As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by pmiller2 » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

vesinisa wrote: post #289

kaesar14 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you're saying that the largest source of funding for primary and secondary public schools is the local government (state? county?), as opposed to the federal government? And that as such your place of living is the deciding factor for the quality of public education available to you? Areas with poor people in them also gather less tax money, meaning they can't provide the residents with quality education, meaning…

Bingo. Schools in the US are usually funded by property taxes, which leads to all the effects you just named.

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

#292

Post by krapht » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

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 think one thing the US does well is provide education and support for mentally disabled children, and children from foreign countries who need remedial ESL instruction. To speak in generalities, in many schools it makes up ~25% of personnel spend, while the proportion of children may only be ~5% of the population.

It really is more egalitarian then you might think over here.

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

#293

Post by II2II » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #245

II2II wrote: post #204

I live in a part of North America that kept its schools open during most of the pandemic. Children are learning and playing together. The games they play are pretty much the games they would have played a bit over a year ago. The adults in their lives don't transfer the stress that they are feeling to children whenever two kids get the urge to hug each other. It is almost as though the pandemic does not exist. For th…

> as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because once you decide to close them, you also need to decide to bite the bullet and open them again. And if it turns out it doesn’t work (or ‘doesn’t work enough’) and cases remain high, that’s a tough decision.

I am not going to claim that it will always work, but it did work the one time our schools were shut down.

That being said, we have kept numbers very low. This means the response can be targeted since tracing the source of an infection is more realistic. When it looked like schools would be affected, they were temporarily shut down. Since it came during the Christmas break, only seven days were lost for students and two for staff. The most recent increase did not affect schools, so the response was directed towards the most common causes of spread. Now that new cases are due to travel and direct contact with someone who has travelled, those targeted restrictions are being lifted.

Is this approach going to be effective in the long run? Probably not. Remaining on guard for an extended duration is stressful and the virus will eventually catch us off guard. On the other hand, our children are still enjoying their childhood and the burden is not so heavy on adults.

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

#294

Post by heavyset_go » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

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?

> How can it so effectively continue to fail to provide social mobility at scale?

School funding comes from property taxes, so the wealthier the area, the better the schools. Schools also do not address the myriad of other issues that arise from what class a child is born into in the US.

Wealthy parents can afford childcare, or to stay home with the child, and can afford tutors if their kids have trouble in school, etc. Wealthy parents can afford to pay for their children's college education, give their kids' good credit by making them authorized users of the parents' credit cards before they're 18, pay their rent or buy them homes, and pay their bills or give them money should they decide to start their own businesses, make investments, or pursue new careers or the arts.

Poor parents aren't at home to send their kids to school in the morning or to be there when they get back because they're working, and they can't afford tutors if their kids are struggling. Kids often have to work jobs in high school and give the money they earn to their parents to pay for housing and expenses, and they are on their own when it comes to college, moving out, or pursuing a career. Even when they're out of the house, they may still have to help financially support their parents, siblings and extended family.

There are also the issues of food and housing insecurity that stem from poverty, and they have an impact on children's ability to learn, cope and move up from their station in life.

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

#295

Post by krapht » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #243

YarickR2 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spending in general is not a universal or meaningful metric to measure quality of education, details matter. Huge sums spent on school security/meals/transportation do nothing to increase quality of schooling compared to countries where all those measures are unnecessary (safe urban environments with parents able to feed kids by themselves)

> Spending in general is not a universal or meaningful metric to measure quality of education Right. Are you agreeing with me? Is this not my entire point? > Huge sums spent on school security/meals/transportation Any numbers on what fraction of school budgets these typically are?

I can't be bothered to break out Excel to tally up the numbers, but here's a link to a typical suburban school district budget if you want to run the numbers yourself:

https://www.apsva.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/FY-2022-Supe...

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

#296

Post by tinus_hn » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #280

tinus_hn wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what that has to do with anything, but if April’s not it, when was that double digit death rate?

End of March. Which is what led to the extremely heavy lockdowns in April.

So, end of March was 900 people dying a day, December was 1000 people dying in a day.

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

#297

Post by yc-kraln » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #200

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.

> 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…

US Averages for school funding are completely worthless because schools are funded with property taxes; i.e. wealthy areas have amazingly well funded schools while poor areas have underfunded, overcrowded nightmares.

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

#298

Post by monocasa » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #296

monocasa wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End of March. Which is what led to the extremely heavy lockdowns in April.

So, end of March was 900 people dying a day, December was 1000 people dying in a day.

Yes, after a year of treating the illness now each patient takes less hospital resources. They were able to get the death rate from 900/day during a time with 5000 new infections per day, down to about the same daily death rate with 25,000 new infections per day.

This is kind of my point.

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

#299

Post by sokoloff » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

readflaggedcomm wrote: post #251

sokoloff wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of that spending is social security and other retirement programs which are earned (and often paid-for) benefits from a lifetime of work. The next largest (by far) category is Medicare which was largely, but not entirely, paid for by a lifetime of work. Take just the retirement program figures out and the figures are much closer to what you prefer. Take out the half of Medicare that was paid…

And by "earned" you're evoking a moral argument, not a financial or legal one, because in the 40s and 50s Congress rejected the fully-funded model of social security. Just because you paid in doesn't mean anything will remain to take out.

In addition to a moral one, I’m invoking a mathematical and practical argument, in that you earn credits by contributing to social security and your payments are scaled by those credits.

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

#300

Post by oceanplexian » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #288

oceanplexian wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a pet peeve of mine but the onus is not on public health institutions to prove or disprove a negative. Saying "There's not evidence of the virus _not_ spreading in Cohort X" is an almost impossible position. If you have evidence to show it's spreading, then present it, and make public policy decisions based on said evidence. If you don't have evidence, then you should not be making policy.

Here's direct evidence: school closures are one of the most effective government interventions. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338 What I have an issue with is people stating crazy stuff like "covid barely spreads through children" even though they have no real data on it.

If you read between the lines the study makes quite a few points consistent with my argument:

> Primary schools may be generally less affected than secondary schools (20, 25–28), perhaps partly because children under the age of 12 are less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (29).

The study also goes on to state, in a profound bit of self-awareness:

> Our approach cannot distinguish direct effects on transmission in schools and universities from indirect effects, such as the general population behaving more cautiously after school closures signaled the gravity of the pandemic. Additionally, because school and university closures were implemented on the same day or in close succession in most of the countries we studied, our approach cannot distinguish their individual effects

And:

> (iii) Our results cannot be used without qualification to predict the effect of lifting NPIs. For example, closing schools and universities in conjunction seems to have greatly reduced transmission, but this does not mean that reopening them will necessarily cause infections to soar.

Like stated above, this doesn't prove or disprove a negative. If someone comes out with a direct, causative relationship between re-opening schools and increased infections, and that is reproducible, sure, make policy decisions based on that information. But otherwise, if we are blindly making decisions that can affect the health and development of children, we better have data to back up those decisions.