I know teachers who are very supportive of mask mandates and that the schools and teachers are generally doing ok, and people who I work with who send their kids to schools with masks are very happy for the kids to have socializing opportunities.
Your friends and community are free to find a solution that works for them. But it is not the only way, and it does not make sense to condemn a system that works for the vast majority of people.
And don't presume to claim that masking children is necessary to protect adults. The adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months.
B. In general, being vaxxed keeps you from getting badly sick but you just can’t say.
E.g., say you’re in a group of a hundred people with a thousand guns trained at your group. Just one gun out of the thousand has a live round while ten others have blank which don’t kill but can injure. Would you be willing to face those odds? Would you be willing to ask others to face the same odds?
These are roughly the odds what you are asking teachers to take on.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
Fortunately the vaccines and other therapies are quite effective at preventing deaths.
What's worse, is a lot of people have long-haul COVID where they suffer severe symptoms that never seem to go away. We have no idea why. Maybe if you get COVID in 5 years we will have figured out why and you get to avoid ruining your life.
Also. COVID is not one and done. You can get it multiple times. People have gotten COVID twice, the first time they were fine, the second time they died.
Not only are you totally misinformed for wanting to "face those odds" you are risking the lives and well-being of those around you.
While reinfections can occur (just as with any coronavirus), symptoms are typically mild. The number of deaths due to reinfections are so low as to be statistically irrelevant from a public policy standpoint.
This panel discussion by several leading physicians provides a good scientific overview of the current situation. It's long, but worth a listen.
This will be endemic, just like the 1968 flu is. The sooner we can get to that point, the better.
But people are so eager to go back to exactly how things were.
What morbid insanity. In the US 850,000 people are dead. That's more dead people than all US soldiers who have died in combat in all wars in history.
Wear a mask, get vaccinated, socially distance, and stop risking your life and that of the people you love.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You get what you pay for. Your kid is your responsibility, not your teachers. If your kid "is fucked" its because you weren't willing to take their responsibility seriously - not underpaid teachers.
Your expectation that teachers should expose their families to a pandemic for 40K pa is absurd.
Poorly, in a normal environment.
Laughably, with what you are demanding they do for you.
There's a whole lot of "other people should endanger themselves for me" around this topic and it deserves some introspection.
https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.ht...
And that is in normal times. Not when rich computer-toucher randoms want them to go into COVID hotboxes Because They Said So.
Yeah what if that happened in medicine and related fields:
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/physicians/more-docs-consid...
https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2021/08/california...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ems-workers-retiring-higher-rat...
I've had exactly the same, and still haven't got my taste or smell back 100% yet. It sucks, but I still can't imagine being so selfish as to expect millions to endure endless global restrictions over some minor personal inconvenience.
If we don’t like to live with global restrictions at someone else’s say so, why should we expect teachers to go out to teach at our say so? As a group, they have chosen to stay home and that should be that.
It’s not war where the price for not wanting to face the enemy is a cowardice charge and a court martial. These teachers don’t want to teach in-person. End of story.
But this thread started with the observation that many private Catholic schools ARE just getting on with the job, and as a result parents are voting with their feet and heading there in droves. These are not teachers being forced; it's just their ideology leads them to make a different risk/benefit calculation to others.
And yet this thread is full of comments arguing that the system of endless global restrictions "works for the vast majority of people". To me and many others, that just seems like wilfully ignoring the harm to our children rather than seeking a way out.
I'm sure I don't need to link to the many MANY studies that have shown how damaging lockdowns have been to our kids' outcomes, and these negative effects hit the poorest kids the hardest. We should be doing everything within our power to undo the damage, and yet so many are willing to stick with restrictions for the foreseeable future with no exit strategy. THIS is why parents are looking for a way out for their kids, and why private schools like those mentioned above are seeing enquiries sky-rocket.
Why the hate for those who seek a return to normality? I don't understand it.
The only kids I know that have a problem with masks are kids with parents that have a problem with masks. It's not a kid problem its an adult problem. Kids are adaptable but adults are whiny little assholes that are set in their ways.
What if they'd been invented hundreds of years ago to stop the spread of disease, and prevented millions of deaths since then? Curious that you use a weak and hyperbolic analogy when the reality is so readily available.
Go to any store, chin-maskers are with maskless kids, while parents with N95 masks are without kids or with fully masked kids.
