Test results point to rising rates of truancy and plummeting attainment rates in maths and English, especially among poor minorities, who tend to be least able to deal with remote learning and most afraid of returning to school. And they will be weighing even more heavily on less adaptable or fortunate ones. But the costs in lost teaching-time, social interactions, and the creative sparks that fly in a well-run classroom are obvious and mounting in his household. Lexington’s sons have two parents able to work from home and dedicated teachers (Miss W’s upbeat karaoke routines and Miss T’s coolly relentless maths drills are still going strong nearly a year into the great school shutdown). This failure is likely to have dreadful consequences.

Nationwide, about 25m American schoolchildren, or half of the total, are either in school part-time or fully on Zoom. And the laggard districts elsewhere are mostly still hanging back, especially in Democrat-run states such as California and Maryland, even as evidence of children’s limited potential to transmit the virus has piled up. Only a handful of American states, including Florida and Texas, were even close behind them.

Most European countries fully reopened their schools in September. His 12-year-old will go back on the same part-time basis three weeks later, by which time he will not have seen a teacher in the flesh for almost 14 months.Ī comparison with their British cousins, who have missed half as much school despite enduring a second lockdown, shows how extreme this is. Provided the board does not put the brakes on its latest back-to-school plan, as it has three times previously, Lexington’s two sons in elementary school will be back in school-for as little as four days a fortnight-by the beginning of April.

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