I'm another poster who did the same thing and I'm also very glad.
> Ultimately I don't understand why so many parents keep taking potshots at remote learning a couple of years afterwards.
Because, as documented in tfa, it was a disaster in terms of learning outcomes.
> If you were able to throw pots of money at the problem, good for you.
Meanwhile, poor parents who weren't, their kids suffered learning losses.
> Can someone explain to me the logic that thinks test scores for young children at specific should keep going up?
I was sympathetic to this line of argument until I looked up what good scores are generally held to be. This is a situation where the national averages are around a third proficient. Clearly a lot of room for growth. If we were in the 80s or 60s, sure, why not. We'd probably maxed things out and demaning additional gains might be squeezing blood from a stone. But ~30% proficient? We can probably do better.
Not even poor parents. The suburbs I mentioned (Fairfax and Montgomery) are among the most affluent in the country. Their schools were closed for two years or almost two years.
Yes, to deal with a highly contagious virus that mysteriously seems to keep being absent from the conversation.
Schools are notoriously bad about hygiene. Currently, RSV, which is completely unrelated to Covid is spreading; and stretching some children's hospitals to their limits [1].
I know that public health and education are probably two different ideas in your mind, and the narrative of incompetent people in charge of your child's education is much easier to throw around; but I invite you and other commenters to consider the case that maybe they might just be related.
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[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1130764314/childrens-hospital...
On point 1, it would be helpful to look at the public health outcomes of districts that closed for two years vs. those that didn't. I don't know the answer on that one, although I do know my kid's private school was open for much of that time without anyone being hospitalized.
On point 2, we "only" went back to 2003 levels. "Only" 20 years worth of losses doesn't convince me.
On point 3: Yes? Tests are to a certain extent arbitrary. But these ones show a clear bad trend. You could ask the children to paint pictures of clowns as a test and if the number went down it would probably be a bad sign. These tests are less arbitrary than that, and lower reading scores in particular are correlated with a higher high school drop out rate.
You could argue that "bad things happened but it was worth it." But you can't reasonably argue that "nothing bad happened and the tests are all bunk and also it was totally worth it."
What I am arguing elsewhere in the thread is probably more along these lines:
- Something bad happened due to a once-in-a-lifetime event. Education probably did suffer, quite badly due to this once-in-a-lifetime event.
- It is hard to definitively say that specific problems happened due to specific causes in the cause of such an event
- So, if you try to bolster your preconceived notions about public schools with poorly-controlled data like a 2% dip in some standardized test scores, I'm going to point that out. If you say stuff like "Well, the data points out...", you have to be able to defend the data.
You can't just consider the intention of a policy, but whether it worked.
One might say "well we had no idea it wouldn't work," but that isn't true. Public health officials had no rational reason to expect closing schools for 1-2 years would prevent kids from getting such a contagious disease. It was only rationalized as a short term measure that stretched to years.
Proof please? Most schools reopened "properly" in our area after kids could get their vaccines, and all the adults in the school were vaccinated.
So I don't think 100% of the kids got Covid, and certainly the intended goal of the shutdowns, which was not to prevent the kids from getting Covid, but to prevent them from being carriers for the disease to a much larger percentage of the population failed.
School closures were not justified (at least publicly) as just reducing spread to others. Most areas had bars and restaurants open with schools closed. If it was just about reducing overall spread--that is a pretty unjustifiable stance to take.
> I resent that I now have to pay attention to school board elections to vote out everyone who was on it.
Voting out everyone on a school board because they implemented what were reasonable public health-based restrictions at the time to avoid the virulent contagious disease is a good way to get anti-science people on your school board. Even if it feels satisfying to you to vote them out in the short term, it is...not what you might want in the long term.
Plus, once-in-a-100-years or not, a substantial portion of a generation of kids spent their formative years in a world that enforced physical separation, covered faces and general agoraphobia for a world bearing an unseen, airborne and contagious horror (with a fatality rate between 0.001 and 0.003 for ages 0-19, established since late 2020[1]). Children born during the pandemic have already demonstrated decreased IQs, and that's just in the short-term. We're probably going to see an upward trend in childhood neuroses and maladaptive social behavior in the years to come.
It's not remote learning that is being discussed here, it's remote learning during a pandemic. That's what repeatedly keeps being ignored. We have never had a proper experiment with remote and in-person learning side-by-side when, you know, there weren't headlines about the number of deaths in the paper every day.
> Plus, once-in-a-100-years or not, a substantial portion of a generation of kids spent their formative years in a world that enforced physical separation, covered faces and general agoraphobia for a world bearing an unseen, airborne and contagious horror (with a fatality rate between 0.001 and 0.003 for ages 0-19, established since late 2020[1]). Children born during the pandemic have already demonstrated decreased IQs, and that's just in the short-term. We're probably going to see an upward trend in childhood neuroses and maladaptive social behavior in the years to come.
