https://archive.is/6F3Fp

Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run and borderline volunteer-run, but funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic.

The sooner you can come to terms with this, the better will be the outcome for your child. I recommend looking up resources on sharing childcare and teaching with other parents in addition to your kids' teachers.

The US spends way more on education per capita than many countries that were able to keep their schools open during 2020-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

The US also spends way more on healthcare and has worse outcomes. Those countries also have way different societies, taxation regimes, healthcare, attitudes towards vaccination, and social safety nets. It's hard to find a country that you can fairly compare the US to in all respects.

Surely that is the point of making the comparisons: to highlight the differences, omissions, and additions so that they can be addressed.

And yet Australia has universal healthcare (among other things). Universal healthcare isn't perfect, but it is significantly better than sickness or injury causing a risk of bankruptcy (etc).

[1]: https://sendmoneyaustralia.com/tax-rates-in-australia-compar...

Pre-retirement: I don't take any personal responsibility for healthcare. It’s not an option. My employer provides me with a menu of more-or-less completely standardized options. Those options even specify how often I should go to general checks-ups and strictly police my access to specialists. I have very little power to control my own consumption of healthcare, aside from the things that almost all countries delegate to individuals: attending my regular check-ups and avoiding the obvious vices. At least in Germany I could get access to a specialist without first finding a doctor who is expert at interacting with automated processes at some actuarial firm. The biggest choice I can ever make is “do I take on a bit more risk so that I can stow away money pre-tax in an HSA”.

Post-retirement: Medicare.

> retirement

All Americans pay into SS and a huge portion of retirees do/will depend mostly on SS income to be able to retire.

Even without SS, one in five Americans have a pension. The rest (who can afford to save for retirement) probably have a 401(K) with a small menu of target date funds. There are some tricks you can play on the side, sure, but they’re marginal. The rest is post-tax savings; again, afforded to most individuals in most (all) western societies.

> employment

I’m not sure how this is different from places like Europe or even China/Russia.

In fact, the US is a bit of an outlier to the other extreme. As best I can tell, the US Department of Defense is undeniably the world’s largest social jobs program.

In most developed countries it's illegal to fire someone without good cause.

If by have, you mean use, my own anecdata is quite the opposite. Everyone I know that isn’t in tech/software, is not contributing to their retirement plans that are offered. Maybe they “have” them with a 0 balance.

> Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run

It is sad that this is the case

All societies in all aspects are like this. Regardless of people like to accept this or not, a person as an individual is always in total ownership of any situation. Sure every once in a while there are bigger problems and the society has to come together. But by and large, we are all on our own.

Acknowledging this helps take control of their life, then do whatever is the best for them.

People need to be ok, with this concept of 'total ownership'.

A person as an individual is rarely in total ownership of any situation. The only thing that we could say an individual has total ownership of is his own actions, which is a totally different thing to what you are saying.

Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school.

* Kids go to school to get emotional care.

* Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen.

* Kids go to school to learn social behavior.

* Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work.

* Kids go to school to learn (from teachers or peers) how to tie shoe laces, wipe your nose, go to the bathroom and so on.

In first and second grade, all of this makes up more than 50% of what kids actually learn, and this is what they are missing completely in home schooling.

In short, this concept that school actually has benefits is pretty alien to my lived reality.

This year (7-8yo), one sexually harassed her, school did shit, so she is homeschooling now.

I won't say more but many other things, including a crazy teacher humiliating kids as punishment (in a nutshell, asking the classmates to laugh at the kid), only listening to bullies etc.

If this is the so called socialization, fuck school. And we are in a supposedly a good town in Switzerland.

I vehemently support homeschool. The homeschooled adults I met in both college and in professional work are some of the best able to actually deal with reality. They’re not perfect and can be downright unaware, but that’s going to be true of anything. The bullying out there overrides any benefits.

I can also tell you that in contemporary affluent european regions, my rosy version of the story is common.

It's of course an enlightment-style utopia, but even if reality often was and is different, I'm very convinced that this is what we should strive for.

There are different stances towards educating children, of course, but this one (and its versions) is arguably the humane one.

Much of this is completely non-evident to small kids, because behavior at home is (naturally) so different.

I.e. they learn many things we don't know they learn, and don't know exist, because we are taking them for granted all the time.

I was homeschooled, albeit not in the pandemic form and I got all of that from my parents. I can't even express how much more grateful your comment makes me that my mom sacrificed what she did to ensure I didn't have to get all of the above from school.

I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the mood of the kid that day. Some kids just idly click away, and the teacher has to tell them to actually read the damn question before clicking on an answer.

A lot of the signal that those tests will give is just that kids weren't super attentive or feeling excited about giving the tests this year, for obvious pandemic reasons. Hard to be in a great mood when your parents are home all the time, everyone is out in masks, and all events and fun things are canceled or have restrictions.

But that doesn't seem to prevent people from pretending like there's some big scandal backed up by objective data about "learning shortfalls" and such.

It's a work of fiction but I'd like to refer to "The Wire Season 4" and how they portray standardised test taking to get you a fresh perspective outside of the utopian thought about curricula.

