Kids are far behind in school
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. We rely a lot on "social promotion", where mere age and time spent in seats is taken as the standard for educational level.
> It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared.
Huh? So you think the problem of being behind is overstated, but observed many students not being properly prepared yourself when you taught?
There's a typo: it should have said "a lot of students". Not sure whether that was the confusion here.
As I asked originally, what does "behind" even mean? It seems to depend crucially on a schedule and expectations. This is why I mentioned social promotion, where students move up in grade simply because a year has passed.
The pandemic has certainly messed up the standard academic schedule, without a doubt. But so what? Are kids irreparably harmed because the standard academic schedule was messed up? I don't think so. Kids were already moving at different educational paces before the pandemic.
I'm not saying it's good that educational quality differs by school district. But this is a socioeconomic problem. There's no "natural human" educational system that the pandemic messed up. When you compare US kids with, say, the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill, we're all way behind. As a kid, J.S. Mill was the beneficiary of an educational experiment almost without equal in history. He was taught Greek at the age of three! Who gets that?
The authors never claimed kids were irreparably damaged. Your take is just so bizarre.
The schedule of standardized tests is not written in stone for eternity. If the academic schedule is messed up, then give the tests later.
Let's say you take a year off between high school and college. Are you "behind"? In one sense, yes. But that doesn't mean your overall college experience will be any worse than someone who started college immediately after high school. Why is the standard schedule so important?
Arguably everyone should take some time off between high school and college to get all the drinking/drugs/partying out of your system before you get serious. I certainly squandered my first couple years. ;-) But then I worked like crazy and "made it up" as a junior and senior.
https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Gricean_maxims#Maxim_of_R...
Not exactly. Most states and the federal government adjust funding to send it to the schools that need it most.
https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/research/school-fundi...
Also, your link is basically a charter school industry propo campaign. Hardly unbiased when talking about public schools.
'"Most states" qualifier supports the claim that funding varies widely from state to state and town to town.'
Of course funding will vary to some degree - as does cost of living. This is especially true depending on the state, but it is not based on local wealth (as the original claim states). The point is that the troupe that districts collecting less property tax are providing poor education because of it are mostly false. The funding levels are mostly adjusted to be similar to other districts based on the needs-based funding of higher levels of government. Are there some states that underfunded the entire system? Probably. The example of Pennsylvania shows that it is one of the highest funded states, with some of the highest paid teachers, has relatively evenly distributed funds, and it still has districts that underperformed. This isn't a funding issue, and continuing to look at it like one is doing a disservice to those students.
There are other factors that drive success more than property tax funding. Things like two parent households, and societal/parental expectations.
Four days. We couldn’t even afford five days a week. There were other effects to this besides four day weeks but I’m giving a good sound byte here.
The data show that causation mostly flows in the opposite direction. The main determinant of whether a school is "good" is the average academic ability of the students who attend the school. And that, statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income.
Policy interventions based on the idea that school quality determines student performance have consistently failed to show significant results. These interventions include local and regional busing. Putting lower-achieving students in close physical proximity to higher-achieving students doesn't make much of a long-term difference.
Busing raises a host of problems that are independent of school quality.
I can only offer my anecdotal experience here, but I was able to thrive in my new school, after I caught up. My inherent ability didn't change simply by moving, but more was given to me and more expected of me after I moved. But I wasn't bused in, I lived in the same neighborhoods as my friends and peers.
"High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction."
"One option is voluntary summer school, which, according to prior research, has yielded about five weeks of instructional gain per student. Another option is an extra period each day of instruction in core subjects. A double dose of math over the course of an entire school year has been shown to produce gains equivalent to about 10 weeks of in-person instruction, although the evidence on reading is weaker."
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/5-lessons-e... lists a few more studies that consistently show the opposite of what you claimed. School quality matters, and more schooling matters.
Stressors make everything difficult, of which poverty is a massive one.
Only partially - only ~40-50% of a person's IQ are a result of parental genetics [3]. The rest is a result of the environment in which the child is raised - and there are very important factors at play that directly correlate with income of the parents:
- Does each child have their own, adequately sized, room with a study desk to work in and concentrate? During the pandemic it turned out to be a real problem that children who had to share rooms had issues following streamed lectures.
- Are the living conditions actually healthy? Poor people are often forced by their poverty to live in decrepit conditions: noise from highways or rails, toxic emissions from nearby factories, general issues with toxicity (paint, lead water pipes, mould). All of this has direct outcome on performance of students.
- Do the children, particularly those of working age (14 and above, but especially 16 and above) have to work actual jobs to make pocket money or contribute to household income?
- Are the parents largely absent from their children's lives because both parents have to work full-time or worse jobs just to make ends meet?
- Can the parents invest time and money into furthering their children's education? Can they sit together with them in the afternoon/evening and work through homework problems? Can they afford side education, playing instruments or similar activities that have been shown to have a positive effect on education?
- Do the parents have enough money to feed the children? Hundreds of thousands of students alone in New York depend on schools handing out free lunches, which turned out to be a massive problem during the pandemic [1].
- Poverty causes stress - not just from being cooped together in too small living spaces, but also in food insecurity, increased fights between parents over the stress, or in the worst cases from literally being homeless [2].
[1] https://www.foodandwine.com/news/new-york-city-school-childr...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/nyregion/nyc-homeless-chi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Molecular_g...
Actually there is a direct correlation between adult IQ and stress [1], it isn't genetic though.
> The adult IQs of adopted children have very little correlation with those of the adoptive parents who raised them or those of their adopted, non-biological siblings.
To quote [2]: "Studies of mixed-race children and black children adopted by white parents suggest, however, that racial differences in test performance are largely if not entirely environmental in origin."
In any case the question is open if "IQ testing" is actually a decent measure of intelligence, especially with children that suffer from a variety of stuff somewhere on the ADHD/autism spectrum (e.g. selective mutism, anxiety issues), or if it can be used as a metric at all due to disparities in testing incidence between population segments - often enough, it's teachers who recommend IQ and ADHD tests, and there have been a number of suggestions that racial and other discrimination can negatively affect children there.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-h...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...
I had a small that I shared with two brothers. My desk was minuscule. I had top grades.
>Do the children, particularly those of working age (14 and above, but especially 16 and above) have to work actual jobs to make pocket money or contribute to household income?
My family was so poor at a time we didn't have the money to pay the mortgage and the bank wanted to take our house. I had top grades.
>Are the parents largely absent from their children's lives because both parents have to work full-time or worse jobs just to make ends meet?
My parents were and are apathetic to my existence. I had top grades.
>Can the parents invest time and money into furthering their children's education? Can they sit together with them in the afternoon/evening and work through homework problems? Can they afford side education, playing instruments or similar activities that have been shown to have a positive effect on education?
None of that existed in my house. Nobody helped me doing homework and nobody sit with me exploring my life path. I rented instruments and asked as few money as possible. I had top grades.
>Do the parents have enough money to feed the children? Hundreds of thousands of students alone in New York depend on schools handing out free lunches, which turned out to be a massive problem during the pandemic.
Admittedly, even in poverty we never were hungry.
>Poverty causes stress - not just from being cooped together in too small living spaces, but also in food insecurity, increased fights between parents over the stress, or in the worst cases from literally being homeless.
This I wholeheartedly agree, that's why the "money doesn't make you happy" is such a lie.
I know my tone was rather flippant but the relationship between money, stress and academics is so important to me. And by the way, even after all these top grades, and a Physics degree and speaking English, French, Italian and German and whatever I haven't escaped poverty. I'm back living to my parents at 27. It seems like the best way to make money in Italy is to inherit it.
I was living in a four man tent during my exams, fortunately I had it to myself.
Not the best situation to be in but its made me hyper aware of how corrupt the criminals running the world are.
Your response appears utterly useless in this discussion except to highlight that even those who grew up in poverty cannot be expected to have any empathy for those who share a similar background.
We should help all kids from poverty, but we shouldn't ignore the huge factor talents plays in how well they will perform in school. Saying things like "rich kids only do well because they get good support" is ignorant. That support helps, but parts of it is genes as well, both are important factors, and understanding how those factors interacts is important to give each kid the best help they can get.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012403
The wife of one of my good friends was on the county school board for 12 years. According to her, it was an unspoken secret was that parental involvement was the biggest predictor of / contributor to student success. The reason it was taboo was because you absolutely cannot expect anything from the parents. It was political suicide.
I would put dollars on the table that such is already happening for every parent that is willing and able to do it, because they were already doing it before too.
It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken culture. Asian's have 2-parent families and have success. Even the lower class ones, suggesting income/class shouldn't be a factor in having kids with 2 parents.
