You remember the six-foot rule. How could you forget?
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) told us during Covid that social distancing—which it defined in July 2020 as a minimum of two arm lengths between oneself and other people inside and outside—was “the best way to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease.”
Not an “advisable approach.” Not a “precaution.” The best way. Grammar nerds note immediately that “best” is superlative, indicating that this method of Covid mitigation was weighed against other options and declared optimal.
Many of us took this guidance very seriously. We locked ourselves in our homes for months. We stood in line at the grocery store—tightly masked—on giant floor decals stuck six feet behind their predecessors.
And most importantly, we stood by as schools in large swaths of the country remained closed in fall 2020 because it was logistically impossible to fit a whole school’s worth of kids into a building while keeping everyone six feet apart. We were doing our bit for the cause. Patriots, we were.
Imagine our surprise when the Washington Post recently reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci—the adult in the room during pandemic—testified to Congress in January that “it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” and the rule was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”
I’m sorry. What? Just sort of appeared? Not based on data?
That wasn’t what we were told at the time. We heard—over and over—that six feet was the standard.
Here are two examples:
When California Gov. Gavin Newsom released his July 2020 reopening plan, it said the state health department “requires that all adults stay six feet from one another and six feet away from children, while students should maintain six feet of distance from one another as practicable.”
He said “six feet” three times in one sentence.
The American Federation of Teachers, in its own reopening guide, stated: “CDC guidance remains clear: There must be a physical distance of at least six feet at all times among students and staff,” and added that “some have been pushing to allow for a distance of three feet for cost reasons, but cost should not outweigh public health guidance.”
Perhaps you find this Monday morning quarterbacking tedious. It was the early days of the pandemic, after all. We were trying to save lives. The overwhelming medical consensus, at that time, favored six feet.
Except that’s not accurate
The American Academic of Pediatrics (AAP) was never onboard with six feet of distancing in schools.
In June 2020—well in advance of the 2020–21 school year and before the statements made above—the nation’s leading organization for pediatricians released guidance saying “evidence suggests that spacing as close as three feet may approach the benefits of six feet of space, particularly if students are wearing face coverings and are asymptomatic.”
Three feet? Wait, there’s more.
According to the AAP, “all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school,” which meant that available measures must “mitigate, not eliminate, risk.”
Translation: Reopening schools for in-person learning was more important than driving Covid transmission to zero. The AAP explicitly said six feet of distancing should not be adopted if it resulted in limits on the number of students permitted to attend each day.
Yet six feet of distancing is what many schools believed they had to provide to prevent outbreaks. As a consequence, most students were kept home for the new school year. In mid-September 2020, about 60 percent of U.S. schools were fully virtual and only 20 percent were operating a traditional in-person schedule. (About 20 percent were hybrid.)
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It wasn’t until March 2021 that a majority of schools returned to full in-person operations. A few districts—such as San Francisco—did not welcome all students at the same time until the 2021–22 school year.
Now, in 2024, we’re seeing a belated acknowledgment that we got it wrong. As three New York Times reporters put it:
A variety of data—about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19—has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
It sure seems like students nationwide should have returned to school—with robust mitigation protocols and serious adherence to them—in fall 2020. Failing to reopen schools wasn’t just a misstep we can spot with the benefit of hindsight; it looks increasingly ill-advised based on what leaders in government and public health knew at the time.
How did reopening go off the rails?
We needed a unifying effort to ensure the pandemic didn’t spoil childhood for our kids. Instead, we got a politicized food fight.
Weeks after the AAP issued its guidance, then-President Trump threatened to “cut off” money for schools that did not reopen. Not helpful.
The pediatricians soon distanced themselves from the Trump administration in a joint statement with the nation’s largest teachers unions reiterating that efforts to resume school must prioritize safety and health. Notably, the statement did not back away from AAP’s position that three feet was sufficient for distancing.
But the damage was done. That was July 10, 2020, pretty much the day reopening fell apart, as AFT President Randi Weingarten later said to reporter Alec MacGillis: “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe. Then Trump and DeVos played their political bullshit.”
Whether you believe Weingarten or not—and many argue she had already been looking for justifications to defend continued school closures—it’s undeniable that reopening became politicized. Subsequent studies found that reopenings were strongly associated with the share of the local vote that had gone to Trump compared to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. It was a Rorschach test.
CDC guidance was not updated to allow for three feet of distancing until March 2021. By then, states like Massachusetts had engaged in their own health research and concluded that three and six feet offered similar protection. The CDC’s voice was almost irrelevant.
While writing this piece, I contacted a number of school and district leaders who braved the reopening process. Not one of them was aware that pediatricians had called for three feet in summer 2020. All they’d heard was six.
Why does this matter? Shouldn’t we move past it?
No. We need to mine the past to handle crises better in the future. Our uneven, divisive reopening—and the massive learning setbacks that came with it—exemplify some of our biggest challenges in education.
This was not an anomaly. We struggle to make good decisions more broadly. We pay lip service to doing things that are “data driven” and “evidence-based,” but our track record suggests we rely more on vibes.
Research had shown for decades that there were problems with balanced literacy as a strategy—particularly for struggling readers. But districts adopted it in huge numbers and made heaps of money for publishers and celebrity academics. Why? Vibes.
Vibes told us to take a hands-off approach to student absenteeism following the pandemic—we didn’t want to come down too hard on anybody—and it bit us hard when missing school became broadly normalized.
I think it’s inaccurate to say our reopening process was guided by science. Our North Star was vibes. Kids went back to school when the local political landscape allowed them to—not when it was safe to go.
Why?
Extreme voices dominated key moments
When one side was saying all schools should reopen immediately without any mask mandates or protections for vulnerable teachers and the other was saying schools should stay closed until everyone had taken a vaccine that had not yet been invented, it wasn’t easy to hear the voices of pediatricians, who were saying: Reopen schools with as many reasonable protections as you can implement.
We can’t silence the extremes. Everybody should have their say. But we need to stop listening to them when it comes time to make decisions.
Need an example? Consider this exchange between Alec MacGillis and NEA President Becky Pringle published in September 2020:
I asked Pringle why her union, like others, had put such emphasis on the virus’s health risks to children, and she said, “When we look at the data and they say only 0.1 percent of kids will contract it and get seriously ill and die, that’s actually around 50,000 children.” I noted that the number of children known to have died of Covid-19 nationwide was around 100. She said her estimate was what could happen if kids did go back to school.
Our institutions lack credibility
We’re at historic lows. Finding out that there was little evidence to support keeping kids six feet apart didn’t help. As Zeynep Tufekci wrote recently, if officials misled people about Covid, “why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should people distinguish between wild conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies?”
Lack of clear communication left communities to slug it out locally with misinformation, partial understandings, and fears driven by pre-existing politics.
It’s time to give the public a full, unsparing accounting of how pandemic guidance was formulated and why something as consequential as the six-foot rule could simply “appear.”
Kids aren’t as high a priority as our rhetoric suggests
Bars and restaurants reopened in many communities before schools, to our lasting shame. The issue was always whether reopening was imperative. If it was, we would have accepted some risk to make it happen. But in many communities, any risk of Covid was determinative. In-person schooling became a nice-to-have. We were told the harm of remote learning would be minimal and that opening schools would harm low-income communities because of the increased Covid transmission that would occur. That was wrong.
States should consider amending their emergency protocols to elevate students and schools above other considerations in future scenarios. How many of the states that delayed reopening too long—and there are more than a few—have ensured it won’t happen again?
Yes, the pandemic was overwhelming. Yes, we did our best under stressful circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t make mistakes. Now’s the time to own them.