It's worse to present an experiment as objective without properly measuring its error bars. As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests. Claiming that you are "measuring outcomes in a rigorous way" from these tests without putting in the time and money to assess and control for all those factors makes for bad public policy. Worse, you'll end up providing incentives to focus only on test scores to the detriment of actual classroom learning.

For individuals, yes. But for the entire cohort not really - the results are being compared to previous years, so the error bars should be approximately the same. Children are, on average, the same as two, five or ten years ago, so the test outcomes should be about the same. The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.

The mental state of children today is not the same for those five or ten years ago, for a myriad of reasons; this should be obvious.

> The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.

Yes. I am also sure they will do worse on a rubric for mental well-being. Unfortunately no one seems to have thought about measuring or improving that, since most of the standardized-test focused measures probably worsen it.

I am saying that the system should fail open in their absence. "Students' achievement dropped 50 points!" makes for a really potent policy cudgel. "Students' learning dropped 50 points, +/- 40" is silly and meaningless. The former should never be available, unless the +/- is explicitly mentioned.

This is similar to prescription medicines. We have a lot of prescription medicines that do great things, which no one is debating. But without a proper evaluation process, you have zero access to them. Test assessments should be similar in my opinion.

Massive [citation needed]. It seems reasonably obvious that mood will affect ability of reading, especially when you can't measure it directly; you're probably doing so via some questions that ask about comprehension. Have you not seen all the conversations about adults burning out at their jobs during the pandemic? Why do you expect children to be totally unaffected?

> These tests are far better than anyone wants to admit at showing how terrible our schools are in the U.S.

The science around this is extremely flimsy, and is mostly supplemented by random strident declarations like yours. Learning is a complex topic even in adults, and influenced by many environmental factors. It's staggering to me that people (usually without an education degree) can casually claim to know a lot about how it's happening in children, who learn at a far faster rate than adults.

Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.

The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.

I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning

They are probably all working towards a similar curriculum, but all the "projects" and handouts and stuff that the kids were given to work from was created by their teacher.

Thousands of teachers all over Australia (and the world) are recreating the same resources every year!

How is there not a national level library of resources they can draw on.

Khan academy is really great, why is Mr Briggs from my small town recreating it badly in power point every year.

As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?

I worked in the ED-tech space (related to music) for a while and for me it's shocking you are expecting teachers to be on top of this. The issue is systemic, the teachers are doing the best they can, the people on the top aren't trained either on using software to leverage and scale their teaching resources. There needs to be someone/some government that implements that as a policy, with experts guiding and driving the adoption of ED-tech in a better and more productive way.

> As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?

The message probably was more in line with "look at how much more work outside your expertise you'll have to do in real life, rather than just what you were hired and trained for". Seems pretty in line with our economic systems, no?

It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.

I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.

I don't think that is true

>and were better educated than most people today.

I'm really certain that isn't true

I'm not a huge fan of cost-benefit decision processes but they are useful for removing some false dichotomies. Like "we can't afford to do the right thing" when the right thing is actually more cost effective.

I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays?

Stresses by the pandemic itself have likely caused parental productivity to plummet. Remember that "classrooms" are not the sterile abstractions you seem to bucket them into, they are staffed by teachers who are both employees and often parents themselves; with the accompanying stresses. They are required to face Covid, often from students who are imperfectly masked or unmasked.

I don't understand the American blind spot that allows people to think of schools being as essential as hospitals; and requires them to both face Covid infections while paying teachers $40k and doctors $400k. Clearly the rates at which teachers are paid indicate that US society doesn't consider them as essential.

As an American parent, COVID has been rough. I love spending my time with my kids, but there’s also an endless debate of “am I going to take time off work today to properly raise my children, plop them in front a screen when that’s the last thing their young brains need, or try and parent and work simultaneously while simultaneously failing at both?”

If you want to work full time, and your partner wants to work full time too, there’s lots of childcare solutions to supplement school during non-COVID times. Without those options, it’s just a continuous unstable compromise with work, partner, sending your kid to school vs online learning, etc.

—-

I can’t explain the pay thing with teachers vs doctors. I don’t understand how my wife, a healthcare provider, was able to deliver a baby at a private, well-equipped clinic in Kenya for a total cost of $300 USD while having to pay >$6000 USD out-of-pocket after insurance for an uncomplicated birth of her own a few years later in a US hospital. Just the way capital, normal supply and demand, mixed with lobbying has distorted things over time I guess.

I also don’t really understand why people send their kids to private school instead of just putting that same monetary support directly into the public school system. Anyway, these are totally separate issues from the cultural reliance on schools as childcare providers.

On some level, I’m a little ashamed of sending my kid to a better school than most kids get, but I’m giving you an honest answer.

The reasons I’ve considered private school for my future children after talking to friends/parents who have put theirs in private has less to do with the quality of education but more to do with the peers they’ll have. They’ll likely be around decently behaved peers and I’ll be able to shape the discussion of how the school is run - whereas that’s not the case at public schools at all.

