School board resigns after making comments not realizing meeting was broadcast
ktla.com
ktla.com
Here's Paul Graham saying almost the same thing in 2003:
> And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
It takes a certain type of person to thrive in the school board environment, a political animal. Petty tyrants excel.
So too did the school board; they were saying things that simply should not be said by people in a position of power. Some of it certainly went well beyond merely flippant.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-...
The section titled "COVID-19 in children and adolescents" has plenty of footnotes.
But I have a hard time squaring fears of letting kids visit other families with kids, with this push to send them all back to school. :(
Thanks for the footnotes. I will be perusing those when I can.
I work from home full-time. Our seven year old son has a desk in the adjacent room with a laptop on it. He'd happily sit there using his laptop all day long instead of going to school, leaving me in peace to work in the office. So I don't feel like we really need school as a babysitter (although I acknowledge many other parents don't have my kind of job and so really do need school as a babysitter)
What I think we really need school for is to get him away from his laptop and into face-to-face interaction with other kids. Learning is quite secondary to that. (He's a smart kid and he learns a lot of stuff outside of the context of formal education.)
Parents who think about their kids in this way don’t deserve them and should not have them.
That's odd. I think this is very wrong. You and I have different definitions of "flippant." This is a threat.
I grew up in a situation where if I didn’t have school, I may not be alive today. I strongly recommend people learn about ACES[1] study and the long term health impact of childhood trauma (of which school away from home is one mitigating remedy).
I think people treat these as “soft” purely psychological issues. But childhood trauma physically changes your development and longer term physical health.
Further these issues impact a lot of the population. From the original Kaiser study:
> more than one in five reported three or more ACEs
Citations: https://www.medpagetoday.org/primarycare/domesticviolence/16...
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33413909-the-deepest-wel...
I thought one of the primary functions of public schools was that they were government provided daycare.
Many parents have to work outside the home (or at least they used to in the pre-lockdown era) just to pay for basics like housing and health care (which are absurdly expensive in the bay area) and can't afford to hire someone to look after their children during the day.
If we publicly and explicitly recognize the daycare function of schools, perhaps they can be improved and made into more supportive and nurturing environments.
Yes, but lots of people don’t want to admit that, especially teachers. The school system doesn’t need college educated, subject matter certified teachers to run a day care.
Kids learn conflict resolution and social skills with those of their age and development level.
They learn by seeing others do things. They learn and take interest in things their friends do and emulate them.
They learn to deal with people with different backgrounds. Different authority figures and different approaches to wielding that authority.
Even my 5 year old saw a marked difference from the time she was home and only interacting with her 2 year old brother to when she returned.
She had no interest in art or coloring and when she returned she was very behind others in that category. She took up a lot more interest and effort and has made noticeable gains with things like the fine motor skills to color in the lines, handwriting etc. Us trying to encourage or enforce it was combative. Her brother a distraction and a competitor for attention. Put her in a classroom and she blossomed comparatively. This is only a couple examples. There are so many others.
So yeah. In a way it’s important for parents to put food on the table and earn. But it’s also important from a social perspective to the kids. We are social creatures after all.
I also think this link is the original reporting: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/02/19/entire-oakley-school-...
They aren't expressing the opinions of teachers and staff, they are projecting their own feelings as parents.
I thought about making a joke about Brexit not delivering, but I'll let you make it in your own head.
This is the attitude that school teachers get every single day. Politics drives it, I assume. It has become completely okay to treat school staff like they are subhuman. It's hard to then be surprised when they develop a bit of a bunker mentality from being constantly attacked.
We all ought to take a look in the mirror before we judge other people, and definitely before we attack them.
And you’re lying to yourself if you claim otherwise.
Some people are just like this...they will happily bitch and gossip during a meeting, and it creates a really toxic atmosphere.
There are ways to discuss these things in a professional manner. Always assume that what you say in a meeting will make its way out of the meeting, because (surprise, surprise), most of the time it will.
> It's fine to say things like this to your spouse or your friend
The context was, in effect, an accidental hot mic situation where they thought they were alone with their friends.
They thought they were alone and it was over / not started yet.
