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As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

reuters.com

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Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#191

Post by Spooky23 »

watwut wrote: post #180
afavour wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“think of the children” has always been a lie, though. Or at best a surface level truth. When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much. In many ways the pandemic response was in line with the norm: rich kids do just fine, poorer kids are mostly ignored.

I dont know, US seems to me to ve obsessed with early childhood education. The expectations on when the kid should read and what not seem to be pushes to very low ages.

It’s weird. Kids are either expected to be little geniuses or are left to the wolves.

In the suburban district my nephews attend, parents double down on sports and refuse to let kids take standardized tests to make them look as good as possible. It’s monsterous.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#193

Post by vagrantJin »

lisper wrote: post #115
afavour wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking with "surface level truth". I think if you asked the majority of the US population if they cared about children they'd say yes and I don't think they would be lying. But there's an ignorance of the bigger picture.

I think that's still not the right way to look at it. Calling it "ignorance" is unnecessarily pejorative. It's a difference in quality metric. Some people attach a lot of value to avoiding (what they believe to be) moral transgressions because they believe it imperils their soul in the afterlife or something like that. You may vehemently disagree with this goal, but if you accept that as a goal then this narrowly foc…

> but if you accept that as a goal then this narrowly focused "think of the children" actually makes logical sense because the afterlife lasts a lot longer than this one does.

The afterlife may last for a few minutes for all we know.

While I do agree with you that not everything neccesarily needs to be looked at and judged quantitatively, the deep dive into esoteric ideas such as the afterlife is misplaced.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#194

Post by onethought »

christkv wrote: post #126
zabzonk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic More like "SOME European countries kept schools open during SOME of the pandemic". And look at the state of Covid in the EU now, with infection rates climbing yet again.

Sure but locking down again is not going to change that significantly and even the WHO who I don’t trust at all has consistently been saying that lockdowns should be avoided at all costs.

Australia’s lockdown policies seem to have worked a treat

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#195

Post by smoldesu »

decafninja wrote: post #155

Disclaimer: I am not a parent. Recalling back to my student days, I and my friends would be ecstatic about not going to school for whatever reason. Granted, the most extended no-school period would be the 3 months of summer break. I don't recall any kid ever actually wanting to go to school. Maybe I'm thinking of this all wrong, but I feel it kind of hard to believe kids aren't liking not having to go to school. Did…

I finished my senior year of high school right when Coronavirus was starting to spread (and graduated in a mask), and I've got mixed thoughts about how this has gone down. On the one hand, I love online school. Zoom calls give me a lot of flexibility to create a better learning environment (listening to music, burning candles, being isolated), but it also takes the urgency out of it all. Last semester I failed 2 classes because the teachers didn't distribute a clear timeline of our work, which made it really difficult to figure out what was due, and when.

Ultimately, (surprise surprise) I think it comes down to an issue with our education system as a whole. Teachers are trained to get their students to "jump through the hoop", and when they fail they blame either the system or the student. The United States has an incredible opportunity to reassess what matters to students, and what the modern workforce is looking for. Our rhetoric around education is stuck in the last century, and we're in the middle of the largest paradigm shift the working world has ever seen.

Another tangential (but important) thing I've noticed is the disparity between our social messaging and teaching methods. Having spent the last 12 years of my life in a 21st century classroom, the emphasis is still on busywork (with an increasing amount of it automated or digitized. I empathize with the teachers who want to keep their workload to a minimum, but it's entirely at-odds with our social goals to make the next generation of students creative and leaders. In my Junior year, I took an AP Language+Composition class that handed out a grading rubric on the first day of class. Overall, the homework load was weighted as 15% of the total grade, so I simply didn't do it for the first trimester. When my teacher found out, he called me in for a discussion about "home life" and other vaguely patronizing things, but he seemed shocked when I told him that I saw his busywork as an opportunity cost. I felt pretty guilty for the next two trimesters, because at some point he just stopped handing me homework assignments with a defeated look. We shouldn't victimize students for thinking critically, and ideally we shouldn't even put them in positions where they have to choose between extracurriculars and practicing their times-tables.

That's just my two cents though.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#196

Post by watwut »

decafninja wrote: post #155

Disclaimer: I am not a parent. Recalling back to my student days, I and my friends would be ecstatic about not going to school for whatever reason. Granted, the most extended no-school period would be the 3 months of summer break. I don't recall any kid ever actually wanting to go to school. Maybe I'm thinking of this all wrong, but I feel it kind of hard to believe kids aren't liking not having to go to school. Did…

They were happy at first, unhappy two weeks later. The home school is strictly inferior - more boring, less discussion, less contact with other kids and teacher.

Then, holidays normally means a lot of activities. Travelling, camps, other kids to play outside with, parents not working and doing activities with you.

Meanwhile, lockdown without school means that you sit in your room day after day while parents work.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#197

Post by jacob2484 »

emkoemko wrote: post #143
cassalian wrote: post #9

Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?

if US really cared about children they would ended the humanitarian crisis in Yemen... so far 85 000+ children under 5 starved to death and they saying 400,000 are going to if this blockade doesn't end.

It's up to the U.S. to fix every single problem?

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#198

Post by dragonwriter »

lupire wrote: post #145
thaumasiotes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt Yglesias wrote an interesting (non-paywalled) piece about this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure > in the actual United States of America, it’s Congress that can write huge checks; it’s mostly states who write rules for restaurants; and schools are a local responsibility — often run by special purpose school boards that have no other governing powers. Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for…

Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because they are afraid to raise taxes on tech billionaires who made a fortune during the pandemic?

> Why can't CA bail out restaurants?

Because the US system has evolved to one which structurally depends on federal government deficit spending to rapidly meet economic emergencies since the feds have structural advantages in borrowing independent of self-imposed limits (borrowing in a currency you control is a massive advantage) and states tend to have (self-imposed, but inflexible in the short term, since they are usually matters of state constitution) budget rules which require balanced operating budgets and, where they allow debt-financed deficit spending, have slow processes (often something like a legislative vote followed by a public election) to approve it.

(Why it's counterproductive to raise taxes, instead of deficit spending, in the middle of a literally once-in-a-century economic downturn to pay for bailouts should be obvious.)

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#199

Post by [deleted] »

redisman wrote: post #177
offby37years wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California COVID death rate: 0.146% Florida COVID death rate: 0.155% These numbers are statistically tied. Yet, FL's economy is open, kids are in school, Disney World entertaining tourists. CA's business are closed & kids are depressed and falling behind. (Bad) leadership matters.

Interesting claims. How do you know FL economy and kids depression is doing so much better than CA?

[deleted]

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#200

Post by School-Cotton »

afavour wrote: post #21
cassalian wrote: post #9

Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?

“think of the children” has always been a lie, though. Or at best a surface level truth. When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much. In many ways the pandemic response was in line with the norm: rich kids do just fine, poorer kids are mostly ignored.

> When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much.

What countries fund education better per capita than the US? Can you give numbers?

According to various sources, for example https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp , US per-student K-12 education funding is only behind four OECD countries: Switzerland, Austria, and Norway (and far behind Luxembourg, which is an outlier).

The US is ahead of highly developed peer countries like Ireland and Belgium, and *way* ahead of the OECD average.

Meta-point: It irritates me when people assume the problem with US education is low spending, because the US education system is obviously so bad that that must be true, when in reality the problem is much more complex.

In my experience the people who believe this never have numbers at hand; they are just shooting from the hip.

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