[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-...
[2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
I keep seeing people arguing that school isn’t important, but also against things like school choice and I really wonder what’s motivating them.
If you don't think the default school is important, why would you care if a kid switched?
--
If the response was that it's too expensive to allow them to switch that'd be logical, but I don't think that's the common response. Tbf I am not really aware of people matching the initial premise either.
Edit: formatting
My understanding of school choice is that there is little to no difference in the overall money spent. It is just that it is assigned to each student.
If the student population were then to remain in the same schools, nothing changes. It is only when students move to other schools and take the money with them that there is a change.
ok, I would expect some significant change in investment because of needs of bureaucracy, IT systems etc.
I mean if kids go by default to school they should go to, then there has to be a process for kids that want to change, there has to be a way to register and keep that knowledge of change through the next sequence of that child's schooling etc.
I would expect it to cost something noticeable, and that it might also cost more or less depending on which part of the U.S. one were in.
The processes and tools to support this are already in place, we're only talking about scale.
There certainly would be a significant amount of disruption over the first five or so years as kids move around, schools would need to figure out expansion/contraction of facilities and faculties.
>I keep seeing people arguing that school isn’t important, but also against things like school choice and I really wonder what’s motivating them.
so what did I say, I said >If you think school isn't important why would you want to spend the extra money on school choice that such a program would entail?
for which I got three downvotes, because reasons I guess.
someone said it wouldn't be expensive, I said ok it seems to me like logically it would but I could be wrong, here are my points why I think it would be expensive. The guy above the post of mine you're replying to said it wouldn't be expensive for any of those reasons but there would be a lot of disruptions the first few years, and I said ok, so then a person who thought schools were unimportant wouldn't want you to shift schools for that reason, because who wants to deal with a bunch of disruptions in an unimportant system? (and in my world systems that have lots of disruptions tend to be expensive)
I think the thread should be pretty clear.
> someone said it wouldn't be expensive, I said ok it seems to me like logically it would but I could be wrong
This is information you can easily find. Charter schools for example spend 61% of what public schools do per pupil per year on average in the US.
But no real danger is easily verified by the stats. Mortality in kids and young adults is a very small percentage.
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
Asymptomatic spread and a lack of clarity on whether it was even "airborne" plagued our early efforts to contain it.
That being said, the lockdown-related learning loss is also a disaster, and one that will disproportionately impact disadvantaged kids and their communities.
I'm not sure what we could have done once the virus entered wild mammal populations and began circulating in places with no public health infrastructure. This happened pretty early on. The Omicron variants came out of mice populations in South Africa.
But I'm not sure why the direction of spread would be one way though, that's highly unusual.
> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare, particularly when prevention strategies are in place. An Australian study of 39 COVID-19 cases among 32 students and seven staff traced contacts across 28 schools and six early childhood centers and found only 33 secondary positive cases (28 students and five staff members) out of 3,439 close child contacts and 385 close staff contacts.58, 59 Several contact tracing studies have found limited student-to-student transmission in schools.47, 54, 60, 61
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
To date only about 1200 people 18 and under have died from/with COVID, and those numbers were far lower before the B variants.
A study about Australian schooling and children probably doesn't hold as much here in the US. My family involves lots of teachers. The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.
>The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.
What the research suggests is that you're probably seeing kids under 12 getting COVID from adults.
You can poke around google scholar and see for yourself. Public health articles are quite readable.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7311007/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S018844092...
[3] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ppul.25344
Are you suggesting that children can't learn these skills from adults, but must learn them from other children for some reason?
It is well established that normal development REQUIRES contact with other children. Any specialist in early childhood development or education will tell you this. I'm in no way an expert here, but I've never once seen an expert claim that adult contact substitutes for peer contact in developing these skills.
I suspect that the truth is that children need play and interaction to build social skills but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant. The challenge in the pandemic of course is that the parents did not really have capacity to engage in those activities due to their own jobs and Video Conferencing is a very poor substitute. But suggesting that it has to be other children is probably incorrect. It's just a hypothesis on my part though.
I think you're probably underestimating how much you learned this from each other.
> but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant.
Again, this very much runs contrary to the general consensus about childhood development. If you disagree, then you need to bring some facts and research to the argument.