You can't say "you can say this among friends" and then turn it around and say "well, you can't expect it to remain private" as an excuse for your repulsion of the statement.
It was a bunch of school board members talking together amongst themselves at either the start or the end of the meeting. If this were in the physical world, it would have been to an empty chamber, or between meetings as they walked.
It just so happens that someone else was in the meeting that they didn't notice; and that person decided to record what they were saying and share it with the internet.
The rest find it more difficult to teach, especially with complicated technology and decade old laptops.
We cheered and demanded the closing of schools when kids were taking videos of the unmasked masses walking the halls.
Huge percentages of teachers _have_ quit for that very reason.
On one hand, there are some teachers that are high risk and should not have to go back.
On the other hand, some students have been severely underserved. For example on of my teach friends has 5 homeless students that have essentially no school, and others in abusive homes.
The practical solution in my opinion was to make low risk teachers conduct in person education for young and vulnerable students for whom at home education will not work, and do so with added precautions. This is what much of the rest of the world has done.
At this point, I think it is largely irrelevant, assuming that teachers will have vaccines in the next month or two and be will actually go back once they receive them.
They understand that parents want babysitting, and they don't want to endanger themselves to give it to them.
Kids aren't are pretty low risk from covid, but teachers are older and have higher risk. Some are elderly, some are pregnant, and some have medical conditions. Many that I know would quit before going back without a vaccine.
That said, return to classrooms has worked well in just about every other country, even during their lockdowns.
Those other countries have much lower community spread, public health care, and mask mandates that are actually enforceable. It's not a comparable situation.
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
If you don't have a spark of that, why would you get yourself into that office?
And if you do believe in schools as a powerful public good, how could you belittle the parents who maybe are finally reaching a fuller understanding of how critical the system you guide really is?
People running public schools shouldn't just be trying to figure out how to be as open as they safely can be, but they should be figuring out how to capitalize on the increased demand for schools to get resources to improve public education for the next decade.
> how could you belittle the parents who maybe are finally reaching a fuller understanding of how critical the system you guide really is
You should see how parents treat teachers. They'd be fully justified in venting.
School is a place for children to get an education, but many parents are clearly just trying to keep the kid alive and themselves sane. It's a babysitting service to them, and the education is a bonus.
It's not always the case, but often when parents really care about education, the child will reflect that behavior; and there's a lot of kids who couldn't care less.
Having heard my friends talk about schools opening up, not a single one of them has talked about how much better teachers are at teaching than they were. Or how much their child really needed to be one of 30 heads instead of getting special attention. They talk about how nice it is to have alone time.
When the grade doesn't matter, what more are they, than "baby sitters"?
Now obviously, schools provide MAJOR help to especially poor kids, as a place to eat, shower and potentially get an education; but, when it's very rich parents who are able to work from home, and they're the ones demanding that their kids go back to school, so they can be alone ... what more are the teachers for them, than baby sitters? And, don't the schools have the right to be upset?
We've almost got the vaccine out to everyone. Regular school can probably return Fall 2021.
edit: the down-votes and complete lack of comments in response to what I've said are fascinating.
Do these comments affect school children in the first place?
In any case, COVID cases are down significantly, and we are reaching herd immunity (either from natural immunity or vaccinations) across much of the planet, in addition to the seasonality effects of Spring.
That's decidedly the speaking of someone that doesn't think covid is serious, if people are "just using it as an excuse", "in classroom and on planes"
Voters
We deeply regret being caught.
It's a fine case of being punished not for what one has done, but for being caught doing so.
No doubt that it goes on everywhere, and that many of the outragees do it too in their own private meetings.
Teachers have to deal with kids from households with bad, low or no parenting and that's something they cannot do much about.
Then, they have to comply with the standardized programs and examinations which are a disservice to students because it's just bureaucratic cargo cult that doesn't work.
As a result of all these difficulties that are completely out of their control, they develop indifference, resentment, some are extremely passive aggressive, sarcastic and toxic. Many of these behaviors can get you fired in other occupations, but as a society, if you are a teacher, we are OK with this.
Despite all these difficulties there are teachers that are still willing to persevere, but the system is built to break the spirits of teachers.