We Have 90 Days.
As of the beginning of May, many U.S. states are starting to allow a limited, partial, highly restricted reopening of some additional businesses shut down by various orders aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19. To my knowledge, no state is reopening schools now, but most have tentative plans to reopen around the normal start of the 2020-2021 academic year.
There is a real possibility of a “second wave” of COVID-19 infections in the fall. We have had roughly 90 days to gather information on the virus and the disease. The data suggest the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads dominantly indoors, and rarely outdoors. UV radiation, higher temperature, higher humidity, and fresh air all appear to reduce the duration the virus lives on surfaces. At the same time, indoor summer conditions (cooler, dryer air-conditioned air, lack of UV light, etc.) may increase conditions for transmission. Once typical fall weather drives people indoors, transmissions are likely to increase.
When that happens, how will various municipal and state governments react? We now know more. Children are less susceptible to the disease when infected. It appears transmission from young children to adults is very low. This argues for not closing day care facilities and elementary schools. We don’t have good data on the transmission from infected adolescents to adults. That means closing high schools might be necessary.
Schools will restart in early August. A wave of new infections may start in October. But the plan needs to be known as school restarts. That means we have roughly 90 days to get a plan together.
It is fair to say the nation’s teachers did yeoman’s work implementing a distance learning plan in almost no time this spring. It is equally fair to say this plan was marginal at best, highly dependent on the parents, and resulted in very different learning experiences for the poor vs. the privileged.
We have 90 days to fix this.
We have had roughly 60 days to gather information on what works and what does not work. We have had roughly 60 days to evaluate the current distance learning efforts. We have had 60 days to look in the mirror and admit the home schoolers had this figured out long ago, and we could learn a lot from them.
We have 90 days to come up with a better plan.
As I pointed out in my previous essay “The Model is the Problem”, the best comment I read on this was home schooler Bethany Mandel who pointed out home schoolers go through a transition from “home school” to “home education”. What she meant by this was a successful home schooler integrates normal home activities into the education of the home schooled child. The most common example is using baking to teach fractions.
We have 90 days to create a better plan than the current one. It we mistakenly congratulate ourselves on our “success” in the spring school closures, and assume any fall or winter school closures will simply be more of the same, we will be making a huge error. The same kids who took an educational hit will take another. The same kids who took an educational leap will take another.
As I noted before, the model for the 2020-2021 academic year for primary and secondary education needs to be a hybrid model—one that can shift quickly from on-campus to distance learning, and back again. It needs to be flexible to account for active, involved parents (tutored), minimally involved parents (proctored), and no parents in the house (latchkey). We need to think in terms of “evaluating progress” not just “testing”. This means more open book style tests, more essays, more reports, etc. A mistake would be to go primarily online multiple choice tests, but there is a place for those. The idea of going to semester long workbooks, rather than frequent assignments, is worth considering. More experience-based learning is needed. By incorporating this into the curriculum while on campus, students will know how to complete experience-based assignments. Given the greater knowledge we have of the virus, a fall/winter lockdown would likely allow for more outside activity.
The idea we have limited amount of time to reinvent our organization also applies to government bureaucracies and commercial businesses. There is a very real possibility of another round of restrictions before Black Friday. The ability of a restaurant to quickly reduce indoor service by increasing spacing, to shift to outdoor dining only, then to delivery and pickup only, and then quickly back, while maintaining customer loyalty is important. Same for retail flexing between 50% capacity, 25% capacity, and curbside only. On the government side, municipal and state government functions will need to be flexible. It was simply to say: “All drivers’ licenses expiration dates are extended 3 months.” It is much harder to service all expired drivers licenses over the last six months in only three months in the summer. “Internet First” has to become the model going forward. Cities and counties should have apps for handling things like utilities sign ups.
