Mood Indigo, part 2

In December, I had a post criticizing the idea that school closures during the Covid years were imposed by "elites." I observed that the public was divided on the issue, and that most people were satisfied with the way their local schools were handling it.  A few days ago, Andrew Gelman discussed that post on his blog, so this one is some additional thoughts suggested by the comments.  

Here's some more information on public opinion.  On several occasions, a Fox News poll asked what the local public schools should do in the upcoming term:  "open fully in-person as usual"; "open in-person with social distancing and masks," "combine in-person and remote learning," or "be fully remote."

                     usual       distancing    combined    remote

July 2020       15%         21%             31%             25%
May 2021*     51%        27%             19%                1%
Aug  2021*    36%         33%             21%               7%
Jan    2022      28%         27%             30%             14%

The two marked with an asterisk just offered the first three options--"fully remote" was a volunteered response.  Data on actual practices in the 100 largest school districts can be found here.  I haven't looked at them closely, but it appears that in January 2022, only about 5 of the largest 100 school districts were fully remote, and about 15 required masks.  

The inspiration for my original post was a column by Nate Silver called "The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency."  He began by saying that "the expert class" was responsible for "the response to September 11 — the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars . . . the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. . . . Then the pandemic: what was supposed to be a triumph of management for a technocratic elite instead wound up as a worst-of-all-worlds scenario . . .  massive inflation, which was supposed to be a thing of the past."  But decisions on how to respond September 11, the financial crisis, and Covid were made by elected officials, not by an "expert class."  The decisions may have been influenced by experts, but the defining feature of expertise is that it's specialized, so that experts on the Middle East and experts on macroeconomics don't form a class with a common outlook.  Moreover, extent of expert influence differed from one case to another:  on the financial crisis, the Bush administration followed expert advice, but on the response to September 11, it seemed to decide what to do and then assemble expert opinion in support of the decision.  On Covid, I don't think expert opinion had that much effect either way:  from an early point, the basic Republican position was that the threat wasn't all that serious, and partly in response, the basic Democratic position was that it was very serious.  Here I can appeal to some data:  a CNN survey conducted May 7-10, 2020 asked "Which comes closer to your view about where the U.S. stands in the coronavirus outbreak:  the worst is behind us or the worst is yet to come?"   Republicans favored "the worst is behind us" by 68%-28%; Democrats favored "the worst is yet to come" by 73%-24.  As a result, on policy it came down to Republicans being in favor of doing less and Democrats in favor of doing more.   So overall, I think Silver's analysis made the mistake of ignoring the biggest factor--partisanship--in order to focus on something that was at most a secondary factor.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]