Having come from such poor schools where we couldn’t even afford five days a week education and only went 3-4 days/week, I know my kids will get an exceptional education compared to what I got - but I want them to have a good social life too and maybe that’ll work at a public school but maybe it’ll work at a private instead.

I believe the research that says that, having a more diverse environment (for all senses of the word “diverse”) results in better learning outcomes. I’m sure that diverse classrooms are common in some private schools and not others, and that you also get access to a different kind of diversity.

I also believe the research that says that, after you account for socioeconomic background, public schools are high performing for kids from families with means. Private schools can select their student body in a way that lets them market a unified accomplishment of their students. Public schools must accept all students regardless of their circumstances, which makes their results appear worse in aggregate.

I also believe in supporting our public institutions.

I’m not trying to create an argument with your sincere response, just providing my own rational for not sending my kids to private school even though we can afford to. I do this to address my feeling of doubt in the same way that you did this to address your feeling of guilt.

Doesn’t seem outlandish (without knowing your insurance covered) a 20x difference would occur.

Why even have kids if you don't plan on having time for them?

Why would anyone have kids? I adore my children and don’t want a life without them, but I also can’t provide any good rational reason to have children.

Many parents in Europe heavily depend on our social net, and I know that's a different debate, however single parents or families where both HAVE TO work full-time sounds like the wrong approach to me.

Let's be honest. Our economy only needs people to work 20-25 hours a week max.

This is a societally productive outcome, because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. If we had 10x the number of engineers, wages would drop significantly. Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different. But also likely more societally beneficial due to lowering cost to provide software (which in a competitive market, will get passed down to consumers).

A big problem we have though is lack of education/direction given to college students so many of them aren't even really aware of wages of various fields and choose based on likability of the role rather than considering both likability and economics.

Unfortunately many people choose to be teachers regardless of low pay. Given that teachers are primarily government paid, we could elect to simply pay them more to attract higher caliber talent. But most fields aren't government employed, so not feasible for other roles.

Doctors in particular are problematic, because as I understand it the AMA limits number of new doctors creating an artificial shortage. That should be fixed/regulated against... it's pretty much monopoly power of labor to be able to decide number of doctors. Monopoly power on either the corporate or labor sides pretty much always leads to worse societal outcomes.

But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly". You're free as a student to choose a career path that pays better. I'm hugely in favor of reducing barriers to role switching and doing away with the traditional 4 year college program. Could open up lots of doors for people.

Whole conversation around free college is starting from the wrong premise (that 4 year college should even be the baseline). College is largely just a signaling tool, and the long duration and requirement makes switching career paths very costly, and pretty much impossible for people who aren't in their 20s. Even if it were made free

In a perfect market economy, yes. In an imperfect economy, where the value of each teacher is hard to measure, and where teachers cannot capture the full value of their work (e.g. a lifechanging middle school teacher can't charge much more than a normal teacher) this isn't true.

> Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different.

This is really not clear. First of all, as software engineering can be done remotely, there is already a fair level of global competition. Second, migration doesn't always decrease wages (see Mariel boatlift for a counterexample). And even with open borders I don't think the current top 10pct of SWEs would be paid more than 20% less.

> But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly".

Again, assuming that the market is efficient, which it probably isn't.

An interesting experiment would be running two cohorts of students through the same school, with same curriculum but different set of teachers. And paying one set of teachers more than the other and measuring long term outcomes. I would be interested in seeing the results of this experiment. There was already something like this done as a result of a New Jersey lawsuit, but I would have to vet whether it impacted pay of the teachers. In that case there was no improvement in educational outcomes, despite greatly increased funding for the schools.

Yes, software could have always been done remotely. But it largely hasn't... and timezones become problematic. Show me where FAANG companies are hiring remote workers en masse for US based teams? Maybe it's happening, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of that.

I worked for a company that primarily hired on H1B, and hiring was a lot easier when pulling people from Europe/India/China due to lower comp expectations. These people were paid the same as everybody else/native US people, but just culturally were less comp sensitive. But H1Bs are highly limited in quantity, of course.

Why suggest the economy is inefficient? In areas where the market has little intervention, it's largely efficient. Though I agree there are areas where there actually needs to be more government intervention to encourage a competitive market. Competitive markets are more important than free markets for a societally beneficial outcome. One example: competitive markets require that information is freely available. Companies can profit by hiding information which disadvantages consumers (e.g. cost of healthcare procedures, cost of enterprise software etc... relies on information asymmetry to enhance margins).

> Unfortunately many people choose to be teachers regardless of low pay.

I don't think this statement is true any more. At least in the state where I live, teachers were quitting in large numbers before the pandemic, and the situation is far worse after. This is one factor that's not touched on in the article at all, and IMO is mainly responsible for why schools haven't returned "to normal".

Maybe signalling your ability to pay!

Making it tuition-free is a good step toward stopping some of that bullshit.

