Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

Your logic is simply wrong here. If you want to assess the effect of the lockdown, you compare effects between similar countries that did and didn't have a lockdown. Apple trees with fertilizer vs apple trees without fertilizer. You don't learn about the effect of fertilizer by comparing apple trees with fertilizer vs orange trees with fertilizer.

Not sure where they got those numbers, France is projected to see a 10% decline, not 30%.

https://publications.banque-france.fr/en/macroeconomic-proje...

2) Current studies show roughly somewhere between 10-20% of hospitalized patients ending up with heart damage, increasing their future risks of heart attacks and strokes.[2][3] Up to 36% of hospitalized patients are displaying neurological symptoms, with possible damage.[4] Up to 60% are ending up with ARDS which may be permanent.[5]

Extracting that with current numbers, assuming we had a 50% infection rate, 15% hospitalization rate [6][7], and a 1% death rate, we'd have ~1.5 million dead, ~22.5 million hospitalized, ~3.375 million with heart damage, ~8 million with neurological issues, ~13.5 million with ARDS.

Obviously many of these would overlap, but it sounds pretty devastating to me.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#the-scale-of-...

[2]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

[3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[4]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

[5]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

[6]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

[7]: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Plus we have more evidence to base our decisions on. We can look at specific other countries and see what works, assuming people don't turn it into politics like they did with masks. It's really sad that some people believe wearing a cloth mask decreases your blood oxygen saturation, regardless of their education or previous interactions with doctors/dentists/etc that already wore masks on a regular basis pre-pandemic.

[1] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/07/16/vacati...

We are talking about a 4/6/8 week lockdown, that's not long term, that's immediate term.

This is totally at odds with the data. The UK, France, Spain, and Italy, among others, have higher deaths per capita than the US.

All of this is completely unworkable in the US.

Except that they are all now on downward trajectories while being more open (as opposed to the US, which is on an upward trajectory). Travel is allowed in Europe. Schools are open. Bars are open. And they are still on a downward trajectory.

But Australia is also an island, in the relevant sense for this discussion, and didn't succeed in eradication.

Hawaii also had considerable success, albeit recently undermined. Much to my chagrin, since I live here.

My conclusion is that eradicating this virus is very difficult, even with all the advantages.

But again, not impossible.

If no, then being an island isn’t really relevant here.

Nobody has been in those places for more than a month, its 2 weeks.

The 'escapees' so far have been an alcoholic (went to the nearest bottle store) and a couple of people with mental issues.

The REASON those people escaped is because the places aren't prisons, or even close. They were hotels, high quality hotels in some places...with no police presence at all...

There was a bunch of fuss made by the public because it was eventually realised that people were being allowed out without testing to attend funerals under a compassionate exemption.

Your description makes it sound like something very different to the reality.

Its toughening up a little now, because everyone in NZ wanted them to toughen up, but for a long while the reality was that all you had to do to leave was decide that you wanted to leave.

Most people didn't, of course, because most people aren't dicks.

This delaying tactic is all we have for right now, its likely saved thousands of lives, and that's not nothing. What is your plan for the next stage?

If we're a year away from a vaccine or treatment, then we don't need to burn down society to stop it this month. But if we act in a way that causes millions of infections, we're inflicting unnecessary harm on thousands.

We've also learned more about how to keep people alive and how to slow the spread of the virus since February, so it's useful to postpone that exponential growth as long as possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

I'm not sure why you say there was no benefit to locking down. It clearly did wonders for NYC. It's likely that thousands of people were saved by this action.

What's lacking is political willpower.

In Europe this was done even between neighboring countries both part of Shengen.

They were also hit early in this ongoing pandemic and had to fight hard to get it under control. That red states are now ticking up is a sad commentary on their governance, which is a mix of hubris, denialism, and willful ignorance.

> Cases have gone up but deaths have not.

The average age of the infected is lowering, and they tend to survive.

> Cases have gone up but deaths have not.

You seem to have a severe misunderstanding of the virus. The reason why people say to wait two weeks is because there's a massive lag time. Not only is there a long incubation period but there's also a massive period of time between exhibiting symptoms and death. People who exhibit symptoms will die around two to eight weeks afterwards.