So of course the next step is to demonize the nuclear family. The trends keep getting worse.
I think this has frayed the fabric of society by damaging the reciprocity that binds families and communities, and encourages divisive and antisocial, short-term behaviors over long-term, collective decision-making.
This varies across our rich tapestry of subcultures, but I see it everywhere. Especially among government and business leaders.
we can't just expect parents to get involved. nor does it help to just blame their kids performance on them.
the focus really needs to be on a broader level. what changes to our society are needed so that families can thrive so that they can actually focus on the care of their kids?
things like higher minimum wage, parental leave, easy access to insurance, etc. all the general needs everyone has.
i believe what largely has gone wrong is the idea that in order for people to have a better life they need to start with better academic performance so they can get better jobs which ends in a better life.
but it appears that academic performance is not the start of a better life, it is the outcome.
That's a broken culture
what part of the culture is broken? and who's culture?
how about the broken american culture that doesn't provide adequate support and protection for parents? i don't think being a single parent is a problem in itself. it only raises the difficulty level. it would be less of an issue if parents had more rights against their employers that would allow them to care for their kids, or get enough financial support that they don't need to hold a fulltime job with hours that conflict with their kids schedule. or affordable childcare. there are so many things that could be done, but people just like to point at problems and not think about solutions.
That's what's wrong here. Rights without responsibility. Stop incentivizing single motherhood, for starters. Encourage men to stick around and for both parents to rely on each other. It feels like you're helping but you're not. You're encouraging futile behavior.
what's wrong is that we keep trying to find out who or what is at fault instead of trying to find out how to actually make things better.
the question is: how do you encourage men to stick around? what makes them leave? who or what is incentivizing single motherhood? if it is economical factors, then those factors need to change. those are what i gave as examples.
what i hear is: being a single mother is bad. you shouldn't leave your family. don't do that. but that doesn't help. we need to get a better understanding of what causes families to break apart. we need to provide an environment that supports families.
being a single parent is not a cause, it is an outcome. we need to fix the causes for that outcome, if we want to change that.
encourage parents to rely on each other
what is that supposed to mean? a cynical reading suggests that this means that if only parents would rely on each other they would not have any problems. how about the ability to rely on society? because that is what is lacking. parents are on their own. i don't know, but is that what incentivizes single mothers? because they can get more help that way? if that is the case, yes, that should change, but not by providing less help to single parents, but rather by providing more help to couples, so they can stay together.
It seems that as a society we have given up on the idea of personal responsibility/accountability.
There still remains a vocal part of society that have given up their civic responsibility to improve society (whether by ensuring the other participants in the democracy are educated or by reducing pollution, etc.) and that believes that these groups should continue to remain impoverished for generations, radiating harms on the rest of society.
i can not force you to change your lifestyle, but i can make the desired lifestyle more economically and socially viable.
but that requires actually helping people instead of lecturing them.
But for starters at a high level:
- Dismantle any form of welfare; money, food stamps, housing, etc. for anyone of able mind and body and of working age. Children will never be an input for how much welfare you receive so there is no incentive to have kids. Possibly even penalize welfare based on number of kids.
- As a consequence of this, fire most of the welfare administration nationwide
- Build a new Citizen Development Force that takes on children from mothers that can't raise them without benefits. Any mother can drop their kid(s) off here but the mother then loses any rights to the child. These are large camps around the country that offer among the best salaries to qualified care takers, teachers, mentors, etc. Each function has aggressive KPIs (to go with the high salaries) and audits to ensure successful outcomes. There are checks and controls to prevent any type of abuse.
- Citizen Development Force has a mission to nurture, raise, teach, and grow these kids into self sufficient, responsible adults. The top 30% are sent to universities or put into military leadership positions (officers). The rest are taught trades/technical/enlisted after 15 years of age based on their interests and aptitudes. Those with learning disabilities become clients of the state for life.
Ideally, after about 20-30 years this program can begin to be shut down and the funds can be redistributed to finance new social problems. The idea is to break the cycle.
do you think parents are going to give up their children willingly?
what you are suggesting sounds like brave new world. that's a horrible vision.
children growing up without their own parents is only going to make things worse. i do not believe that any form of institution is going to be more capable to raise children than natural parents.
your ideas work under the assumption that these parents are not capable of raising their kids. but that is not true, and that is not the problem.
the problem is that they have to raise their kids and make a living in an environment that is not supportive. pretty much any other country in the world is more supportive than the USA.
the big factor that you are missing is that we don't know if those children will be capable to have families of their own. my prediction is that they won't be because they didn't grow up in a family themselves. so this system will have to continue in perpetuity because the children of these people will also have to be raised in these institutions, and more parents are going to send kids to these institutions than parents from there who will be able to raise kids on their own. it's going to create a cycle that will end in a dystopia.
i was still with you when you said to disincentivize single parenting, but i thought you wanted to support families. you said it yourself: The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. what you are suggesting here is quite the opposite. children in institutions is not children with parents.
it smacks of hubris and arrogance. the assumption that normal people should be able to take good care of their kids without help and anyone who isn't is simply incapable and should not have had kids in the first place. that you know better than they do, and they should just submit to your authority.
brave new world indeed.
(UPDATED)
No, they won't want to lose their kids. But if they have no means to support them then they will. So because they aren't receiving any financial assistance for shelter, food, and clothing then they will rely on having a partner. We have now incentivized that type of behavior. Failing that, if they can't provide a safe environment for their kids then we will take the kids out of the home. We do this today. We could altar the civil rights act to include children in these situations.
> children growing up without their own parents is only going to make things worse.
Adopted kids do great. It's about structure and predictability.
> your ideas work under the assumption that these parents are not capable of raising their kids.
Correct. All the evidence says they are not capable.
> the problem is that they have to raise their kids and make a living in an environment that is not supportive.
Correct - as stated above we incentivize them to create a supportive environment or we will create one for their kids.
> the big factor that you are missing is that we don't know if those children will be capable to have families of their own.
We will teach them how. They will be so removed from their environment of shattering poverty, drugs, abuse, etc. They won't even recognize that world and will be disgusted by it. They will learn how to be productive people that can not only take care of themselves but can care for others. These are learned behaviors. One of the reasons we have generational poverty is because bad habits are passed down. The cycle never gets broken.
> children in institutions is not children with parents.
Institutions are a surrogate.
> it smacks of hubris and arrogance. the assumption that people should be able to take good care of their kids without help and anyone who isn't is simply incapable and should not have had kids in the first place. that you know better than they do, and they should just submit to your authority.
Or we can continue to double down on the same bad ideas we've been trying for the last 60 or 70 years. Talk about hubris and arrogance!
The main difference is I'm actually trying to help the kids. Not create government dependent parents that will vote for me because I get scraps sent their way.
My ideas are to help kids from mothers that can't or won't provide an acceptable environment to grow up in have a chance to grow up in a caring, non-abusive environment that gives them the best chance to have a life. And hopefully reproduce and pass those values on to their own kids! :)
I'm not saying it would be the best implementation, but the idea is to help kids. Not create a client of the state that will vote for a certain political party because they are helpless and dependent. I want to help people. Not hurt them and lie to myself and others and pretend I'm helping when I'm only serving my own agenda.
> Not create a client of the state that will vote for a certain political party because they are helpless and dependent.
I'm pretty sure there's no evidence bearing out that this happens to any significant degree. Moreover, people generally don't enjoy staying on welfare.
The problem today is the kids stay in or close to the negative environment. There’s no one to teach them. My idea is to simply close the loop and give them essentially boarding school.
People may not enjoy being on welfare but the data shows that generational welfare is a thing.
and as a result you traumatize everyone in that family for life.
So because they aren't receiving any financial assistance for shelter, food, and clothing then they will rely on having a partner. We have now incentivized that type of behavior.
no, you haven't.
how do you think this works? all you are doing is forcing people to stay in relationships that are not healthy. do you think people separate because they got bored? they separate because they can't support each other. but you are forcing them to stay together, which creates environments ripe for abuse.
Adopted kids do great.
you were talking about an institution. and where are you going to find all these adoptive parents? already now there are not enough of those.
we incentivize them to create a supportive environment
that's not what i meant by a supportive environment.
a supportive environment is a community that helps families who can't make it on their own.
We will teach them how. They will be so removed from their environment of shattering poverty, drugs, abuse, etc.
they will also be removed from the love of their parents, which is the most important thing that they need.
Or we can continue to double down on the same bad ideas we've been trying for the last 60 or 70 years
we could also look at how other countries do it, and listen to people and learn what they actually need to make this work for them.
