School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness.
Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces have dialed back extra sick time that was available during the first couple of years of COVID.
So I don't think they are reasonable at all. If you are sick, you should stay home should still apply.
The pandemic has clearly altered this mentality but it doesn’t seem like a good trajectory. A little cold is barely an inconvenience.
I dont care if it's "just the sniffles" It causes so much inconveniece for my family.
Part and parcel of living in modern society.
School sicknesses are so common that it might almost be argued that the point of public education is to make sure everyone is exposed to as many diseases as possible.
Regularly washing your hands reduces spread of the flu by 30%. (Old study, not going to find it.)
I will believe anti-disease spread measures are effective until they are proven otherwise.
> You're usually "infectious" before you're symptomatic
This trait of Covid was what made it unusual. For the flu, the most infectious period days 1-3 with symptoms. ("Period of Contagiousness" in [1]... of course there are exceptions.)
People need to toughen up. Not every cold is covid.
Part and parcel why I purposefully bought a house where the district was highly rated. Missing several weeks is a serious blow.
Even before the pandemic we had that policy, and it's a very good default. No, colds are not the end of the world, but they are genuinely miserable, and you will share it. And if money is all somebody cares about, well, colds also diminish work output, so one ne'er-do-well going in sick can screw up an entire department's metrics over the course of several months.
I see no measurable impact on performance.
We have multiple people in a company of about 15 who have worked there for over 20 years.
Who are you working for?
No, but whatever industry you work in and whoever your employer is, they should have enough staff to cover minor illnesses and absenses. If you are off sick and your company misses a court deadline thats on your companies poor staff management, not on you for being ill and staying home to avoid infecting coworkers.
Funerals are bereavement leave from school so you don’t need to worry.
I feel like 90% of midwesterners would be agreeing with me…
Other people's family and friends will have multiple destination weddings, etc.
Still suspect it's not a major component, kids can only have so many grandparents after all.
Some of the “meh, missing two weeks a year for vacations isn’t a big deal” attitudes in this thread are very surprising to me, also as a midwesterner.
Is the expectation that a family takes a 2 week luxury vacation every year?
Historically, retail gasoline prices tend to gradually rise in the spring and peak in late summer when people drive more frequently. Gasoline prices are generally lower in winter months.
>https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Only at a certain level of upper-middle-class affluence, but for them probably. But even one-week cruises are much cheaper off-season.
What about schools not sticking their nose too far out into the parts of life that they should not control? Like where and when we take our kids on vacations.
If my kids get good grades and catch up on any missed homework the school should not get spun up about them missing some days.
Turning schools into a mild version of prisons is not good for anyone -- kids, parents or the society. My 2c.
it's not that hard, if you commit to going to school, then just try to go and do vacations during school holidays
otherwise, just home school
Why is this? If true, why this problem is not appearing in private schools that pretty universally do not object to parents taking their kids away for vacations or family events as long as kids master the material.
The teacher needs to have a program of study with specific topics covered, recommended exercises for practice and required homework to check understanding for each. If a student masters the material why does anyone care if he skipped a week? And if the student does not know the material he should get a bad grade, whether he was in every class or not.
That is how the school worked where I grew up (Eastern Europe) and it seems vastly superior to the mess we have in the US today, where many public schools teach to the lowest common denominator, making capable kids bored at best and and a nuisance to the teacher at worst.
It will set some back, it won’t set others back at all. Telling a kid who can keep up or who is ahead of the class that they can’t take a vacation because another kid couldn’t keep up if they took a vacation is bizarre. It’s like saying that someone who’s ahead of where the class is needs to go to summer school because a kid in the class who’s behind needs to take summer school.
Why should we use the lowest performers as the baseline, and tell higher performers that they aren’t allowed to do things they’re fully capable of doing?
The science teacher at the school probably wishes they could do it.
When everyone else is doing the same thing. If you do it at a different time you could benefit from reduced costs and reduced traffic. You can also provide your child with a more rewarding and engaging experience than the drudgery and frustrating inefficiency of the typical school pedagogy.
Because those breaks don't line up with other cousins' breaks.
Because those breaks don't line up with great-grandma's 95th birthday, and she lives a full day's journey away.
Because those breaks don't line up with your work schedule, or your partner's work schedule.
Because my child is excelling academically, and I absolutely don't think that she'll get as much value out of being in school on Thursday & Friday as she will visiting her relatives in a foreign country for a long weekend.
As my child's parent, it is my duty to be aware of their educational performance, needs, and shortcomings. Based on all that info, I have no problem deciding to take them out of school for two days to go trout fishing with grandpa, or to view the eclipse with grandma.
It wasn't super common, but it was common enough that there was a standard procedure around it (basically you'd get the classwork/homework that you'd be missing and be expected to present it upon return).
I think a bigger part now is that schools are somewhat more overloaded, so missing class puts you "out of sync" and there's nothing to help you catch back up. When I was young the parents were expected to do that: I don't know how common it is now.
And it isn't even that folks are wrong; but evidence is fairly clear that nobody has a solution for education that works. We do know of a bunch of small things that can work in some situations, but at large, we are still trying.
I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong on this, of course. Just peruse the top posts and you will see all sorts of assertions about how this isn't actually a problem. There are more than a few pointing out that schooling is irrelevant.
Again, these aren't necessarily wrong. But they are ignoring a whole lot more than they are talking to.
Pretty much no one raised an eyebrow about this sort of thing, certainly not at the 10 day total mark.
Why do you think the rules have remained the same?
Similarly, I don't think I ever had an "excused" absence, I didn't have to provide evidence or doctor's notes to the school when I was sick. That simply wasn't a thing that was tracked at all.