University system is a kind of self-governing guild system. The signal is approval from the older generation who satisfied the requirements of the system in their time. It may be a signal that the younger group has put up with their bullshit hazing. Or that they met some reasonable standards. The money requirement is more like the bullshit hazing.

> and the long duration and requirement makes switching career paths very costly, and pretty much impossible for people who aren't in their 20s. Even if it were made free

Not really. It requires no more time investment than a full-time job. For working age people seeking career advancement not a problem.

Replacing the income of a full-time job is part of the funding requirement that is more important for older people.

> Doctors in particular are problematic, because as I understand it the AMA limits number of new doctors creating an artificial shortage

Any degree system is "artificial scarcity" inherently. Even if the number of spots isn't fixed centrally, you have some social ("artificial") process for including and excluding people. The more exclusive the process, the higher prestige the degree can confer. You cannot remove the exclusivity while preserving the degree.

(And maybe we should get rid of a lot of the degrees and the social divisions they create... I don't especially feel that way for MDs though.)

A 1973 letter to the editor in the journal Science describes the "famous story" about a physicist whose solution to a poultry farm's egg-production problems began with "Postulate a spherical chicken".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

Obviously a nursing home aid is a lot more “essential” than a FAANG engineer, but the latter is paid substantially more. It sounds flowery and noble to pay people based on how “important” their jobs are to society. But it’s simply no way to run an economy.

Because child care has long been part of the value proposition of public schools. It's amusing how "you shouldn't have had kids if one parent wasn't willing to stay at home full time" is now something that the far left and far right agree on.

I consider myself somewhat left wing, and I don't agree with this statement at all. Cooperative babysitting, more flexible work arrangements, larger friend groups, joint families, and more social cohesion in general are a good way to balance childcare.

I actually agree that teaching can provide some part of this, but don't understand the fact where everything else runs according to a hyper-capitalist algorithm, but teachers are expected to take on outsize responsibility and risk adverse healthcare outcomes because "Think of the children".

It does take a village to raise a child. Let's do that, and not just leave it to two parents and a teacher.

I don't mind the best teachers being paid more but we have to be honest with our numbers first.

That's not how salaries work at all. Waste collection is extremely essential to society (without it, tens of millions would die of easily preventable diseases, and big cities would be unviable). Yet garbage collectors also earn around $40k.

Why the resentful reaction? Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing!

I'm proposing that the cost benefit analysis would show that we should invest more in keeping schools safely open, and doing so will probably pay off immediately without even factoring in future harm or benefit to children. It's not wrong to factor in that future, but if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus. (It's still not easy to build a consensus, but that's because our civil society is running on automatic and we struggle at making even win-win decisions)

It certainly isn't. What I'm saying is that:

- Your repeated statement that "Schools increase parent productivity" is far from proven in the first place (see the point about summer, which is not consider a major 'productivity hit' event at most companies, unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving).

- And even if it were true, it's an incidental factor, and not one that is planned for.

> ...if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus.

Sure. All I'm saying is that the consensus which you're talking about should emerge from first principles, and should not just happen to fall close to "schools should stay open as usual, disregarding the pandemic sweeping the nation". If schools do indeed have a measurable effect on parental productivity, then the consensus could look like companies being required to enter into a profit sharing arrangement with all the schools of their employees' children.

I'm a parent, and I work-from-home. We just had winter break. I had 2 kids not in school and 2 kids not in day care. I definitely had a productivity drop.

I had a meeting where all 4 kids took turns interrupting me. I had things to do, and a daughter would "just appear" and ask me about some weird question. They would come in each afternoon and ask me when I was going to finish work amd play with them - and yes, I played with them (no regrets!).

Also, my oldest daughter tested positive for covid yesterday, so we kept all 4 home today. Even with my wife handling the "learning form home", I still got interrupted: how do I log in, what do I need to learn, where is the website, can I eat "this".

I'm not sure I follow your point of separating productivity hits from summer/Thanksgiving/Christmas. My points about these past 2 weeks hold for thr upcoming summer.

You could also get professional childcare for your children to cover the day, but you probably don't want to pay the amount it costs. I am not sure why you don't have a friend or family member watch the kids for a day; few seem to be able to depend on close friends or family members in the US to do things like this that are considered simple favors in some other countries.

What I don't understand is why you think things are any different for teachers. People act as if teachers have the same training, PPE, and pay as medical professionals. They don't.

(I realize that I'm straying a bit from the point, but so is everyone else. There are far too many anecdotes in this thread that boil down to "I had a bad day with my child's education".)

Teachers do the the bulk of the work in keeping "schools" going. A majority of the essential employees in schools are teachers, but a very large margin (the next biggest is janitors and other support staff). Perhaps I am overreacting because discussion about this I have heard tends to descend into thinly veiled blame for the teachers. A typical disingenuous comment that I have heard repeated ad nauseam is "Oh, we are not blaming the teachers, we just want schools to be open". Well okay, we can throw open the doors then without enough teachers, and I guess the students can just...teach themselves?

> But you seem unwilling to simply concede that this is an ongoing disaster for kids. I mean, remote learning has been a farce...

