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Comment by newspheasant | Hacker News Reader

My wife is a teacher and starting school (in person) in a week and a half. There’s no answers to questions like:

- Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away? - When a teacher gets sick, what substitute teacher is going to want to teach an exposed class (also, they’ll be making sub plans with covid?)? - When they’re sick are will they be getting additional sick leave? - Do they get worker’s compensation if they get sick, since they were knowingly sent into a dangerous environment?

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> Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away?

It pains me to admit that this didn't even occur to me as part of the topic of teachers being sent back. The human aspects of students-teacher relationships. I feel I've been desensitized to this after exposing myself to a constant stream of news, and now I'm thinking further about what other aspects lie behind other headlines. Thank you for sharing this

I agree - this never really occurred to me either. My girlfriend's mother is a preschool teacher who just had to go back to in-person sessions and she believes some of these kids will have trauma's from being young and terrified. One little girl is afraid to touch anything and constantly asks if objects have been cleaned/safe to touch? it's heartbreaking to her.

I really struggled with this with my toddler. In the end I decided to chill out and take whatever comes as a consequence rather than traumatise my child for life.

Typically kids are more resilient then that. The kid that ends up as scared had those tendencies before. If your toddler don't tend to be paranoid, you taking precautions and talking about them as normal thing to do won't harm him at all.

We still take precautions proportionate to the risk we face but we don’t make as big an effort to stop him doing toddler things in public

Sounds like a bunch of children just got trained to have obsessive compulsive disorder. My wife has it and my life was filled with contamination fears before COVID-19.

As someone who used to struggle with OCD in my youth: Procedural awareness of sterile field and infection control is a very different thing from OCD. OCD can't really be taught like that.

Neat freak=/=OCD.

It's a human aspect, but to be blunt, it's not a significant consideration as long as you aren't opening schools in an area with high community transfer (e.g. Houston today). IF you additionally filter out high risk-group teaches (known pre-existing health conditions, older than 65, etc.) excess death risk is quite low. (e.g. in the Bay Area, dying in a car crash remains far more likely (~10x) if you meet the criteria earlier noted)

(Children actually have had negative excess death rates this year: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-mortality-over-time-o... --- reduction in travel, etc. has more than offset covid)

How does one isolate "high risk group" teachers, though? What's the plan for that? Is it a volunteer thing? Are you going to lay people off? How do you fill the void in the resulting empty positions? What about the family members of those not-high-risk teachers?

I'm not a zealot on this. Areas with low infection rates should definitely be looking at schools as an early candidate for reopening.

But I genuinely can't understand the outrageous partisanship on this subject that says we have to pick a fight with everyone, right now, on this subject. Why schools? Seriously? Why schools? Why now? What focus group told who this was the hill to die on?

> You shouldn't be having high risk-group teachers

Uh, why? What specifically about diabetes, high blood pressure, or the still largely random distribution of many types of cancer, prevents one from being a teacher?

(In the context of in-person teaching during a pandemic, because of the risk to them. )

> You shouldn't be having high risk-group teaches

So who should take the place of these high risk-group teachers? There aren't infinite qualified people waiting around to teach elementary school.

This strikes me as highly naive. We have states here in the US banning cities from implementing mandatory mask rules. Do you really think places like that are going to tell people older than 65 not to come in? Do you think if someone who's high risk refuses that they'll still have a job in a place like that? If you're over 65 and will potentially lose your pension for not going in to work, you're probably going to have to think twice about that before just saying no.

At least 30 teachers have died of COVID in NYC alone. That seems significant for a viral outbreak that is nowhere near containment or exhaustion, and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually.

But you can say the same for tons of occupations - flight attendants, cashiers, barbers. People will either be ignorant/dismissive of the risk or forced to take risk to feed themselves. I think the real change will have to be less preciousness/protectiveness of the value of human life, sadly.

Or there is the other option that we as a country acknowledge that being compassionate and finding solutions to feed these people is an all around better way to take care of our citizens.

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

> and if I was a teacher over 40 I would have serious reservations knowing it is extremely likely I will almost certainly catch the virus eventually.

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.

