[HN Gopher] Lockdown, distance learning likely to increase socia...
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Lockdown, distance learning likely to increase social class
achievement gap
Author : infodocket
Score : 206 points
Date : 2021-09-27 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| eric_b wrote:
| This is my US-based perspective:
|
| Closing schools last year due to COVID was as bad of a policy as
| putting COVID patients in nursing homes (looking at you MN and
| NY). We knew by September of _last year_ that kids were less
| impacted by COVID (they spread it less, they get less ill etc).
| We learned from Europe that it wasn 't killing teachers at an
| increased rate either (a fear-based argument I heard ad nauseum
| in my very blue state).
|
| There was no good science-based argument to close schools last
| year in the US, especially when restaurants and hair salons were
| reopened. But political polarization - exacerbated by the media -
| ensured we did the worst possible thing for our children. I am
| continually disgusted with every person I encounter who promoted
| (and in many cases still promote) remote learning.
|
| Rich parents could afford professional tutors and create pods and
| go to other great lengths to ensure their kids got _some_
| education. Meanwhile the poor parents were going to work in-
| person and leaving their kids to fend for themselves (many of
| whom, at least where I live, turned to committing crimes)
|
| The most disgusting part is the people most in favor of closing
| schools were rich, left-leaning white collar workers. Nevermind
| that the very people they purportedly want to help with their
| policies were the most harmed. As long as you say the right
| words, who cares about outcomes yeah?
| dageshi wrote:
| The main issue with schools is that the kids catch it, don't
| suffer with it much but pass it to their parents and
| potentially grand parents. Schools are just a great nexuses for
| rapidly spreading covid through communities.
| mikem170 wrote:
| It is true that kids are always spreading respiratory
| ailments. We've always had to live with this risk.
|
| It seems to matter how dangerous the situation is, how
| helpful closing the schools actually is, and how much harm we
| are doing to kids in order to hopefully protect others. It
| doesn't help that we don't have exact numbers for some of
| this. Nor would people assess these risks the same, even if
| they agree on the numbers.
|
| For example, some people don't think that covid is that
| dangerous, given that only 1 in 500 people have died and we
| now have a vaccine. Some people think the harm to kids is
| significant, especially those just starting school and how
| long they have been locked down. Some people question how
| effective closing schools has actually been, how many lives
| are actually being saved, or are we only delaying the
| inevitable spread of this through the entire population. Some
| people feel the opposite, they are vulnerable and want to
| impose on others to lesson risk to themselves.
|
| Keeping schools closed now that we have vaccines doesn't make
| as much sense as before. If the vaccines are 95% effective at
| preventing death and hospitalization then there is 95% less
| reason for keeping schools closed.
| dageshi wrote:
| I broadly agree, with vaccines I don't really think there's
| a good reason to keep schools closed. Before I think it
| made sense to err on the side of caution.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > The most disgusting part is the people most in favor of
| closing schools were rich, left-leaning white collar workers
|
| Correction: the people most in favor of closing schools were
| the teachers' unions. And they are a tremendous political force
| in the US.
|
| Right now (Monday 27-Sept-2021) the teacher's union in NYC is
| arguing that retaining unvaccinated teachers is somehow good
| for children's safety, and brought the case in front of a
| Federal Court.
|
| https://abc7ny.com/covid-vaccine-mandate-nyc-teachers-ny-hea...
| Supermancho wrote:
| > the people most in favor of closing schools were the
| teachers' unions.
|
| I'm not sure they can be "most in favor" when they are groups
| of organizations. They are easily the groups with the most
| influence in how schools are structured.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in
| person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other
| way around when it comes to work and I wonder why. Is learning
| not happening at work as well, especially when you're at the
| beginning of your career?
|
| For me, as a junior, remote work has pretty much been
| devastating on the learning side of things as well as being
| invisible to management when it comes to career prospects.
| Sure, it benefited the seniors as they could more easily dodge
| some of the annoying responsibility of tutoring the juniors and
| leave early when their work was done and they had enough time
| to rub shoulders with management before the pandemic to have
| guaranteed career prospects.
|
| So, to whit, I'm wonder if the teachers also enjoyed remote
| teaching more to the detriment of the kids?
| Supermancho wrote:
| > I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in
| person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other
| way around when it comes to work
|
| One group is composed of children, who we collectively agree
| need to be supervised for the good of their future and
| society at large. Kids are irresponsible and we cannot throw
| kids out of the system when they fail at those expectations.
| So to maximize participation, you need intervention. The
| other is not the same, because they are adults and held to
| different expectations or they are removed from the system.
| Attendance is not an effective measure of success in almost
| any work environment (where you can complete tasks remotely)
| so remote is fine, in these cases. There's nothing confusing
| about it.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Consider that it is not the same people that comment on every
| post, but those most invested in sharing their point of view.
| api wrote:
| > exactly the other way around when it comes to work and I
| wonder why.
|
| Telework isn't ideal, but it offers us a chance to break the
| big city real estate hyperinflation trap. If all good jobs
| must be concentrated in SF, NYC, LA, and Seattle, then the
| choice is "no jobs or unaffordable real estate, pick one."
| Either way you lose. Everyone loses except property owners in
| those cities (who bought before the inflation).
|
| Long term my hope is that telework and diaspora lead to re-
| nucleation of talent centers in lots of places all over the
| country, a reversal of the geographic consolidation trend of
| the past 20-30 years.
|
| Of all industries, this is the one we would expect to be at
| the forefront of geographic de-consolidation. We could, you
| know, actually use this Internet thing we built.
| bena wrote:
| Because both of these things impact them in different ways.
|
| Remote learning means they are responsible for the upkeep of
| their children during the day. There are more demands on
| their time and resources.
|
| Remote work means they are less beholden to their employers.
| There are fewer demands on their time and resources.
|
| So "remote learning bad" and "remote work good" aren't
| opposing opinions if you realize that their opinion isn't
| about the nature of "remote" but about the demands on their
| time and resources.
|
| And let's not forget that all day primary school is a
| relatively modern invention. All the talk about socialization
| and whatever, somehow children got that before the invention
| of school.
|
| People who complain about "the politicization" of a topic are
| themselves engaging in politicization of the same. But trying
| to use the accusation as a cudgel to get their way. It's
| almost as if they've defined "politicization" as "not getting
| my way". I've hardly met anyone who seriously used a
| politicization argument in a good faith manner. Not to
| mention, it's not a good argument either. Whether or not
| something is contentious is hardly ever a factor in whether
| or not it should or should not be done.
|
| I mean, there are other things in his post that are telling,
| but he's got a certain worldview and he's going to interpret
| whatever data that comes through, mix it with some personal
| anecdotes, and spice it up with what he intuits to be correct
| so that his predetermined conclusion is reached.
|
| And about whether or not teachers enjoyed remote teaching, it
| was a challenge. I'm sure some enjoyed it, but it would vary
| by grade level and socio-economic factors.
|
| So while there are plenty of children who probably lost a
| year of education (although depending on the grade level,
| catching up isn't much of an issue), with over 700,000 dead
| and counting even with the precautions we _did_ take (among
| those who took them, of course), it 's hard to say what the
| effect of putting all of these kids in school along with the
| attendant support staff would have been. Because there's way
| more opportunity for cross-contamination when you do that.
| Especially with families with members working in public-
| facing essential jobs. Anyone arguing otherwise is just
| playing hypothetical hindsight games.
| burnafter182 wrote:
| From my anecdotal experiences, teachers did not like it,
| unanimously. And my N is about 50, so take it how you may.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| _> I 'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that
| in person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the
| other way around when it comes to work and I wonder why. _
|
| Hot take: because school as most of us conceive it is
| fundamentally about soft-coercing children into ignoring that
| they're bored out of their mind so they can focus on
| something they don't really care about learning.
|
| Remote school fails for the same reason old-school management
| can't be remote: because its efficacy strongly depends on the
| teacher's ability to coerce children, and it falls apart when
| you remove that ability.
|
| (I'm curious how we'd determine if anything I just said is
| actually true. I'd want to look at how well Montessori
| schools adapted to the pandemic, but their philosophy is kind
| of remote-hostile too.)
| testplzignore wrote:
| I think some of it is the different priorities between
| children and adults. For themselves, adults might care more
| about convenience than learning, given that 1) they have many
| more important priorities than learning, and 2) adults don't
| have the ability to learn that much (compared to children).
| It's the opposite for children of course. Learning is the
| number one priority.
|
| For me personally, I totally agree that remote work is worse
| for the learning aspect of the job, and is a total disaster
| for the social aspect.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It's the opposite for children of course. Learning is
| the number one priority._
|
| IDK about other kids but when I was in school, my number
| one priority was having fun outside with my friends or
| playing video games. Learning was never a priority as a
| kid, but a chore, a forced exercise on the hamster wheel.
| saurik wrote:
| "the" not "their"
| bzbarsky wrote:
| Context: have been doing remote software work for 13-18 years
| (depending on whether you want to count part-time work). Had
| kids in fully remote school spring 2020, hybrid for most of
| 2020-2021 school year, fully back to school since spring
| 2021.
|
| Remote work as a junior is _very_ hard, for most people. Even
| worse as an intern.
|
| Remotely mentoring a junior is likewise pretty hard: you have
| to build in more structure than you would if you're sitting
| next to each other, and it requires more remote-awareness
| discipline on the part of the junior, which they may not have
| yet. Remotely mentoring an intern is pretty impossible in
| most cases. Taking on interns is something I have not really
| done, because it would not be fair to them...
|
| For learning, remote learning in kindergarten with the tools
| we had last year is an absolute shit-show (starting with the
| fact that the kids can't read yet, so even communicating what
| they should be doing to them can be quite difficult). Not
| even the most self-motivated kids can make a lot of progress
| in that environment. And the kindergarten teachers I talked
| to completely hated it. They had to invest a lot more time
| than usual, for worse outcomes than usual. Of course these
| were teachers who cared about doing their job. :)
|
| Remote learning in late middle to high school (think 13+)
| still has obvious challenges (science labs? access to
| equipment? a quiet space for the student to work at home?),
| but it's a lot closer to viable than kindergarten. The most
| self-motivated kids can do OK. Everyone else does somewhat
| worse than they do in-person, not least because they are
| sitting there at a device with endless temptation even more
| at their fingertips than in class in terms of social media
| and whatnot. Doing all the homework electronically can be a
| PITA compared to writing on paper (e.g. for geometry), but
| that may not be an inherent feature of remote learning.
|
| In between, it's a gradient from the complete insanity of K
| to the sorta-maybe-viable-if-we-have-to of high school.
| Basically, remote stuff requires a lot more maturity and
| self-discipline, both for school and work...
|
| I love working remote for various reasons, but there are
| plenty of times I wish I could just hop into the same room as
| some of my co-workers and sort things out on a big shared
| blackboard; the tech for this is just not there yet in
| practice. I would never claim that remote work is always
| best, or for everyone.
|
| So maybe it's just selection bias, in terms of what you see
| on HN? Takes a lot longer to type something like the above
| than "remote work is the best"...
| [deleted]
| ericmcer wrote:
| If you have ever lived with a kid it is crazy how often they
| and you will be sick. I lived with a friend who had an 8 year
| old a few years ago and went from maybe getting sick once a
| year to almost monthly minor illnesses. 8 year olds are
| basically disease factories who take no precautions.
| mikem170 wrote:
| I know what you mean, sometimes it seems that little kids
| always have a runny nose.
|
| I've assumed it would be a long-term bad thing if we don't
| allow for this. Perhaps it is better for kids to encounter
| all these rhinoviruses and coronaviruses when they are young.
| Maybe a lot of them are like covid-19, easy to fend off when
| young but deadly when older. Maybe that is why people
| sometimes die of the common cold, because they never caught
| that particular virus when young.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Where I live the public school shut down all of last year and
| only started in-classroom again this year after lots of
| frustration and fighting from parents and the teachers union.
| Many of these kids will be behind, some nearly an entire year.
| Especially ones where the parents had to go to work all year and
| they were without much supervision.
|
| The private school near me, which charges about $50k/year stayed
| open all year last year and increased their enrollment from
| parents frustrated with the public system. Students from the
| private school are already about 1.5-2 years ahead of the public
| schools during normal times (according to testing and
| testimonials from students that have attended both schools) and
| now with Covid and the effects of that, they are likely 2.5 years
| or more ahead.
|
| So yes, the working and poor classes are the biggest victims in
| all of this in my opinion. If you had money you either sent your
| kids to private school or you were able to arrange "pods" where
| parents each chipped in $10k or more for the year to have a
| version of group home schooling by professionals.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| I feel there was a very strong brand of thinking in this country,
| particularly among the gung-ho pro-lockdown (mostly) liberal wing
| of society, that distance education wouldn't harm children's
| development at all, or at least that the benefits of lockdown
| would outweigh the drawbacks. No studies done on the matter, and
| any disagreement to the contrary of this opinion was treated the
| same as saying END ALL LOCKDOWNS. Sad to see the consequences of
| this will mostly be laid upon the children and mostly the poor.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Yup. In some cities you can't even erect a cluster of cell
| antennas on a roof without a public design review and here we
| are making the largest public policy decisions of our lifetime
| with absolutely no involvement from the public. In fact many
| people will scream at you for "not listening to the experts" if
| you bring this up.
|
| The bullying, censorship, gaslighting, and straight up
| authoritarianism over the last year and a half has been unreal.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Pretty sure at this point any disagreement automatically means
| you're a right-wing anti-vaccine protester who it is now
| socially acceptable to wish death upon and cough on hoping they
| get COVID-19. At least that is the impression I get from
| r/Portland and r/VancouverWA where these new left-wing
| terrorist communities are being bred.
| bosswipe wrote:
| Wow. As a more left-wing person I've been shadow banned on HN
| for much less than this. HN used to be one of the few places
| where intelligent debate accros political spectrum was
| allowed. If you look at this whole comment thread all you see
| is one POV.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| I'm quite left-wing myself (check out my downvoted comments
| against capitalism, lol), but it's a simple _fact_ that
| local civil-society has combined with local activism in
| much of the developed world to generate a nasty sequel to
| 60s-70s-style ultraleftism. Are they some second coming of
| Stalin? Hell no, but are they going to go to every single
| planning board meeting, run for school board, and screech
| nasty names at you when you disagree with their most
| obviously self-serving, power-grabbing hot-takes? Oh yeah,
| they 've been doing that at least five years now, if not
| longer.
| harlanji wrote:
| I had achieved a nice middle class life and faced a setback that
| left me homeless 18 months before pandemic began. Hard worker
| from ages 14 to 32ish when pandemic hit, even crawling back up
| from homelessness with labor and service jobs.
|
| Now I've been forced into an abusive situation that seems
| terminal. The working class where I come from love to abuse me
| and refuse to understand how hard I've worked in last decades,
| and the wealthy who I used to be close with largely dismiss me as
| irrelevant or mentally ill. Due to legal problems created while
| in my vulnerable state I can't even expect to pass a background
| check and get work.
|
| Not so much about me, but I just know I'm far from alone in
| sinking into terrible circumstances. I anticipate a sharp rise in
| domestic violence and similar boil overs as winter closes in and
| the ability to retreat is compromised (mouse bites cat only when
| cornered).
| tbihl wrote:
| Basically, beneficial environments are anything but guaranteed.
| Plus, quiet is an underappreciated luxury good (and an
| underappreciated aspect of public libraries); seriously, poverty
| is so loud.
| tombert wrote:
| Agreed. When I started doing online school, I figured I would
| work on my bed, next to my wife, and have the TV on playing
| "King of the Hill" or something else I've seen a million times
| and thus could tune out.
|
| That was definitely _not_ the case; I found that trying this
| just made me worse at studying _and_ worse at watching TV.
| Eventually I cleaned my basement (which I 'm lucky to have),
| put a desk down there, and made that my "don't bother Tom cuz
| he's studying" zone, and it was much easier as a result.
|
| I cannot imagine that I would have completed school if I were
| living in a one-bedroom apartment.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Which is a reason why we need more aggressive laws around noise
| pollution. Leaf blowers, excessively loud motorcycles and cars
| and potentially purely cosmetic renovations in dense areas
| should be illegal or heavily taxed. What gives anyone the right
| to spike my cortisol and raise my risk of dementia and other
| negative health outcomes just so they can exercise their
| stylistic preferences when quieter substitutes exist?
| beckman466 wrote:
| > quiet is an underappreciated luxury good (and an
| underappreciated aspect of public libraries); seriously,
| poverty is so loud.
|
| this is one of the most compassionate things i've read today.
| thank you
| geebee wrote:
| Agreed, thank you for this. I think we should do more to
| defend quiet spaces.I work for a library, and much of the
| emphasis is on creating "collaborative" spaces. Those are
| important too, and I fully understand the irritation
| librarians have with the "shhhhh!" meme. But public silent
| spaces are rare, and may be a truly under appreciated
| resource by people who have the means to access quite private
| spaces.
| beckman466 wrote:
| The compassionate part I was talking about was the
| acknowledgement that kids today don't have the equal
| opportunities in schools that many claim they do.
| Environmental context (rich family or not) matters.
|
| "quiet is a luxury good" + "seriously, poverty is so loud"
|
| Having said that, I do agree with your point about the need
| for quiet spaces.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Distance learning is being used as a scapegoat. High school kids
| with elementary-school level reading comprehension skills didn't
| suddenly forget how to read during the pandemic, nor was their
| passion for reading extinguished by physical distancing.