Yeah, my statement would certainly be more nuanced than that. I would concede that:

- There is an ongoing pandemic that is a disaster, especially with the model of healthcare that we use in the US

- It has changed the fabric of our society in many ways, including expectations about "going to work" and childcare

- This change has affected children's learning in ways that are unpredictable

What I don't get is the isolation of these unpredictable changes to a simple, easily hurled "schools and learning are a disaster" comment. Society is a disaster right now, and unlikely to go back to normal in a hundred ways.

> it's all our fault because we don't live near retired or underemployed friends or relatives who can take on childcare responsibilities for months on end?

Certainly not, I feel bad for you. I'm just implying that the lack of these is a part of why society (not just "schools") is such a disaster right now. A society with more cohesion that balances responsibility of child rearing across multiple people would have done a much better job.

You keep mentioning that there are ways to take care of kids that don't include "kids in schools with teachers" - you want teachers removed from the equation because they shouldn't be forced to be exposed to kids.

No matter how I think about the alternatives, I keep coming back to a building shaped like a school, staffed with people that look like teachers.

Example 1:

I get a retired person to watch my kids. Well, this person is still exposed to my kids (just like a teacher), and exposed to my house. Also, where am I going to find a retired person who is willing to be in my house, but not willing to go to the local school and do the exact same work?

Example 2: I get an underemployed friend to watch my kids. I don't know any underemployed people - they all have kids and jobs like me. Would I find someone on the internet? I'm certainly not going to let a stranger take care of my kids... not unless that person had similar qualifications as a teacher

Example 3: maybe I partner up with other families. We take turns watching our kids. 5 families, we watch our kids 1 day a week, we work 4 days a week. It's awesome. And I just invited homeschooling. If we are really good, we'll expand. And I just invented school.

You end with this

> A society with more cohesion that balances responsibility of child rearing across multiple people would have done a much better job

I'm pretty sure child rearing has been balanced across multiple people in our society. Many (not all) families have 2 parents. Their kids go to school with people. They may be involved in sports, coached by people. They may even go to places of worship, with more people.

In your examples, you'd probably pay the retired person or underemployed friend extra during a pandemic. You'd probably make sure that the other families you were exposed to had adequate PPE and weren't exposed to unnecessary risk. If your kid misbehaved, you'd probably keep them at home instead of sending them to other families. You probably can't just abstract them into a "childcare unit" abstraction.

But with schools, you seem to be able to do this. The drumbeat seems to be "Kids should be in school come hell or high water", instead of "We would humbly request other people to take care of and teach our kids, and we understand that they are overworked and there's extreme health risks".

My suggestion for you is – if you really believe in Example 3, why not do it? Try it and see; I guarantee you'll run into the equivalent of staffing problems before long. If not, win-win – you just got free school!

- yes, teachers are severely underpaid and it makes little sense to me. Education is so important if not the most important matter for democracy but US messed it up so bad. I wish all teachers’ wages to double if not more.

Essentialism is what's needed here.

Nope. That just means it's a moonshot. Besides I don't agree with current education approaches, so why pedestal one over the other.

Also, there ARE metrics of subjective wellbeing and we can use them. There's a culture of denial and aversion to real challenges that leads to people to escape it through numbers and dollars. What you're saying sounds like what that culture says.

By making it about COVID, the affluent readers of the New York Times can pat themselves on the back as if they weren't failing the youth prior to quarantine measures. Of course they were.

I've seen it. Everyone's seen it; even if they've chosen to believe they haven't. The secondary sources have to water it down like this article if they want to talk about it at all. And the primary sources where it's laid bare are a bit too dirty and undomesticated to mention in polite society. Not as if anyone wants to be caught cavorting with primaries at all these days, lest the blue checks turn their back on it (and you, by association).

What if there was 40 USI just sitting on the shelf waiting to be picked up? But it's in a blind spot. It was there waiting in 2018 and never touched.

The 4 USI can be achieved by getting rid of the things we never wanted in the first place. Achieving that 40 USI will mean ruthlessly tearing into the status quo.

So, let's circle back and remind ourselves that this is an article using big words and statistics to state the obvious: schooling under covid sucks. No shit, that's not news, but it's in The Times. So let's look more carefully at what it does say. They're not learning enough, and the institutional socialization is producing people less well-adjusted than ever.

OK, technically true. But those were the most visible problems with schools before COVID too.

So, why is this specific article - written this way - in The Times? What purpose(es) - deliberate or not - does it serve?

I live in a state that has had a fairly restrictive approach to COVID - my kids were in remote learning for about a year and we had two periods which could arguably be called "shut downs." But our fortunate circumstances made it so that I do not feel like it was particularly difficult for our children. As a result I have not reacted very strongly to local authorities continuing very cautious policies regarding masks and cohorting in schools. I was initially perplexed by the very strong reactions against the same among my peers, but am coming to understand that, like what this article points out, it has been very difficult for other children.

This has been my experience too among families I know. If anything it has been more difficult on parents than it has been on children. That may be another source of reaction towards school polices.

