Schools

I. A year indoors

For most of the 2020–21 school year, tens of millions of American children did not go to school. They learned, when they learned, through a screen. Classrooms sat half-empty, desks spaced apart; districts that opened did so two days a week, or not at all. Across the Atlantic, schools in much of Europe had reopened the previous spring and stayed open.

Ask who decided that American children would spend a year at the kitchen table, and the answer that comes most readily — Fauci — turns out, on the record, to be the wrong one. Untangling why it is wrong, and what the right answer actually is, is the most revealing thing about the whole episode.

II. “I did not close the schools”

Put the question to Anthony Fauci directly, under oath, and his answer is unequivocal. Asked in January 2024 about his role, he said: “I didn’t make a decision to close the schools.”¹ Pressed again, reading back the charge that “Fauci … closed the schools,” he repeated it: “I did not close the schools.”¹

And on reopening, his testimony is not equivocal either. “My advice,” he said, “has always been reopen the schools as quickly and safely as possible.”¹ Elsewhere in the transcript he describes the federal effort he says he supported — “putting together guidance documents, roadmaps … for schools to reopen safely” — and notes that states “sometimes did not respond” to it.¹

This deserves the same treatment we gave the “six-foot rule” misquote in a companion piece: stated plainly, and stated fairly. Fauci did not run the nation’s school districts. He held no authority to open or close a single classroom. The image of him personally padlocking the schoolhouse door is a caricature, and a publication committed to the record has to say so. He testified he urged reopening, and the burden is on anyone who would claim otherwise to produce the document. We have not found it.

So if not Fauci, then who — and what?

III. The machinery

Schools did not close by a single order. They closed, and stayed closed, through a machinery of overlapping decisions — and the federal government’s part in it ran through guidance, not command.

That guidance is the subject of a companion investigation. The CDC told schools to keep students “at least 6 feet” apart, a standard that — as we documented — by the testimony of the official most associated with it “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data,” and that was not cut to three feet until March 2021. Six feet was the arithmetic that made full classrooms impossible: a room that held a class at three feet held a fraction at six. The number, more than any decree, kept the desks empty.

But the guidance that set that number did not come only from scientists. According to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, it came, in part, from a teachers’ union.

IV. The union and the guidance

Here the findings belong to the Subcommittee, and we attribute them to the Subcommittee rather than adopt them as our own. But they are specific, and they are on the record.

The Subcommittee found that the American Federation of Teachers — the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union — “Did Not Support Reopening Schools and Predicated Its Support for Reopening Schools on Non-Scientific Policies.”² And it found that, in drafting the Biden administration’s first school-reopening guidance in February 2021, the CDC “Broke Precedent and Shared a Draft Guidance with the American Federation of Teachers” — a step the Subcommittee characterized as “interference into the CDC issuance of the … first school reopening guidance.”³²

A non-scientific organization that did not want schools to reopen helped shape the scientific-looking guidance that governed when they could. That is the Subcommittee’s finding. Whatever weight a reader gives it, it relocates the question. The body that issued the guidance was the CDC; the hands on the draft, per the report, were not only the CDC’s.

V. Against the evidence

The deepest charge in the Subcommittee’s report is not about process. It is about substance: a finding, in plain words, that “Long Term School Closures Were Not Supported by Available Science and Evidence.”³

The contemporaneous record had pointed that way for some time. Children were among the lowest-risk groups for severe COVID-19. Countries that reopened did not see schools become the engines of transmission that had been feared. And the federal distancing standard that kept American classrooms at a fraction of capacity was, by the CDC’s own later action, twice as large as the evidence required — cut to three feet in March 2021, “to reflect the latest science.”⁴ The science that justified halving it had been gathering while the rule stood.

VI. The cost

The Subcommittee’s bluntest finding is about what it cost. Pandemic-era school closures, it concluded, “will have enduring impact on generations of America’s children” — and, in a phrase that is the report’s sharpest, “these closures were enabled by groups meant to serve those children.”⁵

We do not need to adopt the Subcommittee’s framing to report the shape of the harm it describes: a year or more of lost instruction, concentrated among the children who could least afford it, justified by guidance the report says the evidence did not support.

VII. What the record establishes — and what it does not

The record establishes:

• That Dr. Fauci testified, under oath, that he did not close the schools and that his advice was to reopen “as quickly and safely as possible.”¹
• That federal guidance — the six-foot rule above all — was the mechanism that kept classrooms at a fraction of capacity, and was not revised for schools until March 2021.⁴
• That the House Select Subcommittee found the long closures “Not Supported by Available Science and Evidence,” and found that the CDC shared draft reopening guidance with a teachers’ union that opposed reopening.³²

The record does not establish — and we do not assert — that:

• Fauci closed the schools. He denies it under oath, held no such authority, and we have found no document showing he ordered closures. The popular charge is a misattribution.
• Closures had no early rationale. In the genuinely uncertain first weeks of 2020, caution about an unknown pathogen was defensible; the failure the report describes is the long closures, against accumulating evidence.
• The Subcommittee’s findings are adjudicated fact. They are a congressional majority’s conclusions, attributed here to that majority, and contested in part by others.

VIII. Why it matters

The story of the schools is, in the end, two failures braided together. One is misattribution: the most recognizable face of pandemic policy became the symbol of a decision he says he did not make and could not have made, while the diffuse machinery that did make it escaped the same scrutiny. The other is the machinery itself — a federal guidance shaped, by the Subcommittee’s account, with a union that did not want to reopen, enforcing a distance no data supported, over an evidence base that, the same body found, did not support the result.

A generation of children lost a year of school. By the testimony, no one with a name and an office decided it; by the report, the people who shaped it were not the scientists. That is the hardest accountability of all to assign — and the easiest, therefore, for everyone to avoid.