Remote access (laptops, VPNs, etc.) have to be the norm, not the exception for all white-collar workers. As I have said before, the model is the problem. Models like treating white-collar civil servants like they are hourly blue-collar workers, with time cards, etc. needs to change. Instead of the insanity of “comp time” to allow “9/80” and “8/80” schedules, and banning working during lunch, most need to be considered exempt workers, and provided much more flexibility in hours. Byzantine rules and high approvals for remote working need to be ended. When they can be tossed aside in an emergency, how important were they? And then there is the very real possibility due to an inability to work remotely, many civil servants were simply sitting home and getting paid for doing no work, while others with the ability to work remotely were doing the jobs of two or three civil servants.
The military is another consideration. While members of headquarters can do some jobs remotely, anyone working with classified information cannot. And the operational units of the military must continue to drill and exercise their military mission. The COVID-19 epidemic on the U.S.S. Roosevelt could have easily happened in an Army, Marine, or Air Force barracks. Identifying what training can be done “socially distanced”, and what cannot, is the first step of flexing between the two depending on the state of the pandemic. Can basic training be flexed to double capacity in the summer months, and significantly reduced capacity in the winter months? We don’t have 90 days to determine that. It needed to already be done.
Congress has not handled the challenges of the pandemic well. Cutting and running early from D.C. only to have to rush back looked bad. Why did they leave so soon in the first place? Early on, there were many proposals for remote voting by congress. Even when congress was back in session, and the pressure mounted to pass remote voting rules was strong, it was dismissed as being “impossible” to create a secure voting system. This is hard to imagine. Most federal employees have some kind of smart card based ID card (DOD CAC, DOJ PIV, etc.) which provides multi-factor authentication to computer networks and applications. These cards not only allow two-factor authentication with the ID card and a memorized passcode, they also can contain biometric information such as fingerprints. A laptop, a smart card reader, and an issued smart card ID card supporting multi-factor authentication, combined with a relatively way of communicating a vote is not impossible. It would be easily testable on the House and Senate floors. Again, now is the time to address this. Another lockdown in the fall, leading to complete congressional dysfunction just prior to the election would not benefit the politicians. And the idea of politicians saying there is no way to secure their congressional vote while demanding the people reelect them through mandatory vote by mail will be seen as what it is: hypocrisy.
Which brings me to my next point. Election Day is November 3rd, and we need to face the reality the election could take place during a lockdown. This means states with tougher absentee voting rules will need to act more aggressively. They will need to establish and communicate the integrity of their system. They may need to address restrictions that may not be feasible during a lockdown, such as multiple witness requirements. They will need to get ahead of that now, because if they relax those requirements by emergency decree shortly before the election, there will be a level of public opposition. Since Vietnam and Watergate, individual’s trust in authority and institutions has been steadily declining. Jonathan Haidt described a “collapse in trust” of college students in their faculties. These are both, on average, politically left cohorts, so this loss of trust cuts across ideologies. Societal loss of trust is tinder for a potential fire.
Everything must change. Primary and secondary education must change. Higher education must change. Municipal governments must change. Business must change. State governments must change. The federal government must change. Congress must change. They all have to change. If only a few change, and the majority does not, we will have stasis again. If flexibility does not increase, the only alternatives are “On” and “Off”. If there is another flare-up in late October, and we are faced with only “On” and “Off” in our portfolio of responses, there will be far more angst and unrest than we see today, and that will impact a November 3rd election.
Yes, this pandemic is a once in a century event, and it is temporary. It likely will be history by the 2021-2022 winter season. But the changes made to make education, regulatory and licensing bureaucracies, legislative branches, businesses, and other organizations more flexible and responsive will only pay benefits. The idea of a congress that can be both in session and in district could bring us back to the idea of a citizen legislature. The idea of federal bureaucrats working remotely makes the idea of distributing more of the bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. and into the states they serve more plausible. The idea of more distance learning in higher education may finally be the thing that reigns in out of control college costs. The idea of more remote work by companies makes smaller cities, especially in the industrial heartland more economically viable.
But for that to happen, we have to get to work now.
We have 90 days.