1. Assimilate immigrant children into American culture so that they would think of themselves as "American" first and whatever ethnicity they came from second. (Hence, the Pledge of Allegiance, national anthem, American football games, focus on history & social studies in class, etc.)
2. Provide childcare during working hours so parents could go to work. (Hence, compulsory education, hours that aligned with a factory schedule, high student-teacher ratios, etc.)
3. Teach children the skills they would need to be successful in the factory system. (Hence, attendance, arriving punctually, moving between rooms at the bell, following orders, not complaining, etc.)
What's happened over the last 40 years is that the factory system in America fell apart, and so the skills needed for it no longer seem all that relevant compared to actually getting a good education, which school is not all that effective at. Meanwhile there are new waves of immigration with parents that were often highly educated (moreso than native-born Americans, oftentimes) abroad; they don't buy the "this is what a good education looks like" explanation, because they have had an actual good education abroad. And the Internet in general makes people much more suspicious of institutions, because you can see the ways that different power centers try to enforce control of the discourse, and there is no unified discourse to get behind anyway. The public school system in America is deeply embedded in the industrial institutions that were developed from 1900-1980, and as those institutions collapse, the public school system collapses with them.
But that's overall, in aggregate. All those drops fill up a river. But a single drop won't be missed.
Truth is, some families just don't take education seriously.
(My parents’ background was dirt poor, rural, and white, to set the scene—but skipping by choice was something not to be taken lightly, you go to school, that’s how it is)
My first thought reading the headline was that more people are realizing the irrelevance of school and work, and prioritizing other things.
We need to stop thinking of "education" as a monolithic school concept that produces worker bees through rote memorization and repetition.
I am in the group that took 1-2 yearly week long vacations in elementary school. Nothing was lost, since I just did the week of required work in half a day after returning from vacation.
I and a good many others in my classes were WAY ahead of the curriculum already, and basically sitting bored in class all day. I remember my parents literally asked my teachers to give me more advanced homework because I would constantly say I learned basically nothing or that days would go by wasted reviewing things I had already mastered.
So they were confident that I wasn't really missing much from being out even for a week or two at a time. I don't know if this is standard practice nowadays, but I know my parents also requested from the teacher that weeks worth of coursework so I could do them even while on vacation. I could usually finish a weeks worth of coursework within like an hour or two of sitting down, and I didn't even consider myself a particularly gifted student compared to some.
If course taking a kid out of school for once in a life time events should be okay, even applauded. And children who are excelling should be allowed to take that trip to Europe during school. They will learn more there than in a class room.
BUT, those excuses hinge in good academics and support at home.
I heard someone say once that at the end of the day, everyone is home schooled. If students are not raised in an environment that values education, it really doesn't matter if they are going to school everyday. In my opinion as a dad of two young kids, attendance is a symptom not a cause.
But penalizing attendance issues is a lot easier that fixing the core issues which I think are mostly economic and mental health related.
I and many of my peers grew up with one stay at home parent who volunteered at my school occasionally and engaged with my teachers. Now my wife and I both have to work to afford the lifestyle I had growing up. My kids are going to have to be in after school programs which are basically just babysitting even if I am in a position to afford good mentoring.
Cell phones and social media are also causing issues with older and younger students. Peer pressure is at an all time high and academic pressure is not far behind.
We are putting so much stress on these kids, when they are just kids. They need to explore their world, get their hands dirty and be curious. Not take yet another standardized test. American society is not kind to children.
Back to it being a haves and haves not issues. As someone with a sizable household income. I absolutely afford to supplement my children's education with museum memberships and trips to see events like the eclipse and frankly also mental health support. I am lucky to have a job that I can take time off anytime I want. But this is the bubble I am in of tech workers. The vast majority of Americans cannot do that. This divide is just going to continue to widen the gap.
Few teachers are going to call the truant police on a high-school aged student who leaves during the day, even though technically they could. Younger students would more likely get the actual police called out of concern for safety, not enforcing school.
Some schools it's so bad that the system just entirely gives up, but doesn't document it - so you have students who have never been to class more than a few days but according to the records, they're always there.
For those of us who can't just do work or school remote, I sure wish we could at least do like Japan and mask up. It seems like it should be common courtesy.
I think i never used to think of it, but after the pandemic like if my throat is a little sore but I don't feel tired or groggy am I still just expected to sit inside?A weak cold can linger for days, weeks sometime. I get multiple ways of thinking about it.
I don't think having a cold or two is going to put many people in this category. Decades ago when I was in public school, the kids who were chronically absent like this were the ones who clearly had some behavioral issues or problems at home.
The linked study also demonstrates that the rates are strongly associated with socioeconomic factors. I think the real issue here is that a subset of people simply have fewer fucks to give about school, and that has been accelerated by the distance and space that COVID created between students/parents and school.
I am glad my parents allowed me to be, because school was really, really damaging to my mental health when I ended up needing to be chronically absent.
And yeah, I simply just needed to be away from school. I guess I’m more so making a point that during the pandemic there was also probably a ton of students who realized they can learn without school, and it might even be better for them.
Anecdotally that seems to be the case in my kids' school district (although one complicating factor is that a lot of kids have family back in India or China and go back for long absences at winter break), and the culprit is generally illnesses, which have been extremely rough the past 2 winters.
I can definitely see how COVID shutdowns unmoored some families from school and the return process made it a generally less compelling experience. If you aren't learning, socializing all happens on your phone, and you'll graduate regardless, then why go?
Obviously it’s not doable to stay away from school that much, and I only did when I had a fever or was puking. That said, there were probably some years I at least got close to that 18 days. I would think the few years I went on a vacation I definitely went over it.
I loved college and was able to learn. I didn't get great grades but I was participating in the education process.