|
| If the Biden administration were to spend a Billion dollars
| funding additional school programs, the educational disparity may
| be even more pronounced in a few years as the children and
| families who take education seriously use the resources available
| while the others don't.
| refurb wrote:
| I notice this in SF. The well off parents had private tutors
| pretty quickly after school closed and even middle class parents
| would split the bill across 5 kids.
|
| They didn't miss a beat at all. While the lower income families
| struggle with virtual classes while the parents tried to make
| ends meet.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| In the UK, even before COVID there was a government funded
| Pupil Premium programme [1] which gave funding for
| disadvantaged pupils to get private tutoring.
|
| Additionally, during COVID, there is a new National Tutoring
| Programme which allows all schools to get funding for private
| tutoring [2].
|
| I think it's really important that private online tutoring
| shouldn't be restricted to well-off parents, as it just
| perpetuates the poverty gap.
|
| [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-
| premium/pup... [2] https://nationaltutoring.org.uk/
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Exactly. I was a private tutor thru 2020 and this was my
| experience - it was much less "I'm falling behind" clients and
| more me just teaching the content since the online group
| instruction just wasn't working.
| scop wrote:
| This. Just like with various decriminalization laws, the poor
| suffer the consequences while the rich feel no consequences of
| their "deeply caring" policies.
| [deleted]
| lithium_throw wrote:
| And we all went along with it! And gladly shot down anyone
| who breathed a defiant word! Oh how we never learn.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| This comment seems a bit flippant. The choice was distance
| learning (something) vs. close down schools entirely and...
| ban students from learning at all?
|
| There was a pandemic and I think in many districts they
| made as good a switch to digital learning as they could and
| tried to be effective. Unfortunately we had a black swan
| event so its a bit disingenuous to act like "we never
| learn"
| dustintrex wrote:
| Or do what Sweden did, and never close the schools at
| all, and still end up with overall mortality (across
| total population, not just kids) less than most US
| states.
| lithium_throw wrote:
| There was a pandemic that basically left kids untouched,
| and frankly barely registers on the scale of deadly
| pandemics for almost everyone else.
|
| Let's at least be honest about it - the decision was made
| to avoid any risk of disease and close schools, and
| instead pass on the negative effects to those unable to
| prosper in the new learning regime. That is, those
| without private tuition, and/or a stable home environment
| with some kind of suitable space to focus on online
| learning. In my opinion, the education and welfare of
| children should be somewhere near the very top of any
| priority list, and in this case, we have utterly failed
| them in our scramble to be "Covid safe". Has anyone
| noticed that the near-retirement-age folks at the top of
| the power pyramid seem to be doing just fine, as they
| demanded everything be shut down to "protect" people like
| themselves? Fortunately, my kids are young enough that I
| may never have to tell them anything about this pandemic.
|
| Edit: And do you know who will pay for all of this? Me,
| and people like me. I will be burdened with the societal
| and economic costs of this for the rest of my life, just
| because I have a decent enough job and a family I cannot
| fail.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| It's not flippant at all! People you know in real life
| would scream in your face if you dared challenge the idea
| that kids have to be in school. In fact you still see
| this now!
|
| When the average person thinks getting covid comes with a
| 10% chance of dying... this crazy reaction starts to make
| sense. People are literally terrified out of their minds
| by covid.
|
| Source: http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
| pgwhalen wrote:
| Surely there was a third option of keeping schools open.
| I'm not a parent and am not sure whether that was the
| right option, but that your comment doesn't even
| acknowledge it is part of the problem.
| refurb wrote:
| I mean, plenty of countries never closed their schools
| down. Or at least not for very long. SF schools were
| closed from March 2020 to Aug 2021.
| lithium_throw wrote:
| And the governor of the fine state of CA sent his kids to
| private school for the entire time.
|
| Also, closing school for "just" a year and half is an
| enormous disruption to education.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| A year and a half is an eternity for a kid. Remember how
| long summer break felt as a child? Or a whole year?
|
| Society stole children's childhood from them for a
| disease that doesn't even affect kids.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| So what happens if high/middle class parents discover that the
| results are superior for this solution?
|
| Do you force them to send their kids to public school in order
| to bring up the lower income children?
| beckman466 wrote:
| > Do you force them to send their kids to public school in
| order to bring up the lower income children?
|
| As in, peer learning? It's the schooling systems job to
| accommodate and support, not kids?
| bojangleslover wrote:
| Yeah, eventually lawmakers will, but will probably keep their
| own kids in private school the whole time. Just like the UK's
| abolition of grammar schools.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34538222
|
| tl;dr "It's not fair"
| endisneigh wrote:
| What? Private schooling and home schooling have always been a
| thing. Why would they be forced?
| wyager wrote:
| People are constantly trying to ban private and home
| schooling. Commonly stated justifications for mandatory
| public schooling include reducing class divide, fighting
| extremism, etc.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/privat
| e...
|
| https://taipd.org/node/307
|
| https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-
| pr...
|
| https://www.ncregister.com/news/french-government-seeks-
| to-b...
| endisneigh wrote:
| People have been trying to do a lot of things - hasn't
| been successful.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Instead of bring the public schools up to the level of
| private schools the solution is to get rid of private
| schools? That seems utterly ridiculous. If private
| schools do better than public schools should emulate them
| instead of banning the competition.
|
| I am reminded of the Rush song The Trees
|
| > Now there's no more Oak oppression. For they passed a
| noble law. And the trees are all kept equal by hatchet,
| axe, and saw
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| >Instead of bring the public schools up to the level of
| private schools the solution is to get rid of private
| schools?
|
| It depends if private school superiority (or professional
| tutor superiority) is better in ways that can even be
| emulated in public schools. For one thing, a lot of their
| differences are due to exclusion.
|
| On the face of it, I rather doubt that it's possible to
| raise public schools in the West to that extent.
|
| Of course, there's more to it than that. Public schools
| in the US have achieved some degree of the nature of
| private schools purely by geographic segregation.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| This is true, but I think there are ways we can mitigate
| this. A voucher system could help fix some of these
| issues and allow some kids in crappy inner city schools
| to get out and go to a better one.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| An interesting angle to that is the continuous sorting
| that goes on.
|
| You end up with some schools with the worst of the worst,
| and heaven help anyone stuck in there. How do you
| construct those places? Do they have a SHU?
|
| Given our current infatuation with 'fairness' another
| issue arises. What happens when the good schools, given a
| voucher system, and the bad schools tend to have people
| who look alike within them. Should there be outrage?
| derwiki wrote:
| Can that be forced?
| chasd00 wrote:
| i don't think it can be forced but before the pandemic
| there was a social stigma reinforced by many that
| homeschoolers were weird and anti-social. When the pandemic
| hit so many kids became home schooled that the stigma was
| lost because everyone was doing it. The pandemic was a real
| setback for those on the anti-homeschool crusade.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| There's no substitute for socialization. But, before the lockdown
| we were at one far end of the spectrum where all edu was in the
| same social environment.
|
| Lockdown swung us to the other side of the spectrum. The catch is
| that the ideal balance varies per child and is dependent on more
| factors than we can control.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| >There's no substitute for socialization.
|
| The odd thing about 'socialization' is that it really means
| 'age segregated groups in a highly organized situation'.
|
| Really, it's a thing that never existed until the last 100-150
| years or so.
| lkbm wrote:
| We might do well to switch to non-age segregated groups and
| non-organized situations, but "being on Zoom" doesn't seem to
| meet the requirements in either case.
|
| We've got much smaller family sizes than 100-150 years ago,
| and much less "go run around town with your friends", so for
| better or worse, in-person school is the main form of non-
| virtual socialization a lot of kids get outside of their
| parents.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I deeply believe that non-age segregated or at least level
| segregated fails the other objective of schooling. That is
| education. Honestly the class room model with enough
| resources and giving separate access to those truly needing
| it might be best model.
|
| Like, open offices increase efficiency too right? So why
| wouldn't they be perfect for education, let's say a few
| hundred kid in same space?
| beckman466 wrote:
| > The odd thing about 'socialization' is that it really means
| 'age segregated groups in a highly organized situation'.
|
| Are you campaigning for self-directed learning like in the
| Sudbury Valley model?
| missinfo wrote:
| They could be referring to the Montessori method or the
| SpaceX school too. They have mixed age ranges and are less
| organized, understanding that kids learn at different paces
| and have different interests.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > They have mixed age ranges and are less organized,
| understanding that kids learn at different paces and have
| different interests.
|
| Yep, those are the same qualities of Sudbury Valley
| schools!
|
| https://www.reimaginedonline.org/2013/06/why-i-started-
| my-ow...
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| I'm not campaigning for anything, just pointing out that
| 'socialization' in the sense of a modern school never
| existed for 99.99% of human history.
|
| Is it desirable? I don't know. I suppose it's well suited
| to producing certain types of workers.
| paulcnichols wrote:
| I will actively do everything within my power to give my kids an
| "unequal" advantage. Sorry not sorry.
| josephcsible wrote:
| IMO, public school should be mandatory for the children of anyone
| who has authority over how public schools are run (e.g., I object
| to Newsom, who closed the public schools, sending his children to
| private school), but I have no problem with anyone else choosing
| private school or homeschooling for their children.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why should the children have to do something just because their
| parents have a particular job? It isn't their decision what
| their parents do.
| josephcsible wrote:
| You phrase that as if children would get to decide for
| themselves where to go to school, when in fact it's their
| parents who decide for them.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| That's the point - impacts them but never their decision.
| Shouldn't impose a restriction on someone based on their
| parents' jobs.
| supperburg wrote:
| This is already how it works. The people have control over
| public schools. They elect the officials who oversee it. If
| everybody wanted public schools to do X, public schools would
| do X and there wouldn't be anything anyone could do about it.
| We can amend the fucking constitution. The problem isn't a lack
| of power for the people, it's that people collectively aren't
| very smart. There's no civil solution to that.
| baremetal wrote:
| I would never send my kids to public school. There is no way they
| could get a better education than they could get from me. This
| distance learning thing just makes the decision even easier.
| masterof0 wrote:
| My sister is in the same boat with you,and she is raising a
| couple of Q soldiers for sure. You really can't teach your kids
| what they need to know, and also, kids need interaction with
| other kids to develop social skills, etc.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > You really can't teach your kids what they need to know
|
| You clearly haven't interacted with K-12 public school
| teachers, it's not hard to come up with a better lesson plan.
|
| Anecdotally, it seems the people who go into teaching
| nowadays are the bottom of the barrel.
|
| You can still socialize homeschooled kids, enroll them in
| sports, extra-curriculars, etc.
|
| School of choice and group homeschooling are growing more
| popular and I'm glad.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > First, we review research showing that social class is
| associated with unequal access to digital tools, unequal
| familiarity with digital skills and unequal uses of such tools
| for learning purposes
|
| I have several friends who are elementary and middle school
| teachers. This echoes what they've been saying: The pandemic
| response among parents has been starkly divided across class
| lines.
|
| Families with stay-at-home parents are, obviously, the least
| impacted. However, many of their children from less well-off
| households simply disappear completely during quarantine periods.
| The problem is so bad that they have scheduled time each
| afternoon to try to call all of the parents whose children didn't
| log on to the remote learning session (with their school-provided
| computers with school-provided cellular connections). If they can
| reach the parents at all they often indicate they don't even care
| that their kids were absent because they don't believe in the
| distance learning. The indifference is mind-boggling as a parent,
| but it's real.
|
| That said, leaving schools fully opened at all times wasn't
| really a viable option. Kids may not be as vulnerable to COVID as
| adults, but put 20-30 of them in enclosed rooms and the virus
| will spread. Local school districts here tried to stay open as
| long as possible but they quickly ran into a lack of teachers as
| the teachers became ill (multiple times in several cases) or
| simply quit because they couldn't risk it for themselves or their
| families at home.
| dantheman wrote:
| It's amazing that private schools were somehow able to operate.
|
| Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split
| the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-
| Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class. Give them
| more self directed study and homework. Have some pre-recorded
| video classes they can do on other days and have a proctor to
| help handle a larger # of kids.
|
| There are many alternatives to remote only learning.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Boys and Girls Clubs of America did this much of the Fall
| 2020-2021 school year while schools were remote; they created
| learning "pods" of 6 students to work remotely with one staff
| / volunteer.
|
| The idea being to limit the exposure / quarantine size,
| facilitate remote learning where it was otherwise
| unavailable.
| retrac wrote:
| The idea of split time was discussed in the public system
| here in Canada in many places, at the start. But come summer
| the general attitude and public discussion seems to have
| taken a very all-or-nothing turn.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Somehow nobody seems to feel a need to justify why would we
| make any changes* to in-person schooling. Instead it just
| seems to be a foregone conclusion that having kids in
| school is dangerous.
|
| Why is split learning even on the table? Who are we trying
| to protect? The kids? The teachers? Are most people in
| these hyper-partisan democrat areas (I'm speaking from a US
| perspective, but it's largely the US that has voluntarily
| wrecked now almost 2 years of education) aware that the
| kids are not at serious risk of COVID? Are they aware that,
| not only is the mortality of common comparisons like
| Influenza way higher, but that the common rebuttal of "but
| what about long COVID" is basically an evidenceless
| assertion and there is no evidence that children are
| getting permanent damage from their largely asymptomatic
| COVID infections? Are they aware that, even if it were
| right to try to prevent kids from ever getting infected
| with SARS-2 (spoiler: it's not), that we don't even have
| quality studies proving that going to school is even
| associated with greater COVID infection?
|
| Are they aware that, unlike the H1N1 pandemic, it's
| actually pretty miraculous that SARS-2 almost entirely
| spares children? That therefore to undergo these measures
| like school closures and constant indoor masking of
| toddlers, and 6 foot distancing, and plastic dividers, and
| restricted extracurricular events, has no relation to
| actually keeping children safe, except insofar as those
| measures very clearly harm the wellbeing of children?
|
| I weep for what we've done to children throughout this. We
| as adults are supposed to be the ones saying, "hey, even if
| there's risk to us adults, you guys are more important, and
| we're never going to ask you to sacrifice your life out of
| some misguided effort to prevent the transmission of an
| endemic highly infectious human coronavirus, and on the
| contrary we will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to
| keep you guys growing and developing". Instead we turned
| around and said, "kids are inherently gross, they're
| spreading this killer virus like crazy, if they develop a
| cough and hug their grandmother and the grandmother later
| dies of COVID then they killed their grandma".
|
| As someone who lives in California - which together with
| New York and Illinois has led the country in absurd and
| ineffective and incredibly authoritarian COVID policy - I
| feel like I don't recognize my fellow citizens.
|
| * Well, any changes because of COVID specifically.
| Obviously there's things like later school start times for
| teenagers, etc that are no-brainers that should have been
| implemented long ago
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| > Instead we turned around and said, "kids are inherently
| gross, they're spreading this killer virus like crazy, if
| they develop a cough and hug their grandmother and the
| grandmother later dies of COVID then they killed their
| grandma".
|
| But boy, wouldn't that suck? I have a couple thoughts
| here:
|
| 1) Kids spend a lot of time with adults, so yes, they
| could get grandma sick. They could also get their teacher
| sick, or the school nurse, or other support staff. Good
| luck convincing the teachers to put their health on the
| line; they're already underpaid and overworked.
|
| 2) Several metro areas have been running short on
| pediatric ICU beds. COVID is way less risky for kids, but
| still risky enough to overwhelm our medical system, so
| preventing spread should probably be given some level of
| priority.
|
| On the whole, I'm glad that our school systems moved fast
| to figure out an alternative solution during the
| pandemic. I'm less glad that we haven't tried other
| strategies as those alternative solutions have shown
| clear gaps in effectiveness, and I'm upset that children
| who depend on the school environment for socialization,
| focused learning, and even food have been left behind.
| blitzar wrote:
| I'm upset that there are children who depend on the
| school environment for food.
|
| And it isnt even a small number of children at that.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Agreed! It's a problem that the US hasn't spent nearly
| enough effort on, and the pandemic pointed a big ugly
| spotlight at it.
| handrous wrote:
| > Why is split learning even on the table? Who are we
| trying to protect? The kids? The teachers? Are most
| people in these hyper-partisan democrat areas (I'm
| speaking from a US perspective, but it's largely the US
| that has voluntarily wrecked now almost 2 years of
| education) aware that the kids are not at serious risk of
| COVID?
|
| It was to protect staff & their families, and generally
| reduce community spread.
|
| Schools this year, that are fully back in person, are
| _barely_ holding it together. There aren 't enough subs.
| Trying to go fully in-person everywhere last year
| probably would have fallen apart, for that reason. It
| still might, this year. It's _bad_.
|
| I agree that the harm outweighed the benefit _by a long
| shot_ if we 're talking just about the kids, but I don't
| think we'd have been able to keep fully in-person school
| running last year anyway. The ones that went in-person
| suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online
| cohorts. The only way to fix it would have been a policy
| of having teachers & students who _very likely were_
| COVID-exposed but not _actively ill-feeling_ come in
| until it was proven that they were COVID-positive--but
| that policy would also have increased spread, so I wouldn
| 't guarantee that'd actually improve the situation of
| having too many staff out for quarantine.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > It was to protect staff & their families, and generally
| reduce community spread.
|
| There is no evidence that school closures had any
| positive impact on community spread, FWIW. Hell, even for
| Influenza, which kids are much less resistant to than
| they are for COVID, studies have often found that school
| closures are counterproductive due to actually ending up
| with an increased number and diversity of
| contacts/events.
|
| > but I don't think we'd have been able to keep fully in-
| person school running last year anyway.