When you see cases go up, that means we can expect any deaths to follow within the next month or so. That's exactly what we're seeing in Texas right now with a huge spike in cases and many of our hospitals overwhelmed.

NY/NJ/CT have had the worst outcome so far because they got hit the hardest early on. They've already passed over the death hump assuming there isn't a second wave. For us in Texas though? Just wait and see. In fact I'm going to favorite your post and get back to you when it starts getting really bad.

BLM protests where, on the whole, at least masked. This is a huge contrast from the literal “we will not wear masks” protests that erupted from the radical right.

There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to capturing videos of such people refusing to wear masks or socially distance. Based on the non-negligible amount of (sometimes racist) right-wing talking points they often devolve into, I’d say many would be considered on the right.

In any case, weird attempt to distract against the current sitting president and radical-right legislative bodies of several states acting in direct conflict with scientific advice on how to reduce the rate of infection.

I also agree that simply doing something, anything, isn't always the right approach. I'm an independent who hangs out with the left and there is a tendency to reach for the hammer of government a bit too often. The feds shouldn't have led the charge by any means, but once individual states had started to shut down, a coordinated federal response to get this fully under control would have been the best approach. I think the end game for this will be something like that.

Sure it would. Heck if a Republican that wasn't Trump was in office now, there wouldn't have been the White House bully pulpit being used against basic safety measures and White House emergency powers abused to block states from getting PPE and other emergency supplies. We'd probably have a state aid bill, too, though probably a less generous one than a Democratic Administration and Senate would have been on board for, but probably more than nothing. Which make it financially more viable to do lockdowns (states often can't, Constitutionally, borrow for no capital expenses, and procedurally have a difficult process to approve new debt and have a high cost of borrowing, the Feds have none of those problems). Leadership matters and there's a reason Trump's numbers are falling even among Republicans.

I prefer to think of these words as points in a spectrum, rather than definitional prisons with tight boundaries.

Allowing school districts to do what they are constituted to do, is more democratic than delegating it to the State governments, which is more authoritarian.

Authoritarian is also not an antonym of democratic. They correlate, but not as strongly as any advocate for democracy would prefer.

Whenever I get into a car and drive, I risk death and injury to myself, my passengers and other people on the road.

I weigh the risks and benefits and make a decision that driving is worth the risk. Does that mean I value the convenience of driving over life? I don't think so.

And for the record. I'm actually undecided on the issue of reopening schools. Like many people, I assumed not reopening was obviously the rational and sane choice. But when I looked into it, I found differing data and opinions from scientific sources so it made me reconsider.

Basically, in order to be rational, you should be willing to accept the risk of dying from Covid if it is less than something else you do that is more risky on a daily basis. So the idea that it is a question of morality and differing opinions of N and M isn't really accurate. It's also why we compare death rates from Covid to Influenza and other diseases because we need to understand just how big of a risk to society it actually is to properly weigh our response.

The article is correct. The paper is filled with hyper-leftist demands. You read the summary, not the actual paper.

Here are some quotes:

[we demand] "Explicit plans to carry out health and safety protocols without resorting to punitive policing and punishment"

"No standardized testing infringing on instructional time"

In the section about federal funding:

"Medicare for All: Coronavirus shows definitively why we need Medicare For All."

"Wealth Tax: A new tax on unrealized capital gains to California billionaires only, 1% a year until capital gains taxes are met. This would generate an estimated $10 billion a year initially"

"Defund Police: Police violence is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue.65 We must shift the astronomical amount of money devoted to policing, to education and other essential needs such as housing and public health"

It says:

"Because of the forces of structural racism, Blacks, Latinx, and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County are dying of COVID-19 at twice the rate of white residents"

"Meanwhile, U.S. billionaire wealth has surged by more than $584 billion. Over 150 of those billionaires live in California. There is money to safely restart schools, if federal, state, and local governments are willing to finally prioritize pupils over plutocrats."

"No matter the scenario in August, it’s clear that it will not be a “normal” school year. But when “normal” means deep race and class fissures that result in increased infection and death rates in Black, Brown, and high-poverty communities; when “normal” means increasing police budgets even as schools, libraries, and public health face catastrophic cuts; when “normal” means corporations receiving trillions in bailout funds as federal commitments to support special education and high-poverty students remain unfulfilled; when “normal” means working families lining up for miles for food banks while US billionaires increased their wealth by over $584 billion — it is clear that going back to normal is not an option. This crisis presents an opportunity to create a new normal."

https://www.history.com/news/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-r...

