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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I anticipate a wide range of wacky theories to explain this, but the simplest one seems to be COVID—the disease, not the remote schooling. COVID is a disease that impairs neurological function. The majority of tested students have been infected with a disease that causes brain damage.

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From what I've seen, significant loss of brain function is restricted to severe cases, which did not happen at scale in children. It's much more likely that ruining the school system for two years caused reduced educational outcomes.

The problem with that theory is there does not seem to have been any effect of shorter or longer remote schooling. Every school was closed for a few weeks, and about half of schools were closed for a year+, which sets up a perfect natural experiment. But there is not an observable link between longer remote schooling/closures and lower ACT scores.

That's why I say ruined the school system instead of specifying remote schooling/closures. I think the damage was holistic. Certainly it was at the post-secondary level. Standards were dropped, instructors quit, students stopped caring, and everyone was passed regardless. No one learned anything even when the campuses were open.

As a TA the remote schooling definitely had an impact on the quality of incoming students.

You're being downvoted, but it's well known that brain damage is a common and measurable result of COVID infection.

The lower test scores is doubtlessly multivariate. But one variable is indeed brain damage:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/does-covid-19-d...

(Don't get overly worried. If you're vaccinated, odds are high your brain won't be and hasn't been measurably damaged.)

That article contains no actual evidence of COVID-19 brain damage in children. Have there been any large-scale controlled studies which actually show significant effects in terms of decreased academic performance or real damage on brain imaging studies (not just structural changes which may or may not indicate damage)? And I mean studies with proper controls which compared recovered subjects either with themselves prior to infection, or with matched cases who had never been infected. Individual case studies or observational studies don't tell us anything useful at the population level.

The simplest explanation would be literally the opposite of the conclusion you arrived at.

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