In fact a cursory survey of the research I can publicly get access to indicates that parent-child, or teacher-child interactions are considered very essential for moral and social development and there is very little mention that I can find of inter-child interactions as a critical part. Most of the research that I can find highlights the importance of adult-child interactions. If you can point me to some studies that counteract that I'm interested.
Contra studies on the importance of inter-child interactions: * https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2187-3_...
* https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Child-care-and-childre...
Study indicating that most of the assessment instruments supporting inter-child interactions and their importance is flawed: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001440298305000310
I admit I smell a little bullshit on this as there are a number of red flags here.
What constitutes "normal" is a subjective judgment relative to a culture. More culture-neutral professions use metrics like "health" in medicine, which are far less loaded, ie. if a particular environment leads to self-destructive behaviours, that's an "unhealthy" environment; but there is notion of a "normal" environment or a "normal" lifestyle. Since you seem fairly adamant that this sort of socializing is crucial, you will have to clarify if you meant "healthy development" rather than "normal development", because the former may be of interest but the latter is of no particular interest.
Furthermore, specialists in early childhood development and education would of course be chock full of good advice, but that advice is based on evidence that was also almost certainly studied within a specific cultural context. I'm not at all convinced that such advice constitutes general principles on how any healthy children must be raised.
If you have citations I'd certainly like to read them.
> a specific cultural context
This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.
If you insist that I have to provide citations to convince you of the consensus here are a few. Vocabulary[2]. An article specifically about the effects of school closures[3]. I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?
[1]https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002456.htm
[2]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050.2020.17...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
Yes, milestones for western cultures.
> This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.
Cultural context has little bearing on brain development or language acquisition? Sorry, that's crazy talk. I was raised in a bilingual household, so by any quantitative metric I had twice the language acquisition of all of my peers when entering school, and my nieces and nephews are actually trilingual. Culture has a huge influence on milestones.
"Brain development" is too vague a term to meaningful respond to. Also, "childhood play" doesn't mean "play only among children" it means "play with children". Adults can easily play with children. I do it all of the time.
> I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?
Yes, I have seen literally no reason to conclude that children must interact with other children to grow up healthy. As for your citations:
> [1]https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002456.htm
A review of normal biological maturation of homo sapiens (uncontroversial), sprinkled with a plethora of cultural expectations around maturity needed for schooling and other western expectations which neither hold for other cultures, nor are they some kind of mark of a pinnacle of human growth. I could easily see some of these milestones change in the next 20 years as we better grasp what's happening during human maturation.
> [2]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050.2020.17...
Its own synopsis says this is a qualitative study. That's little better than an anecdote to pique curiosity for further study. It proves nothing substantial, and certainly not that this child wouldn't have learned even faster if interacting only with adults, who naturally have an even better grasp of language than children.
> [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
This does not prove your thesis, quite the contrary. Per the abstract, "High school students from low-income neighborhoods suffer a learning loss of 0.4 standard deviations after a one-year school closure, whereas children from high-income neighborhoods initially remain unscathed."
In other words, children that have parents with good jobs (or a parent at home), or other adults that are around to supervise and interact with do just fine, it's only children that are left to their own devices that suffer learning loss. Where is the evidence that peer interaction is critical, which is what you claimed?
There is no evidence that the "great equalization" effect of school has to do with peer interaction at all, it's equally compatible with the hypothesis that poorer kids do better in a more supervised environment where they have to act within certain boundaries enforced by adults, which they otherwise wouldn't have with parents that are abusive, neglectful or have to work too much to put food on the table.
There's also considerable evidence that after school programs reduce crime because they spend less unsupervised time with peers, which reduces delinquent behaviour. In other words, the more time children spend with responsible adults the better off they tend to be, and the more unsupervised time they spend with peers, the more delinquent they tend to be.
So in conclusion, I see no strong, causal connection between peer interaction and healthy development. Positive human interactions matter of course (preferably diverse), but not necessarily peer interactions, which is what you are claiming.
You aren’t pointing to any evidence that peer socialization isn’t really important.
Absent any evidence I have no reason to accept your assertion that children "require" such interactions, particularly since it makes no sense to me. As I said, positive human interactions are clearly essential as the negative effects of isolation are dramatic, but I see no reason why peer interactions specifically are essential and there's no comparably clear, strong signal as with isolation.
