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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

#261

Post by cpwright »

mancerayder wrote: post #218
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.

Rich kids have access to private schools, which aren't subject to teacher's unions and political battles like the confusing one you had in New York between the Governor and the Mayor of NYC. They were contradicting each other on policy predictions and did a big disservice. In California, apparently teacher's unions have been blocking school opening plans. That's what I read and it could just be false or misleading ne…

I think the idea of "rich kids can go to private schools" is not actually the what is the largest driver inequality of outcomes for children. Roughly 10% of K12 pupils attend private school in the US. I was unable to find anything that pointed towards a definitive increase in private school enrollment; though that doesn't mean that it isn't there.

Sure, the "rich" families can afford private school tuition; but even just well-off families are better able to handle the at home school situation. They are more likely to have flexible schedules or work from home arrangements that allow them to properly supervise their children's learning - which I hypothesize that this better being able to supervise remote learning, is a much bigger driver of divergent outcomes than the fairly small number of private school pupils.

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

#262

Post by pessimizer »

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?

Anybody else find it strange that having students out of school for another few months for their teachers to be vaccinated is being painted as the most important thing in the world when they've already been out of school for a year?

It's fine to mourn the damage that's been done from kids being locked up for a year. To act like the marginal damage from adding a few more months to that year is murder, that's political. To act like the risk to teachers and the families they care for is obviously less important without doing the math is just hatred for working people.

edit: how about this - you're allowed to send your kids back to school if you're willing to stand in a room filled with 30 different people from 30 different households for 8 hours a day, unvaccinated.

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

#263

Post by ilikehurdles »

pragmatic8 wrote: post #82
croes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it's the lockdown and not only that the lockdown makes you more aware of the danger of the virus?

Well, if the person is healthy and young, I can’t imagine why it’d be the latter.

I know otherwise healthy people in their 40s who died from it, leaving behind children without a mother or father. Can you imagine being one of those kids? If so then you can imagine why it would be the latter.

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

#264

Post by monocasa »

whatthesmack wrote: post #222
monocasa wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population. ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity. > Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) bu…

> ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity. My understanding is that lockdowns didn't really change things significantly, so the "with lockdowns in effect" is not really relevant. See California (extreme lockdowns from the top) vs Florida (a bit of lockdown from the top) and their associated infection rate per 100k, which is nearly the same.

You would be mistaken then. Government interventions like lockdowns and school closings were a very good response.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338

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

#265

Post by bjourne »

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?

When push comes to shove, children can't vote, but 70-80 year old geezers can. And many politicians are in their age bracket too. Forcing kids to give up a year of their childhood just to (in the best case, assuming school closures are effective) provide old people with a month or so extra average lifespan is unjust and incredibly cruel.

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

#267

Post by kaesar14 »

vesinisa wrote: post #254
School-Cotton wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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: Switz…

To me, this fact makes it even more shocking how bad the US public education system is. How can it so effectively continue to fail to provide social mobility at scale? Where is all this money being spent? Not at least on teachers' salaries, I guess?

I've always found the statement "how bad the US public education system is" and ones like it to be far too simplistic. It's a country of 350 million people, with perhaps the most staggering differences in educational outcomes of any developed nation on Earth.

Where I grew up in New England and in many of the surrounding areas, public education was incredibly well funded, teachers were paid very, very well relative to cost of living (75k+ USD) and supplies were never lacking. Spectacular outcomes for most students provided a stable home environment (92% of students going on to college).

The US public educational system isn't bad, it isn't good, it's nonexistant. It's a conglomeration of dozens of educational systems receiving some amount of money from the Federal government but more or less operating on their own. Given that, what we should be asking is what are we failing to provide our students outside of classrooms.

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

#268

Post by sjg007 »

smoldesu wrote: post #195
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 clas…

My teacher said that without doing the homework or exams, if you got a 5 on the AP test then you could get an A, a 4 got you a B and a 3 or less got you a C. Homework and exams allowed you to get a + and could possibly push you from a B to an A even if you got a 4.

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

#269

Post by dehrmann »

nradov wrote: post #129
monocasa wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would use many phrases to describe Florida's covid response, but "perfectly ok" would not be one of them.

A better description of Florida would be "perfectly average". In deaths per capita they are right in the middle of US states. Obviously Florida could have done better, but many other states have done far worse. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

The big, open question is why Florida and California have seen such similar case rates despite radically different approaches.

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

#270

Post by thenaturalist »

christkv wrote: post #219
thenaturalist wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you might be seeing things too linearly. Consider all the evolved variants. By letting it run wild you would a) just accelerate viral evolution and b) eventually and unpredictably find yourself in a situation where the mortality rate might spiral out of control across all kinds of demographics. You would then do the same thing as now: lockdown measures to curb mortality. I guess the question of lockdown is…

All viruses either die out or become endemic. They mutate continuously while reproducing in your body because copies are not perfect. Most mutations do nothing. Sars2 is already well adapted to humans and none of the new mutations have significantly changed anything about the virus no matter what the media says so it looks like vaccines will end the pandemic soon. I think Sweden got accused of letting infected senior…

> All viruses either die out or become endemic.

Well... sure, the million dollar question is though how many die before that happens in the case of Sars2 isn't it? Can't really run a school without teachers or a factory without workers. What's your take away from this obvious fact?

> ...and none of the new mutations have significantly changed anything about the virus no matter what the media says...

That is a bold opinion. I guess the media pretty much does say nothing, but rather conveys scientific results? Several [0, 1, 2] scientific publications and studies done suggest something very different. There also seems to be a NY variant which seems to be markedly less affected by vaccines. [3] Quote Dr. Fauci: "Work done by David Ho has shown that we have to really keep an eye on that for its ability to evade both monoclonal antibody and, to a certain extent, the vaccine-induced antibodies. So it’s something we take very, very seriously."

It sure seems like we're on a good track to pushing COVID towards one of the two outcomes, but to me it seems that the path to reaching said outcomes is not yet as trivial and safe as you make it sound.

[0]: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/b117-variant-li...

[1]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/03/scie...

[2]: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n597

[3]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

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