The main difference is I'm actually trying to help the kids.
and i am trying to help the parents. so that they can actually take care of their kids themselves.
I grew up around those environments and was immersed in them. My experience as well as analyzing what we have done to “fix it” have led me to believe that a radical breaking of the wheel is necessary. And not only necessary but moral.
It’s time to put kids first.
this is where i have a problem. taking away kids from their parents is not putting kids first. unless the parents are outright abusive, in which case there are already mechanisms in place. what you are suggesting is not helpful.
we do not need better individual academic performance but we need better relationships, so that people care more for each other and we can build stronger communities that can work together to improve everyones lives.
taking away children from their parents hurts the ability of those children (and of the parents too) to make friends and form trusting relationships. which in the long term hurts the very fabric of society. already individualism is very strong, and it's becoming a problem.
only as a united community can we solve our problems and build a better future.
> The U.S. tax code, for example, contains a marriage penalty for high-earner, two-income couples. And the earned income tax credit penalizes lower-wage married couples. Moreover, welfare rules have frequently made it harder for married households than for single-parent households to get benefits. Although few couples sit down and calculate the possible economic effects of getting married, there is a sense, especially within low-income communities, that getting married means you lose “stuff.” Couples may not be able to calculate exactly how much “stuff” they stand to lose, but they know marriage, at least financially, is a bad deal.
> And they are right. According to calculations by Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, a single mother working full-time at a minimum-wage job who marries a man working full-time at $8 an hour stands to lose $8,060 in cash and noncash welfare benefits. Under such circumstances, the wonder is not that few low-income couples marry, but that any do.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marria...
Where it ventures into racist territory is to present these statistics on their own absent the context of mass incarceration, over policing and manufactured black criminality that play such a large role in the disparity that you’re pointing out. To blame it on culture more so than a correlation with poverty and a cycle of incarceration feels awfully close to blaming black people for the systemic racism to which they’re subjected.
Society is far less racist than it was in the 1950’s. However the amount of fatherlessness has exploded. Same with for whites but it started at a different place.
In my case as a guitar teacher, I see two patterns:
- Students with less support at home or natural feeling for guitar are about a year behind where they would normally be after four years of studying.
- My most motivated, talented and best supported students are on schedule or slightly ahead.
I personally started playing guitar, and tennis, too late in life to become a professional. This had nothing to do with the pandemic. But I can still enjoy them as an amateur.
"Who will think of the children??" come to life
I would argue that literally no one needs professional guitar and tennis players, those are at most the "nice to have". As humans we like to have nice things, even pretend that we have to have them otherwise our life is meaningless. Don't get me wrong I love music, but deep in my mind some intuition lingers, that its vanity to claim that it is necessary, when there are people in china working 996 culture to produce our unnecessary mostly plastic stuff.
I would argue that I need professional guitar players, and my life would be drabber without Steve Vai in it.
By the looks of things, it's the ones that take off the most clothes and do the most scandalous things. But maybe I'm just turning into a grumpy old man.
Or matter?
Is extending parental dependency the problem? If someone starts college at 20 instead of 18 they are likely at home longer. But a lot of people aren't leaving home for college anyway, or they return home after college whether they graduate or not.
If a bunch of kids start high school at 16 instead of 14 is it going to cause serious problems? It seems to me the only issues would be those that we create by our own expectations.
Are the metrics:
1. Based on university entrance (in which case you need to recourse and ask the same questions of that) or
2. Based on some pragmatic list of things that will help the child become a good part of society or
3. Completely arbitrary.
How would a potential employer know they were graduating college at 24 vs 22, and without knowing the reason for the difference why would they care. "I'm afraid we can't hire you at FAANG, it seems you had to repeat the first grade 15 years ago."
A FAANG probably wouldn't care either way, but a Fortune 500 might, and numerous other places of employment might also pick the person that graduated "on time" if most other things are equal between two candidates.
_If_ they knew the reason it might matter less, but not all employers will take the time to figure out what the reason was, and not all reasons are necessarily something you'd want to share and offer up freely because it might be very personal. They'd have to trust the reason given as well. A person that graduated on time presents no such hassle, or unknowns.
I'm not saying it is correct to do this, it's just what I _imagine_ is likely to happen given how people tend to sometimes judge people on other inconsequential stuff.
Alternative explanation: you are acting like there is no problem based on anecdotal evidence that is irrelevant to the current situation - At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all.
I'm not saying there are no negative effects. What I would say is this: even before the pandemic, many students were not sufficiently "challenged". They were already moving more slowly than they could have moved. It's possible for them to catch up. They could have caught up with other kids before the pandemic too, if put in the right situation.
Time spent sitting in seats is not education, by itself. How that time is used is just as important, and we often squander that time, even when there's not a public health crisis.
I actually do think this.
"John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography
I realize that this is not financially realistic for application to every child. But the gap between how far we could push children and how far we do push children is often massive. We've always been "ok" with leaving many children behind.
Why didn't schools keep going during the pandemic, but outside or in very well ventilated buildings? This is what New York did during he Spanish flu pandemic, and it seemed to work. (It did look cold, though).
Possibly because the leadership of the associated organizations were raised in an educational system that doesn't promote critical thinking, creativity, or analytical reasoning.
As one would expect, the education level of parents did affect the results. For example, home-school students of parents without college degrees scored, on average, at the 83rd percentile for the core subjects. When one parent had a college degree, those students scored at the 86th percentile, and when both parents had a college degree, those students scored at the 90th percentile. There was virtually no difference, however, between the scores of students whose parents were certified teachers and those who were not.
[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/30/home-school...
A parent teaches maybe 2 students per day. A school teacher teaches maybe 200 students per day. It's an unfair comparison.
Do you believe that saying "no fair!" invalidates the superior outcomes for home-schooled children?
If billions of dollars of state funding and the teachers' aggregate decades of university education can't overcome this obstacle (which did not seem to be a problem when children in one-room schoolhouses routinely used to learn Latin), I'm wondering what other advantages anti-home-schooler central planners need, in order to force their sub-par solution on parents?
I know I'm being ... obtuse. But, seriously -- if it takes 1 or 2 hours a day to "keep up" with the standard curriculum in grade school, and "schooled" students are sent home with 1 or 2 hours of homework, after they attend "school" all day -- what is the purpose of sending kids to these institutions?
:)
Not the OP, but I think the pushback is against the implication that instructor training means nothing in the context of a large classroom. It's unclear if this was an assertion you were making.
I'm not anti home schooling. Is home schooling illegal in some places? If it is, I wasn't aware of that. Otherwise, I don't see how there's any forcing of parents.
I'm not trying to invalidate the outcomes of home schooling. I'm merely suggesting that teacher training is useful and probably necessary if you have to teach a larger number of students and not just your own few kids.
OMG OMG OMG this!
It’s amazing how little time it takes to keep up with school. It’s so completely clear once you clear the fog that school is mostly just day care so both parents can have a job outside of the house and increase the output of the economy.
Also, the School Sucks Project [2] is a great source of knowledge about the history of schooling, as well as education solutions and alternatives to schooling. They have just launched a re-broadcast of the essential 50 episodes (of their over a decade of 800 episodes) that covers the full spectrum of the relevant topics.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE%3Fref=... [2] https://schoolsucksproject.com
This was well supported and non-controversial pre-pandemic, where we had research results showing that simply having participation in remote schooling lowers high school graduation rate by a significant fraction. But during the pandemic, we still closed schools for most pupils in the developed world.
This was one more problem where the contemporary governance mechanism is "we pretend it won't/isn't/didn't happen because it's politically inconvenient as it contradicts high level leadership decisions (and we can't cause face loss to said leadership)".
But he tells me of all the kids that are just simply failing, and have barely learning anything this year, let along last when many were sitting home by themselves all day.
We did our kids dirty last year :(
I mean you may disagree with the choices which were made, but surely you have to recognize that it's a bit more complicated than what you're suggesting?
Acting from an assumption that an infectious disease spreads more if children from every family gather daily in crowded classrooms doesn't seem like an unreasonable one.
I would also love more data on this, preferably before the next pandemic.
There were lots of alternate futures, ranging from “the whole world, everywhere, utterly locked down schools for the past 2+ years” to “the whole world, everywhere, utterly refused to lock down schools for the past 2+ years”, and everywhere in between in terms of which schools, which policies, when, and for how long.
We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.
> We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.
Sure, and again, after the fact.
Refusing to take action as soon as data were available to justify better methods got people killed.
(Thanks for the link, btw. Had no idea “dildo” dates to the 16th century. The things you learn...)
That I have no idea if you would have wanted more lockdown or less lockdown or more masks or less masks, etc, etc, should indicate the difficulty in decision making.