> They are basically a tunnel for spreading from one family to another
This wasn't and generally hasn't been the case for children under 12 as the aforementioned research points out. Spread generally goes from adults to each-other and to children and rarely in the other direction. It was a very poor rationale for closing schools, especially elementary schools. These kids have missed out on critical milestones in social and psychological development that far outweigh any known risk they face from COVID.
One of the worst things that happened the last two years is this myopic focus on exactly one thing with zero regard to other competing problems. Everything has costs. Keeping kids out of school for a year plus has costs. I am fairly certain history will show that the costs to children vastly outweigh the marginal benefits gained from closing schools to "reduce the spread".
It turns out there are other problems in the world than just a myopic fixation to covid... the inability for "the experts" to balance covid against the rest of human existence is one of the greatest fuckups of our time.
Even in other OECD nations, they kept kids in school and mostly unmasked to facilitate learning.
- Italy [0] - Germany [1] - Ireland [2] - Spain [3]
I could go on and on but everyone who managed to travel globally during 2021 knows this is completely untrue.
[0] https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/italy-unveils-covid-green-...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-angela-merkel-coronavir...
[2] https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/movie-review/movie-review-...
[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/01/21/spai-j21.html
This is an important point in the United States. Many kids have absolutely NO order in their lives outside of school (due to absent parents, economic hardships, etc, etc). Many schools don't fully understand this, and do a pretty poor job of serving the kids, but I've seen public schools that fully understand what their kids need, and do their best to meet those needs. We can argue forever as to whether public schools should be responsible for the sort of things they are forced (by reality) to implement, but without the schools, these kids would be totally lost.
Are there other countries where this isn't the case?
The handful of other western countries I am very familiar with this is also the case.
It’s also important to note that the original article does touch on some of these points, but it explains that the situation is different, and different points are also made, eg:
> Schools in a quarter of countries still have no plans for catch-up, says unicef
> A quarter of poor countries are not keeping track of how many pupils have returned to school. Going after dropouts while there is still a chance to tempt them back is urgent. “It could be hopeless in six months”
Also - while what you say may be true, and there may be some merit to a lifestyle that does not depend on such "daycare", such a lifestyle was also not possible under lockdowns.
https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/insights/economy/impact-of-c...
This is a general trend in (at least North American) education systems. An approach I liken to thermometer removal as a means of combating fever. If outcomes aren't measured, then are failed approaches at education reform really failed? How do you know? It's ingenious in a self-defeating kind of way.
That and the focus on point in time test results to evaluate a school rather than analyzing results taken from multiple periods. X% of Y grade students at grade level in year Z doesn't tell you much about the quality of the school in year Z, unless you know where those students were at in year Z - 1.
Honestly, school has done nothing to me other than provide socialization opportunities.
"There's plenty of data showing that time spent in school does not strongly correlate with learning,"
I have issues with your first source who I believe has seriously misrepresented the data, made accusations of bias without providing evidence, was carefully selective about sources, and has a self admitted bias. Let's get into some parts of his paper.
---------------- [The Author makes his points]
Section 2: In the Benezet experiment, a school district taught no math at all before 6th grade (around age 10-11). Then in sixth grade, they started teaching math, and by the end of the year the students were just as good at math as traditionally-educated children with five years of preceding math education.
the author thinks this is related to the age of the student which I personally think is a heavily weighted variable in learning. However this only means that there is a limit to the amount of time lost (the kids caught up) and age is a factor
He then goes on to New Orleans in which they lost one to two years of school, went back, and outperformed their peers, but the author also notes that they switched to charter schools which (not shown in your reference) have a noticeable impact. So again, there's another variable besides time spent. [a]
Additional points - immigrants and homework (homework having no value i.e. homework is like being school and less homework doesn't hurt)). These do appear to be valid towards his theory
He then mentions home schooling - He shows that by the time kids get to college they have equaled their peers. The author says that home schooling isn't like school because some (I hope some meaningful amount) parent's aren't actually teaching their kids, only answering questions (his words something about unschool). If home schooling was like school then this would work against him because it's time in a school like environment and those kids matched their peers. He provides no evidence that a significant amount of parents are operating in a way that is unlike school. I assume the only way that would be valid was if the kids made the learning decisions themselves.