> (e.g. the Bay Area), about 0.1% of the population is infected weekly

I don't know if your 0.1% number is accurate, but let's assume that it is. If somehow cases remain completely level for the rest of the school year (which is far from a given, but for the sake of argument ...) over the course of 40 weeks, a randomly-chosen person has roughly a 40 * 0.1% = 4% chance of getting infected. But that is a randomly-chosen person, whereas it's not hard to imagine that a teacher exposed for hours daily to multiple young kids who aren't good at keeping their germs to themselves is (ballpark) maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person [1]. So then we arrive at an estimate of perhaps 24% odds of a teacher getting infected during the 2020-2021 school year using my assumptions (which you are free to disagree with).

Is 24% "almost certain"? No, but by highlighting the tiny 0.1% number, I think you are potentially seriously misrepresenting the true risk to an individual teacher. Hopefully, all of the measures that school districts might put into place will make my 6x-elevated risk estimate incorrect, but it's really hard to know. It's also possible that kids just don't transmit the virus very often. There's some evidence that that's the case, but I don't think we have really solid data on the question.

[1] "Teachers had six times more germs in their workspace than accountants, the second-place finisher ..." https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/dirty-ten-germy...

> maybe 6x as likely to get infected as a random person

That is almost certainly not the case. California has had 350 daycare staff get covid infections out of 100k+ workers. That's actually about a third the rate on average.

Again, kids are less likely than average to have covid. Infectious kids may be less likely to transmit. This is different from flu where kids are large carriers. There are few documented cases of young kids (under 10) spreading to other kids or to teachers.

Second Covid19 wave in Israel has been blamed on school reopening- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/israel...

It's amazing to see how differently we treat the low probability, high impact events like active shooters and terrorism, but we completely fail to do the far easier task of dealing with the high probability, unknown impact events.

Well, that’s true, except that it’s not easy. Easy to talk about, sure, but not easy to implement without backlash from the moneyed interests that exist.

Most of the world has reacted better than the US. I agree it's not easy, it has not been easy for anyone. But the unwillingness/incapability of the US to suffer backlash from their own moneyed interests is not the norm. It's a symptom of a dysfunctional system. It shouldn't be normalized.

Agreed it's a disturbing realization of the unspoken acknowledgment people in the US have been forced to live with: "capitalism doesn't care if you live or die"

Neither does socialism, communism, or nature.

And I wasn't advocating for any one of those as a fundamentally better system, assuming you mean raw unfettered nature, hunter-gatherer style. And even then it's likely there is a tribe that cares..but I digress.

I don't see how the moneyed interests really have much to do with the COVID-19 response in the US (or lack of it). Few of the people refusing to wear masks belong to the idle rich.

There is nothing special about America in that respect. Plenty of people around the world are not wearing masks when they are supposed to.

What sets America apart is the hyper-shorttermism: go into a lockdown, then come out of it in the middle when it becomes clear that the lockdown has economic consequences (which should have been obvious). Then, go back into lockdowns when it becomes clear that coming out of lockdown at the wrong time lead to a second wave.

There seems to be a particular class of stupid businesspeople, who cannot think beyond next week. This too is not unique to america. What is unique is that in America their desire to bankrupt their own businesses takes precedence over everything else.

Other countries have had second lockdowns or are thinking about it as well, including China. Also, no one in America wants to bankrupt their own businesses (except the lower side of the lower class). Our downfall is our reliance on "repeatable" profits which we then waste by giving them to the rich who then hoard them and don't spend enough.

Yes, we value money too much here and don’t care enough about sustainability.

do you think low probability, high impact events are handled well on average?

No. I think my intention when using the low-probability, high impact examples is that we over-invest by dedicating far too much time and too many resources on events that will likely never happen but we can't even prepare for / respond to the high probability events well. Far better to practice and iterate on improving our response to the latter which will give us the expertise to better handle the former.

Even on the outside, it seems like pushing kids back into the classroom is poorly thought out. I can't imagine the shitshow it must seem like on the inside.

The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster.

I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work.

In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't care, or are unable to provide internet access.

One solution is to get students back into classrooms. Another is to design a remote learning system that actually works, with enforcement of attendance and where grades actually matter, but that is probably not something our substandard education system is able to achieve.

The actual solution is to control the propagation of the virus throughout society, which for the most part still has yet to be done. We're going to continue to have the same poor options we had in March until this is actually done.

So 2 directions? The cheaper, easier, and far more deadly in person option or invest $$$ with a need for short term results. It's never that simple, but if the issue is spending the money then I don't see why it isn't a straight forward option given how much we've spent to buy bad debt and bail out administration cronies.

