No Way to Grow Up • Hacker News Board

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#411

Post by IggleSniggle » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

quadrifoliate wrote: post #280

ianbicking wrote: post #239

I'd love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it's not just the educational loss now, it's the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we're causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each da…

> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. 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 hav…

Hello, American parent here. In non-COVID times, there are endless summer programs of all variety to provide childcare for kids during summer months. This is not the case during Thanksgiving / Winter Holiday and depending on where you are, Spring Break.

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.

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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.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#412

Post by throwaway_52828 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:21 AM UTC

ilteris wrote: post #367

I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NYC and last year was bad... They did a test at the beginning of this year before the start of the first grade and her results were awful. This is an unprecedented event and everyone is clueless including in education. I don't make a big deal about the test resu…

[flagged]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#413

Post by runako » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:22 AM UTC

rdtwo wrote: post #373

p_j_w wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only 40, but for my entire life school systems have been told that their number 1 job is education. Every time they're given performance metrics to hit, they're in regards to education. We as a society are telling our school system that they're an educational institution, not a child care one, and if the school system started to behave like a child care institution, we'd collectively be pissed off at them. Sorry,…

The performance metric always includes number of open days. That’s why they add days if you get too many snow days. Those extra days have no impact on education. The goal is set with the legacy expectation that women will stay home and do childcare but that isn’t a reality for many folks. So schools have an equally important child care role. For many folks the problem of unreliable child care can be worse than no chi…

Here's the situation on Day 1 return from vacation in my district:

- ~20% of the teachers at one school out sick

- classrooms being combined due to low staff. Some classrooms combined across grade levels.

- Substitutes in many classrooms. Administration staff being used as substitutes.

This is all before we are passed the median incubation period for New Year's Eve infections, so I would expect staffing levels to continue to deteriorate. (Also keep in mind that some teachers will be out because their children are sick, so kids being infected this week will lead to future staffing pressures.)

In that context, I'm glad you mentioned snow days. Our district is really small; many kids walk to school. However, many teachers & other staff live in other districts and so do not walk to work. When it snows here, the schools generally close on the basis of teachers & staff not being able to make it to school. Parents do not usually throw tantrums on those snow days. This week/month is going to be like snow days in that school staff will not be able to make it to work. Parents are trying to ignore that reality and not being realistic about making alternate plans.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#414

Post by quadrifoliate » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:24 AM UTC

ilteris wrote: post #367

I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NYC and last year was bad... They did a test at the beginning of this year before the start of the first grade and her results were awful. This is an unprecedented event and everyone is clueless including in education. I don't make a big deal about the test resu…

American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment.

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.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#415

Post by lucaspm98 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:25 AM UTC

honkycat wrote: post #399

And what is going to happen? Pass a bill to provide additional support to schools? 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 cl…

That is a highly political, opinionated, and pessimistic take. You can just as easily say that the "pendulum swing" hard left has been causing our current issues, and that at least a balancing out could be a natural and needed correction.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#416

Post by quadrifoliate » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:27 AM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #300

quadrifoliate wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vaccines for teachers have been widely available for almost a year now. You appear to have missed the news around the Omicron variant being much better at vaccine evasion than Delta. You can't compare the situation a year ago with the one now, which is unique and unprecedented, just like the pandemic was initially.

I thought it was pretty much understood the vaccines weren't doing much for contraction of Delta already. We've moved on to "prevents serious illness and death" which is still true for Omicron and ought to be enough for teachers to return to work.

In that case, shouldn't it be enough for everyone to return to work? I wonder why top companies in the S&P 500 are delaying return to work then.

Clearly they must be operating under the same mysterious constraints that are keeping schools closed.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#417

Post by adam_arthur » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:27 AM UTC

tylerhou wrote: post #408

adam_arthur wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a market based economy, wage is determined by supply and demand. Then, high wages incentivize new people to enter the high wage field, and low wages disincentivize new entrants. 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…

> because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. 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,…

You're right that the impact of teachers is hard to measure. But we can ask whether educational outcomes would improve by paying teachers more... and my feeling is that the answer is largely no. Most of educational outcome is cultural/determined by the student and their peers rather than the teacher.

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).

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#418

Post by throwoutway » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:29 AM UTC

quadrifoliate wrote: post #414

ilteris wrote: post #367

I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NYC and last year was bad... They did a test at the beginning of this year before the start of the first grade and her results were awful. This is an unprecedented event and everyone is clueless including in education. I don't make a big deal about the test resu…

American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment. 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…

Research after research comes out pointing to the fact that parents should be directly involved in their children's education.

> 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

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#419

Post by throwoutway » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:30 AM UTC

johnla wrote: post #393

ilteris wrote: post #367

I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NYC and last year was bad... They did a test at the beginning of this year before the start of the first grade and her results were awful. This is an unprecedented event and everyone is clueless including in education. I don't make a big deal about the test resu…

My kids are in NYC public schools too. My 3rd grader opted into the state assessment tests. They release the scores with breakdowns how the kids do by grade and school. This time they didn't. I'm pretty sure it's because of how terrible the results were that it'd be a scandal.

Does NYC have some sort of freedom of information act that you can request this?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#420

Post by honkycat » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:30 AM UTC

lucaspm98 wrote: post #415

honkycat wrote: post #399

And what is going to happen? Pass a bill to provide additional support to schools? 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 cl…

That is a highly political, opinionated, and pessimistic take. You can just as easily say that the "pendulum swing" hard left has been causing our current issues, and that at least a balancing out could be a natural and needed correction.

How could you argue we have gone "hard left" exactly?

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