Yglesias makes the case for keeping schools open. I think he's missing something important that we saw as a mostly in-person school last year: No one learned well last year. The pervasive uncertainty of the pandemic left everyone just a little more stressed than usual. Kids need certainty, and that was gone. Adults could not say that they were going to be safe.
Anxiety and stress are forms of transient brain damage. It's something called cognitive load. How much can you "learn" or "think" varies from person to person, but when you add environmental stressors to that cognitive load, it significantly impedes learning. As Josh Marshall notes, everyone is broken.
Last year, we arrested educational decline rather than taught successfully, and we were largely in-person. Yes, I disagree with keeping schools closed, especially now that we have vaccines and treatments. There is no excuse, as Yglesias notes, for keeping schools closed and restaurants open.
However, if we are going to properly understand the educational losses created by Covid, then we need to understand that those loses were not entirely created by the loss of in-person class time.
For Generation Covid, we need to rethink how long a student should be in school. Basically, the overwhelming majority of kids should either do summer school or repeat a year, if we are serious about learning loss.
UPDATE: Good summary of the psychological factors involved here. They don't use the phrase "cognitive load" when talking about students, but it's clearly what they are talking about.
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