The consensus on both ends of the political spectrum over the past 30 years is that public education is a failure and must be abolished through either defunding or diverting funding to charter schools. Providing more funding to public schools would undermine that goal.

I doubt it's truly a consensus on the right half of the spectrum. It most certainly isn't on the left.

I don't see it as a consensus when there has been a systematic defunding and destruction of many many education systems, especially in rural america and the inner cities. It's like saying, why did you fall in the hole I dug in front of you?

I think the GP is arguing from results, not policy. If the past 30 years have consistently resulted in the same policies of defunding and deconstruction, there's apparently a tacit agreement among all parties that that's the way to go.

Interesting. What grade levels?

This seems to reflect that many of these folks seem to think what they are asked to learn is largely detached from their dat-to-day lives. I would agree with that assessment for high school students who are not college-bound.

Specifically, high school for these folks is a rehash of middle school, a simplified version of college prep (which is not relevant for folks not going to college), or both.

One thing that I have taken away from the quarantine is that the function of school as childcare is as much or more important than the function of school as a place to learn for many people.

The people who told me this are elementary and junior-high teachers. The students are fairly young. They are all on social media though, which is why they all learned that the state won't hold students back this year.

Fairly young students are not motivated without personal contact and relationship. Which is more likely reason then fear of non existent threat of being hold back.

They also can't organize to be at online lessons unless parents do that work.

That’s a cultural problem. We need to change it so intrinsic motivation is the driving force behind education.

So elective rather than compulsory?

What's with the black&white? How about nurtured guidance, positive reinforcement learning or inspirational leadership? The stick isn't the only compelling force, and when it comes to education, it's probably one of the worst.

Kids are naturally curious, they're hard-wired to learn from the world around them. But you need a school system that fosters that, not hampers it.

My parents told me that if I didn't get a good education, I'd become a "ditch digger".

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

I got one and dug trenches for a sprinkler system in a pretty small city yard. It was fun for about 30 minutes, which represented a disturbingly small fraction of the total job.

2/10. Would not recommend.

Sure... but we're not going to figure out how to reinvent education before September.

Even for parents like myself that are really, really trying to make it work, it's a nonstarter. I have a 7 year old, and his computer is right next to mine where I am working remote, and I can supervise, except I'm in meetings often and it's hard to keep him on track. There's no peer pressure from other students to behave, the teacher has poor equipment and is barely intelligible sometimes, and there's every incentive to just goof off if I am not on top of him in a ridiculous way that would never have been the case in conventional schooling or even in traditional homeschooling.

I'm distracted and my productivity suffers also.

> Another is to design a remote learning system that actually works

I don't know what that would look like, because at the end of the day it'll just be a TV yelling at you, and kids will tune out. There's lots of interactive educational material, but unfortunately it's either way too much "fun and games" and not deep enough, or it's just boring worksheets slapped on a screen.

The teachers are honestly trying their best with the materials they have, but it doesn't work, and it seems like really we're stuck between wasting formative years, or risking that we get sick with a disease which honestly has a pretty low mortality rate in otherwise healthy people. I hate the decision, I hate the dichotomy, I wish there was another option, but I don't see it.

And this is with a private school outside of America; so I can only imagine how it would be in a more impoverished American inner-city setup, or how it is for people who can't work remote.

I think they have to go back and we just have to accept the health risk. I hate that this is where I've landed.

The alternative option is hybrid remote/on-site schooling, where the kids are on campus half-day, rotating groups a few days a week, on an alternating week schedule. That gets critical face-to-face time, albeit with social distancing, that is necessary (particularly for elementary) to support a workable remote learning plan on the other days.

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

I have mixed feelings about how effective this approach could be, especially in younger populations that don't have the best grasp on what is happening and where the boundaries are in terms of playing together or interacting. I hate to say it but I think it's all or nothing, either no one goes in or everyone goes in. Even if a smaller portion of people get sick, they still have the option of spreading it..especially if they don't work remotely which many people can't.

This is what my nephew is doing, and it's 100% incompatible with working parents. How can they work around shifting 4 hour days with alternating weekly schedules?

The purpose is to safely achieve learning goals, not to provide daycare.

In an ideal world, yes. In the real world school is also daycare so parents can go to work though.

No, what I mean is that providing daycare is NOT a requirement that has factored into school district or education department decisions at all. It is not something that is being optimized for.

The third solution is to suck it up and wait it out until there's a vaccine, which still may be as soon as December.