But for the record, I'm not defending any decisions made by any government, I'm merely defending the difficulty of the process, and they will be dragged for any decision they make regardless because, again, there is no win scenario in a pandemic.
We know very few kids in school have parents or guardians that are "elderly" and that not many have parents or guardians that are "chronically unhealthy", and we knew that Covid (pre-delta) had a very low complication and death rate on school-aged children (not too dissimilar from the flu).
It seems like the smarter thing to do would've been to let parents have their kids stay home if they wanted, and let teachers stay home if they had an excuse, and make efforts to make the environment as safe as possible.
Instead - it became entirely political. One side wanted to go to the extreme for safety. The other side wanted to pretend like it was a hoax.
Once Delta came around - all adults had access to vaccines. Once fully vaccinated - Covid again is not materially worse than the flu (unvaccinated). Again - at this point - the decision for students could've been left up to the parents, rather than just forcing everyone to stay home.
Do we? 40% of US adults are obese.
The IFR for people under 50 (the vast majority of parents and guardians of school-aged children) is 0.427% [1]. If you assume the median age is 45, it drops down to 0.286%. at 35, it's 0.104%. When you factor in vaccines, these rates are reduced by >90%.
90% of these deaths come from people with co-morbidities. So you wouldn't multiply these numbers by 1.42 to get the IFR for obese people. It would be less than that. But I'll do that any way - for a worst case scenario.
Some 35 year olds might have their kids stay home because they'd have an extra 0.042% chance of dying (assuming their kid going to school means they definitely get Covid and their kid not going to school means they definitely wouldn't get Covid - which is a strange assumption). At 45, with those assumptions AND you being obese, it's about an extra 1 in 1000 chance of dying. Some people might not be willing to take that risk. A lot would gladly. If you're vaccinated - the rate is close to 1 in 90,000.
If you're 80, unvaccinated, and a 400 pound chain smoker - yeah, you definitely want to minimize your exposure as much as possible.
The reality is that you have about a 40% chance of getting Covid unless you live in a bubble. Sending your kids to school isn't even going to give you a 100% chance. So the risks of sending your kid to school are about cut in half (or less).
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
What’s your point?
I think I mistook you as agreeing with the GP that we had no chance to improve the outcome with the info at hand.
There was data from many flu pandemics. It led to the standard public health recommendation being against school closures. One more thing that just got tossed out without a moments thought for COVID. And no, COVID is not so novel that all prior knowledge of viruses and respiratory disease became irrelevant.
Calling covid "novel" is only true in some pedantic, insider-talk sense.
You’re also talking like we only get one chance to make the decision, rather than update that decision as facts roll in and more is known; as assumptions become proven unfounded and wrong.
So, yes, let’s see that data.
> Early evidence indicated that schools were low risk and children were unlikely to be very infectious, but it is becoming clear that children and youth can acquire and transmit COVID-19 in school settings and that transmission clusters and outbreaks can be large.
Most of the protocols (besides the baseline, do-nothing protocol) have some effect, but aren’t perfect.
> None of the mitigation protocols we modeled, initiated by a positive test in a symptomatic individual, are able to prevent large transmission clusters unless the transmission rate is low (in which case large clusters do not occur in any case). Among the measures we modeled, only rapid universal monitoring (for example by regular, onsite, pooled testing) accomplished this prevention.
But as it says there, prevention can be achieved by emphasizing frequent on-site testing (which is super consistent with what we know about avoiding spread events generally).
> Without closing schools down entirely, if we want to prevent large clusters from occurring altogether, this leaves approaches to detect potential index cases before they show symptoms. Pooled testing, wastewater monitoring and airflow monitoring have all been proposed with this aim [42, 43]. We simulated introduced cases and resulting transmission under the baseline of no regular testing (with the same baseline as above, symptomatic individuals going home) and compared this to weekly or every three day testing or environmental monitoring covering all individuals in the class. The results for the total cluster size are shown in Fig 6. Regular pooled or otherwise universal testing dramatically reduces the sizes of even the most unfortunate clusters (infectious index, higher-risk room), for example from a median of 12 to a median size of 3 if the index is asymptomatic. But even with regular pooled or otherwise universal testing, testing in a matter of hours (e.g. onsite) has a substantially greater impact than testing at a centralized laboratory (if that takes 2 days including shipping time).
This doesn’t seem like a strong argument in favor of virtual school?
It is in particular useful for cases where virtual schools are just not an option (on the top of my head, toddlers and lower age kids for instance. If their parents can't teach them for whatever reasons, in-person teaching will be critical to their development, and they can't wait 3 years that the dust settles)
Now this study might have a lot more different political stuff going on, but I generally think the situation with kids is complicated and there is no one single solution to the learning problem. We'd need to adjust to a lot of cases.
The paper concludes that an effective testing regimen can, in fact, contain spread. This is the lesson we should take from this whole experience. This is the heart of why Japan and South Korea did so comparatively well during the pandemic: test, trace, and isolate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7688188/
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...
That's not to say that what was done wasn't the best of a suite of bad options. But I saw nothing but fairly extreme downplaying of the consequences of lockdowns from people who wanted long (the only effective) ones.
Were you aware of the tradeoffs for children in less fortunate situations? And while being aware, did you still support schools closing early? Do you stand by your support knowing the trauma it has inflicted now?
The school closings have had catastrophic effects on children with poor home lives. School for me was a place to eat, and in middle school, even just showering when the gas or electricity had been cut at home. Many of these kids were dodging abusive relatives, gangs, and drugs by going to school. The more fortunate kids were lucky to drop high school in exchange for working to support their families.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-11-year-old-...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-online-sex-a...
https://www.wbez.org/stories/to-help-their-families-during-t...
There were no reports of "a mountain of dead children" anywhere in the world.
It's not about what we did know, it's about what we didn't. Early on, we had no idea how the virus was interacting with children and the school system. Being under-cautious would have been the wrong move, because the worst case scenario was horrifying.
The basic understanding of the contagion, what drove the pandemic, and mortality numbers across age groups was known. The data has become more specific since, but not dramatically different.
The worst case scenario is bound to be horrifying, by definition. That’s not an excuse for waffling out of making a tough call.
We did not know how the pandemic was interacting with children and the school system. But we did know that it had deathly, chaotic, fast moving properties. The worst case outcome was not a fantasy. We had reasons to think that the worst case outcome was not improbable. Because we were dealing with an existential threat to possibly our most precious resource, we acted defensively, even though many of us were aware of the deep, problematic tradeoffs.
It was the right decision.
Yes, at the very earliest part of the pandemic, we had no data. We had to prepare for the worst.
Very quickly, we started to see the relative impact of different measures taken in different jurisdictions, we learned about the relative impact of the disease on different age groups and populations, and we started having tools and strategies for detecting, tracing, and inhibiting the disease.
These became the priors that informed (or should have informed) the evolving decision-making process for disease response. But instead, in many cases, we saw a ton of inertia on many fronts, due to fear, political face-saving / ass-covering, or willful ignorance.
That’s the part I take issue with. It wasn’t “the” right decision, it was “an” early and uninformed decision, followed by many opportunities for additional, more informed, better decisions.
Be a kind interlocutor if you want dispassionate, reasoned engagement.
But I stand by the assertion that your previous comment does not make sense.
it's a trade-off, I think we did what we had to do.
Germany and the Netherlands are more suitable comparisons.
So why not remote school just the children with elders in the house, and not hurt the others' schooling ?
One problem I've seemed to notice in the US is that you have the "somewhat reasonable" side and the "batshit insane" side of every discussion, and the "somewhat reasonable" side over-corrects. A clear example of that is the mask discussion; you have the "batshit insane" side which claimed that masks literally deprived you of oxygen, and then the "somewhat reasonable" side would over-correct and downplay any negative sides to having to wear a mask. Whereas outside of the US, I feel like there was a much more reasonable conversation about how masks suck and are really annoying to wear, especially when you're exerting yourself physically or wear glasses, but are overall a good thing.
So it wouldn't surprise me if you had the same effect regarding schools, where the "batshit insane" side wants no response at all and doesn't even think COVID exists/thinks it's manufactured by the illuminati to control citizens/is no worse than a flu/whatever, and the "somewhat reasonable" side overcorrects by downplaying any negative sides to a COVID response.
In reality, the "batshit insane" people were closer to the truth, which is that the shitty cloth masks that were considered acceptable and worn by the majority of people did little to nothing to stop the spread of Covid.
this seems to be a false dichotomy. you can certainly fit all of the opinions into a binary if you'd like, but nowhere near enough people believed what you are calling "batshit insane" to constitute one side.
more reasonably, you could talk about how one side advised not wearing masks at all, proclaiming they were totally useless, and the other "over-corrected" by mandating wearing cloth masks, which we knew all along were practically useless.