-----------------[Author talks about studies that worked against him]
I stopped reading after the intro to section 4 which I will now quote-
"The strongest counterevidence to my position comes from a body of literature on the effect of other long-term school closures, mostly from disasters but occasionally from teacher strikes.
I’m inherently skeptical of these, because I’m suspicious that education researchers love finding that education has huge effects, that any disruption to education is a disaster, and that kids should be in school much more. This is in addition to the usual bias for positive results. Still, the studies exist and we should look at them."
To be fair , as stated, he does start to look into them. However he had no issues with using studies from researches that worked for his theory but if they work against it then he's skeptical.
So let's get into his section 3 though where he tries to poke holes in the studies that work against him.
His response to counter studies 1 - The more snow days, the less learning - His counter is that in the study the only snow days that mattered were in late February and since they tested in March the kids were missing test prep.
My thoughts - Prior he never questioned or looked at when school loss happened as a variable and how it effects learning. Prepping for a test is still studying the material I don't think it's fair to now start digging into the time of the year when that happened to counter studies that work against him
He does offer a decent counter after this by citing a study in MA that didn't show less learning from snow days
His response to counter studies 2 - Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (US) - He says this in response " don’t entirely understand their methodology, so I can’t critique them very well, but I have to admit I’m skeptical of them anyway" Again he states he is skeptical for no other reason because he doesn't understand the methodology and it goes against him
His response to counter studies 2 Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (Argentina) - he says "I can’t find any specific problems with this study. It just seems extreme to me" he then basically accuses the study of being misleading because he doesn't understand it.
------------------------[My final thoughts]
I'm going to stop. Basically for your first reference the author didn't look into this with an open mind, admits his own biases (because I guess he's a hero for doing that), and then looks negatively upon studies because researches want to find positive results for schools but only if those researches results go against him, otherwise he accepts them
In my opinion this person had an agenda and made the data(studies) work for him. Admitting his own bias is fine but that's only a small part. It appears he hasn't overcome it.
[a] https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/charter-schools-rese...
It's ironic that he repeatedly calls out "eliminating Gauss" as a useless factoid that doesn't matter to anyone, but he also worries a lot about AI safety and broadly fusses a lot about ML. Getting a solid grasp of linear algebra is absolutely necessary for understanding ML, so you'd think that "eliminating Gauss" would sit at the top of his hierarchy.
That's plainly false. There is no such thing as "purely genetic". If you control for environmental factors that influence the expression of genes correlated with intelligence though, such as nutrition in childhood and exposure to certain chemicals, then the factors that determine intelligence are mostly genetic. This is just obvious. It's practically tautological to say, "all else being equal between two people, their only differences must be genetic".
Where there's some uncertainty is what environmental factors actually influence intelligence and to what extent they matter. Some people think school improves intelligence, but this isn't borne out by robust evidence; meaning, the genetic influence is much, much larger and school's effect is hard to measure.
Here's a thought experiment: if you redirected all the funding for public education to eliminating childhood poverty and food insecurity, would the resulting adults be more or less intelligent? The answer is not at all obvious. Certainly it makes for more "educated" adults by some metrics, but more intelligent adults can presumably educate themselves much better, which seriously undercuts the alleged value of schooling.
Err, I meant to say that "certainly schooling makes for more educated adults..."
From your link, charter schools don't really outperform public schools so I'm not sure that this has meaningful impact on his argument.
> He provides no evidence that a significant amount of parents are operating in a way that is unlike school.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you can think otherwise. In your experience, do students have the same relationship with their teachers and school administrators as they do with their parents? Definitely not in my experience, and I expect in yours as well, so clearly the default assumption must be that there is more diversity in homeschooling than in public or charter schooling.
Another line of argument is that there is clear evidence that smaller class sizes are correlated with better outcomes, possibly because lesson plans are more catered to individual strengths and weaknesses, and there is no smaller class size than one-on-one or one-on-two in a parent-child scenario. Here again, the default assumption is that there is more diversity in home schooling approaches.
> I stopped reading after the intro to section 4 which I will now quote- [...] To be fair , as stated, he does start to look into them. However he had no issues with using studies from researches that worked for his theory but if they work against it then he's skeptical.
