Economy in school reopening fight
Parents can return to work if students go back to class; more infections would hurt recovery
The U.S. economy is caught in the middle of President Donald Trump’s tug-of-war to reopen schools — and could end up damned no matter what happens.
The full-fledged restart the president is pushing for would boost economic growth by allowing parents to go back to work instead of staying at home to care for their children. But it also would risk a more rapid spread of viral infections that already are surging in some states, sapping the momentum of the nascent recovery.
“It’s really important for students to have good learning opportunities,” said Emiliana Vegas, co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. “The problem in the U.S. right now is reopening the schools in the midst of rising numbers of cases. No country has done that so far.”
There’s little doubt the closings have a deleterious effect — in the short and long term. A four-week shutdown costs the economy more than $50 billion in lost output from working parents who can’t do their jobs, according to calculations by Brookings analysts. It also increases unemployment by a couple of percentage points, said Vicky Redwood, a senior economic adviser at Capital Economics.
These costs fall disproportionately on people least able to afford them: single parents and low-income earners who can’t perform their jobs remotely. Health care workers also are more affected, Brookings Senior Fellow Ross Hammond said.
A smooth economic recovery depends on the country finding a way to restart classes safely, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic told reporters Wednesday.
“The schools are really important,” he said. “If parents can’t get child care and they are worried about those sorts of issues, they are not going to be as productive in the workplace.”
If young people fall seriously behind in their education and social development, the economic impact can be long lasting. Four months of lost education could cost the U.S. $2.5 trillion in students’ future earnings, Vegas calculates.
Trump intensified his pressure campaign on Wednesday, attacking the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over guidelines he said are too onerous and threatening to cut federal funding to schools that don’t bring students back to the classrooms.
Despite Trump’s eagerness to reopen, the decision about whether, and how, to do so rests with governors, mayors and local administrators and not with the president, a point several of them are making.
In California, which reported a record number of coronavirus deaths on Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said any decision will be based on the case count when the academic year starts. And in New York, once the U.S. epicenter of the epidemic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Trump has no authority to order classes to resume.