That's at best a huge misuse of the word 'literally', and at worst you're claiming an insane idea. Like you condemn.
My wife had a negative response to a vaccine as well as her brother. My mother-in-law passed before we had children and never thought to ask for more details until we had a kid. When we were touring hospitals for our first, we asked about vaccination policies. We tried to explain that we didn't want our kid vaccinated at the hospital but at the pediatrician's appointment a couple days later so we could first develop a base line so could identify any negative response if one shows up. The nurse talked over us about how important vaccines are, acting like we didn't want them at all. Turns out my daughter did have an unexplainable neurological response after the second dose. Our first pediatrician's office was fully supportive of us not continuing just that series (I suspect their "expert" we saw after the incident was anti-vax). We moved and had to find a pediatrician's office that carried the combo shot without the problematic one. We found an office that had it but the pediatrician they assigned us kept giving us problems until we saw a neurologist and the neurologist told them to back off (they were the one to classify it as unexplainable).
We understand the value of vaccines and encourage them. While our kid isn't completing a series, we understand the importance of everyone around them completing it to keep our kid safe. Pro-vaccine people treat us like we are anti-vaxxers. I could easily see this leading other people into the anti-vax camp because most people don't listen but anti-vax people would. Another social pressure that could push someone in our circumstance to be anti-vax is the laws. Anti-vax people have been abusing the system so pro-vax people have been tightening things down. We've been keeping an eye on this, worried what it'll take to get our kid through these legal requirements if we live in some of those states. The only political group that would protect our kid is the anti-vaxxers.
> from people who wanted long (the only effective) ones.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I think this kind of wording maybe sets up a straw man. Nobody _wanted_ lockdowns. I know hardly anyone who was genuinely excited and happy about quarantine and stay-at-home. Your wording sounds like there are some significant group of people who want everyone isolated in their homes (for what reason?), and when COVID came along, they could finally get their way! There is no mustache-twirling villain gleefully plotting to lock people in their homes just because.
I was in favor of sustained stay-at-home because it seemed like the only way to at least slow the pandemic from causing even more sickness and death, but that doesn't mean I liked or wanted lockdowns.
It sounds like, if it had come to a vote, you would have voted for them.
Perhaps this hinges on your definition of "fine" - will most of these children become functional well adjusted adults? Sure, people can weather far worse things than this. But will they be set back on their education? Unquestionably.
As a parent of an elementary school child, I can tell you that if "people" were saying schools closures were of no consequence, they were idiots or charlatans. From the beginning it was obvious that a "remote only" learning plan for kids this age was going to be terrible, and it would exacerbate any underlying inequality that was already in place.
"People" can and do state absolute nonsense all the time, so the fact that "people have stated" something dumb is, on its own, a useless data point. The more useful question is whether these people who were making bold claims that there would be no harm successfully manipulated public policy.
Obviously paediatrics is not the same as schooling, but I recall this sort of attitude being prevalent.
Prove it. You can't draw wild conclusions like that and get away with it. Hardly any children die from COVID-19, and the ones that do often had extreme comorbidities.
What we did to the young generation the last two years is awful.
Can this be more factually false:
https://www.ed.gov/coronavirus/data
first sentence:
> COVID-19 and the 2021-2022 School Year
> Students learn best when they're safely in school, in-person.
This seems like that on greater scale.
More granular mastery-based progression seems like it would be a good start.
I remember my time there being effectively day-care, I learned more outside of class than inside it. The only real benefit was socializing with kids my age but otherwise everything I learned in those 2 years could've been taught in a week.
What I’m trying to say here is that if we push kids without telling them “this is so hard, you might not be able to do it”, they might just do it. If we pushed the gas a bit further in the content we teach, not only we’ll get people learning more and faster, but also they might get a better sense of accomplishment.
In her school there is 1 math and 1 reading specialist, who are meant to focus on kids like this. Now they need about 5 more of each but the district has routed funding elsewhere like the Olympic quality weightlifting gym for the high school football team (which is used maybe 1hr per day). Better stop, feeling like I'm about to start ranting again...
There's also a decent amount of conceptual math taught in these grades. I wouldn't say that the concepts are 'hard', but they do take repeated exposure for many kids to grasp them and perform them accurately. You could teach the skills in a week, but only very bright kids would immediately pick up on all of it and not need further practice to be on par with kids who attended K-2. For example, it takes repeated exposure and practice for kids to know that a number ending with 4 and a number ending with 6 will always sum to a number ending in 0. Or to know their multiplication tables.
Does it take three years to learn this stuff? No. But it can't be crammed into a week or even a month.
I agree that Apple TVs in classrooms is a waste of money, but I don't remember text books being particularly useful, either. We covered between 25% and 50% of the contents of the book, and maybe had assigned reading for half of what was covered.
Textbooks are also a bit of a racket, too. The contents and pedagogy generally move very slowly, but legislators and parents like to micromanage contents, and textbook makers are happy to oblige. The number of, say, algebra, books across the US is probably embarrassing, as is the fact that there isn't a movement for public domain textbooks.
Novels are different. With 5 books per year at $4 per book with books lasting a few years, I'm less concerned.
You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it.
There’s no sport in high school that comes close to pulling everybody together the same way as football. There’s more to it than just classroom education vs sports in this case. It’s helping to foster a sense of community and school pride.
Often there will be charity drives that coincide using the games as a place to make announcements.
There are so many non-traditional ways and skills to teach kids that I think would be worth exploring, but sport doesn't even register on the scale of usefulness. Apparently we don't even teach finance in highschool yet or any kind of professional development skills.
Teamwork, acting/thinking under pressure, detailed preparation, controlling nerves, performing in front of crowds (with high expectations), pride in your body and performance.
These are just a few high level/low hanging fruits learned from competitive sport.
You forgot part:
> It’s helping to foster a sense of community, school pride, *and brain damage*.
Then there's the issue of discipline. The stereotype of athletes getting a pass on bad behavior or a little "help" on grades, because enforcing the rules would mean they'd have to miss a game or two, is based on real behavior that is very much alive today, not some relic of 1980s teen movies.
Additionally, I've read a ton of studies of this stuff and everything that I've found said the risk at the high school level is virtually nonexistent when compared with the general student body. In the college and professional level where everybody is bigger, stronger and faster it's an entirely different situation.
But to each their own.
Even the linemen who have aggressive contact each play aren’t banging their heads together, they are using their hands. The helmets are largely protecting against incidental contact.
Head trauma comes from rapid changes in momentum that cause the brain to bounce around inside the skull.
Those from “horse collar” tackles, which are illegal now.
Those from intentionally or unintentionally having helmet to helmet contact, which is also illegal.
Virtually every type of helmet hit is penalized at this point.
Soccer headers are probably much worse I would imagine.
To try and prop it up as a natural thing that is good just feels like a major problem.
It's awful hard for the band to take the field at halftime at water polo. Those uniforms don't really want to be wet.
Other sports play a lot more games. Football has a predictable and consistent schedule, Friday nights in the fall. The limited number of home games (only 5 or 6 usually) also keeps involvement at a level that's not overwhelming for the student body.
Additionally, football teams can support a lot more players than any other sport with rosters typically 50 players or more. Especially in smaller schools, this means almost everybody will know somebody who plays.
Lastly, football is the most diverse sport in the US. There's a role for everybody. From smaller faster guys playing receiver, more medium sized athletes playing defense at linebacker or defensive back and bigger stronger guys playing offensive and defensive line. Even the soccer players can find a role at kicker / punter.
It brings together more people from different racial backgrounds than any other sport as well.
I was not an athlete in high school by any stretch. I was an overweight kid who played MtG, DnD and Duke Nukem all the time who just happened to be 6 feet tall. I played football for 4 years and learned a lot about hard work while I got in much better shape. Even though I was never a starter, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not fully against football. But praising the sport that has more money spent on it for reaping the rewards of said money feels... Not that charitable to other sports.
Edit: I feel ashamed to have omitted basketball I'm my list. :(
Football has more money spent on it because it became so popular that people started spending more money on it. I can't say for sure WHY it became so popular, but people in my area know college football history back 100+ years so well that it's a common topic of conversation.
Usually the 2 big state schools would play a football game at the state fair every year and it became a major social event. The games themselves were almost secondary to the social event.
Football was likely popular in it's origins due to not needing a lot of equipment, amusingly. Is the reason pickup games were so popular in local parks. If you have a local court, basketball is rather popular for similar reasons. If you are out in the court, you are there to play and the main equipment is the net.