Also, they didn't have government leadership publicly questioning the wisdom of mask wearing.

That is mostly what I mean.

Industrialized society has been reducing the long-term carrying capacity of the earth for over a century. These effects, until recently, have been masked by intensification i.e. continually increasing consumption of resources for use as inputs of various processes (e.g. agriculture) that improve the standard of living. In the absence of infinite resources this method eventually reaches hard limits. Also, in a closed system negative externalities can eventually reach levels where they negatively affect carrying capacity.

> Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.

Hunter-gatherer societies have routinely been found to be happier and involve significantly less work than industrialized societies. The accelerating Holocene extinction, ongoing for millennia now, has obviously made this harder. Climate change is making this considerably harder as biomes, generally, shift poleward at rates that negatively impact biodiversity and hence carrying capacity.

> Citation needed.

Not sure what the other poster had in mind here, but the CMIP6 models taking into account cloud dynamics (which also happen to most closely fit historic data) show climate sensitivity of 5-7C, i.e. doubling preindustrial CO2 levels will entail to global average warming of 5-7C. Do you think warning in this range unlikely to occur because you see the necessary immediate societal change as likely? Or do you think that given that degree of climate shift occurs it is unlikely to entail a societal and/or biosphere collapse?

But if you really want some case studies, the best one I have come across is this: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...

After the fall of the USSR, Cuba had trade sanctions, cutting them off from the global supply chain. Locals had to come up with something to survive, and they started building a number of local, decentralized food systems. This was all grassroots, though they were eventually supported at the policy level. These were the same people who developed a sneakernet, passing contraband information from the Internet via disks and thumbdrives along the gossip channels.

So no, this system is not pure fiction. There are working examples. There are practices in place that people have been developing for 50 years now. There are people who are living that way.

More to the point, I am already implementing these things at my house and working my way towards that. I don't need to convince you. I'm not here pointing out problems with economies and governments. I have come across solutions, and they don't require large scale changes in policy for me to start taking action.

> Sorry, but this is just the reality of being a living creature. You can go fully off the grid if you want and make all those things for yourself, but most people don't do that, because, spoiler alert, it sucks. It's more work than participating in an economy.

No, it is not the reality of being a living creature. We can do better than that and we have the technologies and practices developed. There are some conveniences we have to let go, but there are a lot of the "work" is not as hard of a work as you think. It does not require a sudden change in going completely off the grid either. Small changes, over time is the way to go, one that works with the social customs and culture of the people involved.

Let's start with housing. We have this idea of property laws and property rights. Before the rise of civilization, we didn't have such laws. People squatted and lived off of the land as needed. There are also blended model. The Homestead Acts allowed people to claim territory, which, after certain requirements are met, would pass into their hands as legal ownership.

Property, then, is an example where the registration of ownership is centralized to the legal mechanism of the government.

Or, let's take a tomato. Like the kind I can get from Wendy's. That tomato probably came from California or Mexico. (Or during the winter, from the hothouses in Canada). It is grown there and then shipped unripen across country. There are multiple actors involved. You can argue that, because the government is not involved, this is not centralized.

The kind of decentralization I am talking about is a tomato that I grow in my backyard. That can be watered from rainwater harvesting. That can be fed by compost from other parts of my garden. Whose seeds I can save, and I can replant. Every generation, those tomatoes become more adapted to my biome (low desert). After the initial setup, there is no money involved to intermediate between me and the tomato. It is between myself and the land, and the local ecology.

> Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from!

I have no idea what you mean by this. I don't consider shared effort at the household or neighborhood level to be that centralized. That speaks more about coordinating efforts, and cooperating together.

Good government, plus living on a small island that can close itself from the rest of the world. Most countries aren't in that situation.

And remember, if the subway capacity was increased, subway ridership would likely increase as well, as it becomes a more appealing mode of transport.

What NYC really should have done is shut down businesses on March 1 instead of March 15. But... I don't know, I think that's a lot to ask of politicians. The public would not have responded well to schools being closed and restaurants being shuttered. We needed a wake-up call.

