My kids started school today, via Zoom. They and millions of other children will spend the fall stuck in learning limbo.

This was not inevitable. It is a result of the President and his advisors putting magical thinking ahead of preparedness.

With better planning and preparedness, schools could have safely opened - with adaptations - for in-person learning.

They still could.

But it would require investing in three big things.

Some countries have been able to reopen schools safely and sustainably. Others have reopened and immediately seen cases start to spike (e.g. Israel, and numerous US colleges).

The places that have reopened safely have have a few common characteristics:

1. Low community transmission. This is the most important factor.

Traditional in-person schooling creates a lot of super-spreading opportunities. But less baseline transmission means fewer cases that can super-spread.

2. Testing and tracing. As this report from Germany illustrates, widely available, short-turnaround testing can help keep schools open. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/world/europe/germany-schools-virus-reopening.html

3. Adaptations to school operations. Hybrid learning, cohorted classes, eating lunch in classrooms not cafeterias, reducing class size, etc.

All helpful, but not enough to offset elevated local transmission and/or poor testing. And all require more $$. https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1298825569497423872?s=20

The US could have been in a position to deliver on all three criteria - if the government had made it a priority.

Instead the Trump administration spent the summer assuring us that the worst was past, and that we should all just back to normalcy.

So instead of calibrating reopening policies to prioritize school reopening in Aug/Sept, the White House pressed states to "liberate" their economies back in June.

Instead of scaling up mass rapid testing, the President argued repeatedly that we're doing too much testing already.

Instead of laying out and funding a vision for safe adaptation of schools, the administration spent the summer just trying to threaten and coerce schools to reopen normal classroom learning. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/coronavirus/trump-back-to-school-threats-pressure-educators-fearing-covid-1

On each of the big-ticket priorities for safely reopening in-person learning, the Trump administration pushed magical thinking instead of evidence.

And now it's all predictably falling apart.

Schools that took the White House guidance seriously - trying to reopen campus without adequate testing - are becoming transmission hotspots, from NC to Alabama to Iowa.

Schools that have insane amounts of money are setting up their own testing regimes. https://twitter.com/AlecMacGillis/status/1300507938692435968?s=20

And many schools systems and universities, lacking the resources to fund their own testing and adaptation, and facing elevated local transmission due to politicians putting bars before schools, are forced to move schools online for another awful semester.

Again: none of this was inevitable.

There is no inherent binary trade-off between sub-par zoom learning vs unsafe classrooms.

Poor preparedness is a choice. In this case, a choice grounded in magical thinking and the President's ego, rather than doing what's best for kids.

This will damage learning for a generation of kids - needlessly. And avoidably.

The problem is not the people deciding to close schools; the problem is the leaders who didn't put in the work to enable schools to safely reopen.