I think you have to understand the school opening debates in the broader context that bars and restaurants are open.

What could justify that? Well it could be that schools are *especially* risky compared to bars and restaurants.
But that’s pretty clearly not the case.

There’s a range of plausible views about school risks but clearly — especially for younger kids — it’s less risky than some stuff which is allowed.

So is education less socially important than indoor dining?
Well that’s clearly not the case either.

Again, especially for younger kids the value of in-person instruction is very high compared to the value of indoor dining.

So what’s the actual difference? Politics.
The people who own bars and restaurants lobby for them to be allowed to open.

Cities and states want the tax revenue they generate. And since bonus UI has expired the people who work at them want jobs too despite the health risk.

At school the calculus flips.
Teachers have more political clout than cooks and bartenders. They don’t lose their jobs when the schools go all-remote but they *do* incur a non-zero health risk if they have to teach in person.

And open schools don’t generate tax revenue, they instead incur costs to operate.
We don’t need to turn this into a dunk-fest on teachers unions to see that from a society-wide point of view the equilibrium we’ve landed at where we take big health risks on behalf of bar owners while shortchanging parents and young kids is not great.
Instead we have blundered into a catastrophe that is going to do long-term damage to both kids’ learning and to the independent restaurant sector.

[fin]
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