|
| But why do you think this? Are you aware that many parts
| of the world have returned to fully in-person school for
| several months or longer at this point? That here in deep
| blue parts of the US we are unique in our rabid devotion
| to denying children in-person school?
|
| > The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some
| cases worse than fully-online cohorts.
|
| [Citation Needed]
|
| > The only way to fix it would have been a policy of
| having teachers & students who very likely were COVID-
| exposed but not actively ill-feeling come in until it was
| proven that they were COVID-positive--but that policy
| would also have increased spread, so I wouldn't guarantee
| that'd actually improve the situation of having too many
| staff out for quarantine.
|
| First of all I actually reject the premise that avoiding
| spread is necessarily a good thing. Indeed it only
| prolongs the epidemic stage and as the rise of variants
| like Delta have shown, even rushing out vaccines in an
| unprecedented amount of time hasn't actually allowed
| people to avoid the virus. I should also mention that for
| teachers who are quarantining (which remember is also a
| result of policy, you're not talking about teachers being
| unable to teach due to being sick, but rather being
| forbidden from in-person teaching because they or someone
| they know hit a positive on a PCR test), they could still
| teach remotely to a class of in-person kids (yes you
| might need some other adult to oversee things, but I'd
| wager even without such supervision you'd still have far
| better results than the unmitigated disaster that
| "distance" learning has been)
|
| The kids who have survived distance learning have done
| well in spite of it, not because of it. They have access
| to tutors and learning pods and actually have a quiet
| space at home to do work, and actually have parents that
| give a shit. Not everyone has those resources.
|
| But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that, the
| only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been able to
| keep fully in-person school running last year" is purely
| itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine policies,
| and has nothing to do with an actual lack of staff nor an
| actual crippling health problem preventing people from
| being able to work.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| It's really a shame this stuff gets downvoted. I really
| wish people understood that it is quite possible for a
| well intentioned person to completely disagree with
| almost all of what we've done. In fact it would be highly
| unusual for all "smart" people to take one side of an
| issue.
|
| > But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that,
| the only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been
| able to keep fully in-person school running last year" is
| purely itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine
| policies, and has nothing to do with an actual lack of
| staff nor an actual crippling health problem preventing
| people from being able to work.
|
| I suspect we will eventually "discover" the same with
| hospital capacity. When you test everybody on the way in
| and then have all positive results follow strict, labor
| intense quarantine protocols regardless of patient
| symptoms... yeah you will have problems with capacity.
| Imagine if they tested all patients for other viruses and
| did this sort of thing...
|
| A lot of the problems we've experienced the last year and
| a half are self-made. Testing everything under the sun
| for covid and then acting on positive results regardless
| of symptoms is gonna throw a wrench in just about any
| machine.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| I think what makes me the saddest is that the pro-
| lockdown pro-school-closures pro-vaccine-passport-to-
| engage-in-society people never seem to think that the
| onus is on them to prove anything.
|
| They don't need to prove that school closures aren't
| deleterious.
|
| They don't need to prove that the supposed epidemic of
| long COVID is actually real.
|
| They don't need to prove that the missed medical
| appointments and missed routine non-COVID vaccinations
| aren't going to outpace the supposed benefits of doing
| the epidemiological equivalent of hiding in your closet
| from the monster (SARS-2).
|
| They don't need to account for second-order effects, such
| as the fact that "avoiding" COVID for a month or two is
| really just postponing it and that we exist in a state of
| dynamic equilibrium with the countless pathogens we're
| surrounded by.
|
| No, they just get to assume that their intervention de
| jur is without harm, and conversely that COVID is the
| worst thing ever and that SARS-2 is 10 times as deadly as
| all the other shit we don't spend an excessive amount of
| time worrying about (Influenza, OC43, noravirus,
| rhinovirus, you name it)
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Agree. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
| evidence. And it isn't the skeptic's job to prove any of
| that. Logic and science got flipped on its head.
|
| It's truly remarkable.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| The main problem with hospital capacity was ICU beds
| though, not all the trappings around the bodies in those
| beds. People didn't get put in those beds just due to a
| positive test. Fundamental issue was that our system
| isn't built to handle the sort of excess load a disease
| that leaves someone in an ICU bed for weeks causes. If
| covid killed who it killed quickly it wouldn't have been
| nearly as much of an issue.
| ssully wrote:
| >Hell, even for Influenza, which kids are much less
| resistant to than they are for COVID, studies have often
| found that school closures are counterproductive due to
| actually ending up with an increased number and diversity
| of contacts/events.
|
| Can you link to those studies? The big story last year
| was that cases of/deaths from influenza dropped
| worldwide[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-has-
| disappear...
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > The big story last year was that cases of/deaths from
| influenza dropped worldwide[1].
|
| There's a huge difference between "influenza plummeted
| worldwide" and "influenza plummeted worldwide as a direct
| result of school closures [or lockdowns, physical
| distancing, and universal masking]". Influenza did
| plummet worldwide. Indeed, it did so even in places that
| didn't go to nearly the same extent as the US did as far
| as school closures and the like. That should already hint
| at you that it's not actually related to what we did
| intervention-wise (which also makes sense given that
| everything we did was ineffective at slowing the spread
| of COVID more than a marginal amount [granted, SARS-2
| spreads more easily than Influenza so it's theoretically
| possible the COVID measures were completely ineffective
| for COVID yet were completely effective for Influenza,
| but seems farfetched])
|
| To me the most plausible explanation is that of viral
| interference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30950360/
|
| > Since the interferon system can control most, if not
| all, virus infections in the absence of adaptive
| immunity, it was proposed that viral induction of a
| nonspecific localized temporary state of immunity may
| provide a strategy to control viral infections.
|
| Briefly, infection with a virus causes one's cellular
| hackles to get raised, so to speak. That is to say, that
| infection with virus A leads to a ramp-up in innate
| immunity, particularly cell-mediated innate immunity,
| which decreases the probability of being infected by
| virus B in the ensuing days/weeks. The paper I linked is
| about leveraging that intentionally, but obviously it's a
| mechanism that occurs naturally as well. This next point
| is orthogonal to our discussion but I'd be remiss if I
| didn't mention that SARS-2 is, in a sense, actually the
| ideal candidate for intentional exploitation of viral
| interference, given how readily it infects human cells
| and how in large swaths of the population it is very non-
| threatening (and yes, in a small proportion of the
| population it is very threatening)
|
| --
|
| So to tie it back to the Influenza dropping, I suspect
| that viral interference was quite significant, and that
| altered social interactions accounted for a big chunk of
| it as well. Specifically, it seems like social networks
| got much more "local". There was still people going out
| and doing stuff, but overall the average person was
| significantly less likely to visit extended family,
| attend large events, etc. This is somewhat related to the
| lockdowns/forced shuttering of businesses, but I think a
| lot of it was broader than that as well.
|
| ---
|
| > Can you link to those studies [regarding influenza and
| school closures]?
|
| I'll start with one review that does seem to suggest a
| benefit in school closures for Influenza:
| https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/2/e002149.short. It has
| the usual problems associative studies do, but in this
| case specifically the confound of regression to the mean
| is incredibly great. They mention as such in the results:
|
| > However, as schools often closed late in the outbreak
| or other interventions were used concurrently, it was
| sometimes unclear how much school closure contributed to
| the reductions in incidence.
|
| Here's one from Hong Kong. I really like their discussion
| because it points out just how difficult it is to
| actually show a link, given the way epidemic curves
| naturally rise and fall and the delayed natural of
| intervention impact:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2609897/
|
| > Although we can only speculate, given the limitations
| of an uncontrolled natural experiment on the population
| level, routine surveillance data did not detect a large
| effect from the school closures. In particular, we noted
| a decline in laboratory isolations of influenza viruses
| that preceded the intervention and the lack of
| association between school closures and Rt. In fact,
| sentinel data may not accurately represent the incidence
| of influenza in the underlying population because, for
| example, other cocirculating upper respiratory viruses
| contribute to overall influenza-like illness consultation
| rates. Laboratory data, however, should be less affected,
| and extra testing in response to the heightened awareness
| of influenza activity might have artifactually lowered
| the positivity rate. The epidemic curves generated from
| the surveillance data showed a decline in cases that may
| have naturally concluded without any intervention. We
| note the difficulty of making inferences directly from
| changes in epidemic curves because changes in the
| epidemic curve may lag behind changes in the underlying
| transmission dynamics by at least 1 serial interval, as
| has previously been shown for severe acute respiratory
| syndrome
|
| -
|
| This next one is more about the ethics, but I think the
| abstract is pretty sensible:
|
| "Mitigating Pandemic Influenza: The Ethics of
| Implementing a School Closure Policy" - https://journals.
| lww.com/jphmp/Abstract/2008/07000/Mitigatin...
|
| > Pandemic influenza response plans have placed a
| significant emphasis on school closures as a community
| mitigation strategy. However, school closures raise
| serious ethical concerns, many of which have been largely
| overlooked. First, evidence of this intervention's
| efficacy has not yet been firmly established, calling
| into question whether it will be useful against the
| threat. Second, school closures have the potential to
| create serious adverse consequences, which will
| disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. Thus,
| policy makers should focus on gathering more evidence
| about the efficacy of school closures and on
| strengthening communication and transparency about the
| strengths and weaknesses of any school-closure plan that
| they decide to adopt.
| handrous wrote:
| > > but I don't think we'd have been able to keep fully
| in-person school running last year anyway.
|
| > But why do you think this? Are you aware that many
| parts of the world have returned to fully in-person
| school for several months or longer at this point? That
| here in deep blue parts of the US we are unique in our
| rabid devotion to denying children in-person school?
|
| Because they're--US schools in my city-- _barely_
| managing this year, due to staffing /substitute
| shortages? I'm not in a deep blue part of the US,
| incidentally.
|
| > > The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some
| cases worse than fully-online cohorts.
|
| > [Citation Needed]
|
| I have insight into districts that accidentally ran
| experiments for this, by running in-person and fully
| online programs concurrently. I can't share the numbers
| (they were in internal documents, with only some
| presented at school board meetings, which I certainly
| didn't save links to). Look at education & public policy
| journals in the coming years, should be some "fun"
| results (spoiler: _everything_ was extremely bad, not
| just online learning)
|
| > First of all I actually reject the premise that
| avoiding spread is necessarily a good thing.
|
| .... ok.
|
| > [quarantining teachers] could still teach remotely to a
| class of in-person kids (yes you might need some other
| adult to oversee things, but I'd wager even without such
| supervision you'd still have far better results than the
| unmitigated disaster that "distance" learning has been)
|
| The amount of planning and support you need to make this
| work, on short-ish notice, under the constraints and in
| the environment schools were operating in, makes it
| unrealistic.
|
| Overall, you're _severely_ underestimating the disruption
| this has all had on in-person schooling, and the stress
| it 's added for staff. You're overestimating how much
| extra work and (perceived, if you like) risk teachers
| were willing to take on, before they'd have simply quit.
|
| > But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that,
| the only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been
| able to keep fully in-person school running last year" is
| purely itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine
| policies, and has nothing to do with an actual lack of
| staff nor an actual crippling health problem preventing
| people from being able to work.
|
| I 100% guarantee you there'd have been a significant loss
| of staff at schools in our area if you announced a policy
| that all staff & students were to come in unless
| _actually too ill to attend_. You 'd have had serious
| problems with sick-outs among the rest. Again: schools
| would have been crippled due to staffing reasons. You may
| disagree with what those people chose to do in response
| to that policy, but it's what they _would_ have done.
| Source: I know a _shitload_ of teachers in my area, and
| all of the ones who _could_ afford to walk away from
| their job, spent most of last year right on the cusp of
| doing so, and they were absolutely serious about it. That
| kind of policy would have pushed every single one over
| the edge, instantly. Again, I 'm not even in a "deep
| blue" area (rather more red than blue, in fact). I assume
| that effect would have been even worse in "blue" areas.
|
| Your plan would not have worked, for staffing reasons.
| In-person school this year is _barely_ working... for
| staffing reasons. That 's just a fact, source: go talk to
| any public school teachers or administrators and ask them
| how the substitute supply situation is going, and how
| school attendance is going (80-85%ish daily attendance
| rates are common this year). Get ready for some stories.
| Attempting it last year would have gone even worse.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > I 100% guarantee you there'd have been a significant
| loss of staff at schools in our area if you announced a
| policy that all staff & students were to come in unless
| actually too ill to attend. You'd have had serious
| problems with sick-outs among the rest. Again: schools
| would have been crippled due to staffing reasons. One
| thing that is absolutely baffling to me is why this is a
| problem in the US, when there are other places in the
| world that simply do not have this problem.
|
| I'm Swedish, and none of my friends with school-age kids
| have mentioned any problems with this. Schools were open,
| and only older kids (16+) did hybrid or distance learning
| to keep them out of school and reduce spread, because it
| was deemed that they were old enough to handle it, while
| smaller kids weren't.
|
| But there's no hysteria anywhere, everyone just kept
| chugging along. I have plenty of friends' kids who got
| infected, but recovered. Their teachers got sick, and
| recovered. I have teacher friends, I don't know if anyone
| of them got infected, but absolutely no-one has been
| afraid or hysterical about the situation or thinking
| about quitting their job because of the pandemic.
|
| And everyone agrees that distance learning is absolute
| shit for kids, and those of my friends with high-school
| aged kids can clearly see that it was bad for their kids.
| handrous wrote:
| > I have teacher friends, I don't know if anyone of them
| got infected, but absolutely no-one has been afraid or
| hysterical about the situation or thinking about quitting
| their job because of the pandemic.
|
| There's a difference in how US teachers are treated,
| under ordinary circumstances, versus those in Sweden, I
| expect, that accounts for some of this. I'd not be
| surprised if the average US teacher is _always_ closer to
| quitting than the average Swedish teacher.
|
| > But there's no hysteria anywhere
|
| Whether it was hysteria or not, the fact was that an
| awful lot of US teachers were ready to quit last year, if
| they couldn't teach remotely or in an environment with
| masking + distancing + quarantine-after-exposure. Enough
| that there's no way they could have had normal in-person
| school last year, over the whole country, _especially_
| while also trying to do distancing and such (you can 't
| go to 40+ kid class sizes to try to make up for lost
| staff, and still distance). Again, quarantine-after-
| exposure policies and burn-out mean they're having
| serious trouble staffing schools _this_ year. It would
| not have gone better last year, and trying to open in
| person without quarantine policies or remote-teaching
| options would have driven out so many teachers that it
| would not have made matters better.
|
| > And everyone agrees that distance learning is absolute
| shit for kids, and those of my friends with high-school
| aged kids can clearly see that it was bad for their kids.
|
| All school have suffered for what'll be 2.5 years, when
| this school year is over--if we're optimistic, perhaps 2
| years total, because maybe the second semester of this
| one will markedly improve. Most schools are almost
| entirely back in-person this year (some still have online
| options, but I don't think they've had as many takers as
| those options had last year) and it is _not_ going great.
| Not as bad as last year, but it 's still not normal.
| Hopefully next year is better.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > Whether it was hysteria or not, the fact was that an
| awful lot of US teachers were ready to quit last year, if
| they couldn't teach remotely or in an environment with
| masking + distancing + quarantine-after-exposure.
|
| Right, and this mindset simply doesn't exist in Sweden
| and many other parts of Europe.
|
| This _fear_ doesn 't exist there.
|
| The average American is horribly misinformed about the
| actual risks of covid, many young healthy Americans still
| believe the unvaccinated risk of death is about 10% for
| them, they're off in their estimate by _four magnitudes_.
| It 's absolutely unbelievable how misinformed they are,
| and how they're allowed to perpetuate this unfounded
| hysteria unopposed.
|
| I haven't seen similar surveys for Sweden or other
| European countries, but from talking to my friends and
| family, it's clear that their risk estimates are much
| more in line with actual reality. And consequently, their
| fear level is much more proportional and rational than
| that of the average American.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Thank you for your posts and insight. As a teacher, the
| number one thing I ask people with the opinion you're
| replying to is: "How many teachers do you know who have
| died from Covid?" If the answer is 0, I will take their
| point of view with a huge grain of salt. For me, the
| answer is > 5, and they contracted it in school. These
| were not extremely old or sick individuals.
| nradov wrote:
| How do you know where they contracted it? Given the
| variable multi-day incubation period, it's usually
| impossible to reliably determine the point of infection.