I hate having my kids out of school. Virtual learning is mostly useless. They are ( I think ) quietly becoming more and more withdrawn and I don't know how well they'll recover once things open up. We have two parents working from home and barely managing to stay productive.

Still I think sending kids back to the classroom is a terrible idea. I wouldn't be a school nurse for any amount of money. It's just not safe, and we can all still wait.

I doubt vaccines will be provided to low risk groups for some time, even if they are actively distributing the vaccine by December.

What if there is never a vaccine, or what if there is one but it takes years to become available, or what if a large portion of Americans refuse to be vaccinated?

We can't base our policies on wishful thinking.

Then you cut the school day in half, get rid of homework, and find the best-of-breed educators to deliver unidirectional video content with mandatory pass/fail multiple-choice quizzes. Do less than x% of quizzes and you get held back a grade.

Teachers are on the clock for what, 8 hours a day? I don't think it's too much to ask for two or three blocks of "office hours" for miscellaneous Q&A or face-time or "random topic of the day".

I mean c'mon, we all know half of what's taught in schools these days from K-12 is useless filler material. Teachers must adapt.

Online quizzes and video lectures might be fine for college students, but your idea is laughable for younger kids. You really haven't thought this through...

> unwilling to hold anyone back a year

When I was in middle school, a couple teachers threatened a couple kids that if they did not do X and Y and Z, they would be held back a year. The kids did not do X or Y or Z, i.e. nothing, and they were promoted anyway.

I didn't know anyone who was held back a year, other than one kid in 2nd grade. It's a completely empty threat, and the kids knew it.

You're right, and it's because remote education is exposing the core truths of education, which are that it's mostly daycare (at least until dropout age) and signalling.[1] If that's not bad enough, our education systems (not just the USA) constantly make most students feel stupid, so the kids hate it.

I really don't know how you'd fix all the issues, but I am sure that any meaningful reform will be incredibly unpopular (especially with teachers).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

Being hold back a year was not serious threat for the years already. Literally no one worried about that, except maybe few kids with actual learning issues.

>The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster.

Speaking from a USA perspective, no, it was a complete shit show. And you know what? That is fine.

Our school district went from completely normal one day to remote learning the next. Huge swing in what to do and how to do it. There were no plans for a global pandemic. School districts learned quickly there were external factors affecting everyone's life at the same time. Parents losing jobs, food insecurity, child anxiety. All at once.

School districts eased up. Remote learning went quickly from trying to dive into things to one on one check ins to group hellos. The semester started winding down. Everyone passed and moved on.

Now, we're in the fall. School districts had months to prepare for an effective remote learning strategy. Let's see what happens.

(Between you, me and the tree, it's not going to go well, either.)

School districts really aren't doing any more training or working on remote learning. Teachers are not required to work in the Summer and therefore most will won't do anything to prepare. My wife works with multiple school districts here in SoCal. We even had one district who had negotiated with the teachers union and they did not legally have to do any online instruction at all. (Huntington Beach). So, many teachers simply did nothing, or very little. The school board there has been taking heat over it for the last couple of months.

My wife is a teacher, guess how much direction she has had over the summer? Districts are just now thinking about whether they'll be online or not, 2-3 weeks before they open.

This is both disheartening on one hand and encouraging on another it means that remote education of school age isn't inherently broken because the current system is.

To be empathetic, there's a 4th group of parents, those who can't really help. A single mom of 2 that used to rely on school and day care to work is between a rock and a hard place now. Either they work and are able to put food on the table but the kids suffer, or they help the kids and underperform at work and risk unemployment. I think most people chose putting bread on the table.

My girlfriend is a middle school guidance counselor. She was spending most of her week during the end of the school year dealing with referrals from teachers for students who weren't doing any work at home. Not just slacking off some, but entirely refusing to do anything. She'd try contacting the parents but many would never return her calls. The few she did contact weren't very concerned or admitted they lacked a way of making their child do their school work.

Her main concern is that this is going to widen the achievement gap between students with high parental involvement and those with low parental involvement. They've spend a lot of time trying to come up with strategies to deal with the situation but outside of sending government officials to the home for an on-site evaluation (problematic for many reasons), there's little they can do. She's worried that as time goes on, the number of students discovering they can get away with doing no work will increase.

If a child refuses to do anything when they were physically in school what was being done about it then?

You can’t physically force someone to learn then and you can’t now.

