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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

> No school means poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food around here.

I think this is possibly the single biggest long term problem we're going to face as a result of all this. Economic recessions will come and go. But missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids. They will be left permanently behind without a serious concerted effort by every school district to make up for lost time. The bar (which is already dismally low) will have to be lowered further for them to graduate, and how/when will it ever be raised back again?

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When I was in third grade, we spent half the second semester learning about different kinds of whales. This is material I forgot pretty much as soon as it was over. When I graduated high school, my mom and I went through all my old elementary school material to see what we'd like to keep for sentimental value and what we're okay with throwing out to make room in the garage, and we were just overwhelmed by the sheer massive volume of paper that came out of that whale unit.

There is so much redundancy in elementary school education that you can take out a large chunk of it and still teach the same amount of information. School could be way, way denser than it is. Hell, even in high school, a full year would cover the same amount of material as a single semester of one of my college classes, and my college classes only met 3 times a week (for the same exact class length as my high school classes; or fewer than 3 times a week for longer class length).

High school: 45-50ish hours per week of class time and homework, waking up at 7:00 every friggin' morning to rush out the door, stuck in a building with little exposure to sunlight for hours on end. Work often assigned one day and due the very next.

College: 25-30 hours per week of class time and homework, walks outdoors between classes, long, leisurely breaks throughout the day. Usually at most 3 early wake-up days a week, and often zero. Work almost never due the very next day. It was like a goddamn vacation, after high school.

(granted I attended a low-ranked university and I gather it's not that easy everywhere, but we were still covering material much faster and with far higher expectations for work than in high school, yet it was way the hell easier just because the conditions were more humane and there was far less wasted time—on the flip side, my high school wasn't in any way prestigious or notable either, yet still demanded all that time)

I attended a low performing inner city high school and went to an ivy. I still feel that way.

> we spent half the second semester learning about different kinds of whales.

The point of most of that is not to teach you about whales (though whales are cool). It's to teach you:

* How to read and process written material.

* How to organize your thoughts and write grammatically correct sentences.

* The moral value that science is useful and nature is important to preserve.

It's the same reason they still teach cursive. Cursive matters fuck-all, but training fine motor skills in general is very useful and cursive is just a semi-arbitrary means to that end.

Conversely, when I was in 6th grade, I begged and pleaded with my parents to try a new distance learning pilot program our state was doing. They allowed me to do it for 7th grade, and the lack of oversight and discipline led to me being a complete year behind in mathematics when I went back to regular school for the 8th grade. I never recovered, and ended up dropping out 2 years later.

Sure there is redundancy in elementary education. But middle and high school kids missing out on a year of math can be fatal. Smart determined kids can make it up. But the vast majority will be completely lost.

Missing any math in any year is a disaster. There is a real continuity in math teaching starting from addition through high school. I've seen so many people who gave up early on, and they have _no hope_ of making it up later on.

And it continues beyond. I tutored in a graduate business program. And math was absolutely the stumbling block for the students I was tutoring. It was all pretty simple stuff. Graphs for economics, solving equations, very simple differentials to find maxima or minima (didn't really need to understand calculus because these were such simple cases), etc. They were pretty much all totally lost.

It was really frustrating for everyone. I just wasn't in a position to basically teach them a few years of high school math from zero foundation.

And you'll see the same pattern in pretty much any of the books written over the years about the challenges the author faced in the first year of their MBA program.

The thing is, you can 100% learn the gap if some is missed. The problem comes when the gap isn't filled at all and then the prerequisites for future material aren't there. I don't think that will be the case with the current situation.

I took a bunch of communication college classes while I was in high school. High school and K-12 are essentially glorifies day care and much less about the education. I was learning a lot faster with the condensed college classes than the high school classes which dragged on for the whole year.

Elementary school is not just about learning academic stuff but about personality development as well. Unless a child is very gifted, it will also get bored extremely fast.

Middle and high school is for everybody and college/University is for the smart 50% (or whatever).

It's natural that you cover more in less time in college/university because students that go there are already smarter than most.

If you try to apply the same standards to high school, you will push the dropout rate into 60 or more.

>The bar (which is already dismally low) will have to be lowered further for them to graduate, and how/when will it ever be raised back again?

