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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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