Not sure anything’s changed really.

All they did before was remove disruptive children and now I guess they remove themselves. Remains an unsolved problem!

They were less likely to refuse the work. For one, kids are herd animals and when other kids are doing work, it motivates the slacker. For the other, teachers actually make them - most kids just kinda don't want to do it and will if pushed by teacher or motivated by system of rewards.

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.

I can't say for sure but it was my impression that many of these students don't have parents at home during the day. The school system my gf works for is in an area with several meat processing plants, which I assume are considered essential. There are also many undocumented workers in that area. For those who were doing jobs that weren't considered essential, they probably can't rely on being able to collect unemployment and had to go find other work. It's a lot to ask of middle school age children to be self motivated especially if their friends around the neighborhood were outside playing or coming over to hangout, regardless of lockdown orders or not.

Teachers are so under appreciated. It takes a lot of knowledge, training, and some have years and years of experience on how to make kids pay attention to the class and study. I am trying really hard at home but there's no way I can even match any of the teachers my son has at his school on almost everything they do.

You'd send them to in-school expulsion (basically an empty room for 8 hours, no talking, no phones allowed.

Why would they do anything more there if they weren't willing to do anything in the classroom?

Most bad kids feed off an audience and distract the class. 8 hours in near silence, with no peers to feed off is a punishment.

> this is going to widen the achievement gap between students with high parental involvement and those with low parental involvement

How could it not? Volunteering in my kids' school since they were in kindergarten, it was sadly clear to me that some of the kids got dealt a pretty bad hand in terms of parental involvement (often out of conflicting demands on the parents, I'm sure). COVID-related home-schooling hasn't helped anything I'm sure.

All good questions. If it were me I would join forces with other teachers and parents to bring the questions to the principal and school board (or district). I suspect that in many cases, teachers and parents will need to put significant pressure on the PTB to force them to confront these important questions.

edit - If your wife belongs to a teachers union, this would be a great thing for the teachers union to push for.

I think the problem is a majority of parents are FOR school opening up.

You can push for answers from those people, but there's probably no real answers to give. The federal response to the pandemic has been so ineffective, to put it kindly, that it leaves people at all levels with no meaningful responses. Principals, superintendents, and school boards can want to offer the support described in this thread, but have no real way to actually deliver it.

The public schools are run by the states. Look to your governor.

The public schools are only one part of our civilization. The ineffectual and incompetent national response has left no good options on the table for public schools. No matter what happens now, we're sacrificing some children because the assholes in power couldn't be bothered to care about things other than themselves.

Right. Even if one community comes up with a really good plan, we still have interstate travel in a nation with numerous states whose governors are actively against any mitigating actions on a local level. So no, we can't just "look to our governors".

There were proposals for NYC to isolate itself.

Not always. My kids were educated in public schools K-12 and we always lived in areas where the schools were the best. The 2 things in common for different places we lived were: (1) higher property taxes (used to fund the schools), and (2) very active parental involvement in the schools.

"but there's probably no real answers to give"

For sure, there aren't any easy answers. I believe that smaller school districts can come up with creative answers if there's sufficient support for the schools in the community. If the school policies are dictated at the state level, then the ability to do this is made much more difficult (if not impossible).

All good questions. Based on some of what I've read, actions are being taken to ensure (for the most part) the contrary...that businesses / schools are protected with little regard for the individual. A more recent example is below.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-republicans-to-propose-l...

> Included in the list are temporary protection from the trial bar for schools, colleges, charities and business that follow public health guidelines and for frontline medical workers.

One could argue they (in this case Senate majority) are just crossing the t's and dotting the i's but considering there has been little regard (in many states and definitely on the federal level) for public health (in favor of other concerns) thus far...that is IMHO wishful thinking.

Same here. The narrative admin has been giving parents was that they were working hand in hand with teachers on the return plan.

That was a total lie. It came out this week and parents (thankfully) called our counties admin on their narrative.

So no they have principals calling each teacher and asking them on their comfort level about returning . Unsurprisingly, most aren’t comfortable.

When they called my wife they asked for her comfort level on a 1-10 scale.

She refused to give them a number. Instead just saying this plan means she is 100% confident she will contract it and spread it to the family in the month of august. But that is not what concerns her. What concerns her is that if every other school, teacher and parent is doing the same, on the heels of the current numbers, it means we may not be able to get the medical attention we need due to overloading the medical community.

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