Yeah, this is all fair and should be discussed – I just don't understand why a 2% decrease in average scores during a pandemic is considered the gold standard of evidence for it.
> I am...glad you were able to afford expensive private schooling to shield your kid from the effects of the deadly pandemic that led to more than a million deaths in the US?
Protecting your children from external risks is one of the most essential qualities of a parent, yes. I'm not sure what you're trying to convey here.
> Ultimately I don't understand why so many parents keep taking potshots at remote learning a couple of years afterwards. If you were able to throw a ton of money at the problem, good for you. Meanwhile, children and adults were both greatly affected by the pandemic and many were worried about, you know, being alive tomorrow. People lost their families.
Yes, precisely. This is an important issue that the parent commenter was raising: "Remote learning was a complete joke." The well-off are able to shield their children from this, but the average person isn't. Are you suggesting that it should be taboo to discuss how this will widen the class divide?
> Trivializing the knock-on effect of this once-in-100-years thing over some standardized test scores that are back to 2003 levels [1] makes no sense to me.
In what sense was the parent commenter "trivializing" the pandemic? Would you agree that your comment trivializes the concerns that less-affluent parents might have that their children will be at a marketplace disadvantage compared to two decades of graduates preceding them?
I perceived the parent as bragging that their expensive private school was better than the public schools that other people send their kids to, by claiming that the option available to regular people was "a joke". There was no mention of anything like "I wish this was an option for everyone".
> Yes, precisely. This is an important issue that the parent commenter was raising: "Remote learning was a complete joke." The well-off are able to shield their children from this, but the average person isn't. Are you suggesting that it should be taboo to discuss how this will widen the class divide?
Not at all, class divides are important to investigate! But you should have proper evidence and data. I am suggesting that the "evidence" here (a 2% decrease in standardized test scores that are not well-controlled) is not particularly significant compared to the evidence that Covid was a deadly public disease which necessitated school closures and remote learning.
> In what sense was the parent commenter "trivializing" the pandemic?
By saying that "remote learning was a joke". To me, this is like saying "earthquake-related evacuations were a joke, because normal kids' scores dropped 2% during the earthquake. Oh, and mine didn't, because I had a private plane!".
> ...their children will be at a marketplace disadvantage compared to two decades of graduates preceding them?
My comment is simply saying that you don't have data to suggest anything of the sort; so you should stop simply insisting that they are true and calling reasonable public health procedures "a joke" as a result.
Every chance to record and shares true facts, we should.
Sure, but it seems to me that we should do so in a controlled and rigorous fashion. A few questions:
- Are we sure that the tests are exactly the same difficulty each year? If not, what is the falloff?
- Who decides the difficulty?
- How do we think about tradeoffs between grasping concepts correctly versus doing test prep?
- Do the increased test scores from 2003 to 2020 actually translate into meaningfully better further education or quality of life on average?
If you are making confident statements about "test scores dropped and this is bad for children", you should know the answers to all these questions.
I feel like most parents handwave this sort of stuff away when it comes to children's test scores and always assume that it's perfect – but would start asking this kind of stuff very quickly, for example, if they were asked to, say, do a similar test as adults to determine what their bonus for last year should be.
That doesn't sound right to me. My perception is that the value of a rigorous education is actually nearly universally valued, but how/whether children should have access to that education equitably is quite disputed.
The liberal refrain is "High-scorers just had rich parents to hire them a tutor!", as if the tutor's instruction didn't actually uplift the children and make them stronger.
My own institution did not require standardized tests for a couple of years, mostly because of Covid, and it's been a bit of a mess. Test scores turn out to be good for placement in math classes.
His point is that they got in and feel like a failure when they could have gone to a different school and done just fine and not felt that way. And that, as such, affirmative action was actually having a negative effect on minorities.
Anyhow, it's a tough problem and I don't know the right answer and don't envy anyone having to set admission policies.
The arguments are next week!
I think the anti-SAT argument is indeed misguided though. As it stands, the SAT is actually the best way for a poor kid from a bad school district to stand out - you can't take the grades at face value, and academic extracurriculars are substantially more expensive.
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
Absent test scores all you have is GPA which can be gamed and is impossible to compare against other applicants and extracurriculars which will be dominated by wealthy kids with engaged parents. so that smart kid from a poor family in West Virginia has no way to show they can compete with the kid from Greenwich on the Lacrosse, Sailing and Model UN teams.
