportion of in-person schools, thanks to “redder” suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas, whereas the districts in the largest population centers remained fully remote, or getting credit for “hybrid” with masked zoom-in-a-room. The same is no doubt true of the recently released test scores—acute failure in certain areas will be masked by the accomplishments of students in other areas.
How did we come by this data? When our leaders shut down the world, a scrappy little company called Burbio had to completely change its business model. They started doing weekly calls with school districts across the country to track school opening plans, and subsequently which districts were offering 100% in-person, 100% virtual, or hybrid. They tracked 1200+ districts totaling nearly 50 million children (virtually all U.S. school children). I bought access to the data, and we published a digest of it on Rational Ground—a record to correct the inevitable walk back.
I remember when I first got access to the granular weekly district data and started pouring through the spreadsheets, I thought “Oh my god, I have to get this right out!” Then it dawned on me that in fact there was no rush, no one in the main stream media, or any of our institutions had any interest in getting this information out—which is why it was being collected and made available by a small company, and not the department of education. The narrative at the time was that schools had to be closed, deliberately ignoring two key elements. The first was that tens of millions of children did have access to full-time, in-person, often un-masked education for ALL of the 2020/2021 school year. The second, was the near perfect correlation with school opening and political affiliation. The purple maps above that Burbio released on a weekly basis pointed pretty obviously to this divide. However, because they also looked a bit like population density maps (denser populations, more democrats), the vast numbers of children in red areas receiving full-time in-person education could be easily underestimated. I spent the entirety of my Florida vacation sitting on a chaise lounge in Miami parsing data. Once done, the depth of the red/blue divide was clear, the magnitude of the impending harm obvious, and the lack of attendant health benefits unmistakable.
Nonetheless, despite the harms visited upon blue state residents by their leaders, the political response was, and remains quite muted.
 | A guest post by
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Thanks for this brilliant piece.
Emily joined me for a discussion in the Messy Times studios. Check it out! https://youtu.be/2j0mEM9lN2w
You have adeptly unpacked complex issues that belie the simplistic "blue" vs "red" false dichotomy and reframed it while humanizing it through a caregiver's (mother's) perspective as one of restoring liberalism in its classic sense, that respected if not encouraged divergent views, particularly those that ran contrary to the government orthodoxy. Hopefully it shines a light on the "Alice in Wonderland" upside down & backwards party positions that are at odds with how many came to understand their political persuasions and encourages them to turn the brain back on, there's lots of work to do, the Democrat you found safe harbour in before may now shock your conscience in terms of the liberties they'd like you to yield w/out question.