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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#561

Post by istjohn »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #539
istjohn wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

I read you to be dismissing tests outright. If you merely want to stipulate that the test scores are subjected to rigorous statistical analyses that "properly measure its error bars" we are in total agreement.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#562

Post by inciampati »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #481
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…

I feel like European countries handled school much better. Rapid tests 1-2 times a week for all students. Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.

This is absolutely not uniform in Europe.

The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#563

Post by TeeMassive »

honkycat wrote: post #436
djrogers wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would say that spending $6 trillion in Ill leave the judgement to you, but it’s pretty obvious that things are not the same today as they were 3 years ago.

Please show receipts here. You mean the infrastructure bill? That is only 1 trillion? What do you think is going to happen if we stop maintaining our infrastructure?

The problem with the infrastructure bill is that the price tag was hidden with programs that needed to be renewed periodically.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#564

Post by hooande »

paxys wrote: post #34

When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I still have latent trauma from that incident. Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with it. We are kidding ourselves if we think that the long list of behavioral changes we are starting to see in kids is simply a…

Previous generations endured wars and much more deadly pandemics. Do you have any idea how difficult it was and how long it took for black children to be able to go to school, at all?

Man, it sucks that kids have to deal with this pandemic. But my grandparents had to deal with a whole lot worse than Zoom. The kids will be alright.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#565

Post by broken8ball »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #459
honkycat wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you argue we have gone "hard left" exactly? What is an event or piece of legislation that has been passed?

Socially and culturally it's undeniable, it's now completely unacceptable in my professional and social circles to publicly support one of our two political parties. Politically, outside of the obvious 2020 election, there has been unbridled and unprecedented government spending since at least the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it was justified is up for debate, we likely still haven't realized all of the effects…

Since when is it just one party’s bag to spend loads of money? I’m not sure that the stopgap measures in the CARES Act qualify as “hard left” considering they were intended to provide aid to the country during a hudred-year catastrophe event. Distinct from the media monkey-dancing, both parties obliged those initial packages with little cross-party fuss. It seems as if you’re conflating “left” with “spending lots of tax-payer money.” That ship has sailed. I still have my first paper stimulus check with a very proud signature on it. This kind of my-favorite-flavor of picking and choosing what is “left” and what is “right” proves the intentional vagueness of American politics works perfectly in undoing any meaningful criticisms of the system as a whole. Both parties are one in the same. The differences between them are immaterial in the face of the problems we face. Red or blue, they will continue to burp their champagne at us as this magnificent shift drifts further toward the iceberg and they tell us from both sides of the aisle “we’re working on it, but the other guys won’t budge.” How many decades does this pattern play out with nothing getting better before the realization sets in that nothing is going to get better, and that’s the way it’s meant to be? No left or right, only wrong.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#566

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#567

Post by texasbigdata »

istjohn wrote: post #541
lucaspm98 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socially and culturally it's undeniable, it's now completely unacceptable in my professional and social circles to publicly support one of our two political parties. Politically, outside of the obvious 2020 election, there has been unbridled and unprecedented government spending since at least the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it was justified is up for debate, we likely still haven't realized all of the effects…

Politically, we're deadlocked as always.

Don’t think this is true empirically. Unless “always” means “sometime in the 2010s” vs the entire data set.

One small anecdote to avoid citing :), a biography of a US congressman said that in the 1950s Democratic and Republican Senators would sometimes vacation together at each other’s summer homes or during the annual recess. Not sure that happens anymore.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#568

Post by bradlys »

BadCookie wrote: post #497
IggleSniggle wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

I send my kid to private school to get an average class size of about 8 kids. If instead I sent him to public school and donated my tuition checks to the school, my son would have a class size of >20, and I have no idea where my money would be spent. On some level, I’m a little ashamed of sending my kid to a better school than most kids get, but I’m giving you an honest answer.

The other aspect is that private schools are self-selecting first and selective second. Your kid either needs to be well behaved or fiendishly rich (enough to offset their problems with benefits for everyone). This isn’t the case in public - as it takes everyone as they are.

The reasons I’ve considered private school for my future children after talking to friends/parents who have put theirs in private has less to do with the quality of education but more to do with the peers they’ll have. They’ll likely be around decently behaved peers and I’ll be able to shape the discussion of how the school is run - whereas that’s not the case at public schools at all.

Having come from such poor schools where we couldn’t even afford five days a week education and only went 3-4 days/week, I know my kids will get an exceptional education compared to what I got - but I want them to have a good social life too and maybe that’ll work at a public school but maybe it’ll work at a private instead.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#569

Post by texasbigdata »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #411
quadrifoliate wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

GDP per capita in Kenya is 30-50x lower than USA. The provider and the facility are probably a large part of the total cost. Wages and land price are loosely correlated.

Doesn’t seem outlandish (without knowing your insurance covered) a 20x difference would occur.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#570

Post by uniqueuid »

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…

Thank you for this comment, it's incredibly true.

Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school.

* Kids go to school to get emotional care.

* Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen.

* Kids go to school to learn social behavior.

* Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work.

* Kids go to school to learn (from teachers or peers) how to tie shoe laces, wipe your nose, go to the bathroom and so on.

In first and second grade, all of this makes up more than 50% of what kids actually learn, and this is what they are missing completely in home schooling.

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