Welcome to the Schools Issue of the Highlight

Michelle Kondrich for Vox

As schools prepare to open, we’re crunching numbers with the economist who fought to reopen schools, exposing the myth of the perfect college experience, dressing for class, and more.

This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention handed down the sort of ambivalent guidance for school reopenings that makes parents shudder. Schools ought to fully reopen this fall, the agency said, suggesting a swift end was in sight to a 15-month ordeal that at one point left 55 million American children facing a bootstrapped education.

But the agency left open the questions of whether masks, social distancing, and other protective measures should be mandated, leaving the matter of hammering out the details to local leaders and administrators already confused by months of reversals and, now, the emerging threat of the delta variant. And so, weeks from the opening bells, parents, teachers, and children themselves brace for the uncertainty of returning to class in the midst of an enduring pandemic.

It’s in this sort of environment — in the “information vacuum” created by Covid-19, writes Vox’s Anna North — that a new type of pundit has emerged to influence policy and practices across the nation. And when it comes to schools, none has more influence than Brown University economist Emily Oster. Long a parenting expert, Oster waded into the health crisis when she began collecting data on Covid-19 in schools and called for them to reopen. It hasn’t been without controversy.

In this month’s issue of the Highlight, we take a deep dive into schools, and our cover story looks at Oster and her influence. “We’re facing basically this existential threat to schooling for all these kids, and public health,” Oster told North of her motivation in the early days of the pandemic, “and the best data that the CDC can marshal on this has been put together by a professor in her basement.”

Also in this issue, author and journalist Rainesford Stauffer examines how college is sold as a four-year growth experiment best experienced by young, wealthy kids, though that hardly reflects the reality. When Stauffer asked subjects whether it was truly “the best four years of your life,” few said yes, instead noting the backbreaking expense, the risk of social dangers including substance abuse and assault, and the disappointments that came afterward. And Stauffer knows the pitfalls of this misrepresentation of college. She herself had a tricky relationship with being a “traditional” college student — she dropped out.

Georgetown law professor and juvenile justice expert Kristin Henning looks at the rise of policing in schools and how, for children of color in particular, it transformed classrooms into detention centers where a lifetime of criminalization begins. So, she asks in an excerpt from her new book The Rage of Innocence, were Columbine and other school shootings behind the boom in “school resource officers”? Or is something else at play?

And finally, we have some fun at a Los Angeles high school that transforms each weekend into a vintage mecca for youths, and share an illustrated history of the enduringly bland, hardly changed school lunch.