How Much Did We Learn From School Closures During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

By Louis Freedberg

Aug 17, 2026

School Security During Pandemic, January 2021. Photo by Louis Freedberg

As students return to school this fall, it’s easy to forget that exactly six years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted this annual ritual more than any other time in the nation’s history.

The majority of children and their teachers stayed home, amid life-and-death fears about a pandemic that eventually caused 1.1 million deaths in the United States, including nearly 1,700 children.

Yet the nation has yet to draw clear lessons from whether or to what extent school closures were even necessary.

The divisions over whether to close schools were on display again when Dr. Anthony Fauci chose to invoke the Fifth Amendment at a July 29 congressional hearing, as he faced familiar, and often abusive questioning from his perennial foe Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, and other GOP senators. They accused him of being principally responsible for closing schools during the pandemic, and of inflicting irreparable harm on a generation of American schoolchildren.

“You argue that you did not personally issue every lockdown order, close schools or impose every mandate, but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions,” Paul said at the hearing. “Children lost years of education.”

The entire Covid lockdown, Paul argued, “could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime.”

It’s nearly the same accusations he leveled at Fauci at a June 30, 2020, hearing during the early months of the pandemic. “Dr. Fauci, every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do. But when you’re asked, ‘Can we go back to school?’ I don’t hear much certitude at all. ‘Well, maybe.’ ‘It depends.’ Guess what? It’s rare for kids to transmit this. I don’t hear that coming from you.”

Fauci responded testily, “If you were listening to my opening statement, and my response to one of the questions, I feel very strongly we need to do whatever we can to get the children back to school. I think we’re in lockstep agreement with that.”

The tragedy of the feuding between Fauci and Paul, and the politicization of the issue more broadly by President Trump and a coterie of other right-wing critics, is that it has stood in the way of reaching clear conclusions that could guide schools on how to best respond the next time a pandemic strikes.

Which it will. The only question is when.

At last month’s hearing, GOP committee members used much of their time to mock Fauci by quoting from the diary he kept on a government computer during the pandemic. The portrait they painted was of a fraudulent scientist more interested in socializing with celebrities and profiting from the pandemic than curbing it.

I decided to read Fauci’s diary myself to see what it revealed about the school closure controversy. What I found was that his position was far more nuanced than his right-wing critics, and some on other points of the political spectrum, allege.

As the diary makes clear in multiple places, Fauci’s default position — one he advised both the White House and other agencies to put forward publicly — was that schools should remain open. Throughout the pandemic, he argued the decision to close schools should hinge on the level of coronavirus spread in a particular community. The only time he sounded more assertive was in the frightening first weeks of the pandemic.

·       On March 9, 2020: “Gov. Cuomo calls me up and asks my advice on whether to close schools in the orthodox Jewish section of Westchester where they have 90 cases (more than rest of NYC). I tell him yes.”

·       A week later: “I spoke with NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools.”

·       A few days after that: Ann O’Leary, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s then-chief of staff, told him that Newsom had decided “based on my TV appearances today and yesterday to close schools in California, as well as bars and restaurants.” Newsom didn’t, in fact, order schools closed statewide. Rather, he explained, there were wide variations in infection rates across the state, which should determine whether or which schools closed — a position similar to Fauci’s.

By the summer of 2020, despite a vaccine nowhere on the horizon and deaths still climbing, the Trump administration was pressuring states to reopen schools regardless of the risks.

·       On July 9, 2020, Fauci wrote: “Trump wants to open the schools at all costs. Clearly, he does not care about the safety of the children.”

·       A month later: “I have been saying consistently that we should have as a default position our attempt/intention to open schools.” He cited “the psychological toll on children, their dependence on schools for meals, and the burden on working parents.” But “the primary consideration must be the health, safety and welfare of the children and the teachers… one size does not fit all.”

·       On the same day he included in his diary an email from Dr. Deborah Birx, then the White House’s Covid coordinator, describing “a very dangerous meeting in the Oval” with Dr. Scott Atlas, a Stanford neuroradiologist and Fox News commentator Trump had brought onto the pandemic task force. Atlas was pushing to reopen all schools on the theory that masks were “overrated” and children neither got sick nor spread the virus. Birx said she pushed back on that claim, “but I had no impact,” she wrote.

·       In the diary, Fauci reflected that Atlas’ positions were “going to be a real problem,” pointing to “emerging evidence of long-term cardiovascular and neurological effects even in young people who’d never been sick enough to be hospitalized.”

·       By mid-May 2020, Fauci was frustrated that the media were exaggerating his disagreements with Trump: “They fed him that I said we should not open schools, when in fact, I said that we would not have a vaccine in time… for the August/Fall semester.”

·       On November 30, after Joe Biden had defeated Trump, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker in a call said he “liked my statement on the Sunday shows of ‘close the bars, open the schools.’”

·       On December 6, Fauci advised Jeff Zients, Biden’s just-named “covid tsar,” and incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that “they should also lead with saying the administration’s default position is to open, and keep open, the schools.”

None of this reads like someone single-mindedly insisting schools stay closed — the caricature his critics keep repeating.

But what critics also downplay, or ignore altogether, is that opening schools carried real risks, too — not just for students but for staff and their families.

·       An estimated 1645 children between 0 and 17 died of Covid between 2020 and 2023 according to the CDC.

·       During 2021 and 2022, Covid was the eighth-leading cause of death among children overall and the leading cause among all infectious diseases, according to a study in the January 2023 Journal of the American Medical Association.

·       Harvard researchers at Mass General had already found that children could be significant spreaders of the virus and its variants, capable of carrying “high levels of live, replicating SARS-CoV-2 in their respiratory secretions.”

·       Even with milder symptoms, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia warned that “children of all ages can contribute to disease transmission.”

Today, there’s near-universal agreement, in the research literature and among educators, that school closures inflicted a lasting educational toll on many children.

There’s far less agreement on the health side of the ledger. We know closures did little to stop the pandemic’s spread — but we also now know children could transmit the virus, that especially those with preexisting conditions faced real risk, and that school staff risked infecting colleagues, family members, and others in their networks.

As children return to school this fall, the pandemic that upended their early education is thankfully behind us. Fauci , meanwhile, is at risk of being prosecuted for contempt of Congress for pleading the Fifth Amendment at the hearing.

At the same time Republicans in Congress are trying to impose on the nation their version of what worked or didn’t during the pandemic. (See for example the report of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Virus — a 520-page screed denouncing everything that Democrats did during pandemic, with Fauci the principal villain.)

That’s the real cost of six years of feuding: not the failure to reach a verdict on whether Fauci was right or wrong, but to definitively answer questions that could help guide schools in the face of a similar catastrophe in the future. There are numerous research papers that address key issues directly or indirectly, but they are buried in journals, are sometimes flawed, and often reach different conclusions.

Was the community-spread thresholds set by federal, state and local health officials that determined when a school should close the right ones — or were they too cautious or not cautious enough? Did six feet of distancing and masking in classrooms meaningfully slow transmission, or did they do little to justify their social and emotional costs?

Six years on, we still don’t have dispassionate answers to these crucial questions. Continuing to badger an 85-year-old Fauci won’t bring us closer to getting them.

Louis Freedberg writes the substack column Education on the Line, where this story was originally published.