Some parents are even giving negative-fucks about school, in other words being actively against public education, teachers, and so on. I know of Facebook groups where parents share tips on how to maximize the number of absences without triggering various flags. And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination". It's scary.
I can't believe how much of this is creeping into even HN too, a group of presumably above-average educated techies. Just look at the comments in this article dunking on the school system! Education is, for most people, their only shot at achieving the ever-shrinking middle class.
Thank god (ha, ha) for immigrants I guess.
The Internet’s been a disaster for civil society.
I can assure you, the people newly complaining about "liberal indoctrination" in schools don't mean science and math. It's fine to disagree with people about what should be taught, but it's not productive to ignore how much education has changed and why people object to it, and then disingenuously mischaracterize them.
Things aren't always getting worse. And IME the schools tend to get better in the long term.
There are probably legitimate criticisms of recent changes to public education, but it's never the things that Republican politicians harp on.
Also, for what it's worth, much of what my generation was taught in school was utter bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me. If anything, the idea that my children would be taught that the Pilgrims and Indians were best friends, that Columbus was someone to look up to, or that the Civil War was really about states' rights is what would compel me to homeschool, not "liberal indoctrination." But many, like DeSantis, still appear to believe that these lies should be taught.
"Opposition to what was purported to be critical race theory has been adopted as a major theme by several conservative think tanks and pressure groups, including The Heritage Foundation, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and organizations funded by the Koch brothers. [...] In 2021 [Christopher Rufo] wrote on Twitter, 'The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'' and 'We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'"
"The Economist and Reuters have conducted polls on how much the general public understands CRT, a 'once-obscure academic concept', and they found that most people are unfamiliar with CRT and misunderstand it."
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_controversies_around_cri....)
It is absolutely a conservative boogeyman and (for the most part) has never been a taught subject outside of college.
I would assume you also oppose teachers getting their Master's in education? After all, that's not a subject that has never been taught in any primary school ...
You're equating attending public school with "Education". The two can be mutually exclusive.
Have you been around kids post COVID? Winters after the pandemic have been a nightmare for many parents. My nephews have basically been "sick" the whole winter (getting sick, staying home, recovering, going back to school, getting a new virus, repeat).
Has anyone seen any actual research into why this is? It seems pretty serious.
Now we’re sick constantly, it seems. It’s so much worse than before. I think our immune systems are doing some catching up.
[edit] for the timing, we started getting sick a bunch right around the time masking dropped off to near-zero everywhere around us.
Another thing I've noticed is that post-covid they've come home from school with more stories of the teachers just putting on videos and having the kids watch that, or else they just read crap on their tablets. What I'm saying is, it seems like education has also changed post-covid. It's like the teachers are still remote-teaching even though everybody's in the classroom.
This is public school, and maybe that's how they do it these days?
Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours, because I never remember that as a kid. Yes it would have been a VCR rolled out and all that, but if I wanted them to just watch a movie I could do that from home. So weird.
I remember watching video 4 times in school total. At the time teachers didn't know how to start the video player so a kid always did that, the teachers weren't used to showing videos in class at all.
The worst case I remember was a social studies teacher in junior high school who, during the World Series, turned on the classroom television to the game and had us all watch it with him.
Tuesday we are getting sick again, sigh.
To some degree elementary school has always been a large part daycare and small part teaching. But the one big change from my experience is that amount of standardized testing even 3rd graders do. Every month or two there's another day or two spent on testing and then several days before that getting them ready for it. I can't imagine being a teacher trying to craft lesson plans around all that.
The other reasons were… everything else. Consistently toxic work environments across several schools, a culture of “just do a little more—it’s for the kids!”, shit pay, low social standing, watching students have mental health crises or terrible troubles at home and occasionally kill themselves while not being able to do much about it, corrupt petty-dictator superintendents, constant flailing between expensive “frameworks” implemented so incompetently that they plainly have no hope of working right, et c. The small part of summer they’re actually off and not prepping for the next year was the only good thing about it, by the end. The insulting demands, organizational dysfunction, and lack of support during Covid was the final straw—for her and lots of others, now the field has a severe teacher shortage.
This was definitely a fashionable thing to say last decade. But in a post-Covid world where we’ve seen meaningful deficits in skills as a result of disruptions to in-person elementary school attendance, I think we should re-evaluate this prior. It seems evident that there’s a lot more going on in school than just babysitting.
Why did missing school under Covid have such bad outcomes?
I don't know what happens in school (in person), but it must have been something or you wouldn't have seen such a dramatic change.
To be specific: there was a big decrease in resilience in the face of difficulties (in addition to knowledge).
When I read this, I thought you were making a more general point, rather than about missing school on account of sickness.
To the general point, I think schooling is entirely unreasonable, and a terrible way to bring up humans. Though, I obviously think it is valuable to learn to read and write, know maths and certain tools to get by in life.
But the rest of it is terrible - institutionalising children, filling children up with government ideas as if no other interpretations are available, the insistence of deference to authority, leaving no space for individuality, the application of some sort of 'people metric' where you are a problem if you don't want to sit for hours or find the propaganda dull. And this is to say nothing of the impossible expectations teachers have on them, which make the lessons even more depersonalising and uninspiring. In the face of this, we will see perpetual ai teachers and the lifetime monitoring as a good thing.
No wonder there are so many lost people - people who have been brought up by loveless institutions can't even conceive of what they have not experienced - the materialistic collectivised mindset seems 'normal', rather than being seen as an ultra-radicalised ideology itself.
Most people have completely lost sight of what it means to bring up children. It's simply not about farming out the job to institutional structures.
Surely nonstop COVID reinfections aren't doing their brains any favors.
https://whn.global/scientific/spectrum-of-covid-19-from-asym...
