School planning chicken

Many schools are now announcing that they will be 100% remote in August/September when they begin, replacing their previous hybrid/fancy rotating schedule/other half-measure plans.

The patient impression:

School administrators are trying to make the best decision they can, for safety, education, financial, and legal reasons. The information available to them keeps changing, so they keep updating their plans. This is a challenging task and they are doing the best they can with limited information and no control over many external factors that keep changing.

The skeptic's impression:

Schools initially panicked, followed by a period of prolonged scramble, and are adjusting their plan to balance exactly on the knife's edge of [safe enough that the employees will not riot] and [still normal enough that the students and parents will not riot]. They'll continue to make new announcements to maintain this balance, so the announcements are interesting mostly to (1) to teachers, students, and their households, and (2) as way of tracking which riot has more potentiality.

The pessimist's impression:

Schools are inadequately-adjusted. Why do they keep announcing plans which are wildly optimistic and have dependencies on local/state/federal guidelines or international vaccine development? The institutional lock-in to a rigid schooling system means that even the most clear-eyed administrator is not allowed to make reasonable decisions or announcements, as the Overton Window in March did not really allow (for example) a superintendent to announce that public school was going to be 100% at home for the next two years. Or announce that all school was cancelled. Or any of the other things that I can imagine, in future-retrospect, as having happened (or as being equivalent to what will have happened).

So here's where we are, in a repeated game of chicken. It's asymmetrical, and maybe chicken isn't the right game-theory model to use, since we know which strategy to pick in order to lose, but not which strategy to pick to win. And also it's not mutually-assured destruction. And viruses aren't considered sentient, and have never been observed to drive cars around steep one-lane mountain roads...

This post's theme word is palmary (adj), "of supreme importance; outstanding; praiseworthy." A palmary plan is educationally elusive.