Hopes that President Joe Biden and his team could exert a calming, decisive influence over getting children back in classrooms are now getting tested.

After nearly a year of massive disruptions to schools from the pandemic and a Trump administration response heavy on pressure and at times bluster, Biden promised a swift, coordinated, and supportive response. But that pledge has run smack into the decentralized, politically hazardous specifics of actually reopening schools.

There’s no shortage of scrutiny as to whether the administration’s newly released technical guidance for reopening schools has struck a proper balance, put enough priority on key issues, or represented a major shift from what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump had already recommended. Critics who see the new guidance as too restrictive have drawn a straight line from heated reopening disputes involving teachers’ unions in several cities to Biden’s chummy relationship with the national unions.

On national television, Biden reversed what White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki previously said about the exact nature of his 100-day goal for reopening schools. While that might have clarified the issue for some, it also underscored that the president thought a public political clean-up job was necessary after a barrage of skeptical media coverage.

Yet it remains to be seen if these Washington-centric stories have crippled Biden’s influence over the issue, or if frustration over his administration’s strategy will fade as school leaders make thousands of local decisions across the country on reopening, or as the pandemic wanes. And surveys about the issue have sometimes contravened easy or convenient narratives.

President Biden Is Walking a ‘Careful Tightrope’ When It Comes to School Reopenings

A recent Morning Consult/Politico poll focused on school reopening in the fall found, for example, that a small majority of registered voters (52 percent) said they had a lot or some trust in Biden with decisions about school reopening. Local administrators, school boards, and teachers’ unions , as well as national teachers’ unions, received positive grades from half or more of respondents; parents received the highest marks.The same poll found that in mid-February, 48 percent supported Biden’s handling of education, compared to 50 percent around the end of January, a change within the poll’s margin of error of 2 percent.

Any burgeoning doubts or anger about Biden’s strategy are unlikely to impede the $129 billion K-12 aid package from Congress that’s a top policy priority for the president, unions, and school administrators. More broadly, some people might look askance at the situation nationally or the way Biden has discussed it, for example, yet still think their local school system is doing essentially a good job; to the extent data is available, it indicates most districts are offering some form of in-person instruction, and that most students have such an option.

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‘Now it feels like the media’s circling’
Substantively, the CDC guidance reads like a “sensible statement of priorities,” and Biden’s public approach is more nuanced and thoughtful than Trump’s all-caps tweets, said Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied the politics of school reopening.

But Valant also said the president’s position elsewhere has been hurt by “sloppiness” in his team’s public statements.

“Now it feels like the media’s circling, and they’re waiting for the next [mistake], and will be very quick to jump on it, whatever that mistake might be,” Valant said. “I don’t think that will necessarily affect anything on the policy and governance side. … They’re getting a crash course now in the politics of education.”

Valant also questioned how much most people actually care about that national, 100-day metric, compared to what’s happening in their local schools. In fact, he said, Biden made a mistake emphasizing such a goal he can’t directly control, instead of just maximizing the number of schools that are safely reopening.

Whatever goals are shared for public consumption, Biden and his team stressed before and after his November election win that they were ambitious, not ambivalent, about getting students back in schools. That could lead to diminishing patience if Biden and other leaders don’t address a range of parents’ needs regardless of whether their local schools are open or closed, said Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education who has tracked school reopening.

“My impression is that they’ve been more focused on checking the box on the 100-day goal of reopening schools, and providing some elements that were clearly missing that a president should help with,” Lake said. “They’re walking, seemingly, such a careful tightrope here. They need to keep the unions happy, but they also have to maintain the trust of parents who are frustrated. And that’s tough. I think the reopening problem is really a trust problem.”

One of Biden’s greatest political gifts, his ability to reassure people, is something he should draw on more, Lake added.