In what feels like a pandemic education repeat of The New York Times’ series of reports on Trump supporters in Midwestern diners while the majority of voters who opposed Trump were largely ignored, there’s increasing discussion at elite media levels of when to stop requiring masks in public schools. Arguments range from “already” to “very soon,” even as the seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths in the United States is over 2,500. And in many cases, the argument is that The People Think Masks Must Go, not that actual public health metrics suggest it’s time. The savvy pundit explains that the people may have put up with masks in schools until now, but patience is evaporating and effete liberals worried about their kids getting COVID-19 and bringing it home will just have to get real.

Polling suggests reality is different. A January tracking poll conducted for The New York Times found 68% support for requiring kids to wear masks in school—with 48% strong support, and just 26% either strongly or somewhat opposed. The same poll found 69% support for requiring masks to be worn in public more generally. It’s not alone. A Chalkbeat roundup of more than a dozen polls taken since summer 2021 found widespread support for masks in schools, if not always as high as 68%.

That’s not the only aspect of education where polling shows a different picture than you might get from reading The Atlantic or big-name Substack. A poll conducted in December for the American Federation of Teachers found that a large majority of public school parents think their kids’ teachers and schools have been doing a good job during the pandemic. In fact, the percentage of parents who said their kids’ teachers were doing an excellent or good job had increased since a 2013 poll, from 71% to 78%. Nearly the same figure, 72%, said they were satisfied with the schools overall.

Satisfaction with how schools had handled the COVID-19 pandemic was also high, at 78%, and parents were slightly more likely to think their schools had reopened too early than waited too long to do so. A strong plurality felt that schools had reopened at the right time. This poll was taken as the omicron surge was just getting underway, but it reflects people’s thinking after more than a year and a half of pandemic education.

Unfortunately, a large number of the teachers who parents say are doing such a good job may not be in the schools much longer. A poll from the National Education Association finds that 55% of educators are thinking about switching professions or retiring earlier than they had planned. In a stark display of the strains of the recent months, that number is up from 37% in August. It also comes after the loss of 600,000 public education workers since January 2020.

Both educators and parents point to some of the same problems in public education: Shortages of guidance counselors, social workers, and nurses were the top concern identified in the poll of parents, while large majorities of the educators surveyed said that they have had to fill the gaps of staffing shortages and that their work was affected by unfilled job openings.

In the survey of educators, “When asked about potential ways to address the issue, respondents pointed to higher salaries, providing additional mental supports for students, hiring more teachers, hiring more support staff, and less paperwork.” Parents also expressed concern about teacher pay and school funding.

Here’s what we need from our pundits, including both the ones who feel that hot takes on hot topics will propel their careers and the ones with legitimate public health expertise: We need less speculation about what’s politically feasible that’s based almost exclusively on the loudest voices without attention to how many people those voices represent. We need fewer takes that attempt to generalize one high-profile parent’s personal frustrations into a movement. We need coverage, or at least acknowledgement, of conditions in public schools—especially the ones with lots of low-income students.

But most of all, what we need is less shallow punditry from public health experts and more serious discussion of what needs to happen to move forward. It’s great that so many public health experts now have big platforms, but what’s broadcast from those platforms should be meticulous. We need less hazy handwaving about how masks and other nonpharmaceutical interventions can be dropped “soon” and more thoughtful analysis of what metrics will show it’s safe to take masks off, whether at the grocery store or in the classroom.

It would be great to be able to ditch masks, but we need metrics based on case rates and hospital capacity, not public pontificating divorced from the current situation. Maybe omicron will be our eventual way out, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Wanting it a lot won’t make it so, though, as too many people with big platforms seem to believe. I can guarantee you my kindergartener was kidding when he said, “I love wearing masks. It’s a hobby of mine.” But he’ll do it until it’s safe not to, not until it ceases to be convenient.

And if you have kids in school—if you want their teachers and paraprofessionals and librarians and bus drivers to still be around in a few years—you might express your appreciation, or at least try not to make their jobs more difficult. Even better? Press your local and state government to fully fund schools, and do what it takes to keep teachers teaching.