Mood indigo

It's now pretty widely agreed that schools were too slow to return to in-person instruction during the Covid epidemic: "remote learning" usually meant less learning and students suffered from the loss of normal social interaction.   So why didn't the schools go back faster? Some observers hold that cautious  policies were imposed by what Nate Silver calls the "Indigo Blob":  "the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia and public health . . . and instruments of the Democratic party and progressive advocacy groups."  

There are a couple of problems with this analysis.  One is that general public opinion was not in favor of faster reopening.  In April 2021 an NBC News poll asked people who had children in school "do you believe that your child's school system has been too slow in re-opening, too fast in re-opening, or struck the right balance?"  14% said too slow, 14% too fast, and 70% struck the right balance.   That's an impressively high level of public agreement with policy, which may be because policies responded to local opinion or because people generally have a positive view of their local schools and trusted them to do the right thing.  The second is that opinions on the issue were not closely related to education.  In January 2022, a Fox News survey asked "thinking about the winter school term, do you think your local public schools should reopen fully in-person as usual, open in-person with social distancing and masks, combine in-person and remote learning, or be fully remote":  Compared to white college graduates, white people who didn't have a college degree were more likely to favor full in-person reopening (38% vs. 24%), but also more likely to favor fully remote education (12% to 10%).   So education was a factor, but the differences weren't large compared to race (32% of whites favored fully reopening,  11% favored fully remote; only 6% of blacks favored fully reopening in-person and 30% favored fully remote, and Hispanics were about midway in between).  Age also made a substantial difference:  among people under 35, 18% favored reopening as usual and 21% favored going completely online; among people over 65, 34% favored reopening as usual and only 6% completely online.  Two factors that might have been expected to make a difference but didn't were parent/non-parent status and gender.  

Returning to the question of why schools didn't go back to in-person instruction more quickly, I'd say that it was because decision-makers were generally aligned with public opinion--the idea that children need special protection has a lot of intuitive appeal, so in the presence of uncertainty they were inclined to play it safe.  Of course, there were also large partisan differences (see this post), but I don't think that these appeared because Democrats followed the "Indigo Blob"--it was because they reacted against Trump.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]