We are both lucky enough to even have jobs that let you take a last minute personal day to care for your child, but many jobs do not work this way, or even if you can take off, you lose income. You're not going to keep a kid with a stuffy nose home if it means not having enough to make ends meet.
Tough shit, right? But kids get minor colds a lot. In the winter they just infect each other (and us) all the time. Often, by the time they show symptoms the whole class has already been infected.
The practical realities have to be acknowledged. The solution is to draw a line, on one side you are sick enough to be required to stay home, and on the other, oh well.
I just don't see it as realistic that my kid be 100% healthy to go to school, especially during snotty nose season. But then again I went to school no matter what when I was a kid, it was definitely an extreme in the opposite direction. There must a balance between protecting the school and letting the kid get a good education that isn't interrupted too much (consistency and stability is also important).
Miss a day or two of school and now you're "behind" because you don't know some trivia¹ that's on your next standardised test. Mostly irrelevant to the student, but highly worrying to the school. The real things you need to learn, things like curiosity, scientific thinking, critical thinking, practical intuition, complex problem solving, unstructured information retrieval, team work and so on aren't easy to measure, so they're not really measured and then they're not optimised for. Which, when everything is minmaxed to death, means they're optimised against. That's the charitable, non-paranoid interpretation, at least.
I did a homestay in Germany decades ago and the kids left school at about 1pm and spent the afternoon in woodland unsupervised, co-operatively building a sprawling multi-storey "treehouse" that was about 25 metres on a side. I wouldn't be surprised if the skills acquired in that part of their childhood mostly came from there rather than bullet points about carbon bonds in benzene or something.
1: Sure trivia provides "pixels" for a hoped-for complete picture eventually, but the broad substrate you place these pixels on seems de-emphasised compared to just hammering decontextalised details that are easy to test until everyone is heartily sick of the whole subject.
Thats not what the core of any population is, and hence not much catered for, not in public state funded institution.
Now another topic is whats good for any individual kid and society long term, those can be quite different matters.
I see those points in same way you do, but consider them more a parental responsibility and a way to give your kids a head start if you actually care. Look at what kind of folks stay teachers and how they are paid - dont expect miracles. Sad state of affairs, but it is what it is
It's unfortunate because regardless of what you think, the so-called 'alpha males' with an insatiable drive for success are the ones representing the vast majority of the tax revenue.
Just like sometime who "learns" a language by drilling only vocabulary, this ends up serving no one particularly well - many people who would otherwise end up in trades have few practical skills taught and couldn't care less about benzene. Many people who would end up being PhDs in organic chemistry are bored rigid by the tedium of the process.
As you say, it is a parental responsibility. But the school system has spent decades telling engaged parents that the correct way to fulfill that responsibility to provide rounded education to their children is by sending them to school, and it's becoming clear to some parents that the school system isn't actually upholding that promise.
I spent six years attending French classes and three of Latin. I can't read, write, speak, or understand either one. I moved to Norway fifteen years later and spent a couple of hours a week in evening classes for a year and a few years of immersion in the language and now I am fluent with much almost no effort.
So why do schools all over the world persist in educational methods that don't work? Why do they never teach people how to handle money, how to negotiate with tradesmen about repairs to a house, how to drive a car.
But following that it's a fair point that how we do things is not optimal. E.g. pushing kids into classes based on their age and than having everyone for the most part do the same things. People/kids are just different, different interests, different levels. Maybe it was a necessity once, but maybe we can do things differently now.
A grammar, written first approach is hard and boring but it does scale to 30 students for 1 teacher though.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that people who didn’t learn other languages in school, face difficulties when they start doing that later in life.
It's called socializing.
> how to handle money
It's called math. Especially calculus.
> how to drive a car
Most schools do offer drivers Ed in America at least.
In my experience, the people who complain most that school didn't teach them X were the same kids who didn't pay any attention.
I don't even like schools, but this low effort nonsense should end.
Obviously you learned Norwegian faster in Norway. Good for you. The idea that a school should send kids on international vacations is ridiculous.
I spent ~4-ish years learning Spanish in high school and was the same. HOWEVER, after visiting Puerto Rico for the first time, I was genuinely surprised with how much was still rattling around in my head and how quickly I picked up new words and phrases. I was eventually able to navigate a restaurant without English at all in the few weeks I was there. No way I could have done that without the background I got during school.
Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it.
They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary.
Why would they care about school?
I'd be slacking off because it is clear that AI is going to be the brain job top dog by the time I get to career stage.
The kids chronically truant are POOR and have no structural support at home. They are not depressed upper-middle-class-kids. The more-informed (albeit misinformed) demographic you're describing is not the problem.
Anyhow, kids are skipping school because their parents allow them to, it has nothing to do with "climate change," "COVID," or "the future." Parents should be heavily punished for truancy of their children, it's a form of child abuse/neglect. That's regardless of income, poor kids can't get out of poverty if they have no means to do so. That can be unpopular, it's irrelevant if it is. Kamala Harris got flack for that, but it's absolutely good to punish parents that allow this. If you disagree, you live in a bubble.
Forget the doomerism of what a child might think, again it's about perspective. That's not even why these kids are skipping class to begin with, that's just some invention people here have said. We're talking about kids that can barely read or write, not HN poster kids with educated parents or good surroundings. People are skipping classes because their parents allow it, kids will look for excuses and always have. The parents should be held liable, and it's not just bad for the kids, it's bad for all of society. People arguing in favor of truancy are totally detached from reality for -most- people.
And yes, the idea of having children in order to feed them into the same meat-grinder of education and employment that I went through in order to perpetuate some cycle for reasons unfathomable to me is about the least convincing reason to do so. I used to think I was an outlier, but as fertility rates fall near continuously, I'm beginning to suspect that I was just early in realizing it.