And yes, I am in contact with kids. Masks don't bother them all that much.
Single anecdote: we took our 3rd grader from the regular school and enrolled in an online school since at that age they were not vaccinated and we were not comfortable sending a 3rd grader to a school at all.
In fact I feel that our child has done well, the entire 3rd grade curriculum is finished and will be moving to 4th grade in the middle of the school year since the online school supports that. Something that may not have happened in the regular school at all.
So, as usual, let's not generalize - every one is different, both adults and children.
We may move our child back to regular school in the fall since they can now be vaccinated.
Hopefully by the time your child is a little older things would have settled. Best wishes!
BTW, we’re not doing home schooling exactly. We’re doing an online K-12 school.
You're following a set curriculum while the teaching is almost entirely being done by the parents and child. You're a great deal more similar to a homeschooler than normal schools. If you finish all your work for third grade in a regular school you do not go to fourth grade.
Yes you’re right. What I’d meant was that we’ve not had to spend time in figuring out what the curriculum is and how to cobble together the course material - the basic structure is provided so it was easy for us to transition to it.
I believe the term is "decline" or "decadence"...
I do not approve of publicly funding parochial religious schools, for example. This is a bad road to take. The would-be-theocrats don't even comprehend the damage their wish's fulfillment would bring.
I had the misfortune of attending such a "school" once and found it full of fake curriculi and it set me back a year at a crucial time. It was a total joke. I attended approximately 8 different public schools prior to that and after that, including some rather lousy ones, and all were superior to these weirdo cult luckily didn't have to spend much time in.
Public funding? public standards.
This, on the face of it, seems like a good idea[1]. I don't understand why it is being downvoted.
[1] I'm not in the US, if that helps.
It is a bad idea for smart kids whose parents are poor or don't care - they will still get the lowest-cost 'public option' but now get left behind by the 50-80% of kids whose parents care to get their kids into selective schools or ones that need top-up payments, thus cementing hereditary stratification of society.
>
> It is a bad idea for smart kids whose parents are poor or don't care - they will still get the lowest-cost 'public option' but now get left behind by the 50-80% of kids whose parents care to get their kids into selective schools or ones that need top-up payments, thus cementing hereditary stratification of society.
Maybe I am missing something, but how is that worse than the current system? The top 5% are already sending their kids to the best schools currently, right?
The people who are too poor to afford the top-up in the proposed voucher system are currently not getting the best schools anyway. Under the voucher system I expect that some of the currently poor people who are not getting the best school would be able to switch to the best school that doesn't require a top-up.
Right now, as I understand it, poor people have no option to switch schools.
Because the taxes that were going to a public school are now going to a private one. School quality is about a lot more than money but taking money away from a struggling school isn't going to make it better.
Vouchers can mean the difference to a few kids between staying a failing public school and going to a successful private school, the money is enough for some motivated middle class families to make that change. But a lot more kids are going to be ones from families who were always going to send their kids to a private school so for them the voucher is a government-funded discount.
In theory, vouchers could be means-tested so the money only went to families truly had an economic need for it. However, means testing has costs of it own, often has loopholes, and can go against many people's sense of fairness, especially when you're talking about something for kids.
They rely on private school tuition to further subsidize public schools via reduced enrollment but not reduced budget.
The Catholic schools' policy on things like this, at least near me, is dictated mostly by the diocese. The state can withhold funding for things like special-ed programs or meals if they won't play ball, but they get more autonomy as long as they aren't violating civil-rights law.
The teachers' union does. Not most of the time either. All the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10#Effect_o...
"the law reduced average test scores on the state’s standardized exam by approximately 20% of a standard deviation": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027277571...
"8 percent reduction in total compensation" https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/rb71.pdf
Not only does this hold up in general, it holds up district by district. Districts that still had collective bargaining had better scores than one that didn't (even after controlling for confounds, it was the union status that made the difference).
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0160449X1988337...
Not only that, teacher shortages are worse, and they're much worse in rural areas.
https://search.proquest.com/openview/5ae518d77f9e44551206208...
So the outcome is: Teachers make less money, there are fewer teachers to be had, and students are scoring much worse.
A win-win-win for conservatives!
Additionally, you don't have public sector or really any teachers unions to deal with at private schools.
There are other factors that contribute, but aren't nearly as clear cut as those two.