Sweden was an outlier in keeping schools open, premised upon the rationale that social and mental wellbeing outweighed the risk covid posed to students[0].

I relocated from NYC to Stockholm early in the pandemic which gave me some interesting insights on comparative covid responses.

[0] https://www.gu.se/en/news/only-in-sweden-primary-school-rema...

Hell, Anything? No. Nothing is ever done. Nothing ever happens except decay.

The United States is spinning down its governmental duties. The pendulum will swing right again, and that will be the death blow. They will continue to gut public and infrastructure programs. All 3 branches will finally truly be a jobs program for the upper class to suck the blood out of everyone else.

The roads will fall apart. Jails will continue to fill up. The homeless crisis will continue to not fix itself. Everyone but the most wealthy will live like dogs, and then obligingly die when they can't afford the "good" insurance.

I mean San Francisco has a $1.1B budget for homelessness. That's a contribution of almost $1,300 for every man, woman and child resident of SF. And yet the problem is worse, not better.

Maybe it's not a money problem but the approach that's the issue.

They do not. I agree they are useless on purpose. That is my point.

In reality, anyway, the social, economic and political system works pretty well for business and capital owners. Specially those at the very top. Governments are corrupt because the system is corrupt. The rules of society have been written, and this dates back to the foundation of the country, to benefit elites.

In order to change the rules major dissent is needed, and that will only come in a situation of complete collapse of the political system. I think it will happen, and I actually think things are getting really heated up... but it's not gonna be pretty.

It will be interesting to see what kind of economic, political and social models could be followed. But really, elites will never want to risk their current positions.

In addition to that, you need to constantly evolve your delivery vehicles to overcome newly developed defense capabilities.

In even the most bare-bones defense scenario, the needed investment is fairly large, and it depends on how large of an investment adversaries make.

Our best and brightest are making money to buy fallout shelters in NZ or wherever.

If you are a property owner, then distributing the externalities and barbaric social harm of the insane NIMBYism and zoning laws that artificially protect your property's valuation to the majority renting population makes sense. A few thousand a year is nothing compared to real estate.

And obviously, that amount of money is easily enough to just give the unhoused the housing they need, if it weren't impossible to build affordable housing in the first place.

In fy2021-2022 the amount is $670M … over two years.

SF spends 1/4 of the amount you accuse it of.

Furthermore, it’s well known that other counties near and far send their homeless people here. So as a SF tax payer… I think you owe me many thanks for taking care of your homeless people.

> The FY21-23 HSH budget leverages $1.2 billion over the next two years in federal, state, and local resources (including Prop C funds). In addition to HSH’s existing commitments

Actually, a pediatric emergency was just declared [0]. And both Republicans and Democrats passed a $250 Million bill to provide rapid support for children's mental health. A Dr friend described it as "if I'm seeing a child and I'm concerned he/she is suffering from depression, I can be on the phone with one of the top 5 experts in the country in 30 minutes".

I'm aware, "mental health" for kids isn't the same as "education for kids" - but this is a big step in the right direction

[0]https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/zLatest_News/Pediatricians_CAPs_...

That seems like a less than scalable approach.

Sounds unreasonably optimistic.

About $2 per person under age 18.

What do you suggest? More funding? The US has one of the most expensive public education systems per capita. We keep pouring more money into it and it keeps getting worse. I'm in favor of "providing additional support to schools" but it needs to be something other than throwing money at the problem.

What is an event or piece of legislation that has been passed?

Politically, outside of the obvious 2020 election, there has been unbridled and unprecedented government spending since at least the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it was justified is up for debate, we likely still haven't realized all of the effects, but it has been at levels typically only those further on the left would propose.

Forgive me if I'm not really that concerned about Qanon shaman taking selfies in the capital building or the FBI creating fake white supremacist groups.

One small anecdote to avoid citing :), a biography of a US congressman said that in the 1950s Democratic and Republican Senators would sometimes vacation together at each other’s summer homes or during the annual recess. Not sure that happens anymore.

Ill leave the judgement to you, but it’s pretty obvious that things are not the same today as they were 3 years ago.

Let's see, who was the party in charge then, hmm...

What do you think is going to happen if we stop maintaining our infrastructure?

> Everyone but the most wealthy will live like dogs

These two points confict. Maybe the left should stop trying to raise the SALT tax deductions that the right reduced?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/22/democr...

And I say this as someone that would benefit from raising the SALT taxes. It is wrong for them to try to raise it

I'd really want to see the data on which you base this belief. Watching US politics from Europe I see the Democrats roughly matching the European center. European "left" has no voice in the US!

"They say things very far left( arguable ), but the way they govern is extremely moderate."

The politicians? They aren't confused. They understand the system.

In order to have political success they explicitly seek the backing of the wealthy elite.

It constrains the politics to never be leftist, and politicians to dodge policy and posture on culture wars.

I really feel for the kids who are younger. The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.

Unlikely. The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance. Even unstructured homeschoolers, who have little to no explicit instruction of any kind, are only on average a grade level behind average children[1]. The last historically comparable school closures, for the 1918 flu pandemic, had no detectable long run effects[2].

