Snow Days Are a Government Failure Dressed Up as Weather

The Forecast Was Predictable

Last Tuesday, the alert came through at 5:47 a.m. Two inches of snow predicted. Schools closed. Across three counties in Ohio, parents scrambled to find childcare, call in to work, rearrange lives they had already arranged. The forecast, it turned out, was wrong. Roads were clear by 8. The kids stayed home anyway.

This happens every winter. It will happen again next winter. And the cycle reveals something that has nothing to do with ice or sleet or road conditions. It reveals a bureaucratic reflex — the instinct to close, to cancel, to retreat — that has become the defining posture of American public education.

Closing schools is not a neutral act. It has costs. Working parents pay them. Small-business owners pay them. Hourly workers who can't Zoom from home pay them the most. The families with the least flexibility absorb the most disruption. And the schools? They lose nothing. The superintendents go home anyway.

Risk Aversion as Institutional Identity

School administrators in the United States have spent twenty years constructing a culture of preemptive cancellation. Snow days. Heat days. Air quality days. Mental health days. COVID days that stretched into COVID years. The pandemic accelerated a tendency that was already metastasizing — the belief that keeping children out of buildings is a form of safety rather than a failure of it.

Children fell catastrophically behind. The National Assessment of Educational Progress data from 2022 showed the largest score declines in reading and math in the history of that test. Thirty years of progress erased in two years of closures. We have not recovered. The kids who were in third grade in 2020 are in middle school now, carrying deficits that compound with every passing semester.

But the lesson administrators absorbed from that experience was not "closures cause harm." The lesson was "closures are safe." Safe for the institution. Safe for the union. Safe for the career of every administrator who signed the order and faced zero accountability for what it cost the children.

I grew up in Michigan. We went to school in weather that would shut down an entire mid-Atlantic city today. Blizzards. Ice storms. Temperatures that required serious winter gear. The buses ran. The teachers showed up. The building was warm. Nobody thought canceling school was a form of care — because everyone understood that sending kids home to empty houses, or burdening single mothers who couldn't miss work, was the actual harm.

The Parents Are Not the Problem

It has become fashionable to suggest that parents demanding accountability for school closures are being unreasonable. Think of the bus drivers, we're told. Think of the custodians. Think of the teachers who have long commutes.

Fine. Think about them. And then think about the mother working a retail shift who gets an automated call at 5:45 a.m. and has exactly forty minutes to figure out what to do with a seven-year-old before she loses her job. Think about the father on a construction site who can't work remotely and doesn't get paid if he doesn't show up. Think about the kids in Title I schools where school meals are not a convenience — they are the only reliable nutrition in the day.

The people who bear the costs of school closures are not the people making the decisions. That asymmetry is not a weather problem. It's a governance problem.

School boards across this country have become capture zones — captured by teachers' unions, by bureaucratic self-preservation instincts, by a risk calculus that treats adult comfort as a legitimate institutional goal. The families these schools are supposed to serve are an afterthought. The closures prove it.

What Accountability Would Look Like

Every school district in America should publish its closure metrics annually. How many days did we close? What was the forecast at the time? What were actual road conditions? How much instructional time was lost? What were the academic outcomes for students?

None of them do this. Because transparency requires accountability, and accountability is not something these institutions have ever been required to practice.

School choice isn't just a philosophical preference — it's a correction mechanism. When parents can leave, institutions have to compete for enrollment. When enrollment drops, budgets shrink. When budgets shrink, administrators face consequences that they currently never face. The snow day calculus changes when the family across town can take their child somewhere else.

That's the argument. Not that weather isn't real. Not that no storm ever justifies a closure. But that the current system has no mechanism to punish excessive closure, so excessive closure is exactly what it produces.

Two inches of snow. Schools closed. Parents scrambled. Kids stayed home. Nobody was held responsible. And next winter, the same superintendent will make the same call and face the same consequences.

Which is to say: none.