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| > Somehow nobody seems to feel a need to justify why
| would we make any changes* to in-person schooling.
|
| Here in Canada we responded more aggressively than most
| parts of the USA. While we never had a lockdown that
| ordered us into our homes in most of the country, we
| generally shut nearly everything non-essential besides
| health, food, supply chain, etc. towards the start and
| then started re-opening various businesses and
| facilities. Schools and daycares (private and public)
| closed in March 2020 along with most workplaces.
|
| That justification seems self-explanatory enough. We
| intended (and still intend) to contain the virus from
| doing too much damage too quickly until we're all
| vaccinated. (The vast majority of Canadians have still
| not been exposed to the virus because of our more drastic
| reaction. In terms of the virus alone, we did control it
| better because of it.)
|
| So at that point, it became a question of when and how to
| re-open under conditions that would prevent the spread of
| COVID-19 sufficiently. That includes in the schools. I
| supported the lockdowns in March 2020. But we seem to be
| unable to navigate the discussion into the next phase of
| living with this. We cannot sacrifice child education,
| and the more of us are vaccinated and less likely to get
| ill, the more compelling the argument to resume truly
| normal education becomes. (In person education re-opened
| in September 2021 here in Ontario, but the doomsayers are
| already calling for closures, and many students are
| remote.)
| robhunter wrote:
| > While we never had a lockdown that ordered us into our
| homes in most of the country
|
| This is not accurate? Ontario was very explicitly under a
| stay-at-home order for many months in the winter &
| spring; you could (technically) be charged for leaving
| your home for non-essential purposes
| dontbedumb wrote:
| While you may not care about using children as test
| subjects for long COVID, the most obvious reason to not
| allow in person learning is that the kids will act as a
| substrate for the virus, allowing further mutations.
|
| It seems like you've let politics get in the way of
| common sense.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > While you may not care about using children as test
| subjects for long COVID
|
| And you apparently don't care about using them as test
| subjects in an experiment in long-term social deprivation
| and cutting off of access to resources like in-person
| school. Perhaps you don't know any kids in real life but
| the effects I've seen in my deep blue California area
| have been absolutely staggering. Kids who never got so
| much as a B failing all their classes, kids who never had
| psychological issues struggling with anxiety and
| depression and agoraphobia, and that's just the kids that
| didn't already have those issues!
|
| So two can play at that game. I suggest you avoid such
| specious and deceptive emotionalistic argumentation.
|
| And once again I need to remind you that, places all over
| the world - and even in the United States - are open for
| fully in-person learning and there is no epidemic of
| children with long-term complications. There's simply no
| evidence for it (nor have you even attempted to balance
| the risks of this supposed long-term complications with
| the long-term complications of missed schooling, social
| isolation during critical developmental periods, etc)
|
| > the most obvious reason to not allow in person learning
| is that the kids will act as a substrate for the virus,
| allowing further mutations.
|
| Sorry, are you envisioning a universe in which you can
| actually prevent kids (or anyone) from getting COVID? Are
| you not aware that we literally tried to "stop, drop and
| roll" the global economy for over a year, rolled out
| novel vaccines in _record_ time, and still ended up with
| the virus propagating through the population, as it was
| always destined to do?
|
| > It seems like you've let politics get in the way of
| common sense.
|
| No, my problem is I've let common sense get in the way of
| the politics. I'm so tired of people like you taking the
| moral highground when you actively support policies that
| are harming children in ways that vastly eclipse the
| harms of the physical virus itself.
|
| --
|
| Lastly, I hope you're aware that every viral infection
| bears the risk of long-term complications, but that such
| reactions are exceedingly rare - so rare it's really not
| worth living your life in fear of such complications -
| and that COVID is no exception. Hundreds of millions of
| children worldwide have gotten COVID. The bogeyman you're
| afraid of would have surfaced by now.
| [deleted]
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just
| split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then
| Tuesday-Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class.
|
| In practice this would get you two groups of 30-40 kids in
| each class - but they didn't need to build a new school they
| were planning on.
|
| I'm from an area that used to have one high school. It now
| has 8 in the area. I had a class of 1100. This year with the
| additional schools it is around 1000.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Perhaps instead of doing something didn 't work, we just
| split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then
| Tuesday-Saturday._
|
| While that might be good for reducing the achievement gap, it
| doesn't help parents who are being kept from returning to
| work by the need to care for their children
| conductr wrote:
| > it doesn't help parents who are being kept from returning
| to work by the need to care for their children
|
| I'm not sympathetic to parents that view school as daycare.
|
| I feel bad for those kids, but the education system
| shouldn't cater to this behavior.
|
| I feel like these kids are also consuming a larger share of
| education resources due to goofing off, etc because their
| parents may not be involved enough or setting higher
| standards/expectations for their kids.
|
| It always gets framed as the hard working low income family
| who values education as a generational vehicle of mobility.
| The stereotypical immigrant family with mom and dad both
| working 3 jobs.
|
| However, I feel like that is not the norm. There is a lot
| of people who just don't care about education except for
| the free daycare and meals it provides. Many parents care
| more about their kids place on the sports team/etc than
| their test scores. They'll let there kid play video games
| all day then cry about how remote learning doesn't work.
| dantheman wrote:
| Completely agree, but it's better than 100% remote which is
| what happened.
| handrous wrote:
| > Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just
| split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then
| Tuesday-Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class.
| Give them more self directed study and homework. Have some
| pre-recorded video classes they can do on other days and have
| a proctor to help handle a larger # of kids.
|
| A district I have good insight into did a split-week schedule
| similar to that, with online portions for the "off" days,
| plus a _completely separate_ online program for parents who
| wanted their kids 100% remote. Unlike some other districts
| around here that outsourced the online program to one or
| another terrible companies when offering both options, this
| district ran their own fully-remote program.
|
| The results were that _both groups did terribly_ but the _in
| person group did worse_ , despite high levels of near-zero
| engagement at the online school (i.e. a double-digit
| percentage of kids basically didn't do school at all). The
| actual effect of that half-on-half-off schedule in practice
| was that ~half as much material was covered right off the bat
| --few of the kids took the online component for the "off"
| days seriously, and teachers had a hell of a time trying to
| arrange things so that even _could_ work in the first place,
| and mostly failed at it or gave up--but then, it gets worse:
| in-person means people will get COVID, and will expose
| others, even with fewer kids around at a time reducing the
| rates, it still happens. So now you 've got some weeks with
| whole classes at home, pretty much not doing school, lots of
| teachers out and calling for subs, and sub shortages leading
| to baby-sitting rooms, basically, with too many kids in them
| to realistically teach--incidentally, this is still happening
| all over in our city, as the sub shortage remains very bad.
|
| > It's amazing that private schools were somehow able to
| operate.
|
| Our kids are now in a private school for this school year
| (the above was not our district last year, incidentally, but
| another nearby one) that stayed open all of last year and had
| minimal issues with "quarantining" or viral spread. How? 1)
| Cut extracurriculars, especially sports--public school
| parents would _never_ allow this, sports kept running through
| all of last year and were only barely interrupted the year
| before, shutting them down was _not_ an option unless school
| board members all wanted to lose their next election and
| probably get some death threats and experience some
| vandalism, 2) powerful air purifiers in every room, 3)
| everyone masked & distanced and took it seriously--again,
| compliance issues at public schools are less of a problem at
| some private schools, 4) no-one constantly pushing to relax
| measures the second the local infection rates trended
| slightly down--they had much better and more consistent
| planning. This year? Vaccine mandates for staff, and high
| levels of (voluntary) vaccination among eligible kids.
|
| As with other cases where (some) private schools do better
| than most public schools, dealing with COVID better mostly
| had to do with those schools getting to select who they have
| to deal with.
| artursapek wrote:
| Private schools didn't have insane months-long "remote
| learning" because they're accountable to their
| students/families, who pay tuition and _choose_ to attend
| that school over other schools. It 's free market capitalism
| at work and it's beautiful.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| A lot of public schools in MA did just that. Our school
| district had two cohorts, one of which was in school Mon,
| Tue, Thurs, Fri one week, the other the next week,
| alternating. Fully remote Wednesdays, ostensibly to do
| cleaning/sanitizing. Parents could also opt for their kids to
| be fully remote, and some kids (e.g. those whose parents were
| teachers, not necessarily in our district) were in school
| full-time, except Wednesdays.
|
| It was definitely much better than remote-only.
| ativzzz wrote:
| I live next to a private school, and they did not close down
| at all. It's a pre-k - 5th grade school and the kids have
| been wearing masks the whole time (still do) even at recess.
| IDK what other measures they have taken, but they certainly
| have had in person school the entire pandemic
| ASinclair wrote:
| > If they can reach the parents at all they often indicate they
| don't even care that their kids were absent because they don't
| believe in the distance learning. The indifference is mind-
| boggling as a parent, but it's real.
|
| Is it because they don't believe in distance learning or just
| learning in general? Maybe they relied on school as a glorified
| daycare. Education was just a side effect.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| In the UK, opportunities for the working class are certainly
| much harder to come by. Entrance to many professions is
| closed-off by not going to the right private school, not
| having the money to pay for tuition to get into a grammar
| school or not having enough money or connections to work for
| free as an intern. Our government, businesses and the media
| are mostly run by privately educated individuals. We don't
| have "the American dream". It's not unsurprising to see why
| some parents might see state education as just day care.
| michaelt wrote:
| Aren't unpaid internships mostly for industries that have
| shitty job prospects anyway?
|
| I mean, I know unpaid internships are widespread in things
| like fashion design and poetry and journalism - but there's
| no need to do unpaid internships if you're trying to get
| into programming or accounting.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| My point was that when people turn on their TV and they
| don't see people like them in the media and in the arts,
| it must not exactly inspire.
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't think relying on primary and secondary education as
| glorified daycare is class-specific, or all that surprising a
| statement. Plenty of my HS and college classmates who are
| successful economically were complaining publicly about
| having to "deal with" their kids during the day while trying
| to work.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > whose children didn't log on to the remote learning session
| (with their school-provided computers with school-provided
| cellular connections).
|
| That's just laziness.
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| > The indifference is mind-boggling as a parent
|
| Imagine you were raised by parents who had unpleasant
| experiences with formal education and/or by parents who had an
| attitude themselves of "my kid isn't getting any use out of
| those six hours" anyway. That's often the mindset behind the
| attitude, not so much as that parents don't love their kids and
| want what they see is the best for them. (Of course there's
| plenty of abuse and full-on neglect motivating such
| absenteeism, too.)
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| I can talk a bit about private schools.
|
| Many of them adapted quickly. Outdoor classrooms, meeting at
| parks. Tons of flexibility from teachers / staff. Very quick
| remodels of spaces - ie, take a wall out of a classroom so it
| open straight outside with a rolling door etc, very high levels
| of ventilation. Some doing weekly testing - test on Thursday,
| turn in Friday, results by Sunday to make decisions on stay at
| home / come in. Vaccine mandates for all adult staff.
|
| In other words, for parents of private school students, the
| value of in-person learning is clear, and the schools are
| delivering it.
|
| The risk in an outdoor classroom, students and teachers masked,
| teachers vaccinated, is relatively minimal. Student viral load
| in terms of spread is not so high either from what I've heard.
| Even inside, with in and out fans running, significant
| ventilation I'm not sure risk is as terrible as its made out to
| be.
|
| We'll see how this all plays out. From what I've seen, those
| kids are doing great (and yes, camping trips replaced
| sleepovers etc in these families - but their kids remaining
| socially engaged with friends etc).
| bachmeier wrote:
| > In other words, for parents of private school students, the
| value of in-person learning is clear, and the schools are
| delivering it.
|
| There's nothing surprising about that. You have a group of
| parents with money and a desire to educate their children in
| a particular way, so they went ahead and spent the necessary
| money and put in the necessary time to make it happen. That
| doesn't help much for the parents that have to send their
| kids to an underfunded public school in a big city.
| handrous wrote:
| Private schools that did well with in-person learning last
| year could take measures public schools couldn't, and had
| much better compliance rates for things like masking and
| distancing. For instance, parents wouldn't let public
| schools suspend sports programs. There'd have been actual,
| physical violence if that'd been seriously attempted, lots
| of places. Private schools? Might be a thing they could do
| (and many did). Many public schools have to deal with kids
| who couldn't be trusted in outdoor classrooms, or face
| parent agitation when they take kids outside in anything
| but perfect weather (this is a weird phenomenon I've seen
| repeated at a couple private schools vs. public schools in
| the same area--the private-school goers want their kids out
| unless the weather's so bad they'll lose fingers to it even
| if they're bundled up, or there's an intense thunderstorm
| or something, while the public schools have been cowed into
| only taking kids out if the weather's quite good; I don't
| know what causes this).
|
| Private schools could plan better because, despite
| supposedly being _more_ beholden to their paying customers
| then public schools are to their constituent families, in
| practice they seem to have an easier time saying "nope,
| this is how we're doing it, deal with it", for whatever
| reason. They didn't have to pay any mind to morons trying
| to strip all protective measures every time "the numbers"
| started to look a little better, or lose planning time &
| focus to misguided planning for those sorts of things.
|
| Private schools may already have had things like longer and
| more recesses than nearby public schools, so already spent
| a larger portion of the day outside--public schools have
| cut recess down to almost nothing, chasing those sweet,
| sweet test scores.
|
| Private schools also may have had both the money and the
| leadership to get things like ventilation improvements or
| other expensive measures done _fast_. Public schools were
| crippled by indecision, and various factions pushing for
| things to go "back to normal" ASAP, fighting any spending
| or policies that acknowledged this would be a problem for
| more than a very small number of months and trying to deal
| with it in those terms.
| aweiland wrote:
| We looked at a private school, but ultimately opted for
| virtual K. The other thing this private school had going
| for it was class size. Way smaller than what public
| schools have to put up with.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > You have a group of parents with money and a desire to
| educate their children in a particular way, so they went
| ahead and spent the necessary money and put in the
| necessary time to make it happen.
|
| I don't even think it's a matter of money, but you nailed
| it on the head with the desire part. Some public schools
| actually get more funding than private ones...
|
| Private schools get to filter out applicants. They only get
| applicants from families that are interested in education
| (and willing to spend a little bit more on it than average)
| and they are allowed to expel students that are not
| compliant.
|
| That significantly lightens the teacher's workload and
| makes it easier for them to adapt.
|
| Keep in mind in a public school classroom there will be a
| percentage of kids that don't want to be there and that
| will disrupt at much as they can no matter what. And,
| thanks to the Pareto rule, probably get 80% of the
| teacher's attention and energy. Some magnets schools
| manages to bypass that, but they are slowly being shamed
| and bullied into not doing [0].
|
| [0] https://thelowell.org/8815/news/board-of-education-
| announces...
| sreque wrote:
| I think there have been enough studies now to show that the
| problem with most public schools in the U.S. have little or
| nothing to do with underfunding. Thomas Sowell's recent
| book, "Charter Schools and their enemies", shows that
| Charter schools with less funding can insanely outperform
| public schools they compete with in inner cities, even
| though the public schools have more funding per student.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-
| Sowell...
| asoneth wrote:
| I have not read Sowell's book. Do you know how he
| addresses the issue of self-selection? For example, with
| cost: Some kinds of students require orders of magnitude
| more resources than others due to
| health/behavioral/developmental/poverty-related issues. A
| school that is able to attract specific families or expel
| specific students should logically attempt to minimize
| the number of these kinds of students and therefore we
| would expect them to have significantly lower "per pupil"
| costs than average. Comparing such a school to one that
| must accept all students is an apples-to-oranges
| comparison.
|
| As a personal anecdote I used to manage an academic
| department that was highly ranked. I'm proud of the
| faculty and curriculum but to be perfectly frank the
| biggest factor in our success was that our ranking
| attracted top-tier applicants. At the level we were at,
| the differences between us and similar institutions
| mostly boiled down to that initial self-selection.
| nradov wrote:
| Public charter schools can't pick and choose their
| students the way private schools do. They have to take
| students with special needs, discipline problems, etc.
| Expulsions can only be done in extreme circumstances.
|
| The real advantage of charter schools is parent
| engagement. Parents usually have to specifically ask for
| their children to be placed into charter schools. That's
| a signal that the parents take education seriously and
| will impose some discipline on the children.
| sreque wrote:
| He addresses all of self-selection, demographics, and
| discipline directly in the book, if I remember
| accurately.
|
| First, to address self-selection as a primary cause,
| Sowell specifically compares the outcomes of students who
| won the charter school lottery versus those who didn't,
| and shows the performance gap between public and charter
| schools remains even when only considering students who
| entered the lottery.
|
| Second, Sowell purposely compares schools that have as
| similar demographics as possible, including racial makeup
| and economic status. He also attempts to control for
| location differences by comparing schools that are co-
| located in the same building or are located within a
| small distance of each other.
|
| Finally, he specifically calls out charter schools'
| ability to enforce stronger discipline and even expel
| students as a distinct competitive advantage, one that
| the teachers unions recognize and are trying to
| undermine. He also believes that relaxing discipline in
| the name of reducing disparate outcome among identity
| groups has a direct causal effect on worsened education
| in public schools.
|
| To me, with regards to discipline, the lesson to be
| learned is that public schools need to be empowered to
| enforce stricter discipline as well. There is no justice
| or fairness in allowing a small minority to disrupt the
| education of a willing majority. A few of the discipline-
| related anecdotes Sowell shares in his book are heart-
| wrenching, including one story of a student punching a
| pregnant teacher in the stomach, telling her he was going
| to punch the baby right out of her, and finally returning
| to school the next day with no imposed consequences for
| his violent behavior. I don't know how any student could
| learn in an environment like that.
| asoneth wrote:
| With respect to cost, I'm not sure any of these points
| refute the hypothesis that charters cost less per pupil
| primarily because they are able to offload the most
| expensive students. And _if_ that is true then increasing
| the number of charter schools will simply increase the
| concentration of the most expensive students into fewer
| schools that have less funding to deal with them. At that
| point we can either acknowledge that expensive students
| require an order of magnitude more money or we let them
| pass through to the welfare and justice systems. In
| either case it doesn 't seem like we're saving society
| money by switching to charters, we're just shifting it to
| other parts of the budget.
|
| With respect to educational opportunities that seems more
| compelling. But as Sowell alludes, I suspect you could
| get a similar effect by allowing public schools to
| enforce stronger discipline and make it easier to suspend
| or expel difficult students. On that note I'm surprised
| to hear that teachers unions are opposed to that now.
| I've certainly heard that unions are an obstacle to
| getting rid of poor-performing teachers, but I rarely
| hear of them being an obstacle to dealing with difficult
| students. At least a couple decades ago the AFT was
| actively pushing to make it _easier_ to expel students
| for things like drugs or weapons in school.