You don't have to lower the bar. There are other options. There is no fundamental law of physics that says a generation has to graduate at age X, so we -- the society -- should be perfectly able to delay that process for a year, instead of lowering the bar.

That said, there's something deeply wrong either with the society as a whole or with the HN audience if you read "poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food" and you say that the biggest long term problem is the lowering of the bar because kids skipped school.

The longer you delay graduation past the age of legal majority, the more students will drop out and [attempt to] enter the workforce.

Not every kid is willing and able to live with their current parent or guardian after they are legally able to either move out on their own or be evicted.

It's not a law of physics, but there are a lot of pitiable kids out there who have never even caught a whiff of good fortune in their lives, and the US lacks the social sensitivity to make them feel secure enough to add another year of high school to their pile of problems.

> It's not a law of physics, but there are a lot of pitiable kids out there who have never even caught a whiff of good fortune in their lives, and the US lacks the social sensitivity to make them feel secure enough to add another year of high school to their pile of problems.

Yes, that's why there are "poor kids roaming the street like packs of feral dogs" in the first place, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. That's the big problem.

So let's not pretend that lowering the bar is what's going to make those kids catch a whiff of good fortune. The US system grinds people like that into dirt and that won't change with a single decision, be that decision to add a school year or to lower the bar.

I am not advocating lowering any bars. I'm just saying that those kids are as screwed now as they have ever been, and that this particular misfortune will not play in their favor in the future, as employers, government, and nongovernment institutions will be just as unsympathetic then as they are now.

A sufficient proportion of the US is willing to let those kids fall by the wayside, rather than do whatever can be done to boost them over this hurdle. It won't be adding another school year, and it won't be lowering the bar. It might be by providing housing, food, and petty spending allowance for over-18 kids still attempting to finish their high-school diploma.

>I am not advocating lowering any bars.

Sorry, I misinterpreted your reply. My comment was a reply to a comment about lowering the bar and I thought you were arguing that same point.

>I'm just saying that those kids are as screwed now as they have ever been, and that this particular misfortune will not play in their favor in the future, as employers, government, and nongovernment institutions will be just as unsympathetic then as they are now.

I completely agree with that assessment.

I missed pretty much the same amount of school during SARS in Hong Kong in 2003. This was before any sort of remote learning was possible, I didn’t do school work for pretty much a whole semester. I didn’t feel that this held me back at all, however there were a few key differences in my end:

- I was in 4th grade where school was less rigorous

- I went to a private international school

- While my parents were busy working, I still had a stable home environment to count on

If you went to a private intl school, I imagine the tuition wasn't cheap. That right there is the difference. When you're paying big bucks, your parents will want to do everything to make sure you don't fall behind. I assume with that kind of education you also went on to complete a university degree of some kind.

Contrast that to the public high school system in the US, where resources are lacking, and students may not even have the tools at home to follow through with remote learning, let alone hope to go to college, which is still 5 figures a year minimum.

> still 5 figures a year minimum

Speaking from personal experience, if you did decently well academically in high school, you can get upwards of 16K a year in grants alone (Pell Grant ~6K, State Grant ~5K, University Grant ~5K) if your situation is documented poor based on your parent's and your tax returns.

My state school (UT Austin) charges tuition of about $5.5k/semester if you take >= 12 hours of classes a semester.

Of course, I realize this advice only applies to those who are demonstrably poor and perform decently academically. But college is (better than) free if you fall in this category.

The problem comes with families who aren't "poor" but aren't rich enough to afford spending an extra $20k/year ($11.k for UT Austin plus $10k for living expenses) for four years, for each kid. If you have three kids it's like buying an extra house, which isn't that affordable for most families.

Often times when parents are taking international positions for their firm, the employer will pay for private international school.

I expect it's a bigger problem for high schoolers in general--especially seniors if it ends up meaning some students don't graduate and just drop out.

If I think back to my grade school experience, I was admittedly a pretty good student but I can't really imagine any single semester being all that critical. (And, in fact, I ended up skipping 8th grade.)

There was some discussion of aspects of this yesterday and there have been a few articles. The general consensus is that kids who have good home environments and have at least some interest in learning will mostly do fine. Some may even do better than normal.

