On lockdown drills after Uvalde
and what researchers are learning about pandemic school re-openings
Like I’m sure for many of you, last week was both painful and infuriating, as details emerged slowly about the shooting timeline at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, and particularly the inaction of the police.
I don’t have clear thoughts to share right now, but I can share a story I did on lockdown drills (also known as ‘active shooter drills’) which are standard exercises American public school students do each year to prepare for the kind of nightmare we saw last week. I will say this was the kind of story where some of my original priors on the drills were challenged by the time I finished the reporting.
You can read that here.
The other story I published is a look at what researchers are still learning about school reopening decisions during the pandemic. A narrative ossified pretty early on that public health / Covid-19 metrics had virtually nothing to do with whether schools reopened for in-person instruction, and the “politics” of a given community, and, relatedly, the strength of their teacher unions, could explain nearly all the variation. Researchers now are getting a much more comprehensive understanding about factors that drove reopening (and on the consequences of closures.) I wrote about where the research stands, what kinds of questions people still have, and why it’s worth studying these decisions even as time marches forward. You can read that here.
Thank you as always, and hope you are having a restful Memorial Day