| sreque wrote:
| So I think an underlying assumption you have that I want
| to scrutinize is that misbehaving students are costlier
| from a monetary perspective, or that they require more
| money spent to handle them, or that spending more money
| will result in better outcomes for these students. This
| assumption may or may not be true, but I think it is
| valuable to question it and expect some evidence to
| support it. For instance, it is quite possible that
| stricter and more rigorous discipline in schools could
| benefit misbehaving students far more than any spending
| increase in the school system. Likewise, there may be
| certain cultural norms or expectations in charter schools
| that have far more impact on misbehaving students than
| spending increases.
|
| I think the far more important point, however is that
| some charter schools are working phenomenally well for
| the underprivileged and doing so with less funding, and
| that there are valuable lessons to be learned from that
| fact, which lessons are at risk of being ignored or lost.
| However, instead of either trying to learn from these
| charter schools or allow more of them to be created,
| teacher's unions and the government officials they
| support via campaign funds are openly hostile to them, as
| the book details. These adults are clearly acting in
| their best interests, not in the interests of the
| children they are claiming to serve.
|
| With regard to government policy in general, there seems
| to be a complete disincentive to analyze policy in
| retrospect honestly, determine successes and failures,
| and learn from the past in order to influence future
| decisions. With government policy, intent often matters
| more than results, as intent earns votes. This can easily
| lead to perverse incentives.
|
| As an example, it's easy to claim good intent when
| proposing to spend more money on schools. But, if we want
| to actually help children out, results matter more than
| intent, and it seems very clear that, past a certain
| point, pouring more money into the public school system
| has little to no impact on educational outcomes. Instead,
| we should both be looking at other factors, and we should
| be allowing for more competition so that we can iterate
| on more ideas more rapidly. The relative monoculture of
| the public school system, combined with perverse
| incentives among both the government and teacher's
| unions, seem unhealthy for society and for our children.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The US spending is on a per student basis is on par with
| other OECD nations[0], it is incumbent upon the teachers
| unions and department of education to explain why they
| can not achieve what the rest of the world has with the
| same funds, not the taxpayer to throw more money onto the
| bonfire.
|
| [0]https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
| tyoma wrote:
| US schools serve as a de-facto provider of social
| services. Think free lunches and breakfast, school
| nurses, screening for disease/disabilities, sports and
| multitudes of after school activities to keep kids
| occupies until parents return, transportation to/from
| school, etc. Those services are a separate line-item i (I
| imagine) every other country.
|
| A better and more instructive comparison would be money
| spent only on instruction, adjusted for PPP and maybe
| student poverty.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I can't find that data, but I doubt that a couple of
| minimum wage lunch ladies and a school nurse are why our
| schools have to cost twice as much as everywhere else.
| Other nations provide transportation as well, all of
| Europe doesn't live in areas with public transit, despite
| that perception.
|
| As for sports, if sports aren't moving the needle
| academically then we shouldn't be funding them. If other
| nations priotized education over sport, and got better
| results we should learn from them.
|
| Just throwing more money at probably won't do anything,
| what is likely is that they will double down on the
| strategies that aren't working.
| tyoma wrote:
| My point is that its not as simple as concluding the US
| wastes money and is ineffective at teaching. The schools
| in the US do a lot more than instruction, and work with a
| different set of students.
|
| We certainly could learn from what works around the
| world, but comparing raw numbers is simply not helpful.
|
| We can also learn from what works in different states.
| For instance, Massachusetts, as a state, has PISA scores
| that are on par with the best in the world.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I just don't see a basis for calling them categorically
| underfunded.
|
| For example, New York State has the highest spending per
| student $24,040 and is ranked 14th in this survey[0]
| while Virginia is ranked fourth and only spends $12,216.
| Massachusetts spends $17,058 and tops the list.
|
| A honest look at the school system may reveal that some
| parts of it are underfunded, but it will likely also
| reveal parts that are overfunded. I suspect a lot of
| progress can be made by being better stewards of the
| money they currently have, and therefore suggest starting
| there. Ultimately any taxes come from the wallets of
| families supporting the children we are trying to help
| here, making them poorer needs to show benefit to be
| justified.
|
| [0]https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-
| schools/533...
| slownews45 wrote:
| The thing is, these schools in some cases do not charge a
| lot more than the funding allocated to the local public
| schools.
|
| What they do have obviously is incredibly flexibility and
| there really was no option in folks mind to cancel all in
| person learning. So they just do everything they can, small
| pods / cohorts, split schedules for recess, split day
| schedules even and all the other steps.
|
| So I wouldn't say money, but the time and decision velocity
| was there. Teachers WERE going to be teaching, and the
| admin (with teachers and parent council) basically said,
| how do we make this work.
|
| The secondary win was that this let parents work from home!
| So they could stay home in peace and quiet and avoid
| spreading stuff around.
|
| I'm seriously curious what the larger model of learn from
| home was in public schools? How do these parents work and
| progress vis a vis their colleagues who send their kids to
| in-person learning?
|
| The folks I know with kids in school actually did very well
| career wise, they were 100% on it for remote work, got lots
| done without commute or kids or if on an in-person job were
| 100% there (usually with an N95 mask if school demanded
| that).
|
| If anything, if folks were struggling you'd think in person
| would be even MORE critical for both parents and kids.
|
| Note that my local suburban public school has TONS of field
| space outside to set up some tents and outside classrooms.
|
| Some links as to what this looks like sometimes:
|
| https://www.greenschoolyards.org/covid-learn-outside
| hgial wrote:
| Everyone here seems to be certain the pandemic will have huge and
| lasting effects on educational outcomes for kids. I would instead
| bet that while there will be effects in the short term, these
| effects will mostly fade within a few years (preexisting gaps
| will remain, but they won't get much bigger).
|
| This post reviews some of the existing evidence on the effect of
| missing school:
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-...
|
| And generally finds that kids can catch up quite quickly.
|
| I think my one caveat is that there may be a group of at-risk
| kids for whom school was keeping them from getting into serious
| trouble with the law. Those effects could conceivably be both
| large and lasting (e.g., if you carjack someone and kill them in
| the process and spend the next 15 years in prison it's going to
| have a big effect on your life!).
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I agree - primary school is an interesting exercise but maybe
| over-stressed.
|
| Anecdata: my brother-in-law grew up in rural Oklahoma. "How
| were the schools?" "Oh, terrible. No AP courses; not a lot of
| math. I had to spend an extra year starting college, to be
| ready for regular college courses."
|
| "So", I asked, "your entire primary education could be
| recapitulated in 1 year once you were 18? Why then do we put
| kids through all that?"
|
| He had no answer. Of course, since he is a High School teacher,
| he didn't want to think that was true. But I wonder.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Entirely fed up with these articles. The debate is whether these
| things should be mandated or let to the appreciation of the
| people.
|
| Let me keep my kids at home, or get them to a school, or
| socialise, or wear a mask, or get vaccinated.
|
| Enough. Enough of this non sensical noise about whether x or y is
| better. Let people be. Stop coercing people to follow the
| potential idiocy of some group sitting in an office think will be
| wiser for society.
|
| The scandal isn't that deprived kids suffer social distancing
| most, the scandal is that governments around the globe have been
| telling people to cover their face wherever they go, to not meet
| their friends, to find themselves a other job because their
| industry is shut, to get infected or be banned from travels and
| other public places if they don't.
|
| Let people be. We don't care what you think is better for people.
| They know better.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| First major issue is that you can't get your kids to school if
| there aren't enough teachers willing to teach there. Whether
| it's even worth paying a teacher to be there depends on the
| aggregate of the decisions of other parents as well. We've
| decided on a very standardized way of doing public schooling,
| and that goes beyond just what is taught.
|
| But the bigger issue is that you're talking almost entirely
| about decisions that only have effects with society wide
| adoption. Me wearing a mask doesn't help, everyone wearing a
| mask does. Me getting vaccinated gives me 70% protection,
| everyone getting vaccinated creates herd immunity. There are
| classes of decision that only have an effect if almost everyone
| in society has to make them, you can't just say "you do what
| you want and I do what I want" and expect that to make any
| sense when we are talking about that kind of decision.
|
| Which isn't to say we should force everyone to do things like
| get vaccinated. Arguing that choice and liberty are more
| important than safety is reasonable (as is arguing that the
| system is too incompetent to be trusted with that sort of
| power). But you have to argue for that specifically, not say
| "let me do what you want and I'll do what I want" as if that's
| a valid way to handle this type of situation. When we're
| talking about things that only help if everyone does them, the
| choice is to enforce it or accept we won't get the benefits.
| eropple wrote:
| There are plenty of public-health mandates out there--because
| it's not about you, it's about the people you impose upon with
| your unmasked, unvaccinated presence--and _even if you think
| lockdowns weren 't a good idea_ (which I think is an arguable
| point, even if it's one with which I disagree) to try to
| contest that one about a mask over your nose and mouth reveals
| your position as an unserious one.
|
| There's no serious objection in the whole of existence to "wear
| a mask to reduce transmission", and you tip off your false
| reasonableness by trying to sliiiide that one in there.
| nradov wrote:
| You cannot expect asymptomatic people to wear masks in public
| indefinitely. That is an unserious position. So what are the
| exit criteria? Several European countries either never had
| much in the way of mask mandates, or have recently removed
| them.
| eropple wrote:
| That's not what the prior poster was referring to, and if
| we're being honest we both know that, but you and I can
| have that conversation, sure. Given the general benefits to
| public health and how frankly effortless wearing a mask has
| been every day since March before last, my S1 response is
| 99% vaccination coverage, which at least where I live is in
| line with the vaccination coverage of most other major
| vaccines, and two cases a day in whatever reasonably sized
| area (metro, county, whatever)--what's yours?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| There is plenty of serious objection to mask mandates, the
| literature on the subject was unanimously against universal
| masking before 2020.
|
| It is absolutely possible to find examples of positive
| correlation between mask use and lowered spread, but it's
| also possible to find examples of the opposite, and of no
| difference.
|
| If it works, why are there so many cases where it just
| doesn't?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| If you want some fun examples of counter-correlations, this
| is a good article: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/the-more-
| masks-fail-the-more-w...
|
| Yes, those examples are cherry-picked, but if you're
| defending the null hypothesis - mask mandates don't work -
| that's a perfectly valid argument for your case.
|
| If you argue that mask mandates work, it's on _you_ to
| explain every single counter-correlation, you can 't
| cherry-pick correlations that happen to support your case.
| ghoward wrote:
| Not GP.
|
| There _are_ serious objections to masks: they make people
| more anonymous (which is hard on everyone, but especially
| kids), they increase carbon dioxide intake, and the ones
| people generally use may not be effective against something
| as small as the COVID virus.
| bena wrote:
| The COVID virus is 20 nanometers in diameter at its
| smallest.
|
| Carbon Dioxide is one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. Its
| diameter is 0.33 nanometers.
|
| If a mask increases carbon dioxide intake, then it can stop
| the COVID virus. If masks are not effective against
| something as small as the COVID virus, then it wouldn't
| increase carbon dioxide intake.
| ghoward wrote:
| To add to the sibling comment, which is correct, I
| actually created a model [1] that showed that any
| impedance leads to the air behind a mask eventually
| stabilizing at half oxygen and half carbon dioxide.
|
| This means that _any_ mask will eventually lead to about
| the same carbon dioxide intake, even if they let air
| through quite freely.
|
| [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/masks-and-carbon-
| dioxide/
| Fellshard wrote:
| The latter premise is false, as there is still some
| impedance to exhalation - air is not allowed through
| completely freely. That is not to say the impedance is
| great, but it must still be acknowledged that it exists
| and has an effect on the air breathed, however
| negligible. The matter, then, is one of 'to what degree',
| more than 'does or doesn't'.
| bena wrote:
| If there is impedance to carbon dioxide, then there must
| be impedance to COVID.
|
| That's what you and the other have missed. Or ignored.
|
| You can't argue that it both impedes carbon dioxide, but
| not COVID.
|
| And even if some gets through, it's got to be better than
| all. I thought we weren't supposed to let perfect be the
| enemy of good.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Your virtue signalling is nothing but repugnant.
|
| Any mask under a dollar doesn't work.
| ghoward wrote:
| Just because COVID is impeded does not mean the mask is
| effective.
|
| The mask might impede COVID by 1% and carbon dioxide by
| 0.5%. That means the mask is 99% not effective against
| COVID, but a model I created [1] shows that even the 0.5%
| impedance will eventually lead to the mask keeping in
| half oxygen and half carbon dioxide, leading to higher
| carbon dioxide inhalation.
|
| [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/masks-and-carbon-
| dioxide/
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Don't forget folks who can't hear have a hell of time
| functioning.
|
| But thanks to covid myopia these problems get gaslight
| away. Only covid matters to some people... almost
| literally. Sadly they are the ones in control.
| kingkawn wrote:
| This strain of opinion is why the US still has >2,000 deaths
| per day from COVID, and has the highest death toll of any
| wealthy country.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > the highest death toll of any wealthy country.
|
| And the largest population of any 'wealthy' country.
| nivenkos wrote:
| And higher rates of obesity and diabetes.
|
| Just looking at the data, it's clear mask mandates and
| lockdowns don't work at scale. Compared to the vaccines,
| the effect size is minuscule, and the fact it's even
| debatable (unlike the vaccines) means that it definitely
| isn't worth the costs.
|
| If anything they should mandate vaccines, and end all
| restrictions and mask mandates.
| Fellshard wrote:
| That is malign use of data, undifferentiated by vastly
| different locales and policies across the nation, and not
| even accounting for per-capita.
| bena wrote:
| I don't think differentiating is going to help your
| argument any.
|
| We're approaching two very different situations in the U.S.
| Health outcomes with regards to COVID are following
| political leanings. And it is not looking good for one of
| them.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > We're approaching two very different situations in the
| U.S. Health outcomes with regards to COVID are following
| political leanings
|
| Which group do you think is doing worse? Whatever that
| opinion is, it's not supported by the data:
|
| Highest covid deaths per 100,000 are in Mississippi at
| 317 but New Jersey is #2 at 308. Alabama is high at 286
| but NY is right there at 284. Arkansas is terrible at
| 252, but Massachussets is worse at 269. Texas at 221 is
| better than Connecticut at 238 and much better than Rhode
| Island at 266, but worse than Illinois at 215, which
| itself is worse than Ohio at 187.
|
| Given the disparities in poverty and obesity and how both
| of these lead to much higher mortality rates, the red
| states are doing much better than the blue states on a
| wealth/obesity adjusted basis, and are the same on an
| absolute basis.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-
| covi...
|
| I suspect the mistake you are making is the same kind of
| observational bias that is common in these culture wars
| -- e.g. bad things happening to your side are a terrible
| tragedy whereas bad things happening to the other side is
| proof of their misguided policies. But the facts don't
| show any meaningful difference in total deaths, even
| though deaths in any given week swing wildly as the
| disease burns through some states before others. E.g. NY
| was hit hardest in the beginning, and then it spread to
| other states when NY was already recovering, then those
| states recovered and it spread to others, etc. It would
| be _extremely foolish_ to look at only a snapshot in time
| rather than cumulative deaths since 2019.
| bena wrote:
| You know doing it from the start of things is a bit
| misleading, right? Of course you do. You do it because it
| misleads.
|
| Do the daily average. Do it since April.
|
| Because that's what it means when one says "we're
| approaching". Things are changing in two different
| directions.
|
| You only think it's foolish to disregard the rolling
| average rather than the cumulative deaths because it's
| only by considering the cumulative deaths can you ignore
| the pattern forming.
|
| COVID is becoming an epidemic of the unvaccinated. Even
| with daily variations, the trends are moving in two
| directions. That's what the facts are showing. Disregard
| them at your own peril.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > You know doing it from the start of things is a bit
| misleading, right?
|
| No, this is absolutely false. Please stop spreading
| misinformation. You know as well as I do that diseases
| move from region to region, and burn through some regions
| quickly while they slowly move through others. What
| matters is the total deaths after everything is said and
| done, and you must understand this -- everyone else does.
| There is no advantage to having your population killed
| earlier rather than later, or later rather than earlier.
|
| Please stop misleading people in the arena of public
| health - total deaths per capita during the entire course
| of the disease is how reasonable people measure the toll
| of the disease and the overall success or failure of any
| approach.
| [deleted]
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > This strain of opinion is why the US still has >2,000
| deaths per day from COVID, and has the highest death toll of
| any wealthy country.
|
| Is it though? Or is it some people trying to moralize
| catching a highly infectious respiratory virus? I know plenty
| of people who "took this serious" and did all the double
| masks, washing mail and quarantining groceries and they still
| caught covid.
|
| Until I see actual research done when people have a level
| head that suggests "not taking it seriously" actually changed
| things... it's all just wild conjecture.
| [deleted]
| eawze wrote:
| DEATH TO ALL MASKERS!
|
| I hope you vaxxers get ran over by a bus.
|
| The only good fascist is a dead one! I wish death on every single
| vaxxer/masker here.
|
| FUCK YOU!
| spoonjim wrote:
| When my kid was in lockdown I taught him math and science and now
| he does algebra at 5. Other kids his age were in lockdown getting
| beaten by their stepdads. I think the achievement gaps will be
| massive and that the lengths of these school lockdowns were a
| crime against a generation of kids. A society with restaurants
| open for sit down dining but schools closed has its priorities
| completely upside down.
| WhereIsSweden wrote:
| Indeed, if restaurants are open - school should be open too.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > A society with restaurants open for sit down dining but
| schools closed has its priorities completely upside down.