And, at large, any sport or group activity is good. Remember back when schools would have large tug of war contests? Tons of fun that most anyone could join in on.
Fairs were neat in the sheer variety of offering. Shame we lost those in favor of organized game nights, to me.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry that you would unironically write that about a Sport that excludes 50% of the population.
Wow, that's not my high school experience. Sports divided the student body into the popular athletic kids and the unpopular academic kids. If you celebrate the football team and not the math team, the results are predictable, and they won't be to promote math.
We had two valedictorians, one who was excellent at cross country and soccer while the other was a fantastic golfer. Our salutatorian was homecoming queen and a cheerleader too.
The top guy in my school ended up going to GA Tech on a baseball scholarship.
Being required to waste an entire evening at a football game to play for a few minutes here and there was insulting.
I'm pretty sure it's also the reason the curriculum was built almost entirely around the microscopic musical niche of marching band, rather than instruments & skills that were more likely to be useful in life beyond college.
Our marching band always got superior ratings every year in their own competitions and had a blast playing throughout all of the games. Everybody in our band seemed to have a great time with it, especially the drummers.
I suspect selection bias also plays in to all of the negativity. But variety reigns and places that had more offerings almost certainly had more success.
EDIT: Since we've hit the reply nesting limit. I still don't see how having an activity that involves so many people sidelines anyone or how a lack of that activity would improve the involvement?
I can't think of any school sanctioned activities that discriminated against any student based on their appearance, even cheer. I had giant glasses that slid down my nose, a belly and braces. Believe me, the only thing that kept me from feeling included was my own perception of myself. Having coaches and a routine that forced me to exercise and lift weights was one of the best things I ever did.
Edit: if you click the timestamp on a post, you can reply to it. :) Having an activity vacuum up all the money from any alternative sidelines folks. Did you have a thriving chess club? Go? Math or spelling bee?
I honestly don't remember. I know we did have a chess club. We had "Mathletes" that was very popular. A lot of people were involved in it.
For many small town High Schools in the US, it's not just a school-wide event, it's a town-wide event. I remember in my small town, during High School football season, the entire town mobilized around the event. Sales at local stores, drinks and catering to the field/bleachers, specials at bars post-game for the grown-ups, and so on. The football game was quite literally the most exciting and important thing going on within a 25 mile radius of the school.
As for it becoming a school-wide event, your post is only part of it: Yes, football manages to pull together a lot of the students, not just the athletes, which is positive. But it also can very negatively disrupt the academic routine. Teachers would plan lighter days and/or skip topics because "It'S FoOtBaLl DaY" and they knew everyone was mentally checked out because football game. Athletes would get special exceptions from academic expectations, get special treatment in the classroom, get treated with kid gloves discipline-wise. High School athletics was so important to the entire town that it kind of established the entire local area's social totem pole.
The last football funding discussion at the town level was whether to fund better helmets to protect against CTE or make the players' parents pay for it, so the town isn't seen supporting/encouraging brain damage to children.
That a magnet school that attracts the students of wealthy parents who are deeply invested in their kids eduction doesn't have a sport the those demographics turn their nose up at <insert low effort quip about brain damage here> is expected. I bet they have rowing and lacross to make up for it.
Maybe they have the "best overall public school systems" but looking at individual public high schools Massachusetts doesn't even make the list till #26 and then not again until #153 in the national rankings
That's just lying with statistics. Adjust for parental income and see what you get. The state has few poor and rural areas to "drag the average down" so of course they look good. VA would look good too if they had the luxury of counting just NOVA and the coast in their stats.
I'd say that more sport is generally a good thing. What matters most to me about high school learning is that IQ does not decline. Grades are just a bad IQ test and most things you learn in high school don't matter. Sport is healthier than sitting in a dim classroom all day.
I am the kind of person that likes to learn by myself so all learning in school is time spent ineffeciently (from a pure learning perspective; reading a book instead is better). But I think that for most people many things that are taught in high school are useless while more important things (understanding how social media affects you, how to declare taxes, how credit cards work) are not covered (at least here in Germany, I suspect its no different in the US).
Well, speak for yourself. It may be a very unpopular opinion here on HN but I learned a lot at school, be it elementary, middle, high or university. But I went to school in Italy, and it was a good school.
>But I think that for most people many things that are taught in high school are useless while more important things (understanding how social media affects you, how to declare taxes, how credit cards work) are not covered (at least here in Germany, I suspect its no different in the US).
This are thing that you can easily google. Why would I want to waste time teaching such trivial things while there are subjects much more interesting and intellectually engaging. Talk about inefficiency.
If someone does not want to study academic subjects it is not obliged to finish school, they can simply abandon once they reach the appropriate age (in Italy, 16 y/o): I know someone who did it and went the trade route and was very happy, but please, please, let us, academically inclined people have our own habitat.
4.0s only mean you worked really hard or, in very rare cases, are extremely intelligent. I know a guy who got a 3.2 in calc 3. Doesn’t sound very good right? Well the only reason is because his teacher was test heavy and those tests were quite difficult. My teacher was much more focused on homework so I could work harder to get a good grade. After working with him I realized we almost exactly the same amount. However, if you looked at our grades I would seem significantly “smarter” than him.
> I learned a lot at school
These aren't contradictory statements. You aren't considering all the things you forgot from school, for a very simple reason: by definition, you forgot about them and didn't learn them.
I think physical activity in school is important; but you could definitely argue that these are special treatment.
Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is.
It's sad to me that this is the way things work. Being smart and understanding the material are the important endpoints. If he's already achieving those then it's backwards to make him do lots of extra work just to jump through the hoops of exams.
The school system often fails to do that effectively, but their failure does not invalidate the goal.
Saying busy work is important because they might need study habits in five years is not motivating.
This statement contains a serious misapprehension and requires revision.
My grandfather would often say that "understanding" swimming won't help you when you're drowning. You need to be able to swim. You can't get to a point where you can swim through mathematics without solving a lot of math problems. You don't become good at something by stopping when you obtain superficial understanding. You become good through practice.
I can go read a tutorial on Rust and "understand" the words on the page, and I may even be able to explain the borrow checker to you in my own words. But I won't be able to program in Rust until I spend a lot of time practicing it.
The important endpoint is not what you can understand, but what you can do.
You can understand what study skills are, but not really apply them and experience them working. Study skills can be super important, and it's nicer to develop them early rather than just in time in your third year of undergrad, but access to challenging subjects at a challenging pace in high school or earlier is hard to come by for some. In some cases, there's a hoop jumping requirement to get more challenging work, and hoop jumping is an important life skill, so there's that; but sometimes, there's no way to get more challenging work in the school system.
In deciding how the school system should better serve its function, one must first have a proper apprehension of what that function is. It is harmful to believe this myth that "understanding the material" is the fulfillment of education. It does not identify the correct measure of success.
I think it's impossible for school to go at an appropriate pace for everybody, because all students are different and struggle with different things. Half will be bored, the other half struggling to keep up. And in my son, those halves definitely overlap.
In primary school, he did every possible gifted program they had and then some, skipped a grade, and did all his regular school work in half the time the other kids had. And now he's struggling with everything, doesn't know how to start work, finish work or plan it (despite planning being supposedly a primary focus of his school), and he gets tons of failing grades mostly because he simply doesn't submit his work or misses his tests.
Or at least I did better in school. Once I went to university and had to plan everything myself and work independently on it, that's where I started failing. Maybe it's better to fail early? I don't know.
These are the things he needs to learn, and they're probably a lot more important to the rest of his life than French grammar.
In other words, I think the kids that make it through are going to be okay.
This is another factor increasing inequality, by the way - we were exceptionally privileged to be able to have work schedules able to handle this, and a nanny who could watch our kids while we worked. Most parents wouldn't be able to do that.
Most people that home school…not so much, in my experience.
Note that this is often relative. You may find the church to be full of people with bad values. Likewise, someone who is religious may not want their kids to socialize with kids that have parents that encourage things like transgenderism in pre-teen kids.
In other news Politicians Are Far, Far Advanced In Their Schemes.
Ed.: it may sound as if I'm calling out a major conspiracy and centralized but that's far from it, I'm just saying bad actors will increasingly have their way and bad intents will group themselves and plan out the short term ahead, step by step of public degradation. But that's been happening since the first fall and destruction of Babylon anyway.
Not that this should be dismissed. But I hazard it is not a panic item.
That's often because they are dropped in a single pace system, where they are forced to sit with kids learning the alphabet, wasting valuable time, getting bored.
Individuals will tend to learn things at their own pace. Individuals will tend to learn different things at different paces.