He literally explained the reason in the part you quoted: pro-education researchers have incentives to find schooling is essential, but researchers who don't have this incentive therefore don't have have this bias (and researchers who do have this incentive but don't find positive results are very trustworthy). It's the same reason we ask researchers to cite their conficts of interest on every paper, because we all recognize that this does bias results. I don't see a problem here, as long as the skepticism isn't extreme/disproportionate.
> His response to counter studies 2 - Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (US) - He says this in response " don’t entirely understand their methodology, so I can’t critique them very well, but I have to admit I’m skeptical of them anyway" Again he states he is skeptical for no other reason because he doesn't understand the methodology and it goes against him
Per above, the default should be skepticism given the vested interest. Secondly, Scott does this sort of publication analysis a lot, particularly in his practice as a psychologist, so if he doesn't understand a methodology then that's suspicious on its own.
> His response to counter studies 2 Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (Argentina) - he says "I can’t find any specific problems with this study. It just seems extreme to me" he then basically accuses the study of being misleading because he doesn't understand it.
Extreme outliers should immediately raise suspicion. If a signal is that strong then we should see it everywhere, but we don't, ergo we should be suspicious that this was either a statistical fluke or some kind of shenanigans.
This sort of argument is what has led to the retraction of lots of ivermectin papers over the past year and a half. The reasoning is sound. It's not an outright refutation, more a recognition that a single paper is insufficient to accept a conclusion absent corroboration, and we should investigate such strong signals that fail corroboration for fraud.
The author uses home schooling as part of his arguments but doesn't show that either mostly different or mostly the same as being in school for the factors that matter.
I assume what kids are missing isn't being in a specific building, it's probably instructor lead education in certain subjects. However he doesn't discuss what defines school
He does mention "unschooling" which is student controlled and I'll accept that as being different enough from school for his argument.
The problem each parent operates differently and even if there are groups he doesn't show proof that unschooling or the similar is the majority of home schooling
More briefly he makes an assumption that home schooling is different from school in the way that matters when you miss it
Similar example. I'm reviewing a complex hand tool and say about its use-
"you turn it right to tighten but left to tighten, i dunno maybe I don't get it, let's move on"
To some people reading the implication is that the hand tool doesn't work,is wrong, or confusing to use.
If he has mistrust why not attempt to prove one or more of the studies were fake, used inaccurate data, or came to the wrong conclusions based on the data?
Because by simply mentioning the mistrust and bias, AT BEFORE he even discusses the counter arguments, WHILE ONLY providing potential motive as evidence, he manipulates the reader by leaving a bad taste.
Why even mention your mistrust at all? How is that useful in this scholarly article when you don't offer proof? In my opinion manipulation
The more I think about this article the more it just feels like someone so determined to prove his theory instead of using the proper scientific method and being open minded.
Because their research is all about the importance of education. It's like asking whether a pharmaceutical company would strive to publish negative results of their drugs; generally, not if they can avoid it! This is why recent pushes for open data and pre-registration are so important.
> If he has mistrust why not attempt to prove one or more of the studies were fake, used inaccurate data, or came to the wrong conclusions based on the data?
Because that's not the goal of the post. The goal here was to develop a general, informed opinion on a topic by performing a broad review of the state of evidence. Misinterpreting or dismissing one study here or there will not change the conclusion much: if there are strong signals in the data then other studies will surely show it, and if there are no strong signals, then you won't know to trust this one study over the others which found no such signal.
> Because by simply mentioning the mistrust and bias, AT BEFORE he even discusses the counter arguments, WHILE ONLY providing potential motive as evidence
He doesn't provide only motive as evidence, the other studies that dispute the "huge effects" that education researchers seem to find are evidence that these huge effects are not real, hence the suspicion. The whole post to the point where he starts discussing this literature consists of a boatload of evidence that should make you skeptical of those studies.
> Why even mention your mistrust at all? How is that useful in this scholarly article when you don't offer proof?
I'm not sure what sort of "scholarly article" you think this is, or what that term means to you. Hopefully my elaboration above cleared this up. This hand-wringing over one study is just an indication that the evidence is simply not that strong.
I think Scott looked into this with an open mind, as he usually does, but the evidence is simply not that convincing. For low income kids public education is a huge win, probably mostly due to the structure and safe environment it provides, but the evidence for its educational value is just poor.