By contrast, I feel like Florida, Georgia, etc have really had that wake-up call, and have chosen to flout it anyway. I don't have much sympathy.

You have other countries where subways service are still running with no major breakouts. ny has resumed service, and no major breakouts either.

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/612979/

Oh, and the government successfully managed to use the epidemic as a cover-up for heretofore unseen levels of electoral fraud in the not-really-referendum on constitutional amendments.

has 27% of all the known cases - FTFY! Do you honestly believe the reported number of cases from the populous developing countries known for their corruption and a lack of functioning systems (I come from one, so I know first hand how they work)?

> I'm asking, because when it comes to COVID-19 the US is doing so badly...

so badly in terms of what? Reported number of cases, which is miserably under-reported due to a lack of testing / credible systems in the majority parts of the world (at least by population)? I know that people are losing jobs in the US, businesses are bankrupting but where I come from, people are starving and a 12 yo was begging for food when my sister went for grocery shopping, since his family hadn't had enough food in 2 days.

If you are in the US and haven't experienced a poor society first-hand (beyond a 2-3 week vacation in the tourist spots in such places), please count yourself lucky and appreciate what you've got!

But that is school.

Suffices to say, millions would fail under similar conditions, where she succeeded. Odds in normal education are much better than that.

Also, yes Tara was given lots of autonomy early in her education, but she was completely unprepared for the world even at BYU (her undergraduate university), she struggled through many years of therapy, and she claims she was admitted to Cambridge because of luck (on top of lots of talent and hard work) because she still needed lots of remedial coursework to catch up. One interesting quote from a (TED?) talk she gave is that her early childhood was spent reading early Mormon scripture, so she spoke and wrote with the character of a mid-19th century LDS prophet when she arrived at university.

Let's say the kid turns out a little weird. Would they have turned out better going through the public school system?

It's not necessarily fair to blame the homeschooling if the kids come out different. What were they at the start?

>They just choose to not settle for the mediocrity, nor accept the indoctrination pushed by the education system.

Most people I know who went to public schools came out fairly well. I refuse to share this elitist/ideological attitude towards them. What indoctrination? Don't you think that's a rather general and blanket statement considering how varied each school district is? Maybe that's more of a criticism of how schools are run in your area.

Starvation and malnourishment are drastically lower due to industrial farming. But that was to the detrement of destroyed ecosystems, pollution, and greater government regulations. Heck, I believe that I was Michigan that was trying to prevent people from purchasing seeds to plant their own gardens.

Don't worry. I'm not actually all doom and gloom. I just don't think we are on the right track and we are heading of course. And this has been going on for a lot longer than 2016.

The claim is "dubious", so (therefore) there was exactly no reason for this to happen?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dubious - "questionable or suspect as to true nature or quality"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exactly - "in a manner or measure or to a degree or number that strictly conforms to a fact or condition"

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/08/donald-tru...

> One thing the stockpile clearly doesn’t have enough of is face masks. News reports found that the N95 face masks were not substantially replenished after H1N1 in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. (continues)

https://www.dailywire.com/news/obama-admin-allegedly-deplete...

> “The national stockpile used to be somewhat more robust. In 2006, Congress provided supplemental funds to add 104 million N95 masks and 52 million surgical masks in an effort to prepare for a flu pandemic,” Bloomberg News continued. “But after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828303817/surgical-mask-manuf...

> KELLY: I mean, I have read that since that experience, you have been sounding the alarm. I know you wrote to President Trump. I know you wrote President Obama before him, warning that it wasn't going to be if but when that there would be another...

> BOWEN: I'm not. No. No, no, no. You know, I have been off and on. Of course, I've been selling this message for 14 years, but I'm really not angry. I'm puzzled. And I think what I've been fighting is not the government, not President Obama, not President Trump. I think it's human nature. I think since everybody ignored it - I mean, reporters ignored it. Pandemic experts ignored it. Our government ignored it. Hospitals ignored it. Everybody ignored it. So to me, it's a human nature problem. So I'm over my anger.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XMOzAY...

> “Prestige Ameritech is presently the lone voice warning of the insecure U.S. mask supply,” Bowen wrote to President Barack Obama in June 2010. “Apathy and inertia are our biggest hurdles.”