Where's the sense in forcing children to spend the best years of their lives as automatons to an education system, just to be baristas at Starbucks anyway? Everyone simply can't work a white collar job, somebody has to clean the toilets. We should at least let those people enjoy their childhood.
Some truancy is because their parents can't enforce what their kids are doing (though some are just really bad parenting), or are too poor too (work double shifts, etc.) We can support those people with social programs, while also making sure their kids go to school and making sure the schools are funded, even hinging the programs on truancy. Incentives work.
There are things schools can’t or won’t teach and unfortunately for them, there value was significantly tainted when parents got to see what was happening every day in the classroom.
I’m pulling my kids to go to see the solar eclipse in Texas next week. They’ll get to experience something that won’t happen again in the US for another 20 years, get to visit family they rarely see, and go to parts of the country they’ve never been to. Obviously I find more value in that than the day of school their missing.
I have a ton of empathy for these people, and it makes me count my lucky stars for being a Gen Xer. Honestly, I feel like Gen X is the luckiest of all the generations. People generally don't blame us for f'ing everything up, we had the luck of growing up before the Internet and smartphones where we still got to just play and have relatively unstructured "kid lives", many of us graduated into the booming, optimistic 90s. Many of us got to buy houses before they became unobtainably expensive. Sure, we had the epidemic of parental divorce, and if anything that hope of the 90s has, at least for me, turned to jadedness in many areas, but I just feel so lucky to have been born when I was.
The fact that "school shooter hero" even has to be a term is absurd and embarassing for us as a country.
Even when I was in high school over a decade ago, the fact that we could have a school shooter was constantly present and I was always running exit plans. I do have anxiety issues but I can't imagine what it is like for children now.
I recognize this with my own kids and my students. Two things: 1) since the pandemic the bar for a sick day has been lowered drastically. 2) Educational material can be found online in most of the cases, at least in my university. Students think they can handle it themselves from home.
These are not necessarily bad developments. What would be interesting to see is if the drop out rate has increased.
Some have show to do well from home, especially when schools opened up a little bit at the end of the pandemic: all was online, some students thrived!
Policy is set through statistics and cost / benefit though; the protestant classroom setting for a good while was the most cost-effective way to get many students up to a specific level. It wasn't perfect, but it worked at the time.
This is something we've known for millennia that we want to pretend isn't true because it's more convenient to ignore, also because of our obsession with venerating youth culturally.
Kids not going to school is a symptom, and it's not going to be solved with attempts to make school more attractive without actually changing anything.
Everyone in my high school didn't really care too much about taking a detention (it was annoying) but would work pretty studiously to avoid anything being sent home to the parents.
Unis will drop their standards to get the desired pass rates.
Because "school but with one funny twist" is still school with the same broken system. It's like the workplace memes about ping-pong tables and free food, you can't fix the problem without fixing it.
Kind of like the lottery, you cannot win if you do not play. I could have a job with a paycheck, or I could have a job with a paycheck and a lottery ticket.
I don't know maybe one of your startup journeys hit or will hit massively (versus comfortably positive) and I'm wrong but at the end of the day it's about your risk tolerance and understanding the distribution of potential outcomes. The distribution had fewer massively positive outcomes than we all thought in the economic expansion/zero interest rate days of 3-10 years ago I think, and that motivated people to stay late, play ping pong with coworkers, leetcode for sideways promotions, etc. That was my initial point, it wasn't the free food and ping pong it was the hope of a ridiculous (instead of decent) exit.
Even if the startup goes 'total loss', you lose nothing compensation-wise and get picked up 48 hours - 3 weeks later by another place.
Maybe I am anti-jaded (?) but I can't understand the allure of being employee number 290,000 where your job is to change the color of a button back and forth. Is $150k+ in cash really not worth actually being useful to a company?
For a lot of folks, school was never good. If I had the choice back then, would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to?
Given that I would do as much of my course work as fast as I could so I could slack off the rest of the time, if I'd've had distance learning as an option in high school I'd've been all over it (and perhaps learned not to double contract).
However, another reason you could go is if you wanted to graduate early. My wife finished her high school degree just a few months after her 17th birthday; 2 years of "school" were completed in 3 months. Had I gone a similar route, I could have been done with a doctorate degree by 23 instead of just finishing undergrad.
Would you every worry about doing ok academically but falling behind socially?
But I went to public school not too long ago. High school, about 4,000 people. Really diverse culturally.
I think you can make the argument that you had "the majority" (50.1%, 2k+ teenagers) who "did well/liked it" overall. Did they dislike it for one reason or another? Sure. But I don't think 49.9% were bullied (social media or not). I would say it's a smaller minority/more "fringe".
Not to say that if it's 20% of children it isn't a very large problem. But... if 80% of people 'can and do' make it out + benefit from it + find a way to enjoy it... how come it works for them and not others?
The kids become active. It’s not as big a deal if they are a little late. And my daughter (but not my son) hates missing it.
Or take an example of a high school student who adamantly refuses to attend school, do you eventually just let him "get away with it" or do you put him in a correctional facility?
Add the much more common use of drugs to the mix (from 14 on), phones that are not required to be put away in class, and it's very tough to keep them on track.
I didn't have half of the distractions/opportunities for entertainment kids these days have, and it was hard for me to muster up the enthusiasm.
When I remember my classes in high school - 90+% of the time is just the teacher talking, us copying on notes, the teacher demonstrating something or letting us do assignments present in the school book, it might as well be a video or interactive content. Do we really still need children to learn in this way and structure nowadays? Or is it just to let parents work they 9 to 6? It all feels... very inefficient somehow.
