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Comment by datavirtue | Hacker News Reader

There is a dangerous level of cognitive dissonance around school closures that effects nearly everyone. I have to filter arguments by finding out if the people making them have or do not have kids in school. People with kids in school just want schools open. Teachers and administrators want schools open. ...and therefore politicians want schools open.

There are a lot of vested interests that bias toward opening schools.

Honestly I do not think we are capable of weighing particulars to make a scientific determination. We need policies around school closure that are rigidly followed in the course of a pandemic.

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>Teachers and administrators want schools open. ...and therefore politicians want schools open.

This is just false. The largest teacher unions in the country have been pushing school closures. This means many teachers, administrators and politicians also want school closures.

Until like the last week politicians have been reluctant to even suggest schools reopen

https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-teachers-unions-odds-over-20482...

You could be right about that, but re: your link, Fauci is not a politician, he's a bureaucrat. No doubt they are subject to politicization / political bias and pressure too, but he doesn't seem completely partisan and one sided, he "has acted as an advisor to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan"[wikipedia], so it's hard to gauge the political response to the mood of constituents based on what he's saying, in my opinion.

Biden has been parroting the same stance since he's been in office. They're not about to go against a large part of their voting base. When the teacher's unions want something they usually bow to it.

I have kids in school. I don’t want them open during this kind of Covid surge. I also think the attribution of poor learning in the previous surges to remote learning, ignores a whole set of coincident factors and has more to do with wanting everyone to get back to work with kids in care.

“But our schools are safe!” say the administrators! “The virus doesn’t spread in schools! We’ll keep them masked!”

I’m planning my work schedule to get sick this week.

Where are the kids going to go when you shut down schools? You end up upping the care taker to kid ratio from 30:1 to like 2:1 when you pull kids out of school so you have to pull an equivalent number of adults out of the work force to handle that responsibility.

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