(Note that this is from The Washington Post)

I don't disagree that there's no GOOD reason for this to happen, other than the unfortunate reality that human beings are not very good at thinking, at least compared to how well we perceive ourselves to think. As far as I can tell, almost all humans are living in some sort of a severe state of delusion at all times, our minds and societies haven't had nearly enough time to evolve to accommodate the massive increase in complexity in the last few hundred years, let alone the last 20.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/16/georgia-mayors-bria...

On the federal level, no sane President would go out of his way to force states to give the CDC less information.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...

“Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”

AKA how to handle a pandemic for dummies

What did our current administration do? Claim it at first did not exist, and then definitely didn't look at it when they were informed it did exist.

Really, you're not putting any effort in your trolling/cynicism

No US President in my living memory would have screwed this up as badly as Donald Trump has.

Ask yourself this, could the current administration's response have been better given what was known at the time? If the answer is emphatically yes, then perhaps another person is better suited for the job.

We, as a country, screwed the handling of this. It isn't just one person. It is the way our entire system works. How do we fix it?

I plea that you refrain down voting any comment that advises you to take a look at DeVos's Wikipedia page. I HIGHLY advise reading Betsy DeVos's Wikipedia page.

With no offense intended (truly) I've got the idea that quite a portion of HN users probably don't know just how much of an absolute shitshow the head of U.S. Education is. DeVos is certifiably insane

Maybe if it were also possible to lock down borders between states, making them truly separate sovereign nations.

A lot of states had a declining infection rate and looked to be getting things under control, then people traveled to other states and brought back the virus with them.

There are still things only the federal government can do or coordinate.

This strikes me as a pretty passive-aggressive argument style.

Who, in your opinion, is the better leader? Which of Obama or Trump do you think would handle this pandemic better?

You are picking out one mistake, and kind-of-sort-of implying that makes them both the same, except you don't have the courage to directly state that. If you have a point to make, make it.

It’s not so simple in that many states are miniature versions of our polarized country. For example, you have a Democratic governor facing Republican opposition in rural counties in Washington, and a Republican governor suing a Democratic mayor in Georgia.

All of those things lead to what we're seeing now where the average person can't even afford to live on savings for a few months. If the average person can't keep themselves above water, how can they realistically contribute to their community efforts like we did in WW2? And if they're all going broke and risking losing their houses and livelihoods you end up with a massive backlash to anything keeping people away from work.

We need leadership that pushes serious reform initiatives to reduce government bloat and reach goals that actually benefit the people.

>Obama failed to properly launch a simple website for his signature initiative

Healthcare.gov was a shitshow, but referring to it here is a very silly false equivalency. It was not time-sensitive in the same way that COVID-19 response is. It involved getting the federal government to exercise new competencies that it hadn't done at scale before; responding to national crises is kind of the number one job of the federal government, and PPE acquisition, distribution, and even manufacturing are not new. It failed for reasons having to do with mismanagement of timelines, not outright fraud; COVID PPE shipments have been hijacked and sold off to the president's cronies.

But sure, both sides technically did something wrong, so there's no difference between them.

I think the reason the outcome is largely the same is this is a situation where we rely on our federal government to lead the response, and so far they haven’t.

It's very frustrating seeing people continually arguing that because some people screw up, learn from experience, and fix things, that it justifies others going in the opposite direction, ignoring experience, and breaking things.

Even before your metrics show that the destruction has reached a crossover point, the latter is fundamentally different because it's unnecessary. The former is fundamentally sound because there will always be mistakes.

It doesn't matter how bad you think government is, it's not an argument for making it worse.

It also has 100% not been an overreaction. It saved countless lives by preventing spread. That whole flattening the curve thing and how well countries that have actually followed through and did not open early should show you how effective it has been.

Yes, it does. It may not be explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, but the federal government is absolutely tasked with responding to national disasters, of which pandemics are one example. What is the CDC? What is FEMA? What is the NIH?

>Merkel didn’t issue a national mask order, for the same reason Trump didn’t: she wasn’t legally allowed to.

Even if it were true, that would make this the very first time in his life that legal limitations ever stopped Trump from doing something.

COVID is clearly a national security issue, which is squarely a matter for the federal government. The prior administration made pandemic response part of the national security apparatus (i.e. the NSC). According to public testimony, this continues in the current administration despite a reorganization.