[1] The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence From Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Students

http://zoleerjemeer.nl/files/1313/9109/4391/The_Impact_of_Sc...

[2]School Closures During the 1918 Flu Pandemic https://www.nber.org/papers/w28246

Is this really true if the entire class missed a few years? It is very different having one kid who missed a lot and then later interacts with kids who all didn't miss a lot, and a class where every kid is behind a couple of years.

Yes, in many places it really is. Look at what test results have been released - there is a tiny cohort of kids that managed to remain close to the normal level of achievement, and generally in areas where parents are heavily involved in schooling their kids.

I wouldn't be surprised if kids who fell behind during remote school are clustered at the same schools.

> Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright.

But, this is not true. If you look at generations that grew in hard times, they were doing worst. Generations that grew in war are more violent then peace generations. They have more mental health issues, drink more and so on. Famines have long term impact too. There were even studies about Holocaust survivors - even their children have more anxieties and similar mental health issues. The even affected parenting and communication of survivors enough to change children.

Education achievements now are better then they were in those generations.

> Our results are not inconsistent with an emerging literature that finds negative short-run effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning. The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality.

Furthermore, from the paper:

> Another important contrast is that school closures in the 1918-19 pandemic were substantially shorter than current COVID-19 related school closures, potentially limiting their effects. In our sample of 1918-19 school closures, the average closure length was 36 days, and some cities decided to make up for missing school days by extending the school year.

Closing schools is just one of the many measures society has taken to steal the prime years of life from the young to give to the elderly.

I wasn't a day behind. The class had not advanced at all.

But I'm sure the pandemic will be blamed for school unachievement for decades. It's a godsend to the school industrial complex.

If I were of college age and was able, I'd take a gap year or two without any hesitation.

I wouldn’t bother and have seen the effects on people who did skip the last year or two. It’s been terrible for them. They’ve basically been stuck at home doing jack shit and watching years of their life disappear without any progress on literally any front.

Variety in age in socialization is a healthy thing, and I feel cramming entire cohorts into a 24-month bloc isn't particularly amenable to how we've evolved.

I think it is more of a relative problem than an absolute problem.

Finally I didn't have to waste time on commute and it was way easier to ignore doubtful profs/useless courses and focus on the right things.

but yea, things may be harder if you don't know people you're studying with

Personally, I had to take classes like "Ancient Eastern Civilizations" while pursuing a degree in Audio Production. So while the term "useless" is a bit strong, I understand where they're coming from.

There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Prerequisites, of course, prevent one from wasting the professor's time from unprepared students.

Sure, course is never 100% useless, but when in one course you can learn "10 things" and on this one you can learn "1 thing" and have to spend similar amount of time on them meanwhile you're working full time, studying on weekends and trying to learn other things for your job/career, then things are tricky and you gotta pick - you put effort into some classes that aren't really efficent or maybe some OSS side project?

I couldn't

I could only take "specialisation" - a few courses at the last year or something like that.

It could be software engineering / cybersecurity / something else

Children are resilient. What is _hurting_ them is not the school closures, but the panic and uncertainty that some people have put around this.

Simply by observing those around me, I have learned SO much about humans.

We hate uncertainty. I hate it. I remember worrying myself into a frenzy looking at all of these tables predicting exposure and risk. "If we go to the grocery store, we can't see X friend... but if YOU go to the store and spend less than 15 minutes getting peanut butter and bread..." it was a mess.

I also learned that humans are bad at responding to highly unlikely events. All throughout this pandemic, I remind myself that people are making emotional decisions not logical - and they are doing that because we all are really bad at making logical decisions. And then I remind myself to show them love and grace.

What can I do to make your experience a little less frantic? Even if only for 1 minute.

Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever going to be paid more? What about later start times for high schools?

There's so many things that can be questioned.

I don't really see how this would happen, or even how they connect. Covid is keeping our schools from even being schools. It's displaying the flaws in our larger system, but it doesn't really speak at all to what's good or bad in the classroom itself. EXCEPT that we've had a natural experiment where kids are removed from the classroom, and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school! If anything this indicates we don't need to reinvent our schools, we just need to reinvent our school HVAC.

(We also aren't reinventing school HVAC, which is disappointing because of all the options in front of us that's about the easiest.)

I'm not sure that was ever in doubt, but it doesn't mean classrooms are good environments for learning. "It's better than (almost) nothing" is where we're at now.

I have seen nearly every aspect of life in the U.S. take a major hit. Nearly no one cares about anything, and the attitude of taking care of me myself and I seems rampant.

I have been worried about children since day one, from social disorders to education. We have several generations that basically missed out on two years of schooling from pre-school through university levels. That can't be good in one to three decades time, even if we i prove the issues tomorrow.

Based on the news being fed to me, it’s almost as if the pandemic didn’t even happen to them.

The 1st world kids will be fine. Some of them will struggle and carry some emotional baggage forward.