Example: I despised history in school. The only subject I ever scored less than a B in during a quarter. I discovered it was mostly just down to how it was being taught, as a series of factual but mostly disjointed events. I found that I enjoy learning about history, as long as I'm understanding the complex causation and linking between those different events.
Example: I've hired people that had zero experience in one of our programming languages. They typically end up completing their first PR in that language within a month or two -- with assistance, of course. People tend to pick things up pretty fast when it's part of their job expectations. (I always make it clear during interviewing and the hiring process that such an expectation would be present.)
Example: My son didn't begin to talk until after his third birthday. Now he is almost entirely caught up, with only minor speech issues.
This seems... extremely slow to me.
I've been doing this as a career for fifteen years, and in that time have taken three jobs in languages I'd never used. I started with JavaScript and PHP, because that was what was in use the first place I worked. I discovered Python and slowly transitioned to it and staying away from the front-end as much as possible. In the fifteen years since then, I've taken jobs where Ruby, Scala, and Clojure were the primary languages. In no case did it take me more than about a week before I was able to make minor changes, and within a month I was focusing mostly on making sure I understood the idioms in use by the language's community. At the company where Scala was the primary language, I was asked to learn Kotlin and re-implement a core part of the application stack in that language. I was able to begin that about two months after being hired, and launched the service into production about a month later. It only took that long because the ORM that I was using lacked a feature needed to support our legacy database layout, so I had to write, test, and submit a patch for it.
The above is n=1, obviously. I feel like picking up new concepts is one of my strengths, so it wouldn't surprise me much if I were able to progress more rapidly that is typical. That's not been what I've seen, though. I've mentored several junior developers who were in similar situations, including a handful whose only experience with programming with an eight week "bootcamp". I don't recall anyone who wasn't contributing simple changes without assistance a month after joining the team.
Perhaps by "with assistance", you mean that they were guided toward what concepts were important to learn quickly, and which were better deferred? If that's the case, then I completely agree: being able to ask "Should I spend time learning this?" is probably the most impactful thing that can be provided for someone learning a new skill.
Also, some of the people I'm referring to are also of non-traditional backgrounds. Meaning they don't have a foundation in abstract computer science in order to ground such transitions.
I'm also not counting changes like, "modify this one if-statement to work this way." I'm talking about actual meaningful changes.
While I don't technically have formal education in computer science, it's obvious that my mind just kind of... works that way. That's definitely an advantage both in learning new things and in teaching.
This trend pre-dates the lockdowns. Web-induced changes in reading behavior is my #1 suspect for the culprit, though I'm also suspicious of the YA book genre—I have an unconfirmed hunch that, as it's risen to prominence, it's also chased more and more "palatable", if you will, writing styles, in the name of greater sales.
A bad teacher in adolescence can ruin an individual’s appreciation of a subject. Today’s kids are blessed with the best teachers in the world, only a few taps away.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with video content. But perhaps the recommendation algorithms need to be tweaked so that these websites have more social responsibility towards younger users.
Eh after spending the holidays with siblings around the age targeted by these things, I highly doubt the quality of Netflix material as well.
On the other hand, I was impressed by the ability of shows who’s IP is owned by massive corporations pump out material that looked worse than a HS video editing project.
Since streaming services are all terrible as far as letting you control what kids can watch, we've started just manually curating content for our kids. Took them almost no time to adjust to the new options, while if they were presented alongside Netflix, they almost never chose them. They're just as happy, and the average quality of what they watch is far higher.
[edit] I think it's already happening, but with parents. My kid is not a bad learner, it's because of covid!
The closest example to something like this happening is probably major teacher strikes. Kids in Argentina during the teachers strikes of the 1980s lost an average of 88 days of primary education and today make about 3% less per year than you would expect given their age.[0] This effect largely comes from lower income groups being less likely than usual to achieve higher levels of education and being more likely to be unemployed.
[0]: https://www.cedlas.econo.unlp.edu.ar/wp/wp-content/uploads/d...
The interesting question is whether there's a 20-year block with lower performance, or there are spikes at certain points. I imagine anyone starting professional work out of college in 2020 is effectively a year behind by now. Someone who started in 2015, not so much. I'm not sure if something similar applies to school.
I'm not suggesting the solution wouldn't work. Just interesting to think about the new problems that would arise from it. Especially given that public school doubles as "babysitting" for a lot of working parents.
Don't have a curriculum that "finishes". Put more material out there, even college-level. Maybe a student gets their PhD by 18, but they're unlikely to get it but 12. And if they do, congratulations.
I think the concepts of grade levels and even different school types (elementary, high, college), useful as they are socially, are getting in the way. We should be trying to make it a granular, smooth progression all the way up.
What I can say is I'm not surprised if people get lower scores after missing school, because a lot of exams benefit from freshness. You sit there and memorize things that are only useful for the exam, you do the exam, and then you flush the double angle formulas from your cache.
What really matters is that you have some tools, both intellectual and psychological, to keep learning new things for the rest of your life.
Let me give you an example. In 8th grade a kid will learn math that will basically put them on STEM trajectory or not. They learn Algebra that sets them up for taking high school calculus or they dont. If they dont, they may get into college, but they will have an up hill battle with STEM trying to learn it there.
Easy fix though, lower standards! Lots of districts are already figuring that out. If you take away the primary means to hold the educational system accountable then you have teachers who are unaccountable. All of the sudden all of them are good at their jobs and the teacher mafia… I mean union… can continue to demand more money for the children and won’t even have to deliver anything measurable. It’s genius!
I (27 y/o) recently discovered that my sister's (16 y/0) History teacher hasn't done more than a week of lessons in the entire year: he comes in class, turn on the IWB (Interactive Whiteboard, the last unnecessary technology creeping in school), put on a video and let them watch while she do whatever she fancies.
During the entire year, out of a 400 page History textbook, they have done 39 pages. Now it is clear why there was so much opposition to the idea of online lessons: parents could finally see that their kids were not lying when they said that the teachers were incompetent.
The worst thing is that the teachers' mafia here refuse any kind of evaluation while teachers while touting the necessity of evaluation for the students: they are basically unfirable and devoid of any form of accountability.
I could stay entire evenings recalling events that should never happen in a normal school set[1], and that would be easily prevented with some quality control: they do not even need to be good teachers, just decent persons.
[1]One of my "teachers" used the fact the a dear friend of my classmate was killed in a car crash to mock her, the only satisfaction was having the entire class scream that she was a "dumb bitch": this in a very high-income, sophisticated, old money school.
The credit will always go to some academic who discovers the obvious after the damage is done.
This is survivorship bias.
There's at least one study that tried to link loss of education with a greater long-term loss of life than the short-term losses avoided with closures... but there are a lot of holes and assumptions so it's far from reliable.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/31/962090342/did-closing-schools...
Is this referring to differences b/w students in the same schools, but of different ethnicity? I don't really understand the racial implications this article is making.
That said, it is the current atmosphere. Hard to have that as a major complaint on this article, and more against the atmosphere. Hate the game, as it were.
Plus what does it change about our understanding, or responsibility? The effect is there, it's real. What are you hoping for, the reason will turn out to be "minority kids are just naturally dumber?" Something else that makes it not a problem we need to solve?
At large, incentives and feedback loops rule. And poverty robs families of incentives and creates poor feedback loops.
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The second major problem, after chronic and extreme under-staffing, is that our didactic methods are designed (inadvertently but surely) to be slow and ineffective. If you teach children well they learn happily and rapidly. What we do instead is teach poorly and so "eduction" is slow, boring, uncool, and ephemeral (i.e. people forget what they "learned".)
Conversely my friends in Asia and California saw their kids out of school for very extended periods.
Children compulsively and under duress are exposed to so many horrible people and behaviors at school that the rest of the world seems mostly like sheltered, peaceful place by comparison.
That’s a generous take.
Not having dead parents who you infected and caused to die is an even better benefit
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/200000-us-children-lost...
What’s a child? What’s a caregiver? I’d also point out it’s not “technically most” it’s 99.7%
Children are people under 18.
> We considered parents and custodial grandparents as primary caregivers, and co-residing grandparents or older kin (aged 60–84 years) as secondary caregivers.
Lot of kids are raised by their grandparents.
It is at that (thankfully theoretical) moment when the FULL benefits of having made this current sacrifice with devolve upon them. Only then will they be able to look at the rest us and say, "We are all in this together. Please don't sacrifice me to a slow and painful death, please make the sacrifice for me instead, and, y'know, stay home and wear masks."
We care for the elderly because we love them, but if that's not enough for you, remember that the selfish reason to care for them is there in the background, waiting for you to get old and slip in the tub: we want to be cared for when we get old.