You claim a bare recitation of fact, but in my view that is completely inaccurate. There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. One of the first iterations of our government under the Articles of Confederation didn't have a strong enough government to respond to national security threats and we could have lost the war for it. Having a strong federal government that can accomplish things the states cannot is literally the reason for our government as it exists today.

As I mentioned, by our own government's admission pandemic response is a national security issue. There are two additional reasons why this is clear. First, what if the pandemic was started by a biological weapon? Would we still leave it to the states then? Certainly not, yet it would be the same exact pandemic whether started by terrorists or by accident. Second, COVID is going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. On and don't forget it literally took a nuclear powered aircraft carrier off the battlefield. It is then by definition a national security issue because of how weak it makes our country.

I generally enjoy your writing on these issues but I think you have the basic structure of our government completely reversed. We threw out the Articles of Confederation and created a stronger federal government because disjoint states did not have the ability to respond to massive threats at the scale of COVID.

One you throw out your designation of COVID as a public health matter and recognize it is an issue of national security (again by our government's own admission) I think a lot of your other arguments do not hold up. Some things that you mention as a matter of law are clearly correct with respect to masks. But the idea that "nobody thought pandemic response was mainly a federal responsibility" is completely false and counter to the ideals of our government after the Confederation Period.

Of course, these days operating a Ditch Witch isn't a bad job at all, and frankly looks like fun!

This is what my school district, for example, was planning on doing until the teachers union organized a walk-out.

We can't base our policies on wishful thinking.

Second, doing work at home alone all the time is much demotivating for even good kids. And parents are less fun to explain things then teacher, because most parents sux at it all. Some end in power struggle others just don't know what to do.

Neat freak=/=OCD.

Why is the solution: Generate corporate profits or die. Or expose yourself to needless risk or die? Seems...sociopathic?

I'm not proposing schools open in an NYC/Houston/Miami type situation. But in lower infection area (e.g. the Bay Area), where about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly, you are not "almost certainly" going to get the virus.

Obviously, school opening should be gated by community transfer level. California seems to be using a 2 week target of < 100 confirmed per 100k people (with low test positivity), which seems reasonable to me.

1. Have an exam to pass up to the next grade. This isn’t necessarily intended to be malicious but it means that kids who are struggling, have less than fully supported disabilities, unstable home environments, etc. aren’t in their stats for the higher grades but will be in the comparison schools.

2. Have a graduation requirement that, say, you pass a ton of AP exams. Struggling students are probably going to bail when the odds aren’t looking good.

3. Not offering support services: charters have a financial incentive not to hire specialists for special needs, psychologists, librarians, cafeteria workers, etc. Parents will often pull kids over to the public schools where they’ll get more support, which also makes the cost differential and difficulties accurately comparing performance more pronounced.

4. Favor high levels of family support: academic performance tracks closely with family wealth so anything which favors affluence will have the effect of removing more lower-performing kids. That can be homework requiring laptops which aren’t provided, having a schedule or location which doesn’t work well for transit users, after school / weekend clubs or courses with supply fees, etc.

5. Tailor the curriculum to attract certain types of student: require things like taking Latin/Greek or a STEM load, don’t offer much in the way of arts/music/sports, or simply requiring more classes total, etc.

Again, this doesn’t need to be malicious - it just means that you’re encouraging kids who aren’t hyper-focused on academics and well supported to go elsewhere. That makes the numbers harder to accurately compare with public schools who have to serve everyone and also confounds the question of how many of those kids would have been high performers at any school. People like to say this pushes them to be better, and that’s true in some cases but not as many as lore would have it and tends to ignore the kids who burn out but would have done well with a bit less pressure.

I'm fine with properly managed charter schools. However, opting out of public education does not entitle you to defund public education.

But second, even if the funding is exactly the same, the result is that all the "cheap" i.e. wealthy students (books and technology readily available at home, familial support for their studies, financially able to engage in more expensive educational opportunities outside the classroom) end up in one school while those without these privileges, or with disabilities, end up in the other. Even if you give both the same resources the second school is going to perform worse. And under current US policy, the school that performs worse then gets even less money while the school of rich kids gets more! It's wealth consolidation, pure and simple.