(ps : I do not have children in school, as most readers probably guessed)
To a substantial degree, information central to an education has been reasonably readily available since the early 20th century, a combination printing, cheap paper, and public libraries. Not entirely as convenient as online Internet access, to be sure, but a low barrier for a motivated student. There are notable examples of self-taught prodigies[1] ...
... but overall, organised, school-based education seems to scale vastly better. Teachers don't merely expose but guide, at least in the best cases.
________________________________
Notes:
1. One was, I believe, William Sidis, who'd taken refuge in a public library after being bullied, read Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and corresponded with Russell over errata and corrections. I'm trying to turn up a reference, possibly The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy by Amy Wallace.
It's all mixed up in and endless sea of shit though.
Its just Covid, this is what living with this disease looks like.
A friend at another school knew a guy who came to school with a stomach bug and puked several times throughout the day as they had a perfect attendance incentive worth a percentage of your grade, so to ensure he got his grades, he walked around puking for the day.
At the time people praised his dedication.
https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/
There is an orchestrated push by capital to not acknowledge this basic fact.
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-a...
Since then they’ve been playing catchup immunity wise as they’ve been exposed to all the colds and other viruses. Which means they are absent more.
I’m hopeful that they are almost caught up in terms of what they have been exposed to and the amount of times they are sick in a year will be declining.
Seriously it blows my mind that folks say masks don’t work because if you’ve had school age children you know how often they are sick and for those two years the district was masking we had nothing. It was glorious while it lasted.
this sounds almost like you regret that it couldn't
In NYC public school reading/math comprehension is at 50%. They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts.
Unfortunately once a large special interest group is subsidized by the taxpayer and a voter base is established for local politicians and the jobs program never goes away even though all evidence indicates the benefit to the taxpayer is marginal.
This on its own communicates nothing interesting. It’d be surprising if this weren’t the case, given private schools possess the superpower of not having to serve everyone.
It's insane that public schools have to be some great equalizer and then they're simultaneously sold as preparing kids for the ultra competitive cutthroat world of academia and commerce.
Either they need to not be the great equalizer and prepare kids for the real world. This would mean not serving some kids with the same services (although again, a basic education would be guaranteed). Or we could admit that while we succeeded in building a basic education system, we have failed at building a public academic system for the early years and just let the private academia take over.
Maybe they could try making school less like prison, with less mandatory pointless toil?
Dilbert talked about pointless meetings 25 years ago; Zoom has made it more prevalent.
At least if you're "off camera" you can just mute yourself and get some real work done.
I note without comment that those kids aren't in school right now.
It’s surprising to me. Back when I was in school, I was extremely anxious missing any days. Elective classes are one thing, but I just don’t understand how students are missing multiple days of history or math or science and able to keep up.
Getting my tonsils removed as an adult was a literal life changer. I used to get strep 6 to 10 times a year. I have not had it since.
https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-rec...
The failure to prioritise rationality over economics is going to be seen as one of the biggest public health and economic failures in recent centuries.
A basic truth of economics is that people respond to incentives. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Public choice economics shows us that government employees likewise respond to career interest. Incentivizing people not to work and incentivizing another group of people to pump up their rookie numbers of people not working may create a slight inflationary pressure on the overall figure.
'London historically is a nice city. It's too bad that rampant criminal enterprise has been imported into it.' Jeeez.
post-covid people are more hesitant to send their kids to school slightly sick or when there are sick siblings / parents in the household.
We don't send our kid to school with fever. Sending your kid to school with a low fever used to be very normal. But post-COVID we are more tempted to check the temperature when the head feels warm. But actually the better way to 'measure' a fever is how much a child is playing and energetic.
> “We haven’t seen an answer"
Alright.
Our son doesn't really even want to miss school, because he knows we'll make him do his missed work anyway. I guess we are old school (we are older, Gen X parents). The pandemic seems to have, if not broken, changed society in many fashions, and I guess schooling is one of them.
Many of his affluent friends still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug. We are far from "tiger parents", and push our son to mostly get As because he easily can do so, and feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.
Weird times.
> feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work.
Can you take an A or “advanced work” to the deli and exchange it for a sandwich?
The people you are criticizing realised the pointlessness of it all and that extra work (or knowledge) beyond a baseline doesn’t make a measurable difference worth the extra effort.
Past the first job, credential specifics stop mattering really. No one will care whether you got an A or B+ in Calculus in junior year.
If the kid is doing alright and isn't getting into too much trouble, I don't see the issue of letting them play hookey with parent permission especially in their final years.
My parents had a policy that if we had good grades, we could skip days occassionally in our senior year. We'd take the day off and just pal around on errands if we wanted.
The curtain was pulled back and people realized the lies they were being fed by companies.
Turns out the business won’t fold if people are remote, and if you’re out sick that immovable deadline gets…moved.
Spoiler alert: purchasing power fell way more than 30%, so we are actually lucky things work still as much as they do.
The number of TPS reports filed is not the actual value to the economy, but it gets counted in the GDP.
The biggest negative from WFH was it being more challenging to onboard new folks (a legitimate concern). It's less easy for someone new to pop into your cube, ask a question, and then get back to it. Now they have to do it through IM, or schedule a virtual conference. It's not all that much harder...just a bit of additional friction since things are more asynchronous. Maybe the senior engineer you need to talk to is sleeping in late and then working late and you're doing the opposite.
I'll add one additional negative is that WFH may interfere with our natural need to be social. This is extra hard on extroverts, but I think even introverts are impacted. They may be quiet, but I've talked to many that don't miss the disruptions or commute, but do miss just being around other adults to a degree. Some introverts struggle to find social outlets outside of work (especially outside large cities), so they spend a lot of time alone and naturally get lonely and this impacts their mental health. Everyone is different though and none of this is significant enough to force a return to office.