But kids in poor home situations who were already barely scraping by--if that--will basically lose the year and everything that implies. In some areas, double-digit percentages of students have basically gone incommunicado from their schools.

Yeah, that's what really sucks about this pandemic compared to more physical natural disasters. Since the pandemic hurts people directly and not material things, it effectively increases inequality. Those living at the margins are hit hardest while those will lots of money and capital see most of that stay preserved.

What does it imply?

If any school district cares, all the kids will essentially end up repeating a grade. This is not the end of the world. If anything, it might improve student achievement. (Students who are born right after the cutoff for a particular elementary school class, in aggregate, outperform the ones born just before, the youngest in the class.)

Outside of college-bound seniors — a special case — the main price is their time, same as anyone else, and their caregivers' time.

1) there's no way parents will be OK with this, and

2) the count of districts ready to have a 7.7% student headcount increase in one year (you're doing this for 13 grades at once, plus have another coming in) on top of whatever growth they already expected approaches zero. I mean, hell, think of what that would do to the teacher labor market alone if even 10% of districts all did that, putting aside things like building space and bussing.

> If any school district cares, all the kids will essentially end up repeating a grade.

It sounds more like you haven't thought this through.

I shouldn't assume school districts care

voted +1 touché

You don't understand how urban school districts work if you think you can just get a grade to "repeat itself." Kids will drop out once they're 18 like flies.

To make matters even worse, the jobs those kids would get to offset a lack of schooling won't be available now.

I don't know if they'll be roaming the streets (the police in America are pretty unforgiving), but I can certainly say they will have it worse than ~2001 and ~2008 graduates.

Students attend school for 13 years. Let's say they miss out on 5/8 of a year because of this (I think the number is closer to 1/3, but it's not a big difference). So, instead of getting 100% of a "dismally low" education, they're only getting 95.2%. That hardly seems like a devastating loss to me, either from a knowledge or economic perspective.

I don't know if the US is the same as other countries.. but in the UK your birthdate defines how much schooling you get.

I'm a summer child so my first year of school consisted of a two week introduction and then the summer holiday.

My best friend at school and all of the higher performing kids (except me) were born in the first half of the year so had an extra 6 months of schooling.

I thought everyone in the UK started school together, in September?

Not in the early 1980s at least. You're put in a school year based on birthday, the school year starting in September. You then started at school on your 5th birthday.

It may be different nowadays; it would make way more sense to have everyone start in September. I live in The Netherlands and here kids start as soon as they turn 4. They then spend two-three years in the young kids class depending on maturity.

You should rethink that. It's the poverty that these kids and everybody else will be subjected to that will have a much larger impact. If every one of these kids were sitting at home in a financially secure household, I guarantee you they'd all be fine.

> But missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids

If only there was a way we could give them access to the entirety of the world's knowledge, a million lifetimes of recorded video, and the world's best teachers for near zero incremental cost, right in their homes. If only.

We're gonna flub this one because "Netflix and chill" is the best this tech generation can muster in the face of the worst crisis in recent history.

Squandered.

I weep almost every day because our entire communications infrastructure and online experience has been tailored for our own. goddamn. greed.

>But missing 5/8ths of a school year

Yes I'm sure many did not plan on having a snap year. Though it does seem to be the case. Looked cool in the movies, real life - not so much.

Let alone the whole financial impact upon university students whose lifelong debts they build up in education fees, will also entail the everyday costs of living as well. Most of which work summer to pay for that and now, had a real kick upon that. Now that whole aspect hasn't even been touched up and does seem to be one that needs addressing. Heck, i'm sure some parents will be impacted equally. After all if a child is effectively held back a year, then equally government support should for that child equally be extended a year beyond the normal age cut-off's.

Though I'm 50+ and no children, I'm mindful that the impact has much minutia.

May I ask you a question though - when you do get back to school after this `snap`, will your drive for learning and making the most of the class's be more, or the same as it was without this pause? I ask as I suspect many student will be more focused and keener to learn after this break as for many if you deny somebody something or remove it - they tend to appreciate what they are missing more - something we all do in many respects.

> But missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids.

It's not. The amount of learning that happens in a typical school year is not very high. The world can skip an entire year of school, and the educational cost it will pay will not be very high.