My province had a curfew (another bad idea, to be fair), and even then we still kept schools open (after the first 2 months of the pandemic, and that was longer than a lot of other places). Keeping them closed for more than a year had nothing to do with keeping people alive, or we would have seen massive differences between children death rates in the US vs. the rest of the world.
Uhh, citation needed?
At least in terms of population, the two biggest countries in the world with a population greater than the US are China and India. I know for a fact (having family there) that schools in India were closed for longer than the US.
Perhaps in China things were better, but they also have totalitarian control over all your movements. Would you accept you and your whole family being monitored at all times as the cost of having your kid in school?
In any case, Western Europe and Canada did not close schools for more than a year and also didn't monitor everyone's movements like china did. And I assume it wasn't because of careless disregard for students and teachers. So that kind of invalidates your original point; closing schools for years is not a normal, necessary consequence of a pandemic. It was a policy decision that has not yielded any results, even if political rhetoric makes it hard to admit (in the US)
Your response immediately after the question indicates that you understood what the citation request was for. I was asking for a citation that schools in most of the world were open during Covid.
> Western Europe and Canada did not close schools...
So now we are down to a minority of the world population, incidentally in a political environment very different from the US, where basic pandemic precautions like masks and later vaccines were highly politicized.
> closing schools for years is not a normal, necessary consequence of a pandemic.
Just like frustrated commenters in the rest of the threads, you are continually moving goalposts to prove your preconceived point.
The reality is that there is no normal consequence of a pandemic, and yes, the US is completely different from the rest of the world in terms of how stuff works here. And no, schools were not "closed", teachers worked in the midst of a pandemic to try to deliver remote education with minimal training about how to do it. It is unsurprising that some problems would result.
Combined with the poor testing practices, we felt really unsupported. Not to mention, from pure observation of my family, I suspect we are some of the major carriers for viruses: children get it at school, bring it at home, then we spread to other adults.
FTFY
These are the trade-offs. They need to be reckoned with. The death toll from the pandemic is only the beginning of the fallout and as one of the only countries to keep schools closed as long as we did, we now have to deal with that. And to dimiss it outright as being trivial is to cast aside the most vulnerable who were NOT able to afford private school.
This is poorly-informed repetition, typically caused by news cycles about Sweden, a country with a population comparable to Ohio.
At least in terms of population, the two biggest countries in the world with a population greater than the US are China and India. I know for a fact (having family there) that schools in India were closed for longer than the US. Chinese schools are still closing sporadically [1], so presumably they were doing so during the thick of the pandemic as well.
If you are that worried about get your kids the education to enable critical thinking, it is probably wise to implement some yourself when discussing these issues.
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[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-12/shanghai-...
Although I think your point that our only company in regard to school closures is China and India doesn’t frame us in the best light in terms of pandemic response.
Also, I seem to have upset you with my comment. It was poorly phrased and I do apologize for that. I don’t think that you are 100% wrong in your argument and I appreciate your position.
Many administrators are looking at the numbers and saying, gee, if we could send kids home for X days a week, we could free up facilities and reduce costs and liabilities, and engage support staff from a wider geographical area. The missing piece here of course is that instead of kids seeing their friends and learning in a classroom, they're trapped in video chat purgatory. These effects simply do not enter the conversation unless measured into quantities that schools actually feel pressured by. Hence why test scores are an attractive subject here.
Another reason is that the conversation about schools centered heavily on "well, people are dying." That's true -- people died, and continue to die. In many regions, this was used as a blank check to dismiss a lot of very serious issues in risk management. Closing the schools was not some sort of ethically-unambiguous decision. It was a substantial transfer of risk -- COVID deaths and other long-term consequences affected everyone, but the disease impact slanted VERY heavily towards older people and away from children[1]. This is a highly relevant, highly significant fact in the risk management of COVID in schools that, in my opinion, was frequently lost sight of. These closures represented a substantial generational transfer of risk from older people to younger, in which we somewhat extended life expectancy and reduced ongoing loss of health for a substantial number of older people, in exchange for severely degrading education and socialization of kids for 1-2 years. We should expect criticism of pandemic-era policies for as long as the effects remain relevant -- which will be for decades.
Now, why do people WANT to take potshots at schools in the first place, if these policies have now ended in most districts? I can't speak for everyone who does so, but I can point to one thing I see a lot: we're fed up with the system. There are a LOT of people for whom this is not working. These problems existed long before COVID, but distance learning and other COVID policy has turned out to be a lightning rod because it allows a lot of families with very diverse frustrations to pinpoint a specific issue that upsets all of them. It's not JUST the distance learning -- it's the entire way districts relate to families and the manner in which they feel trapped and without a voice.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...