As an educator I see an impact of absences even in this fun class that kids want to go to and there isn’t a grade. We generally have a 1-2 or 1-2-3 approach to teaching something. That is: teach it one week, then review it, then teach or review it again the next.
When someone is out for two weeks they just don’t learn that concept and then later on need specialized attention to be caught up. Or in the case of larger class sizes or multiple kids out the whole class either has to be slowed down or those kids get left behind.
That to me is the bigger problem: absences change the velocity of the class and make it harder for not just the kids that are absent.
On the other hand: I wish school life was more flexible so I could take my kids to more life experiences. Grand parents live an 18 hour drive or an 18 hour flight away. We ski. We travel. And we value school.
I wish there was an easier “if you are out for this week, then here’s a link to the remote curriculum”, but as a teacher, it is the difference between supporting a fully remote office and a hybrid one. It’s more work and teachers are already overworked and under paid compared to the value they have on society.
During covid we had all remote school and while the outcomes of my kids suffered the flexibility was nice. I wish we, as a society and nation figured out how to find a way to make that work instead of going “back to normal” and learning/changing nothing.
For instance: I imagined a nationally backed “remote school” any student could optionally attend on a week they are sick or out. With both live remote lectures and pre-recorded content. Maybe parent guides for some homeschooling. Or if students are lagging behind in that model, maybe sunmer school becomes more normal (or some other creative solution).
It’s a bit like that Rick and Morty episode where he is in the VR game. “ What's this, you beat cancer and then went back to work at the carpet store? Boo.” We lived through Covid and then collectively decided to go back to the carpet store.
Now they're both in early-years of school. Attendance is kinda interesting!
We parents EXTREMELY want the kids to go to school as it's the much-needed break to get our own work done - both in basic upkeep of our lives/household, and in our careers. We need the school hours to be long. Longer than they are, in fact. (As a side note, my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess? wtf? Have you met children before?)
On the other hand, life is expensive. Being restricted to only travel during the most expensive times to travel (around school holidays) isn't ideal. We can work with our kids to make up lost school time.
I also just don't like this third party entity whose value seems to go down every year to control our lives!?
Teaching (from the teachers point of view) increasingly is geared towards meeting metrics that are divorced from the needs of the kids. The teachers incentives are being misaligned with ours.
Additionally, I think we've (royal we) grown distrustful of public school in general. Not in a "big government" sort of way, just that we need to acknowledge that US public schools are designed for conformity. Being different (e.g. having ADHD, or being "on the spectrum") is not tolerated well - you might find your kid in a special needs bucket that effectively segregates them into programs that might not fit their needs at all.
At the same time, private school costs are huge and often the ones closest to you come not only in an extreme monetary cost a culture cost - being overly religious, or not religious enough (YMMV).
So, yeah, it's hard to really want or care to "be a model citizen" to the public schools that are increasingly putting up the pressure on parents (that's a whole other topic, why aren't grandparents capable of being helpful any more? where did our support networks go?) while standards that might be outside of the school's control are lowering their ability to give quality education.
(Also, pay the f*&king teachers, maybe!?)
For so many reasons, we need a well functioning public school system. Where "well functioning" means serving various needs of both children and parents. All children.
The importance of education is something that liberals and conservatives actually agree on. But like so much else, it's become a pawn in the culture wars, so that the most dissonant voices at the fringes drown out the common sense concurrence in the middle.
What? In Norwegian kidergarten (barnehage) there are no formal lessons at all. The whole point of barnehage is to turn young animals into cooperating members of society not to teach them mathematics and reading, that comes later.
So the whole day is some kind of play time with intervals of helping to lay the table for lunch, having stories read to, going for walks in the woods, and a hell of a lot of playing outside in the rain, snow, mud, climbing, falling, etc.
And also it is the most effective way to teach a language. My English speaking children were able to speak Norwegian from a standing start at three years old within six months and indistinguishable from the natives within a year with no classroom instruction at all.
Now preschool has standardized tests (!!!!!) and expected outcomes and kindergarten is worse. And 3K has been invented to be what preschool (and before that, kindergarten) once was. Of course, you can't go to 3K or 4K if you're not potty trained, which puts additional time crunches and restrictions on things.
Maybe it helps overall, but I'm not entirely sure it does.
Wow, pajama day didn't bring back students? So strange.
I wonder if they tried less homework, shorter school-days and/or later start of the day? Basically the three reasons I myself was chronically absent from school for as long as I can remember.
No. And if it were don't you think it would be better to teach the children how to improve the state of the world instead of perpetuating its evils?
Later days is a solid idea, and I believe research shows it improves student performance at the highschool level, although if I understand correctly this is largely a scheduling/budget issue with how busses are staggered today.
My California public school district had no busses. I still remember miserably making 7AM classes.
The brutal truth is a subset of parents just don't care too much about education. It doesn't matter if it's an affluent or a working class district - there will always be a subset of parents that are either unable to (fairly common among impoverished parents sadly) or uninterested to (fairly uncommon among more affluent parents sadly) become much more involved parents
Basically, teachers assume parents will intervene in their students lives to give structure. Parents in the other hand assume teachers will intervene to give their children structure in their lives. And neither side will budge.
Some autonomy for kids is critical, but there also needs to be some amount of structure as well. You can't be 100% disciplinarian nor 100% free roaming. A happy balance is needed, and sadly, a handful of bad apples among both teachers and parents have deteriorated that relationship among these critical caregivers.
EDIT: This is for Sweden where we are talking about the same issue. But I do not think we have the same numbers here.
This is a valid reason to be absent, and school administrators, teachers, and statistics take that into account.
My comment was aimed specifically at students who don't have valid physical or mental issues.
