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When you close schools, kids and their needs don't disappear. When you close schools and the rest of the economy is open, parents still must go to work. Kids are sent to grandparents, to crowded informal child care centers in basements, to mix in learning pods with other kids.
While Americans might (rightly!) fetishize European social policies -- enhanced sick leave, wage replacement, etc. -- the truth is that right now we're going to war against the coronavirus pandemic with the social contract we have, not that we wish we had.
And this means that school closures in the United States -- this is not fair to teachers, but it is our reality -- impose much higher social and epidemiological costs on our country than school closures do in other developed countries.
If our politicians don't like grappling with this reality, maybe they should use the decade before the next pandemic occurs -- before SARS 3.0 emerges from somewhere on the planet -- to build a true welfare state with robust universal programs.
That’s actually kind of what Sweden started doing after the Spanish flu pandemic. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/29/how-spanish-influenza-helped-create-sweden-modern-welfare-state-ostersund
“What is interesting is that, after the epidemic, the state...made tentative steps towards a cooperative approach to social reform. Issues such as poor nutrition and housing were on the political agenda,” says Hedlund. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/29/how-spanish-influenza-helped-create-sweden-modern-welfare-state-ostersund
“Anyone trying to date the inception of Sweden’s welfare state cannot overlook the events of autumn 1918.” https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/29/how-spanish-influenza-helped-create-sweden-modern-welfare-state-ostersund