The cost of missing a year of childcare, that school provides, on the other hand, is pretty massive.

This sounds like 1970s' movies depicting groups of teenage and younger kids roaming the streets throughout the night after all the community centers, arcades, and malls [i.e. any communal source of entertainment] closed. Midnight skateboarding in abandoned lots, drunk 11-year-olds, graffiti, sneaking out the window as a matter of course ... parents having no idea where their children go at night [remember "Do you know where your children are?"? Forgive a "wrong decade" but the point stands] ...

Of course this is all "crazed cinema depicting crazed societal horror", but are we truly expecting a return to such times and activities?

For primary school, it's a lot more about the child care than it is about the education. At that age the most important thing is safety and enrichment, something provided equally well (well, probably better) by unschooling. Something all my neighbors seem to be doing right now.

We could come out of this with a generation of kids that have learned better how to play and how to let boredom cultivate creativity. Depends a lot on the home situation though.

> They will be left permanently behind without a serious concerted effort by every school district to make up for lost time.

Left behind who, exactly? Everyone is out of school.

It’ll also discriminate on educational and monetary lines. Highly educated households are better prepared to self educate, both in terms of experience and available resources. While they probably won’t do as well as teachers did, they’ll do better than less educated households, conferring a competitive advantage.

I think we're gonna have to talk about repeating the school year come fall.

Schools are not going to repeat for everyone, if only because it would be monumentally unfair (and counterproductive) to force students who learned the required curriculum to repeat a grade. But if you just give everyone a pass and throw students into the next grade who basically skipped a semester, that's not going to play out well either.

ADDED: What I suspect happens is that most schools bend over backwards to pass everyone they feel they possibly can and adjust lesson plans when schools come back to recognize that many students didn't really learn much the previous semester.

> Missing 5/8ths of a school year is going to be absolutely devastating for this generation of kids.

Which subject can they study at school that they cannot study at home?

There is very little that students can't study at home given at least some parental support. However, it's pretty clear that a significant number of students have basically given up on the school year.

Some of them have essential workers as parents and are left unsupervised during the day.

Some have parents ill equipped to assist them with school work those parents never completed themselves. (Hell, I went to college, and my kids' math work is a challenge.)

Some have no access to internet.

I saw an article the other day (I'm unfortunately having trouble Googling it up) that said some school districts have 15-20% students they still haven't managed to connect to teachers yet.

My son's school started remote classes this week. More than a third are missing in action. Naturally it is the third that benefited the most from the structure and support of school.

TL/DR - Students in poverty lose more ground when not in school than other students. Having an extra three months at home will exacerbate this.

In the US we have a school system where the children are off from school for about ten weeks in the summer. Educators have tested the children at the beginning of the school year and at the end of the school year to study the effect of this.

Students with decent to above average socioeconomic factors tested at about the same level from the end of the year to the beginning of the next.

Students with poor socioeconomic factors tested measurably worse at the beginning of the next school year compared to the end of the previous year.

They also looked at the delta from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year. There was no significant difference in outcomes when socioeconomic status was taken into account.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312240707200...

Lets be honest. Many people just aren't cut out to teach many subjects, and a lot of people just didn't pass many high school subjects, let alone have a good enough understanding to teach them

I have several kids at home, all at different elementary grade levels and it’s not at all easy to keep them on track, motivated, and actually learning something while trying to get work done myself. The kids have been cooped up and its hard to keep the kids from bickering. Schools are not helping. They are giving assignments but telling kids things won’t be graded or are optional, etc... so kids don’t want to do some things. We have to undo that and push them to do it.

Given how competitive our society has become I am terrified that we will get behind.

I wonder why we have collectively decided to make society so competitive. We have more technology and resources at our disposal than ever before. We could make things easier on ourselves not harder. What’s the point? (I don’t believe all the competition and thrashing about is improving performance. Did stack ranking improve performance at Microsoft?)

English & Language Arts, including writing. Even for competent parents, unless you fully understand the curriculum and know how to teach it, providing direct instruction or enabling self-teaching in these areas is FAR harder than for math & science ... until you get into lab sciences where access to materials becomes problematic.

Not being in bone-crushing poverty with parents that are unable to help them.

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