Masks Caused Schools to Close More Often, Not Less (Guests: Phil Kerpen)

Throughout the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Education, and school districts claimed ordering children to wear masks would keep schools open.  Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment, along with Emily Burns and Josh Stevenson, looked back to see if that was actually the case. The researchers examined school closure in 500 of the nation’s largest school districts to find out if mask mandates kept schools open more often. What they found was the opposite. The report, “No Masks Don’t Help Keep Kids in School” can be found here.The most pernicious mask mandates existed in the nation’s public schools.  If schools were open, in many school districts, children were ordered to mask-up. Kerpen has a hypothesis as to why masked schools closed their doors more often than those that made masks voluntary. Kerpen also discusses the work he did on the latest analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research, A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID 19, that ranked states on economic, health and education outcomes during the pandemic.  At the top of the list, were states that had the least heavy handed COVID policies.