|
| Be careful: that's analogous to asking "why is Narcan free for
| drug addicts but insulin so expensive for diabetics?". The fact
| that restaurants are open isn't relevant, and mentioning it
| like that will just make people suggest that they be closed,
| instead of addressing the real problem.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Not sure what your point is. Restaurants are a Lower priority
| than schools. If Covid is out of control, close the
| restaurants and open the schools (assuming both are disease
| vectors). If the disease is too dangerous then of course
| there can be circumstances where both must remain closed
| (especially if it was a disease targeting young people like
| H1N1)
| qsort wrote:
| This is something I did a complete 180 about.
|
| I used to think closing schools wouldn't hurt anybody and that
| performance would at worst remain stationary. My reasoning was
| that so much time is wasted at school that it doesn't really make
| a difference where the learning happens, but I _severely_
| underestimated effects I thought were second-order like the
| familiarity with technology, the digital divide, or even just
| having access to a quiet, private space where one can focus.
|
| The data really speaks for itself, it's been a disaster.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Another reason why accessibility is so important. Someone might
| be doing their homework/research from a smarttv or hacked
| kindle.
| spoonjim wrote:
| What do you do for a living? I also found school to be a huge
| waste of time but I was a very high IQ kid. When I would be
| stuck at home I would just read books or mess around with
| chemical reactions. Plus I had a very comfortable middle class
| life. But the average IQ kid cannot self study like that and
| the average income family may not have a private room for the
| kid to study, may have abusive situations at home, etc.
| qsort wrote:
| > What do you do for a living?
|
| I'm a software developer, I have been working from home since
| the pandemic started and that's probably what led me to my
| initial opinion - I had almost no drop in productivity and I
| (wrongly) assumed school wasn't kinda sorta like my job.
|
| > I also found school to be a huge waste of time but I was a
| very high IQ kid.
|
| I was top ~1% as well. I agree K-12 is inherently useless for
| the top few percent, but I still think "normal" school is
| massively wasteful, even when you only take into account the
| middle 90%. Most of it just felt fake if I'm being honest:
| dumbed down versions of reality fed by teachers to students
| with the mutual understandment that it's all bullshit, so
| that eventually there's going to be a garbage test where the
| teacher knows the grades in advance.
|
| I'm Italian though, not American, so YMMV.
|
| > average income family may not have a private room for the
| kid to study, may have abusive situations at home, etc.
|
| Yes, completely agree. I thought they'd be second-order
| effects but they weren't. My parents were working class but I
| don't recall money ever being a pressing issue, we were
| "poor" but not " _really_ poor ", so that might have skewed
| my perspective as well.
| packetlost wrote:
| Not to mention the fact that a _massive_ part of school is just
| learning to socialize with people who aren 't your family and
| that you may or may not particularly like.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm wondering: Do we understand the long-term impact of this
| lack of "social school" from how homeschooled kids do post-
| education?
| orwin wrote:
| I'm not in the US, we have a far smaller culture of
| homeschooling here from what i read, but due to my pre-dev
| activities and social engagements (i was young and full of
| hope :) ), i met a bit more than two dozen homeschooled
| children.
|
| They all did pretty heavy extracurricular activities. Keep
| in mind that i met them in a particular time, either as a
| youth camp counselor or as a "street educator" (not really,
| basically i animated open physics classes with
| experiments/construction for kids, think Kiwico but free
| and with social settings).
|
| They also were quite late in STEM, even those with
| engineers parents (definitely not the majority), but at
| least bilingual (i saw a 10 year old girl speaking 4
| languages and playing violin better than i did). The most
| "advanced" i saw (at least in mathematics principles and
| understanding) where those with a formal musical education.
| Most of them could play at least one instrument, but those
| who understood underlying music principle were definitely
| more likely to "get" physics and engineering for some
| reasons. I think pattern recognition is definitely
| important for people to understand STEM work, and that can
| explain my limited, anecdotal data.
|
| Another common point is that each of their familly were
| fairly religious (or spiritual rather), but not close-
| minded. I think around half were christian (not really
| defined), and the other half were more new-age. No Chomsky
| day for any of the famillies.
|
| [edit] It's quite unfair from me, putting them in boxes
| like christian and new-age. Let say around half of them
| believed in a single entity we could call god creating the
| universe and guiding humanity, and the other half believing
| that the universe himself (or Nature, or the soul) guide
| them. I'm pretty sure one couple were active dualist
| proponents
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| As a parent of three home schooled children, the social
| aspect is always brought up by those not informed about
| home schooling. My kids are socialized through various
| group activities (P.E, dance, piano, art classes etc.) and
| with close friends. They also have friends of various age
| groups since they are not forced to socialize with kids of
| their age group as they would in public schools. Overall I
| find the social aspect to be of higher quality than my
| experience as a kid going through public schools. One big
| benefit is not having to deal with being bullied, which is
| very common in public schools.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| There's this joke I often see about homeschooling: "I
| didn't want my kid to miss out on the high school social
| experience, so I beat him up and stole his lunch money."
| _-david-_ wrote:
| This is not universal but there are often times groups of
| homeschooling families that get together and have their
| kids socialize. It is likely significantly less than at
| school but probably changes the formula a bit.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| There are a wide variety of homeschool types. But in
| general, homeschool parents make conscious efforts to
| ensure the kids get social activities.
|
| In standard school, there are very rigid age-based
| hierarchies. Sixth graders rule over fifth graders, who
| rule over fourth graders. And the adults rule over all of
| them. And then you have the cliques, etc.
|
| You'll find that such hierarchies do not exist in the
| homeschool world, and the kids are better for it. If the
| homeschool environment is religion-based, you'll probably
| find that the children do not know how to interact well
| with people in other religions, but you still have
| excellent interactions between age groups.
| loonster wrote:
| There is a wide range of socialization that happens in
| homeschool. Some kids are practically hermits, only meeting
| other kids during church. Other kids have a full schedule
| of extracurricular activities that rival HS and college
| kids.
| packetlost wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I grew up in a cult that encouraged home-
| schooling. While I was lucky and did not get home schooled,
| nearly every person I know who did was socially stunted in
| some way.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wouldn't say the homeschooled people I have encountered
| were "stunted" but definitely "different enough to not
| gel smoothly with the rest of society." They kind of just
| run in totally different circles: They socialize but with
| a totaly disjoint set of kids. All their friends are from
| their church and they don't know anyone in public school,
| their parents take them to totally different movies
| (Christian movies, no Marvel superheroes), listen to
| totally different music. Can't talk sports with them
| because they literally can't name a football team. No
| culture overlap at all. Totally siloed off in their own
| world.
|
| Maybe these traits are specific to Christian
| homeschoolers and not homeschoolers in general, but
| frankly I have never met someone who was homeschooled
| because of secular, rather than religious reasons.
| d883kd8 wrote:
| Personally I was homeschooled and sports was one of the
| main points of common ground I had with kids from
| "regular school"
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I wouldn't say the homeschooled people I have
| encountered were "stunted" but definitely "different
| enough to not gel smoothly with the rest of society."
|
| IME, the homeschooled people raised by people
| (homeschooled or not) to whom that description does not
| apply also do not tend to fit it, but people to whom
| (again, homeschooled themselves or not) that description
| _does_ apply are overrepresented among those choosing
| homeschooling for their kids.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I don't think life would be worse off if I never watched
| popular movies or if Football didn't exist. I have
| actually given this some thought given recent events.
|
| These last two years have changed my perspective. While
| the vast majority of people were bathing in hand
| sanitizer, hoarding toilet paper, locking themselves away
| in quarantine, and avoiding elevator buttons, the people
| who were least in tune with popular culture (Religious,
| rural, etc.) seemed like the most rational actors. In my
| opinion turning off the TV and ignoring mass media,
| sports, culture is probably the most healthy thing a
| person could do.
| missinfo wrote:
| The counterargument is that it's an artificial socialization.
| You are put in a group based on age; an axis we don't
| segregate on beyond school. It means you are mostly being
| socialized by other kids of the same age. It's the blind
| leading the blind. It's cliques. It's bullies. It's mean
| girls. I think it's a special kind of torture for both the
| body and mind.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| One thing that rubs me the wrong way about school socializing
| is that you learn to socialize only with people of your own
| age. That is a very unnatural group that succumbs to
| idiosyncratic peer pressures, fashions and groupthink.
|
| I definitely got better at socializing when I left school and
| started to interact with much more age diverse groups in the
| wider world.
| farmerstan wrote:
| No this is a good thing. Kids develop at different ages and
| being around kids their age build up confidence. If they
| mixed classes too much then the older kids would dominate
| everything and the younger kids would learn to just shut
| up.
|
| Especially with girls it's important for kids to learn self
| esteem and agency, and they can't do that when bigger,
| stronger, smarter and faster older kids are dominating
| everything in the classroom.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Sounds like post-hoc rationalization to me.
|
| With that reasoning, you could also decide that classes
| shouldn't be mixed-gender, because boys might bully girl
| or girls might bully boys, and it's better to keep
| everyone in a group of people exactly like them.
| packetlost wrote:
| This really isn't true though. Some schools have mixed-
| grade lunches, clubs, some classes, etc. and how can you
| not categorize interactions with teachers and other faculty
| as not being in a different age group???
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Almost nobody is building meaningful relationships
| outside of their year group. It's an unhealthy state of
| affairs that wasn't this way in our ancestral past. A
| side effect of going for economies of scale in schooling.
| It contributed to my own immaturity as a teenager. I
| would've been better off with actual friends older than
| me and especially some actual friends older than 25.
|
| This is one thing home schooling has going for it, where
| the social life is built around activities with other
| home schooled kids who likely differ in age. It's much
| harder for kids to get caught up in the typical pet
| immaturities and stupidities of their age group.
| verall wrote:
| In my American public school, and likely where the parent
| is from, there are not mixed-grade lunches, clubs, or any
| classes, until around 9th grade or 14ish years old.
| Interactions with teachers and faculty is extremely
| limited by the ratio (at least 1:20) and the context
| ("You need to remain quiet and do as we tell you").
|
| Kids that have siblings, neighborhood friends, or social
| activities like boy scouts, which generally include
| children over a range of ages, really appreciate it.
|
| It sounds like your school had access to this stuff
| already though, do you think it was valuable?
| jlokier wrote:
| > interactions with teachers and other faculty
|
| Interactions, yes, but I wouldn't call those interactions
| _socialising_.
|
| In my entire time as a child and teenager at multiple
| schools, I don't recall spending any time socialising
| with teachers and other faculty. Not once, and not even
| with my favourite teachers who made the most lasting
| impressions through their teaching, and willingness to
| teach me more advanced things than on the standard
| curriculum.
|
| It was pretty minimal at university too. Socialising was
| with other students.
| packetlost wrote:
| Social education is _not_ just _socializing_. It 's
| important for children to learn social dynamics with
| people who are a different standing as them and their
| immediate peers.
| jlokier wrote:
| I agree those things are important.
|
| But the post by inglor_cz you replied to was specifically
| about _socialising_ being limited to peer ages as a
| child, not social eduction in general.
|
| Therefore your reply "this isn't really true though" and
| "how can you not categorise .. teachers" implied
| _socialising_ with teachers and faculty, not just formal
| social interactions.
|
| It really is true that many children don't have the
| opportunity to socialise with people outside a narrow age
| range at school, and that seems like a legitimate thing
| to dislike.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "how can you not categorize interactions with teachers
| and other faculty as not being in a different age group"
|
| These are interactions, but form just a very limited
| subset of socializing. Most teachers remain fairly
| distant and unknown. Or at least that was my experience
| when going to school.
|
| YMMV.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Yeah - mosr schools are frankly missocialization. It
| "works" because it is a largely synchronized one which sets
| the norms which are accepted.
| Spivak wrote:
| And there's not really an age where this stops either.
| Socialization is an ongoing life-long process. I'm sure all
| the exceptions will be in my replies but we need social
| interaction in order to not go crazy. And with our shitty
| hyper-individualistic culture, work and school is the only
| non-parasocial human interaction a lot of people get.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Once enough time has passed to give proper retrospective stats,
| I am very curious to know if there is a clear dividing line
| between the harm of remote learning at the elementary grades
| compared to high school or college or if it gradually tapers
| off in later elementary school into the baseline education
| reduction in high school.
|
| I'll also admit to not thinking that a missed semester of
| school was a big deal. Why'd I ever think that? I only thought
| of the glacial pace of American middle and high schools and
| elementary grades simply skipped my mind entirely. There's no
| way to teach a child to read over Zoom.
| [deleted]
| lithium_throw wrote:
| I know a headteacher from a fairly disadvantaged area in the
| UK. He said a lot of the kids will never recover.
|
| Hopefully soon, it will no longer be contraversial to say that
| lockdowns (especially any that lasted longer than the initial
| "flatten the curve for 2 weeks" we were all promised) caused
| more harm than good.
|
| For a (Western) society that is obsessed with helping the
| needy, it's just incredible that something that obviously would
| hurt the poorest very hardest was also something that could not
| be disagreed with.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > something that could not be disagreed with.
|
| Disagreement with the narrative still gets you exiled in many
| parts. I've gotten called all kinds of extremely horrible
| things by people I know in real life just for asking basic
| questions. It's really amazing what fear does to people.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Hell, I got a lecture from someone once for questioning
| whether cloth masks were accomplishing anything meaningful
| in a 100% vaccinated workplace with surveillance testing. A
| lot of authorities are concentrating more on appearing to
| Do Something against COVID than on the cost-benefit
| calculation of NPIs' actual impact on preventing disease.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Indeed, we might have a serious issue with illiteracy again.
|
| All over a virus with a 99.5+% survival rate, with 92% of the
| deaths in the UK in over 75s (and mostly with diabetes and
| dementia).
| asoneth wrote:
| > was also something that could not be disagreed with.
|
| At the time I recall significant disagreement on this point
| between politicians, the news media, the school boards in my
| area, and my neighbors. After much debate, our local public
| schools ultimately did decide to maintain full-in person
| school for as long as possible due in no small part to equity
| concerns. Everyone seemed uncertain about whether this was
| the right thing to do, and I don't recall anyone on either
| side insisting that disagreement was forbidden.
| lithium_throw wrote:
| I was referring to the broader topic of lockdowns in
| general, but at least where I was, it was the narrative
| that "selfish" parents who "didn't want to look after their
| own kids" wanted to keep the schools open, and therefore
| risking the very lives of the teachers.
| asoneth wrote:
| That's rough. Some of the discussions here also got
| heated and a couple people on both sides of the debate
| did sink to leveling personal attacks and questioning
| others' motivations, patriotism, intelligence, sincerity,
| empathy, etc rather than understanding their point of
| view. It's amazing how damaging it can be to have even a
| small number of people who have decided to abandon good-
| faith discussion.
|
| I'm not sure how you prevent folks like that from getting
| a foothold, but seems like it's worth figuring out.
| adpirz wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear why you think Western society is
| obsessed with helping the needy.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| As an adult, you should have a basic grasp of things like
| knowing which societies have large social insurance
| programs and which do not, rather than being baffled by
| these basic facts of life.
|
| https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm
|
| Western society has a historically unique obsession with
| social insurance programs, to the point where between
| 20-30% of GDP is spent on social insurance, whereas in
| other socities the number is much lower. In fact the modern
| version of these programs were invented in Germany under
| Bismarck, and the ancient version in the Roman Empire with
| their bread dole. From the Roman Empire's 'dole' to the
| hospitals in the middle ages, there was a tradition in
| Western societies with having the government help the
| needy. That's not to say that individuals didn't help the
| needy in many different societies (begging was an
| occupation in early Islamic societies) but having organized
| government programs on a mass scale simply to help the poor
| was the invention of Western civilization during the Roman
| Empire and continued as a Western obsession to the present
| day.
|
| Even in the US, the share of national wealth spent on
| social benefits is 19%, the dirty secret being not that the
| US spends much less than Europe on things like publicly
| funding healthcare and education (because the US government
| spends about the same amount as in Europe), but in the US
| those public funds are pocketed by well-paid professionals
| and still the private sector is left with large individual
| bills, whereas in Europe those same institutions have to
| get by on the public funds only.
|
| If you want a quick way of shutting someone up who is
| arguing that the US should have European style funding of
| universities, tell them we already spend as much as they do
| in Europe with public subsidies, so the missing step is
| just making tuition and fees illegal with no increase in
| government spending. Same thing for healthcare. That will
| be a cold dose of reality.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "whereas in Europe those same institutions have to get by
| on the public funds only."
|
| Europe isn't a homogeneous place and you have a lot of
| private healthcare and educational institutions here.
| They might not form a majority, but richer people will
| often make use of them, if they dislike the public option
| or consider it subpar.
|
| Sometimes not even richer people. I know a lady in Madrid
| who does not make much money, but gives about half of her
| income for her son's schooling. He visits a semiprivate
| school where he gets reasonable education. In her own
| words, a fully public option would mean that he might not
| even learn proper Spanish, as only kids of the poorest
| immigrants frequent it.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Yes, this is a good point. Everything is messier in real
| life than a few paragraphs can properly portray.
|
| But my main point is that the difference between the
| national healthcare you see in Europe versus the U.S. is
| not the level of public spending, but the universal
| nature of service delivery achieved for roughly the same
| total public spending. The same thing for university
| education.
|
| In both cases, the government spends an enormous amount
| and in Europe that covers a baseline of service (with
| private spending optional to supplement it) but in the US
| that covers maybe 1/2-1/3 of your bill, leaving private
| citizens to still face huge costs for things that are
| fully covered in Europe. The natural solution -- to cut
| employment and wages on the part of US healthcare or
| education workers so that they make do with the public
| funds they are already receiving -- is rarely advocated
| by those who want a more european-style system of social
| insurance.
| lithium_throw wrote:
| Are you for real? Find me another culture that spends so
| much time fretting over people suffering in other
| countries, or the poor or disadvantaged in their own
| countries (Covid polices exempted, of course).
