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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#531

Post by jay_kyburz »

geoduck14 wrote: post #403
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 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home". 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

What shocked me (here in Australia) was that every teacher is creating their own resources to give to the kids.

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.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#532

Post by peppermint_tea »

khazhoux wrote: post #350
tehjoker wrote: post #37

I wonder how all those kids with long covid will view decisions to physically disable them potentially for life so the state could force their parents to work. I wonder how kids mental health copes with the idea that adults will intentionally expose them and others to a deadly disease with no mitigations to make money.

I furiously disagree with anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, but I'm very disappointing that the "official" Covid guidance mostly glosses over the (apparent) fact that children simply don't suffer major effects, except for a very small number of them (comparable to other common seasonal viruses). After two years and 300,000,000 cases worldwide, don't we have enough data by now to know that Covid isn't a major health risk…

You have a good point, but I also think it will take more time to get the full picture of long covid in children (number affected, symptoms etc).

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...

Because of the lack of data, it seems like I am running an experiment on my child either way :

- if I send her to school where she will most likely catch covid (1st generation of kids to catch covid at a young age)

- by getting a vaccine studied on such a small test group and short period of time (1st generation of kids get this vaccine at a young age)

I am on the vaccine side but my ex is not.

sorry for the rant(ish) reply, it is a sensitive personal topic and just needed to lay my thoughts bare I guess

P.S : vaccine not available for child in her age group where she lives

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#533

Post by DarylZero »

partiallypro wrote: post #507
honkycat wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think democrats are the left?

I love this talking point, because in comparision to basically every country, US Democrats are socially very far left. It's only fiscally where they are more moderate. Which is basically the opposite of what most Americans want, yet they seem confused on why they struggle.

> they seem confused on why they struggle

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.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#534

Post by _v7gu »

BobbyJo wrote: post #477
honkycat wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small government. So you are in favor of defunding the military?

Small doesn't mean non-existent. One of the few things even the most extreme anarcho-capitalists believe the government should do is protect it's people from a hostile takeover on behalf of a non-anarcho-capitalist nation.

Well, I don't think any sane country will try to invade somewhere where the citizens have recreational nukes.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#535

Post by WalterBright »

bsder wrote: post #515
bsder wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times). Sigh. This simply isn't true. I'm no fan of the Gates Foundation as I think they helicopter in, muck everything up, and then leave picking up the pieces to the locals after they leave again. However, their transparency was at least useful. If you want effective education in younger students, it…

Here is the original link to the Gates Foundation report from 2014: "Lessons from Research and the Classroom: Implementing High-Quality Pre-K that Makes a Difference for Young Children" https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/Lessons%20from%20... Everything in the report is 2012 dollars. Scale appropriately for today. Boston Pre-K is about $15K now while New Jersey would be about $18K now. These are minimums. More…

> teachers asking for donations to buy school supplies.

Around here, the school district has razed the local schools and built fancy new buildings. Then they ask for donations to buy pencils, at what, 5 cents apiece?

Does something seem wrong with this picture?

Let's put it another way. $15,000 per student. 30 students per class. This is $450,000 per classroom per year.

No, lack of funding is not the problem.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#536

Post by istjohn »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #499
johnla wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're a programmer (like many on this site are), I find it hard to see how you think state assessment tests can be objective or measure real learning for a student in any statistically meaningful way. They make whiteboard coding tests look extremely subjective, fair, and balanced in comparison. I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the moo…

Obviously tests are imperfect, but it's silly to dismiss them as useless. Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. Children of priveleged families will always do fine. Their parents have the knowledge and bandwidth to take a proactive role in their children's educations, but we can't leave behind all the kids who aren't so lucky.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#537

Post by bsder »

aidenn0 wrote: post #223
bsder wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times). Sigh. This simply isn't true. I'm no fan of the Gates Foundation as I think they helicopter in, muck everything up, and then leave picking up the pieces to the locals after they leave again. However, their transparency was at least useful. If you want effective education in younger students, it…

As of 2018, 16 states in the US spend over $15K per student[1]. The US average is either nearly 13k[1] in 2018 or over 14k[2] in 2017. Only 3 countries in the OECD spend $15k or more[2]. 1: https://ncses.nsf.gov/indicators/states/indicator/public-sch... 2: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

And I've had this discussion before, as well.

Comparing the numbers to countries we would like to emulate implies that there is a maximum $1,500 overspend. Maybe. This is far from some magic windfall.

Part of the problem with comparing the US to the OECD is the fact that socialized support systems means that auxiliary things like breakfast, lunches, learning disability support, nurses, etc. come out of a different budgetary bucket.

This means that Norway, Sweden, etc., for example, actually spend more per student than is recorded because of the auxiliary expenses that are part of their socialized support system. And Norway and Austria already outspend the US (I wonder if they have something that's in the "education" bucket that we don't).

If, however, you would like to argue that this being a function of the school budget is a bad thing and that school lunches and medical support should be a fundamental part of universal healthcare for children, I'm all ears.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#538

Post by istjohn »

dogleash wrote: post #480

This article is a confidence trick. 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 primar…

I agree 100% that US public schools have been failing our kids for years, but I'm curious what these primary sources are that you refer to.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#539

Post by quadrifoliate »

istjohn wrote: post #536
quadrifoliate wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a programmer (like many on this site are), I find it hard to see how you think state assessment tests can be objective or measure real learning for a student in any statistically meaningful way. They make whiteboard coding tests look extremely subjective, fair, and balanced in comparison. I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the moo…

Obviously tests are imperfect, but it's silly to dismiss them as useless. Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. Children of priveleged families will always do fine.…

> Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments.

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.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#540

Post by WalterBright »

scottlamb wrote: post #510
WalterBright wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The survivors of the pandemic will be, by and large, just fine. Like has happened with every other disaster.

When your standards are the human race dying out or not, of course they'll be fine, and the survivors of all the other disasters have been too. But as a parent of young kids, my standards are clearly higher than that. As I said before, I want the world to be better for them than it was for the survivors of all those other disasters. On this forum, you're well-known and rightly get a lot of respect. You're a great tec…

> It doesn't comfort me much when you say they'll be fine.

As for me, I personally know people who went through WW2. They would not talk about what they went through. But I know, from reading many accounts of WW2, that what millions of people went through is worse than can be imagined. And yes, the children suffered terribly. In Britain, where the children were separated from their parents for the duration of the war, and sent to live with strangers in the countryside. It was much, much, MUCH worse for the children on the continent.

And yet they grew up to be, by and large, ordinary, productive citizens. If you did not know their history, you would not see any difference in their behavior from people who did not go through such experiences.

I also personally know Vietnam boat people who live in my neighborhood. I also know an Afghanistan person who escaped the collapse last summer and arrived here safely with his whole family. He's doing fine rebuilding his life here.

No, you don't have to believe me. I agree, you shouldn't believe some guy on the internet. But there are people all around you who have survived major trauma, and are doing well. You just may not recognize them, because they are doing well.

Yes, some people are broken by trauma. Most are not. We live in a time that is so free of trauma that we need to invent trauma. We live in a golden age of security, health, and plenty. But this is, historically speaking, highly abnormal.

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