My mom's school district does not enforce suspensions for chronic absenteeism due to a subset of very affluent and litigious parents.
> This is for Sweden
Makes sense. There is no point comparing the Swedish or "American" system, as there are 13,187 different American systems that all have different norms and rules besides a handful stipulated by the DoE.
Even inter-US comparisons don't make sense for that reason.
There absolutely is a small subset of parents like that, though being in the Bay Area, access to abortion has been fairly common for decades, especially given the affluence of the district and the relative lack of stigma, so I don't see that as playing a significant factor.
https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/43-children-in-pover...
[2] https://archive.is/dXpQf/fba33991824e68e9b1ecfbde5c773bcbe92... (from [1])
A lot of Americans and Westerners in general seem to ignore that reality, and will fall behind.
As of 2022, Middle schools can start at 8am at the earliest, and number of school districts transitioned to a 8.30-9am start time. Some affluent school districts already did this transition in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
The US has roughy 13k school districts. Each one has it's own different sets of rules, regulations, and local political culture, and aside from limited State and Federal DoE regulation, implement their policies based on local political constraints due to the School Board and PTA.
Some School Boards and PTAs are apolitical in nature. Others are hyper-political and used as a stepping stone to enter local and state level politics (eg. Mayor, City Council, State Assembly, Congress) as donors won't donate without a proven electoral track record. Most younger (< 60yrs) Congressmembers started their political careers this way.
If that would be the intent, arcade cabinets, open play fields, parks and other social areas within school grounds would be the way to go.
My understanding is that the current school "format" was developed during the industrial revolution stage, and its meant to instill into kids that schedule and "lifestyle". Which to many extents hasn't kept up with the way society is evolving.
More funding into schools would help (which countries contribute significantly to education anyway?), but also by helping kids develop and learn in what they have an interest. Instead of the currently standardized boring circula. And the sometimes insane hours.
On that note, during highschool I had days where I've had up to 7 different classes a day. At least when you go to work, even if it's 8 hours, I (and maybe you as well) got to slack at least 1 hour a day in the morning, or even in the afternoon after the 1 hour lunch break.
The trick is to look into total funding - beyond federal funding and into state funding.
I strongly agree that education in the internet age needs to evolve. I would love to see an education system centered around critical and entrepreneurial thinking, financial literacy, Cognitive Behavioral thinking tools. If you give kids something worthwhile they'll use it and come back for more.
https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/how-is-k-12-education-fun...
It's simply too big and undeveloped for education to work as well as in, say, Switzerland. See also public transportation.
If your children are so smart they can surely do some reading and research of their own. That's what I did back in prehistoric times (1960s and early 1970s). In the subjects I enjoyed I was consistently ahead of the bulk of the class and occasionally of the teachers simply because I read all the text books and spent time in the library. It was enthusiasm that drove my performance not the imposition of extra homework.
“Although previous research has shown that homework improves students’ academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students’ homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which may be less accurate than time-diary data. We use data from the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the effects of time spent on homework while attending high school on two measures of academic achievement: high school GPA and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time has no effect on these measures of academic achievement.”
Rønning, M. (2008). Who benefits from homework assignments? (Discussion Papers No. 566). Oslo, Norway: Statistics Norway, Research Department. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ908287 Full text available http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp566.pdf
I know many parents whose kids stayed up until 1-2am at least once a week. We expressed strong opinions to our kids that sleep is way more important than getting an extra grade bump, but many kids still trade sleep for a better grade.
/slight sarcasm.
US schools have changed, a lot, in the last 30 years. Many schools now are pressure cookers on both the teachers and peer levels. So some kids stay up very late and some go on antidepressants. On the other side are schools where no one cares about academics, and the bar for good grades is no mischief. Which is also not a great school for any kid.
Do this and then you'll have your top performers start being absent as well -- out of boredom.
I'd suggest sending kids that are lagging behind, and those that have high absentee rates, into remedial classes. Education should get kids excited about learning. From my experience, nothing gets kids more excited than the feeling that they've accomplished something. Make them sit in a room to rehash the same old crap over and over and you lose the ones you want.
Frees up teaching resources for the slower kids and respects everyone's time. Puts the incentives in the right places, rewarding the diligent responsible students.
Like in life if they can find a way to work faster they can have more time for other things.
Perhaps, but they also shouldn't be artificially held back. Life doesn't have a speed limit.
>If a student is so great that they're skipping out of boredom then there's little that a public institution should do to help them.
This doesn't follow at all. Why wouldn't you want to invest in the people with the most potential?
but are they? It seems like every school district has magnets, AP tracks, relationship with community colleges, extracurriculars, skipping a year,... for the smart ones.
Just because you're smart enough to perform at a 10th grade level doesn't mean you're mature enough or will fit in.
Makes sense.
* in the USA
Skipping school without a valid reason (e.g. illness) comes with a €100/day fine.
My wife asked for the lesson plans for the period and was grudgingly given them; all three of the children were ahead of their respective classes when we got back.
Does fining people make their educational attainments better? I know that such fines are a big thing in the UK but as far as I can tell it is just a burden on the poor and merely adds a small additional cost to family holidays for the well off that is offset by lower prices during term time.
(Yes, education policy in the US is an absolute mess.)
Anyway even if you're from the USA, "everywhere" is still not a useful title: for all anyone knows, it means countries around the world. I'd equally expect our local news to specify "in Nederland" if that's what they mean. Opening such a site now, indeed the homepage specifies Zeeuwse beaches are the most polluted among Dutch beaches, it doesn't say "of all beaches". Another one says family of Israeli soldiers in the Netherlands are receiving more threats, rather than such family everywhere. I can't find any headline that's written like this
The title is simply somewhere between vague and misleading