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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

> Chronic absence is typically defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, or about 18 days, for any reason.

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.

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I was chronically absent in high-school and it certainly wasn't because I was sick. School wasn't very engaging and I maintained good grades while barely being there.

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?

My colds typically last 3 weeks with about 7-10 days of them being full-on. I also have an (obviously) terrible immune system and get quite a few per year.

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 don't think having a cold or two is going to put many people in this category.

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).

I have heard this from so many people, all over the country. I've heard many parents saying they're getting repeatedly sick as their kids bring diseases home.

Has anyone seen any actual research into why this is? It seems pretty serious.

We didn’t have so much as a sniffle in our house for 2+ years. Masking, distancing, and not going to restaurants—we just did not get sick. Even after the kids went back to school—we had them in a school with heavy-duty air filters in every room and high masking compliance, at the time.

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.

It totally makes sense though right? While we had zero tolerance, our immune systems didn't get any work out, and vaccines can only take you so far and doesn't cover many nasty RSVs anyways. Now we are back, and our immune systems are simply not in shape.

I’ve also heard that because of lockdown only the stronger variants of different viruses made it. So we’re dealing with them now. But I haven’t heard of any study about it yet.

It's been the same for my kids.

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?

I’ve noticed that too! So many videos. “We watched a movie today” - what?

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.

> Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours

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.

I remember video weeks at school, it was definitely a thing in the late 80s/early 90s. But then we also had study hall in Mississippi, where you spent one or two periods a day just sitting in a room doing absolutely nothing. The year I left, they wanted to make it mandatory (with the excuse that kids weren't getting enough time to do their homework, but it was really about saving money).

I went to public school in California in the 1960s and early 1970s. I remember a lot of time spent watching films and television programs during class. Sometimes the films had relevant educational content, but I realized even at the time that the main purpose was to pacify the children and give the teacher a break.

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.

Same here (and we get it too). These 2 weeks are the first time I don't have extra mucus in my chest because there is no school.

Tuesday we are getting sick again, sigh.

Most schools have a policy of not returning to school until 24 hours after the last measurable fever. One cold can burn 3 days easily that way. Four colds (easy in elementary school) during the season and you’re already up to 12 days. Throw in a stomach bug, and maybe some appointments and now you’re getting really close to the limit.

My daughter has missed 10 days of school because of a lingering cough even when not actively sick. She doesn’t sleep well and teachers now consider her disruptive if coughing in class. I think th expectation is no longer to go to school with sniffles and a box of tissues.

My daughter had a cough for 4 weeks. She saw the doc twice over that time period. They said it was viral and for her to get plenty of rest and fluids. Only had a fever for two of those days. If we'd kept her home every day she coughed the she'd have missed 25+ days.

> 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.

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.

> 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".

Thank god (ha, ha) for immigrants I guess.

The Internet’s been a disaster for civil society.

I recommend approaching people who want to homeschool with an open mind and a little empathy. They are not bible thumpers who want to eschew science, many of them are just normal people who do not like the bias and worldview that is being applied to education.

Obviously, not all of them are homeschooling for religious separatism reasons, and whenever there's a homeschooling article on HN, you'll see all the success stories post in defense of the practice. For every one of those successful individuals, how many are not so successful? We may never know, because most states don't even measure outcomes and/or make it illegal to even check on the progress of homeschooled children.

As someone for whom the pandemic inverted the hierarchy of needs around school, we are still homeschooling because public school around here is a glorified day care full of busy work. The one thing we are missing is the socialization part and are working to address it. But I promise you, we ware not bible thumpers, nor concerned about the curriculum per-se. Rather, the slow plodding movement through the curriculum and soul-crushing aspects of bored kids.

> 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".

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.

This. Even if I don’t fully agree with the motives, it’s dishonest to say they are just afraid of science and math ignoring the politicized atmosphere we’ve been dealing with in recent years across all spectrums of society.

Gah, it's not even the politicization! I dare you to sit through a 3rd grade class at your neighborhood school. Nothing gets done. They do projects with little to no mooring to curriculum. That is, unless you live in a top percentile district that values curriculum mapping, but then you were already going to be in the middle class at least. In the meantime, most of these schools are day cares so parents can work. Marx wasn't that wrong.

At my daughter's kindergarten they provide hours per week of ESL support, in addition to the regular material. The walls are covered in curriculum, including more about phonics than I was taught in my first 2 years growing up in the southeast. (Thankfully that era's anti-phonics fad passed by and even those schools got better.)

Things aren't always getting worse. And IME the schools tend to get better in the long term.

I'm pretty sure most of them have no real idea what they're complaining about, other than what the angry man on TV told them. See the giant, nonsensical hubbub over "critical race theory" a few years ago, as well as stuff like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/desantis-florida-ap-af...

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.

Critical race theory is not some made up Boogeyman. It's real, it's used to influence the curriculum being taught, and it's just as bad as described

Bullshit:

"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.

CRT is mainstream, and the foundation of tainted beliefs like "whiteness" being "evil" and somehow being the root of problems. It's a foundation in what teachers learn in training and apply in their teachings.

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 ...

>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.

You're equating attending public school with "Education". The two can be mutually exclusive.

Having experienced how home schooling is in the Midwest, I'd say education and homeschooling is usually more mutually exclusive there than the vast majority of public schools. (Sample size: 10 public schools, 3 home school groups)

You're painting with a wide brush.

I was in high school 4 decades ago was chronically absent. I absolutely hated school and it really only provided unmanageable stress for me. I was entirely focused on getting to college. I was able to attend an art school which seemed to have a high population of un-teachable students.

I loved college and was able to learn. I didn't get great grades but I was participating in the education process.

lol, i was chronically absent for an entire mathematics degree and still finished with a 3.5 gpa. chronic absence doesn’t mean shit imo.

This winter has been brutal with kids. One bug after another.

If it were simply that, wouldn't we see a similar effect across socioeconomic backgrounds? Colds don't discriminate.

We are seeing a similar effect across all socioeconomic backgrounds. Or at least locally here, Hospital admissions for Winter 2023-2024 almost hit another all time high (nearly hitting the same numbers as peak COVID) - https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2024/01/covid-on-the-r...

I think we are seeing a similar spike across all backgrounds - other news stories in this press cycle have highlighted that one thing unusual about this surge in absences is that it's affecting affluent and poor districts alike, and that well-off kids are missing school too.

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.

The local hospitals in my community have been full of hospitalized kids with different respiratory issues this winter. My doctor commented that this is a post-pandemic effect.

Richer kids get more vitamins and high quality food in general, have more exercise, have good winter clothing, clean and warm bed sheets, their home isn't full of mold and other problems, their water might be higher quality...

I mean, my children had fever 3 weeks this year and we have been responsible and avoided sending them in school when they have very bad cough and runny nose (3 and 5). We are already at 15 days of absence this year because of that. Children are always sick.

Oh hey I was chronically absent under this definition.

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.

Hope you got the help you needed -- but to my point, it doesn't sound like you simply had a cold?

Nope. Not a cold, although that was the excuse :).

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.

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