So it's entirely reasonable to separate the reasons for the NEA to (1) exist, and (2) dislike charter schools -- that is, because their job is to protect teachers -- from the educational merits of charter schools. We shouldn't expect a teacher union to balance the merits of charter schools, because it's _not their job_.

We can talk about those points separately, but we need to expect that those talking points are completely independent of whether a teacher protection union (and I don't mean that negatively) objects to the schools which cut them out of the picture.

What are you insinuating?

I will add "skimming" into the list, thanks for bringing this up.

And religious schools can discriminate in a separate decision.

Blind lotteries were started to combat this prevalent issue (and still fail to address poorly performing/SPED kids dropping out of charters and back into public education at a disproportionate rate, which undermines their goal).

https://www.teachingdegree.org/states/ohio/#:~:text=Generall....

The fact that people constantly compare teaching salaries to non-professional jobs and minimum wage workers is very telling.

> ...median annual income of $58,230.

> This number would be above the average salary in the U.S., but it's the median of an awfully wide range of salaries. Elementary school teachers in the bottom 10% of income only made around $37,780, while those in the highest 10% could make as much as $95,270.

You then scroll down to the section on per-state numbers and see the wide gaps between states. You also see that this article, like others, suddenly jump to using mean instead of median.

I usually don't play this card, but show the data. You are likely only looking at a specific statistical lens that does not paint a real picture.

[1]: https://www.niche.com/blog/teacher-salaries-in-america/

https://edsource.org/2015/states-in-motion-school-finance-na...

Even if it stayed constant per your graph, teachers are competing with growth in administrators for education dollars.

In fact, the inequity in voting power produced by the Electoral College is a direct consequence of that in the structure of the House and Senate, since the latter is apportioned simply (except for DC) by adding the apportionment of House and Senate seats.

Dear god, do facts not matter at all? He absolutely lost the popular vote. He won the election through the electoral college. It's the system we have and it's what determines the election but to say he didn't lost the popular vote is false and revisionist.

I seriously hope you're baiting and don't actually believe that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

    Nominee  Donald Trump  Hillary Clinton  
    [...]
    Popular vote  62,984,828  65,853,514

Do you think they have no levers to pull to affect policy from a federal level other than physically forcing people to do things? I'm not really sure what your point is.

Nowadays, many people have a plan which is mostly: finish school, get a job based on the education.

It is not difficult to see that if you set back financially large number of people, suddenly, this might increase suicide rate, for example. Or may make them worse off in many different ways causing some to tip into loosing life.

These are not easy decisions, and saying "I would prefer people to pause their lives for 6 months than loose one life" is a completely braindead, extremist way of looking at things.

To show how stupid this is, you can use just a portion of your home budget to save a life. Today. There are many people that don't need much in the way of help. You are free to find one and help him/her, without involving large percentage of population that doesn't want to get involved in it.

I guess it is easier to go about and proclaim extremist slogans.

> Strong statement: dumb kids are better than dead kids.

/s if that wasn't obvious - but with a small element of truth.

Granted, the situation has become a lot worse since then. It's still a good glance at how the virus spread before any measures were put in place. Especially for relative figures of how COVID behaves differently across age.

Comment I made the other day:

> What bothers me the most is that just like retail / grocery store workers we put people with the lowest earning potential and generally worst benefits directly in the path of this. I don’t want to get COVID but unless I convince my wife to quit her job my odds of getting it greatly increase due to situations out of my control.

Store workers are relatively distant and contact with any one person is brief. With teachers, every surface is constantly touched and they spend all day with the children.

Store workers are also dealing with adults rather than children. Most adults know how to conduct themselves in a pandemic, most of them...

Length of exposure to an infected person matters a lot. Spending a day in a room with an infected person is riskier than a 60 second interaction with one as you ring them up.

I went to a private school for 1st+2nd grade (this is Michigan, in the 90s), and we were allowed to roam around unsupervised in the woods during recess. That includes the dead of winter. We built forts out of tree branches, constructed igloos and snow tunnel, etc. Occasionally we did outdoor lessons, like making a to-scale model of the solar system.

I’m not suggesting those activities necessarily, but it seems to me that there is the possibility of moving outdoors for a significant portion of the day. Even in the absence of a lesson plan, kids still get the benefit of social interaction, experiential learning, etc.