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Our elites just love flying round on jets to African
| countries to help, if you run a foundation you're seen as
| a good person. The defining musical event of the 80s that
| still has cultural continuity today was Live Aid. Most
| cities have food banks and soup kitchens too.
|
| I think we still have a notion of "the right sort" of
| needy though, compare starving African kids to any of the
| wretched opioid addicts (and their families) that shuffle
| around North American cities and the sympathy given to
| each.
| [deleted]
| valeness wrote:
| This is almost impossible to quantify because we can't
| determine how the pandemic would have played out without
| lockdowns. It could have gone from 600,000 dead in the United
| States, to 2 million. (Again, we don't know, it could very
| well have been less than that, or more. :shrug:)
|
| I would say losing parents or grandparents (any primary
| caretakers really) to COVID would be far more impactful on a
| child's development than missing a year of school.
|
| I will gladly concede that lockdowns did cause harm, but
| "more harm than good" is something I'm still not seeing as
| true.
| WhereIsSweden wrote:
| One word - Sweden.
| glogla wrote:
| Sweden was beating the "we're not restricting stuff!"
| drum for a while, but eventually they chickened out and
| locked down, just like everyone else, if not more. They
| are not a good example.
| WhereIsSweden wrote:
| Wrong, flat out wrong. Sorry. I wonder from where people
| like you get their information, just wow. Educate
| yourself: https://www.government.se/government-
| policy/the-governments-...
| nivenkos wrote:
| I live in Sweden. There were some restrictions on closing
| times of bars, and seating in shopping centres.
|
| This is nothing compared to the "stay in your flat for a
| month" lockdowns in Italy and Spain. Or shutting almost
| everything in the UK, France, Australia, NZ, etc.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Only in those useless models. I recall one interview on
| Unherd with one of the British modelers, if more people
| understood what kind of "science" this was hinged on there
| would be outrage.
| [deleted]
| lithium_throw wrote:
| I do understand, and I am outraged. The stastical
| modellers have given science, and particularly the public
| perception of science, a terrible blow, as well as the
| actual outcomes of blindly swallowing their predictions.
| I'm planning to put together a list of all of the
| predictions made since March 2020, and what actually
| happened.
| lithium_throw wrote:
| If it had been 2 million dead in the same period, it would
| still have been a fairly tame global pandemic, by the
| standards of deadly global pandemics.
|
| It was pretty clear after the first few weeks that Covid
| was not the horrible killer that leaves people literally
| dropping dead in the streets, yet the response continued as
| if it were. Given the incredible disruption our response to
| it has caused, that I predict will continue for years and
| decades, the fact that we can't even say (and probably
| never will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning
| enough.
|
| Most kids lose a grandparent at a young age (I did). I
| really disagree that it was worse than losing a year of
| school, and being shut in the house for a considerable
| period of that. If anything, we have forgotten the lessons
| that death teaches us, and have lost touch with the cycle
| of life and death. The incredible aversion to a relatively
| harmless (for most) disease shows this is the case.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > the fact that we can't even say (and probably never
| will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning
| enough.
|
| Exactly. I assert that for _any_ of these non
| pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile
| their effect on "the charts" should be plain and
| dramatic. You should be able to pull anybody off the
| street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown
| state and have them see plain as day the profound
| difference.
|
| If you need grad student level statistics to tease apart
| differences it means even if these things worked, their
| impact was so minor that the extreme social costs made
| them not worthwhile at all.
| handoflixue wrote:
| > You should be able to pull anybody off the street and
| show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state
|
| Keep in mind that the constitution protects free travel
| between states, so such an analysis only shows what
| results a mixed response gives.
|
| If you compare Australia to the US, you can see that
| lockdowns very clearly do work: 1K vs 600K deaths. Even
| accounting for relative size, that suggests lockdowns
| produced a 50x effect.
|
| (of course, if the question is "should California be
| draconian" then this is still very useful information!
| I'm just saying the answer changes depending on whether
| California is doing this while still being forced to have
| open borders with states that aren't locking down, or if
| the entire country coordinate a federal lockdown)
| [deleted]
| lambdaba wrote:
| Moreso, I sincerely believe the fear exacerbated by the
| ridiculous measures and the social isolation especially
| of the vulnerable and sick (no visits etc.) caused a
| substantial proportion of the deaths. We are not isolated
| organisms.
|
| Fear causes stress. Chronic fear causes chronic stress.
| Chronic stress causes chronic cortisol. Chronic cortisol
| causes immunosupression.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Indeed. And to flesh out in more detail, we caused:
|
| - lack of sleep/exercise (which destroys the body's
| immunoregulatory capacities, leading to either a sort of
| acute immunosenescence like you said wrt fear, or
| alternatively leading to an overreactive immune system
| that kills via cytokine storm)
|
| - decline in social interaction
|
| - more time spent inside (which apart from the other
| correlates, very obviously leads to less sunlight).
| sunlight => vitamin d + nitric oxide; vitamin d is
| critical for respiratory pathology specifically, as well
| as just general health, and nitric oxide is very
| important as an immunoregulatory compound and as a
| preventer of strokes
|
| - the general environment of fear/stress/anxiety (again,
| going to screw up the immunoregulatory balance of the
| body)
| lithium_throw wrote:
| At least where I am (UK, and in particular, Wales), it
| seems our healthcare system is in the process of failing.
| It was already doing badly, and our response to Covid has
| tipped it over the edge. That alone will cause a
| significant amount of suffering and death.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I think this is being too light on the impact of covid.
| In places like NYC, where they had refrigerated trucks
| full of bodies because their morgues were full, or India
| where the oxygen shortage killed many many people from
| Delta infection...
|
| I would argue the severe aversion in reaction to the news
| coming out of NYC wasn't unreasonable, even if it was an
| overreaction.
| lithium_throw wrote:
| I too saw the widely-circulated picture of the "open
| graves" in NYC. Somehow they forgot to mention it was
| just a regular picture of a pauper's graveyard. Funny
| what fear can be provoked by context-free visual imagery.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > where they had refrigerated trucks full of bodies
| because their morgues were full
|
| Is that really true though? Because what the headlines of
| these kinds of stories say vs. what the article itself
| says usually never match.
| handoflixue wrote:
| While the overall death rate isn't up that much, I've
| heard that it's clustering a lot more, which means
| various systems are overwhelmed: We can process X bodies
| per day but we have a couple weeks where we're getting
| 1.5X bodies, and so for a while we have a few bodies in
| refrigerated trucks or other overflow systems.
|
| So... it's sort of true, but it's more of a congestion
| issue (like rush hour traffic), not a sign of systemic
| collapse.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It's kind of true. These refrigerated trucks were on
| standby anyway because they are needed every time there's
| a bad flu season.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| And that is what I found for almost all articles of that
| type. If you read into the article it was never "this is
| happening" but "we are getting prepared".
| mikem170 wrote:
| Hospitals and related services are optimized for
| efficiency, not flexibility. They don't like having empty
| beds that aren't being used, or idle workforces. So when
| something out of the ordinary happens they can't deal
| with it while maintaining their normal level of service.
| As a society we don't seem to want to pay for idle
| capacity. Human nature, I guess. We could have been
| building more hospitals over the last year, training more
| nurses, etc. But that doesn't appear to have happened.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| The burden of proof is on those who promote the lockdowns
| as an effective strategy to show how they help. This is
| because without that proof, so many other issues arise from
| legal, ethical, and practical perspectives that make
| supporting it not just non-scientific, but also highly
| irrational.
|
| Legally, what right do our nations have to shutter
| businesses as they did? Where in the legal frameworks do
| they legitimately yield such enormous & violent authority
| over us? Did they do enough to protect & compenate us all
| against these violations of our rights?
|
| Ethically, is this even a moral way to conduct statecraft
| during a pandemic? Is scapegoating appropriate at a time
| like this, and were we right to erode so much of our
| monetary base to provide the benefits that states did to
| their citizenry, necessitated by the lockdowns in the first
| place?
|
| And practically, how many people have been harmed or killed
| by the conditions of lockdowns? How many people committed
| suicide who otherwise wouldn't? How much industrial output
| was sacrificed and how did this impact the deaths of
| despair that rose considerably over the last 1.5 years? How
| many people didn't get their cancer detected early enough
| to survive it? How many people didn't get their emergency
| medical care due to the chaos caused by lockdowns and
| perished as a result? Did these figures remain low enough
| to make the actual policies of lockdown worth it?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > This is almost impossible to quantify because we can't
| determine how the pandemic would have played out without
| lockdowns.
|
| There is a wide spread of pandemic responses from different
| countries and regions, so yes, we can make pretty good
| guesses as to what the effect would have been.
|
| All the various lockdown-supporting studies compare
| lockdowns to a do-nothing base scenario, where people are
| essentially assumed to be rolling around naked in a big
| heap, licking everything and everyone. This is completely
| false, because people _everywhere_ acted on their own to
| protect themselves from spread.
|
| And when you compare the effects of the decreased mobility
| due to ordered lockdowns vs. what people voluntarily
| achieve anyway, the effect is zero. No benefit, all harm.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| Isn't that decreased mobility largely impossible without
| lockdowns though? I can't imagine more than 20% of
| workers would realistically have been able to stay home
| if their employers didn't have to lock down.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Absolutely not, because you could measure a substantial
| decrease in mobility _before_ any region instituted a
| lockdown.
|
| You can _support_ working-from-home and furloughing
| without _forcing_ it. And that 's enough.
|
| Last autumn in Sweden, cases started rising, still no
| lockdown, and people voluntarily decreased their
| mobility. Everyone I talked to decreased their social
| activity, skipped out on things, stayed home more.
| Without being told to. Without being ordered around. It's
| enough.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| >Absolutely not, because you could measure a substantial
| decrease in mobility before any region instituted a
| lockdown.
|
| Source?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
| scop wrote:
| I commend you for changing your opinion. That is no small task
| these days.
| snarf21 wrote:
| It can be an easy mistake to make. Too often we assume that
| everyone is high functioning and higher than average aptitude
| with higher than average support. I'm sure all those kids did
| okay during distance learning. It is all the other kids that
| will struggle. We forget that there were kids in our classes
| that struggled even with the full support and structure of
| school. I think it may allow us to change our approach to
| education moving forward. We had a forced experiment that
| created a lot of data. Hopefully we all learn something from
| it.
|
| I always take it back to a conversation I've had with co-
| workers about meetings. Frequently, people all leave the same
| meeting with different expectations and understandings. This is
| despite a long meeting, discussion, white boards and back and
| forth. Communication is hard and a skill we tragically under
| develop. Education is the same, you have abstract concepts that
| must be converted into internal mental models by students at
| different levels and abilities.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| It's a HUGE issue when you look at low income, lower class
| individuals. A lot of the kids in those circumstances only get
| reprieve from their terrible home lives by going to school.
|
| This is not to say it doesn't affect kids in other income
| classes but the effect is far worse on the lower class.
|
| The younger the child is the worse as well.
| vmception wrote:
| I don't know how this is surprising.
|
| We locked down to protect boomers and obese people because we
| could and they are such a large <<' part of the population and
| we value their contributions to society and lives. There would
| be consequences, fairly obvious ones, and we coordinated
| quickly anyway.
|
| I thought everyone knew that. You did a 180? like, you
| supported lockdowns because you didn't know that?
| bachmeier wrote:
| Just FYI, this idea that the only impact of covid is deaths
| in people over 65 and obese people is simply bad reporting.
|
| https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
|
| If you want to stick to deaths, we have by age
|
| Under 5: 183
|
| 5-11: 119
|
| 12-15: 152
|
| 16-17: 125
|
| That's a total of 579 deaths among kids 17 or less _in spite
| of the fact that schools and most activities were closed_. We
| don 't know what the total death count would have been with
| everything open, but 579 child deaths used to be considered a
| lot, and it would have been a lot higher without the
| precautions that were taken.
| WhereIsSweden wrote:
| but 579 child deaths used to be considered a lot,
|
| When?
| orangecat wrote:
| _That 's a total of 579 deaths among kids 17 or less in
| spite of the fact that schools and most activities were
| closed._
|
| Schools stayed open in half of the US and many other
| countries, and they didn't have noticeably worse results.
|
| _579 child deaths used to be considered a lot_
|
| Bluntly, it's not. There were over 20,000 childhood deaths
| in 2016
| (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsr1804754). That
| level of risk doesn't remotely justify shutting down
| schools and massively disrupting their lives.
| [deleted]
| ghoward wrote:
| For the number of children in America, those numbers are
| tiny. Really. And do we have the data on the comorbidities
| those children had?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Pretty much every single one of those kids had at least a
| comorbidity, usually diabetes, obesity or cancer.
|
| There's also a slight problem of overcounting covid
| deaths in the US, so a few of those kids actually died of
| car accidents, and then tested positive for the virus, so
| into the pile of covid deaths they went...
|
| The actual risk of death from covid for a healthy child
| is 1:1000000. There are so many things in life that are
| much riskier than that, and yet many places closed
| schools over such a tiny risk. It's absolute insanity.
| vmception wrote:
| > There's also a slight problem of overcounting covid
| deaths in the US
|
| Recounts already happened like a year ago due to this
| specific criticism, revised down for miscounts and
| further resulting in a greater total due to missed ones.
| This is such an old argument that never got updated, just
| added to the pile of frustrations that never get
| revisited.
|
| The other issue with this argument is that the numbers
| are for indicative seriousness, and all other diseases
| especially respiratory illnesses have the same counting
| flaws, which means for relative seriousness everyone is
| still getting an accurate signal, compared to other
| ailments.
| ghoward wrote:
| Agreed, and it's even more insane when you consider the
| fact that the lockdowns _increased_ the comorbidity of
| obesity among children!
| henrikschroder wrote:
| In the US, for 2020, kids and teenagers seeking help for
| suicidal thoughts doubled, suicide attempts in that group
| increased by 50%, and successful suicides increased by
| 20%.
|
| Can we have a sane debate about the drawbacks of
| lockdowns and school closures? Weigh the pros and cons?
| Estimate the cost of each option?
|
| Nope! Hysteria it is, and if you disagree you're a
| grandma-killing science-hating Trumper.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Indeterminate impacts of long-covid on people, including
| children, also played a role in the extension of the initial
| lockdowns.
| nradov wrote:
| There is no reliable scientific evidence of significant
| "long Covid" effects on many children. Even before the
| current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, children were commonly
| infected by the other four endemic coronaviruses. A small
| minority experienced post viral syndrome but the vast
| majority made full recoveries.
| david38 wrote:
| For more I think is having someone around to ask questions of.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I will comment that I kind of love this process of fact
| finding. We could have an endless political debate a about
| teaching methods, tech in the classroom, distance learning,
| teacher quality, school funding and so on. We could have an
| unquestionable doctrine that smaller class sizes lead to the
| best education or other maxims. We could have heartfelt beliefs
| in teacher compensation. But at the end of the day, you try
| something and it either works or doesn't work, and you really
| and truly have an opportunity to learn what works best. The
| best possible way to honor the tough years that students had
| during the pandemic is to supercharge our learning about
| learning, take the distance education lessons to heart and let
| previous dogma be overturned with new best practices.
| jseliger wrote:
| I've taught English to undergrads (mostly freshmen), on and
| off, for 13 years, and it's apparent that no one I'm aware of
| has a great model for teaching reading and writing skills
| online, at least to college students. Most of the efforts I've
| seen attempt, mostly unsuccessfully, to replicate the classroom
| model, or attempt what looks mostly like a busywork model.
| College students are likely more motivated on average than K-12
| students. It's possible for the highly motivated to learn a
| lot, but, for the median student, things look much grimmer.
|
| I'm not a luddite and would love to see successful online
| education that works at least as well as offline. So far, I'm
| not hugely optimistic, for the median student:
| https://seliger.com/2013/08/19/computers-and-education-an-
| ex....
| toast0 wrote:
| I think there's this expectation that online/computer based
| education would reduce/eliminate teachers and allow for
| mostly unsupervised learning, and I just don't see how that
| would work for reading and especially writing.
|
| Maybe reading, a bit, because a lot of people will get most
| of the way there with learn by example and a couple check
| ins. And then lots of practice.
|
| Writing seems difficult to computerize. And having a
| classroom full of students doing roughly the same thing seems
| a lot less labor intensive than each student at their own
| pace with a teacher available with enough context to
| appropriately critique and encourage and provide useful
| resources.
|
| The arithmetic portions of elementary mathematics seem a lot
| more amenable to computerization. The computer can easily
| judge the answers, and while it takes a lot of time and
| practice to master some of the skills, the breadth of skills
| is really not that deep, so there's not a whole lot of
| context that needs to be considered when help is needed. I
| don't know that this still holds at higher level math, but
| there's parts that might. On the other hand, group
| instruction can allow for peer assistance with tricky things
| which may help both parties understand the material more.
| qsort wrote:
| To be fair that's a _very_ hard problem.
|
| I have no formal teaching experience, but I taught several
| competitive mathematics seminars for elite high school
| students. Transposing the classroom model is unsatisfactory,
| working remotely strongly encourages you to pursue
| asynchronous models. But on the other hand a lesson is more
| than just a youtube video, you definitely want some degree of
| interactivity.