Respect your elders.
Everything has costs and efficacy levels. One quality year of life of grandma vs. the economic opportunity of a new grad. It’s not easy at all. It is easy to claim that death outweighs all else and hide behind naive humanism
I don't "support" anything the CCP does. I think that whole mode and form of government is destined to fail due to their fundamental denial of God. But that's a whole different kettle of fish, eh?
The simple truth is that I have no idea how to manage a pandemic in a city like Shanghai. I'm glad it's not my problem.
> With a population of 24.89 million as of 2021, Shanghai is the most populous urban area in China and the most populous city proper in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai
> Do I not respect my elders if I refuse that?
Do you live in Shanghai?
> One quality year of life of grandma vs. the economic opportunity of a new grad. It’s not easy at all. It is easy to claim that death outweighs all else and hide behind naive humanism
It's very easy for me: my mother is in the most-at-risk category. When her time comes I want it to be peaceful and painless, hopefully in her sleep. I do not want her to lungs to dissolve and drown her.
The "economic opportunity" can go screw. Don't sacrifice my mom for that person's extra money. There are over a half dozen empty apartments next to our house, and dozens of families living in RV's a few blocks away. I make six figures and can't afford a to buy a home. You want me to risk my mom for someone else's "economic opportunity"? And you think I'm naive?
Cop out answer. That this problem is difficult and accepting deaths will occur in any scenario is the entire point. In the very least you can’t take a moralistic hardline stance when it personally affects you and say wel it’s hard when it affects other people only.
> The "economic opportunity" can go screw. Don't sacrifice my mom for that person's extra money. There are over a half dozen empty apartments next to our house, and dozens of families living in RV's a few blocks away. I make six figures and can't afford a to buy a home. You want me to risk my mom for someone else's "economic opportunity"? And you think I'm naive?
I do think you’re naive.
Because you’re saying you make six figures and this isn’t about you. It’s about the person making low five figures, or maybe no figures. Oh no, you can’t afford a house. That sucks, but it’s also far from the bottom.
Your mom can isolate herself without a lockdown. She may get sick either way. I’m in Massachusetts currently entering its 4th wave. This stuff is endemic now. What’s the probability that your mom does not get covid with another lockdown vs the probability she does? Is there a level improvement? Is it just a delay?
What’s the probability that another lockdown causes a child to go hungry?
Not as "don't visit school".
The reason we moved to a private school. Kids under 12 should not be 9 hours at school everyday.
None of those suggestions will solve the fact that the education system itself is incredibly flawed and near collapse.
I remember feeling smart for the first time in my life when I went to a public high school. My peers were not dumb but the average level of knowledge was pretty shallow and not so wide. This was a smallish high school in a small state (2000ish kids in new england) in the early 2000s. I know its worse now.
Consider that the primary goal of marketing is to create the perception of a need/want on the part of the target segment.
I would be more interested in seeing a survey on what students have actually learned and done over the past two years (both inside and outside the standard curriculum) instead of this pervasive whining by the educational industry.
I believe most of the knowledge the kids were taught that long ago is not present in their memory anymore as if it was never taught.
I remember happily forgetting all information I learned and it took me just summer vacation to do that.
I had completely opposite expeirience from primary and to some degree secondary school. Especially on the last item. But also speaking and writing and thinking. It didn't develop me in those areas. If anything it stunted me for life. I had to painstakingly recover from it after it was finally over and I'm sure I'll never recover 100%.
Yes, more anxiety inducing pointless education is what kids need. I like how they're trying to sell the idea of measuring students in 'weeks of instruction' as if they're mechanical objects.
More hours of education doesn't make kids smarter. It might make them more knowledgeable in certain subject areas (many of which are completely useless to both children and adults), but it definitely gives them anxiety. The education establishment is trying to encroach on ever more of our kids and young adult's lives, and to what end?
Let's get back to being human. Let's go outside for 7 hours a day, we can probably limit education instruction to just 3-4 hours 3 or 4 days per week, and we'll have more functional adults.
This is a very sad truth.
We are very fortunate and were able to afford private tuition for our son along with more free time to put into home schooling during the lockdowns to ensure he didn't fall behind.
Unfortunately a lot cannot afford private tutors nor have free time they can commit to consistent home schooling so it will further separate those on lower incomes. Something we will not truly see for maybe a decade or more when younger kids (my sons age) enter higher education. This is something I feel strongly about and have written to our local education governmental body about but all I have had back is generic soundbites :(
Part of me is wondering if I should just take this into my own hands and try to organise something with the local schools and social centres directly for weekend and summer programmes.
The same has happened everywhere, from factory production to restaurant meals and hotel stays, which limits our ability to pay teachers to do this - in order to pay them more in real terms they have to be able to buy more, but the amount of stuff available to buy isn't even enough to support people's existing quality of life. Any attempt to pay teachers generous overtime to teach extra would have to come out of other peoples' real-terms income in a world where that is already dropping for most, and the bigger the program the more painful and broadly felt that would be.
In the US household income is one of the most reliable ways to predict academic success. We're already seeing Covid widen some of these existing gaps.
This is also kind of irrelevant to the parent article. All kids lost out during the pandemic. Without additional efforts beyond what was happening pre-pandemic, everyone will slide down a little.
I don't have any magical solutions other than that. I do understand that being able to provide resources for a student in early life is directly influenced by wealth and greatly improves the odds of success. How do we encourage this among parents who don't have this wealth? My mom used to wake me up early on weekends and put me up on the counter, making me recite times tables. Small things like that, that can help equalize the playing field because they are not directly tied to wealth, should be encouraged for parents.
Parents aren't often educated well themselves. They don't know how to teach anything to anyone.
Some of the working poor don't even have time to cook their kids reasonable meals.
Locally we're experiencing a bus driver shortage (more like a pay shortage), and the school district knows that on days without buses... some kids don't show up because there's no one home that can take the time off of work to bring them to school.
Parents with the education, time, and money can educate their own children. Outside of the upper-middle class... it's rare to encounter parents who have all of those.
If we were to rely on parents for education, we'd be setting half the country back by a good 50 years. Literacy rates would absolutely plummet.
Taking responsible for education doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself. You see that it happens and accept the personal cost.
Your assumptions about me is not only wrong it's irrelevant. Not only do I have more experience raising children than any two men you are likely to know (I have many), I've lived among much much poorer people than 99% of hacker news. In places that struggle with running water and electricity to say nothing of Internet (none).
You're feeding me a bunch of excuses. Yes, some people struggle and it can impact their ability to do it. But where there is a will there's a way. Good parents find a way, it has much less to do with wealth and much much more to do with good family structure - which even poor people can do perfectly fine.
Cause and effect are often reversed. You aren't going to have good families because you are wealthy. Families get wealth when they are good families.
When children are well loved and have good characters they will prosper. They will understand good families and tend to have good families themselves.
A lack of love creates behavioral problems that can dominate a life and can easily be passed into the next generation. A society centered around school life will not provide children with love in a life devoid of it.
Society can't fix the problems at home but it can certainly stop getting in the way.
In any case, I have no doubt kids will catch up.
"Fine" is relative. Individuals will continue on as always... and many won't notice any change... but this will likely be an ongoing measurable difference when society is more cumulatively studied.
Oh, I forget to say that actually we humans live or in dictatorships of in only-formal democracies.......................
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx
For example, in 2021 only 46% were at least “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education. Pre-COVID numbers were only slightly better.
But if you ask a parent about their child’s education 73% are at least “somewhat satisfied” and pre-COVID the numbers are about 5-10 points higher, indicating the vast majority of parents are fine with the education their kids are receiving.
This is because of how public school works in the US. Yes, there are federal and state standards that dominate the curriculum but because so much of it is funded by local taxes, school boards do have some leeway in terms of how things get shaped. So maybe you’re appalled at what’s being taught in Texas schools, but why should you care if your kid goes to school in the Chicago suburbs?
To me this says the schools are worse than they though. Now that they can sit in on the classes they see what's actually being taught and don't like it.
It's not much an accepted topic here, because here is still a platform someone own, but did you see the curios evolution of downvotes? Anytime there are anti-neoliberal posts they get quick upvotes to be subsequently downvoted, often without commenting about why. I can't say it's part of a scoring propaganda technique to hide certain thoughts to many others, I have no data, have done no check to confirm but that's a behavior I've start seeing time ago and regularly observed it.
On general media we know how things works anytime there is a "different" opinion, immediately put together with improbable extremists, ridiculed etc...
I'm curious if others have seen something equivalent and want to dig a bit more substantially.