The ones who have nothing will have a little less. Society will hold them in as much regard as they do now, maybe a little less if helping them requires more taxes.

The type of conservatives that wield the most power in the US Senate are skeptical of public education. This is their golden chance to finally dismantle it, creating a patchwork of federally funded religious private schools.

At the same time, children will increasingly grow to be emotionally underdeveloped, leading to poor romantic relationships filled with toxicity, leaving them perpetually unsatisfied with life and cynical of others. Poor quality breeding will become rampant and add to the problem.

Over the past ~150 years, our society has been remade; higher education is hardly the esoteric province of the aristocracy and clergy it was ~700 years ago in Europe, and as you imagine it will "obviously" soon again be.

There's no doubt the elite retain advantages of birth. Perfect meritocracy seems at odds with humans' intuitive creation of entrenched hierarchy and autonomic drive to empower and extend one's specific genetic legacy. But even when beset by imperfection, corruption, hypocrisy, etc, a Western non-elite human's life is not likely to turn out "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," as is it would have in almost any other age. A peasant in Lancashire c. 1350 could reasonably bet many of his children would die, and those that did not would live almost entirely the same life as his own. A working-class American can make the opposite bets just as reasonably.

All this to say: I'm no Whig historian, but it is impossible to deny tangible and massive improvements in the average human's access to education and general quality of life over the past several generations. It is therefore absurd to make "obvious" predictions such as you have, contrary to a pervasive, macro trend, without providing some insightful analysis. (William Gibson's Cassandra cries should not be used as primary evidence...)

We rich, lucky ones, likely as not great-grandchildren of semi-literate factory peons, seem, generally, to exist in a cynical milieu which thoughtlessly assumes inevitable dystopia (an anti-Whig history!). But recent negative trends in, for instance, the Gini co-efficient, are minuscule vibrations within a relentlessly positive curve [https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality].

Humans are animals, yes, but they have long transcended the ordinary pressures of environment and selection. In a stupor, trying to comprehend our exceptionalism, we intuitively and nonsensically describe much human behavior as "unnatural."

Your crude reduction of human reproductive choice denies myriad past choices made in free will, subsuming both the terror of power and the rare true love to biochemical animism. Go far enough down this path and you will assign to animal spirits the abstract free will you deny, accidentally recreating primitive religion & symbolic thought, thus elaborately disproving yourself.

We're obviously animals. That's a place to start, but not an insight. Contending otherwise is insight to the soul and pain of the speaker, not their society.

The end, the ur-insight: a universal theory which succinctly predicts homosexuality, Dennis Kuchinich's marriage, the Ptolemaic family tree, the fate of the Sabine women, and Kate Upton's romance.

No. It works for some 10-year-olds. Few, even. The school system is not intended to educate a few children, it is intended to educate all the children in the country. Even the poorest and least motivated. You cannot just throw children into a room with an adult and computers and tell them to learn.

Is the goal for kids to pass exams and then forget most of it by adulthood? Or is it for kids to gain basic life skills, find out what interests them, and have the environment to pursue their interests? (Almost everyone finds some “work”-type things interesting.)

Note: I'm not saying that my system would work for everyone; I'm challenging the suggestion that the existing system works for most people. Some people require interactive (rather than book) teachers to learn well, but that doesn't mean that “You Must Learn This, Then This, Then This” is an effective approach.

For example the article says

> Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances.

But when you go to the study they link, it says

> Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no difference in the risk of death from covid-19 in households with or without children.

There's a big difference between, "You're just as likely to die from COVID if you have children" and "Children going to school doesn't increase the spread of COVID". The study even points out that closing schools "may decrease transmission", but the article completely ignores that.

This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their children returning to badly ventilated classrooms

Some districts simply weren't able to do virtual learning, and almost every parent their was an essential worker. They did a ton of outreach over the summer distributing Chromebooks getting people internet access etc but it still had a dismal turnout and had to go to modified in person in fall of 2020 for a couple weeks and then just full time regular school after a month or so. Even then they had a record number of non-returning students, and we are talking elementary school, first and 3rd grade. They can't find these kids, the official line is that they left the district, but there's no reason so many low income families would move in a single year.

They did masks, plexiglass, spacing and all the other stuff to start with, but it made instruction nearly impossible and they had so many problems with students bringing contraband including guns to school that they basically removed anything COVID related and had to ban book bags and made lunch free for everyone and no outside food without written persmission for allergies. They sent letters pleading for parents to please remind children not to bring guns or drugs to school. Delta 8 gummies have been a major problem. Again this is a school of about 1200 students that only goes to 3rd grade.

I think those on the outside of low income communities are really under estimating how a certain segment of the population is being drastically negatively impacted. Despite my families commitment to public education by nieces were sent to private school. There are still issues in their public schools and if you go to Walmart or just ride around their are school age children everywhere all day long even though full time in person instruction has been going on since Fall of 2020.

Like I'm not even sure how some communities will recover. This is an area that already had around 70% graduation rate now the pace of instruction is significantly reduced and 2nd grade is basically a repeat of 1st grade.