|
| It sounds really silly, but I wonder if internet-first models
| like Twitch streams with rich interactive chats are actually
| closer to the solution.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Don't forget those who had to work during the pandemic. Many
| many high school students whose families were in a bad position
| financially had to work and would frequently be listening to
| zoom class while working a cash register for example. How
| effectively do you think they could listen and participate, or
| even care?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I'm not convinced this was a common thing. Source?
| skizm wrote:
| I agree with this for like 95-99% of people. I do think there
| are a few internally motivated students who will thrive in this
| environment. Obviously you can't make policy around those few,
| but it would be interesting to give students the option going
| forward now that there is some sort of infrastructure set up
| around remote learning. The primary issue I see is that a large
| group of very non-motivated students will probably take
| advantage of this option and just slack off even more. These
| are the ones that need the in person structure the most.
|
| Overall though, agree that it has been a total disaster apart
| from being a rare learning opportunity for policy makers.
| icelancer wrote:
| > I agree with this for like 95-99% of people. I do think
| there are a few internally motivated students who will thrive
| in this environment.
|
| No doubt. Perhaps ironically, outliers that thrive on
| independent study (I likely would have been one of these
| people) drive inequality up!
| qsort wrote:
| Yeah, I agree that a mixed model can possibly work, but I
| worry you'd be running into similar problems as those that
| came out during the pandemic.
|
| I'm a big believer that meritocracy and an ethics of self-
| motivation can genuinely help disadvantaged but talented
| people, but that requires offering them a place where they
| can dedicate themselves to developing that talent. I worry
| that talented but poor people would actually those that get
| hit the most by mixed solutions like that.
|
| > I agree with this for like 95-99% of people.
|
| Honestly, K-12 education is completely useless for the top 5%
| in the first place. You simply can't design a system around
| those people.
| odessacubbage wrote:
| my high school actually had a good structure for this kind of
| model. all class attendance was effectively optional and
| there was no homework outside of a few big quarterly projects
| (every classroom has a drawer full of practice assignments
| you could refer to as-needed). you were essentially given
| complete freedom... provided your gpa stayed at least 3.0, if
| you fell below you'd be put on academic probation which
| required you to come to class and do homework etc until your
| grades improved.
|
| in general i dislike the notion of 'unmotivated students'
| more often ime you have kids who not being provided an
| educational experience that aligns with their motivations.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| My SO is an elementary school teacher in a post-industrial
| urban school. Her students (mostly poor, and crucially almost
| all with parents who were working in-person through the
| lockdown) were effectively remote-only from March 2020 until
| earlier this month, and it's had some substantial visible
| effects on them. Among other things:
|
| - Missing that in-person school time meant losing a lot of
| "leaving home" practice for a large chunk of kids. Current
| second graders were in-person for 6 months of kindergarten, and
| remote from there. This means there are a lot of mechanical and
| social things they haven't had to do (sit quietly next to each
| other, tie their shoes, ask to go to the bathroom).
|
| - The "summer slide" has been much more severe than usual. A
| large chunk of the students didn't get much education out of
| being remote for first grade, so a much-larger-than-usual chunk
| of the cohort are substantially behind grade level for basic
| skills, especially reading.
|
| - Related to above, there has been a huge backlog of students
| who need to be evaluated for various special education and
| disability needs who just haven't been able to be accommodated
| and who, due to the process difficulties for the last year,
| probably won't be able to be evaluated based on their data from
| last year (leaving them severely under-supported for another
| year while the data is collected).
| vxNsr wrote:
| Yup that's why every private school that had honest staff and
| wasn't bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing
| political games was in person most of last year.
|
| Kids come first. Until this summer the chance of them getting
| sick or transmitting was super low, with delta it's a little
| higher but with sane precautions most of the risk can be
| alleviated. In a few years time you're gonna see real
| disparities between even religious private school kids (which
| don't necessarily have better education standards) and public
| based solely on who was in person.
|
| If you're trying to win one over your political opponents get
| out of this, it's not game.
| 8note wrote:
| If you kill all the teachers, the students still aren't
| going to get an education
| twofornone wrote:
| Are you implying that a significant proportion of
| teachers are going to die of COVID? You're aware that
| this is a virus with a 99.x% survival rate, right? And
| the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| The average American thinks if they catch covid their
| chance of death is around 10%.
|
| People are _horrifically_ misinformed on the risks of
| covid. It has made it impossible to have a reasoned
| discussion on public policy.
|
| Source: http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
| farmerstan wrote:
| The split is worse between liberals and conservatives.
| Liberals think the chance of being hospitalized is up to
| 50%. I'm a liberal myself but the abject fear that I see
| among my friends and the families in my mostly liberal
| school is scary.
|
| Even worse, they believe it's even more dangerous for
| children when it's the exact opposite. Even considering
| delta the chance of hospitalization is still less than 1%
| and death is almost nil. "But what about long covid?" is
| the response I get, which is just as small.
|
| If fear is dictating policy we will never break out of
| this because the time to vaccinate everyone plus the
| chances of a variant coming along means we will never be
| free.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| I always catch flak for saying it, but we need to be
| honest about the fact that long COVID is largely a
| psychogenic illness. It can be a real thing, in the way
| that any infection can leave a sort of malaise that
| persists for years or even decades for the unlucky, but
| such reactions are incredibly rare. Yet based off the
| self-reported surveys, you'd think the rate of long COVID
| was like 10% among progressive twitter users in their
| early 20's...
|
| I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-
| print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing
| the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs
| never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had
| more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance),
| but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were
| literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long
| COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot
| that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all
| things that happened before COVID and will continue to
| happen long after...
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Most 'long' Covid cases aren't that long. It's entirely
| common for people to still feel symptoms 8-12 weeks after
| a respiratory infection; by most studies that's 'long'
| Covid.
|
| What gets reported however are the extreme outliers,
| people who are reporting Chronic Fatigue-type symptoms 6+
| months later. Some of these people genuinely have a
| delayed immune response, while others were probably
| psychosomatic cases (turns out having to live with the
| fear of a deadly virus does a number on people's mental
| state if they actually do get sick). But either way,
| these cases are likely a minority of what's included in
| the 'long Covid' umbrella.
|
| It's irresponsible reporting, and I'm not sure if it
| happens through ignorance (scary news is fun to talk
| about) or an ulterior motive (if we can convince our
| readers that they'll likely to have long-term effects
| from getting Covid maybe they'll mask up and vaccinate).
| Either way, it's proof that even 'mainstream' media often
| can't be trusted to report the facts.
| twofornone wrote:
| The worst part is that you're effectively not allowed to
| have any sort of objective discussion, as evidenced by my
| immediate negative comment score. This has become a
| borderline religious hysteria.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I've been called "dangerous" multiple times for posting
| screenshots of the state department of health covid
| dashboard. It's crazy...
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > as evidenced by my immediate negative comment score.
|
| I don't like commenting on internet points (it isn't
| usually productive) but you'll note that the person you
| replied to has been downvoted and flagged into oblivion.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| The teachers can vaccinate if they want to now so that's
| a moot point. Even before that the likelihood of
| suffering any severe outcome from COVID was extremely low
| and no higher due to being a school teacher. Students are
| at very low risk of contracting it and/or spreading it.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| My understanding is that the data indicate that children
| do not transmit Covid as easily as adults, so the
| situation is a bit more subtle than you seem to suggest
| here.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Only true of Covid classic, the Delta variant negates
| that.
| abduhl wrote:
| Was in person schooling shut down before or after the
| delta variant? Imputing a risk to behaviors/decisions
| that occurred before the risk manifested is a logical
| error.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| I'd also note that an even-more-infectious variant of
| SARS-2 (Delta), in which children transmit just as
| readily (I haven't seen proof of this whatsoever but
| let's accept it for the sake of argument), and which
| largely-but-not-completely bypasses vaccine immunity
| (this is definitely the case; the Israel data confirms
| that the approach of vaccinating against just the spike
| protein was an incredible failure given that a couple
| point mutations on the spike like we saw with Delta was
| enough to drop vaccine efficacy to <=40% against
| infection), should tell us that trying to run away from
| this virus or wage war on it is folly and that, yes, your
| kid is going to be exposed to COVID, and that's okay.
|
| This is a bit of a side tangent but it never ceases to
| amaze me that the supposed asymptomatic spread of COVID
| (which was never proven; pre-symptomatic was but
| asymptomatic appears to have been a myth) was used as a
| justification for the necessity of lockdowns and the
| like, when really it should have been a screaming
| indicator that we should stop trying to aggressively
| contain the damn thing and just focus on population
| health and focused protection of the severely vulnerable.
|
| By the same logic (this is me basically restating my
| first paragraph), the idea that a variant that infects
| kids more easily or as was argued above that kids can
| transmit more easily, is a sign that we should stop
| trying to close schools, not that we need to double down.
| And regardless it seems like people seem to have
| forgotten that we're now in late September 2021. It's
| almost been two years of this now.
|
| Hell, I remember catching major flak here (on a different
| account) in early-mid 2020 for saying that we were going
| to stay locked down until they coerced everyone into
| being vaccinated, and at the time I was called a
| conspiracy theorist; nowadays people act like I'm crazy
| for not wanting vaccine passports, and will turn around
| and act as if we all collectively knew they were going to
| happen from the beginning! More than 18 months of this, a
| third-world child starvation / missed medical appointment
| crisis, a massive worldwide uptick in missed preventative
| care like cancer screenings, a >30% rise in y/y fentanyl
| overdose deaths in the US alone, and yet people still
| insist on more of these ineffective and outright
| authoritarian measures?!
| handrous wrote:
| > Yup that's why every private school that had honest staff
| and wasn't bound by the National Teachers Union who were
| playing political games was in person most of last year.
|
| Teachers' unions are so weak in my state that they're
| nearly worthless as far as contract negotiation &
| enforcement goes, yet every district I know of in my city
| had a well-attended online option last year, if they
| weren't fully online, and in-person was largely "hybrid"
| (in-person some days, remote other days). The unions had
| nothing to do with it. Parents and teachers--not their
| unions, just teachers, directly--drove most of the
| decisions.
| vxNsr wrote:
| I'm sorry but that's not been my experience at all, in my
| state the union refused to work in person even after they
| were vaccinated.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| As someone who's battled with that last point, it's not only
| the 'intake' side of things (it can be weeks or months before
| you can get an evaluation, then weeks afterwards before any
| results can be tabulated)--but even if you do get any kind of
| evaluation, good luck finding counselors.
|
| Only about 10% of the counselors we called would even call
| back, and of that 10%, almost all of them said they would not
| accept any new patients, indefinitely. A couple had openings
| within a year or so, and one or two had any availability in a
| shorter time frame.
|
| Not sure what all the reasons are, but I'm guessing it's the
| perfect storm of more kids needing more services in this
| unprecedented time, more counselors on the older side
| retiring early, and funding for these programs being a
| continual battle.
| PeterisP wrote:
| A local response from some child psychiatrists is that
| they're swamped by existing patients, as the pandemic
| changes have been very harsh on kids already having issues
| with e.g. self-harm or being shut-in so relapsing patients
| are returning and not leaving much space for new ones.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Yes, for sure in that situation the staff shortage and
| backlog of students have made a system that is difficult to
| navigate in normal times essentially intractable.
| goalieca wrote:
| I know people who have special needs and others who have
| terrible internet where the parents and kids can't video at the
| same time. Remote learning is just one problem, we need the
| full spectrum of school activities and programs too! All of
| those little things that communities have built over the last
| few decades really really matter!
| Shadonototra wrote:
| It's always the people not affected by it who comes with such
| arguments
|
| They do not see how negatively it affects public workers, nobody
| care about them anymore since they became invisible, you don't
| get to see them when you work from home
|
| We are heading toward a soulless society, full of inequalities,
| and nobody will be able to do shit because gatherings will be
| looked down because people are scared
| chasd00 wrote:
| my wife is a teacher, when her school closed some of her kids
| ended up in CPS and others simply vanished and haven't returned.
| Elementary schools in low income areas are basically social
| safety nets for kids. Now that her school re-opened a sizable
| portion of the student body is still missing.
| willcipriano wrote:
| When the lockdowns and the masking up in daycare started, I
| presumed this would be the case and took steps to ensure my 2.5
| year old received sufficient social interaction. I took her out
| more, talked with her more, and attempted to find like minded
| parents.
|
| As things opened back up the differences between kids of parents
| who did that and not is striking. My daughter is social and
| rarely shy, other kids we see seem so scared and withdrawn.
|
| Sample size of one but I'm glad I did it.
| blitzar wrote:
| Yeah, sadly those steps put you in the top 1%.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >other kids we see seem so scared and withdrawn.
|
| It would be interesting to know how many of those other parents
| also told their kids if they go outside without a mask or
| socialized with other kids they would get sick and die.
|
| That would be enough to cause any kid to be scared and
| withdrawn.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| The weird obsession in the US with masking toddlers and
| children is absolutely baffling to me.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Are children less likely to spread the disease than adults?
| You don't wear masks to protect yourself, they're generally
| bad at that, you wear them to not spread disease to others.
| robhunter wrote:
| Who is downvoting this?
|
| Why?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| People who are myopically obsessed with how the pandemic
| is being handled in their immediate vicinity, without
| knowing what it looks like in other parts of the world,
| I'm guessing.
|
| Throughout most of Europe, you would be viewed as an
| extreme child-abusing weirdo if you suggest masking
| toddlers or small children is a good thing.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I commented about this easily and obviously noticeable change
| based on anecdotal observations on HN late last year. Even simply
| observations of politicians getting away with not practicing
| their own guidelines and sending their own kids to private tutors
| while locking down everyone else should have woken up people. I
| got a lot of negative comments ranging from how I was advocating
| for putting kids and their elderly parents at risk and what not.
| It's like everyone has completely forgotten about all the other
| side effects and have tunnel vision of covid only. Last week, CDC
| came out showing how the obesity rates in youth has doubled
| during the pandemic. All these decisions will have long term
| consequences which people get silenced over.
| masterof0 wrote:
| I also got down-voted for suggesting the same, a year or so
| ago, it turns out the people who suffers the most with a lock-
| down, are not hanging out here in HN, go figure.
| missinfo wrote:
| Worrying about nothing but Covid is a luxury.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Just an observation - many people on HN work in the tech or
| similar industries which can be performed by working from
| home. They have a hard time relating to others who don't have
| the same luxury.
| srl wrote:
| > Last week, CDC came out showing how the obesity rates in
| youth has doubled during the pandemic.
|
| Do you have a link to the CDC saying that? I found [0], which
| claims the rate went from 19% to 22% --- far from doubling.
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
| updates/2021/0...
| ghoward wrote:
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm
|
| That's the one referred to.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Yep, this is the one I was referencing. Thanks.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| i think the person meant to say that the rate of increase
| doubled
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| I believe the trend toward a peaceful society has led to an
| imbalance of power based on age. When life was violent, it
| stabilized wealth concentration issues by periodically resetting
| the power of entrenched interests.
|
| Today, the old disproportionately control power and they direct
| that power towards their own protection. This is true of 80 yr
| olds. But it is also true of 50 yr olds. And even 30 yr olds.
|
| The COVID crisis response is one such example. Overbearing
| responses were put into place primarily because the danger was to
| old people. Concerns over this very outcome were handwaved away
| with low likelihood counterfactuals.
|
| Alternatives exist in some other cultures. We are familiar with
| the Fukushima Skilled Veteran Corps
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13598607 but there
| are people who have a similar perspective who occupy this world.
|
| My parents are surgeons in their sixties and they continue to
| practise during this crisis and do not advocate for the degree of
| total lockdown that is so popular. They do not advocate for
| closed schools. I would rather be them than be like risk-averse
| 70 yr olds saying that life should pause (but not their
| pensions).
|
| I'm going to go ahead and say it: intransigent old people might
| be the greatest threat to humanity's long term survival through
| their normalcy bias, grip on power, and fear of change. I hope
| that as I grow older I, too, manage to prioritize the next
| generation over myself.
| notyourday wrote:
| > Overbearing responses were put into place primarily because
| the danger was to old people.
|
| Not only that - but these responses were put in place by _the
| old people_ to protect _the old people_ at the expense of _the
| young people_
| ls65536 wrote:
| This reminds me of an old Greek proverb: "A society grows great
| when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never
| sit in."
| opheliate wrote:
| Do you believe that, if the numbers had been reversed, and
| COVID was much more fatal to children and young people than it
| was to the old, lockdowns wouldn't have happened? That seems to
| be the implication of your post, but I find it difficult to
| imagine that being the result.
| [deleted]
| WhereIsSweden wrote:
| Check the Swine Flu epidemic
| _-david-_ wrote:
| I'm not who you were responding to but I think if covid was
| more fatal towards children than adults we would have seen
| far less opposition to lock downs. I am not sure what the
| current number is but at the beginning the average age of
| death from covid was around the average life expectancy in
| the US. I am not saying we shouldn't take actions to avoid
| getting old people sick, but it is hard to justify completely
| stalling the education of children in that situation. If
| children were dying from at high rates people would have
| found hurting their education to be more acceptable.
| dnprock wrote:
| Closing schools and lockdown exacerbate the inequality that has
| already been in place. Instead of seriously looking at how to
| address the problems, we blame it on lockdowns. We're taught to
| think that opening schools will fix the problems. The US
| government printed 16k per individuals. Each person gets 1.4k.
| The rest goes into "recovery". We just want to find convenient
| ways to bury the real problems.
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