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Pandemic school closures didn’t stop the spread of COVID and resulted in high levels of learning loss for students.
By Brigham Tomco
Political identity continues to shape how parents perceive pandemic-related school closures four years later, according to a new Deseret News poll.
Republican and independent voters are much more likely than their Democratic counterparts to say the cancellation of in-person classes during COVID-19 negatively impacted them personally. The gap is even wider — by a margin of more than 30 percentage points — when asked whether school closures hurt or helped their children, the poll found.
“The entire response to the pandemic was polarized like this,” Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, told the Deseret News. But the polarization didn’t stop when the public health emergency was declared over last May. “The same partisan valence” still colors discussions of the pandemic today even as students face a crisis of learning loss and chronic absenteeism, Malkus said.
As evidence grows of long-term damage to students’ education, observers disagree over what could have been done differently. But most share the same concern that America might be too divided to learn from its COVID-19 mistakes as they relate to the country’s youngest residents.
What do Americans think of pandemic school closures?
The Deseret News/HarrisX poll revealed that 50% of American adults with young children believe school closures hurt their kids more than they helped. Less than a third (31%) of registered voters with children in the household said the policy helped their children more than it hurt them. One-fifth (19%) of respondents said their children were not impacted one way or the other, according to the poll.
But overall percentages mask the unpopularity of COVID-19 school closures among certain political demographics. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans (63%) and independents (64%) thought school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic were more harmful than helpful, compared to just 34% of Democrats. Half of Democrats said the closures helped their children more than hurt them.
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