Covid has broken the social contract between parents and schools | Hacker News Reader

Covid has broken the social contract between parents and schools

capx.co

15 pointsllimos19 comments

Reminds me of a story in which a day care started charging fees for parents who were late picking up their kids. The behavior of the parents then changed, from regarding tardiness as a moral failure, to viewing it as something they could pay for, whenever they wanted to, and therefore the amount of late parents increased. The way I heard it, the day care did not want this, and so they removed the fee. But the outlook of the parents had irrevocably changed, and since being late was now free, they started to be even more late. There was no going back.

I believe that this is the study in question, but I have not verified whether my recollection above (of the story as it was told to me) matches the actual study:

<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2587744_A_Fine_is_a...>

instead of cash, they should have required a handwritten letter of apology

The classic economics lesson of perverse incentives.

No, if it was merely a matter of incentives, the behavior of parents should have reverted when the fine was removed; i.e. when the situation was restored to its initial condition. But when the fine was instituted, a culture shift occured, which would then not revert when the fine was removed.

This article is UK-centric, but something similar is happening in the US: https://fortune.com/2023/08/11/school-chronic-absence-record...

Test results also show significant decline in the US: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-pandemic-has-had-deva...

My wife and I had just started sending our daughters to public schools when the pandemic hit (kindergarten and pre-k). We were excited about some of the special programs available in our school district. But the public schools handled the pandemic so much worse than many of the private schools, some of which stayed in-person throughout the pandemic, sending students home in clusters of just 6 to 12 when someone got sick... when nearby public school districts were closing down entire districts at a time on the strength of a single student's illness. We moved our girls to a private school that stayed in-person, and I don't think we're coming back anytime soon. We're pretty happy where we are, and I expect that public schools will need to spend significant resources managing their social and academic pandemic fallout, leaving less time for students who have not (yet) fallen behind.

We were in the same boat. Our local schools looked great at the start, our kids were doing OK, but as soon as the pandemic hit, everything went into the toilet.

The online learning was abysmal, leadership seem to go out of their way to antagonize parents, teachers for the most part, we're OK, but some became really condescending. We pulled all four of our kids out and put them into a homeschooling group. Now they are in private school, which we pay for, and have much more control and direction over our children's education.

Glad to hear parents are altering the social contract, and hopefully for good. Let people take their kids out and bring their kids in anytime of the year. Schools need to adapt instead.

Attendance isn't fundamentally the problem. Self-paced learning is what's needed here. It should be okay to have students at varying stages of learning the material.

Teachers should be careful about wasting class time with lectures. Flipped classroom model or similar is probably the way to go - lectures in video watched at home, class is for practice/homework/support.

Yes!! Thank you for expressing this

Parents want more adorable family fun time and are taking their kids out of school more frequently to accomplish this.

In many areas in the US, state funding for schools is done using attendance data. tardies and absences result in the school losing funding partially or fully for the day (even if it is averaged across the school population). So, "no big deal" for parents and kids is for the school's budget.

That's an odd article. It seem none of the examples are of persistent school absence, but rather parents pulling kids out for a small amount of time. I'd be much more interested in the kids persistently absent.

Look to the source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Policy_Studies>

The UK government has become rather obsessed with attendance levels. It's one of the things schools are scored on in government ratings.

They don't really look at why kids are off school, just that they are.

A child that falls into a coma is counted the same as the child of a negligent parent that doesn't care or even know whether their child goes to school.

This then gets fed into these sorts of studies that are used to blame various things.

Rightly or wrongly, one of the things being blamed is ongoing teacher strikes. It's seen as very hypocritical for teachers to say that a parent taking a child out of school for a day is bad, but that it's also OK for the school to have to close due to strikes.

> Education research – and the experiences of heads up and down the country – tell us that attendance directly correlates to performance in exams.

We’re assuming test scores are a valid metric for success later in life.

Test scores also correlate with parent’s educational background, the community students live in, and their families income [1]. These factors are not affected by the student’s attendance, but attendance can be affected by these factors.

[1] https://theconversation.com/students-test-scores-tell-us-mor...

Instead of "attendance" it should be called "failure of teachers to accommodate variable in-person learning times"

As a positive, maybe we can consider this a bit like wfh vs in-person. We had this Dickensian workhouse version of work as somewhere you go for the day and give someone else your time. And in the best cases, this turned into outcome based work where you got paid to deliver some result.

Likewise, the idea of school as a place we lock our kids in for a fixed number of hours per day is potentially dated, and it would be interesting to see how it could transform to something more aligned with what we actually want to achieve as opposed to the process.

There is also a link, school prepares you to tolerate spending your day somewhere being told what to do. Maybe we can do better.

I remember in high school long wasted days of nothingness. Sorry but I agree with the other parents.

I do what I can to bring my children to school, but I'm not going to die over it.

School needs to change so much and we are so far from it

teachers, as a class, loudly declared they aren't essential workers.

No, that was the doctors

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