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Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

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Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#341
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also kidn of implied that teachers signed up to work with snivelling children who spread germs. That being said, there's evidence this particular virus doesn't even spread easily among children.

> this particular virus doesn't even spread easily among children. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

There's some conflicting results here. There's a study showing it generally doesn't transmit among children: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-commentary-pediatrics...

The study acknowledges children having been infected, but that they generally aren't a major vector for transmission. In particular, the study concludes that rise in cases among the young seem to occur from adults infecting the children.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#342
post #307
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people).

The Senate is designed to act as a counter balance to the house. The senate with equal representation per state, and the house with population based representation. What do you mean by the Senate is broken?

It's not doing what not2b wants.

It's working as designed, but that seems to be irrelevant to not2b.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#343
post #238
post #13

My mother is an elementary school teacher, and I don't want her to go back to school this year. The federal government is worse than useless, and the state government is feckless and unwilling to make the tough calls to protect people's lives. She's been a teacher for ~15 years and still makes less than $30k a year teaching. She loves helping the kids, but her life isn't worth it.

> The federal government is worse than useless, The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope. The presidential talk about it is just that - talk. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/08/when-it-comes-educ...

>The federal government has no jurisdiction over education.

It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#344
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. The current state of the world is incredibly unnatural when you compare it to even 50 years ago. Everything is too connected. We are so much more efficient, but so much more fragile. The best thing you can do to save the world is save yourself and your family. Less fragility, more robustness at the personal / local level. I am mid twenties, and was homeschooled my entire childhood. My father owned a technology…

I don't think homeschooling is usually like you're describing. Most of the people I have met who were homeschooled were not social adjusted or developed and didn't seem 'normal' by most standards. Most of them had parents who were either extremely religious or some other ideological tendency (survivalist, etc).

If you as a parent are grappling with the idea of homeschooling, know that you don’t have to do it the way those parents did. What you saw is not an indictment of homeschooling, but of those parents that decided to do it that way.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#345
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is a consequence of ideologies that have become popular in the US both in politics and in business. Having government direct a mobilization is not acceptable. A mandate that people wear masks is not acceptable. Having manufacturing capacity to make low-value products in large numbers in the US is bad business when poorer countries can do it for less. Having spare inventory is bad, because just-in-time man…

So you think it would be better under a different political leader? I think it’s great that you’re still such an optimist

I think there would probably still be systemic problems, but I don't see how anyone could think that it wouldn't be better under another leader. Trump is overtly incompetent.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#346

I have pretty much given up on everybody at this point. I have already pulled my kid from school and will not send them back. I am in a single income family and I am now working from home. All actions and purchases at this point are to help us to become more independant from the system. Society and government at large has shown itself to be unreliable and undependable. I am also making longer term plans to move out o…

I think Matt Stoller makes some good points on this sort of topic.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-cant-america-handle-t...

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-new-york-city-is-on-t...

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#347
post #265
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people).

> The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people). That's because States are political units, not just arbitrary boundaries. So they also have a voice in the federal government as States. To me, Wyoming being able to not be run roughshod over by California just because California has a lot more people is a feature, not a bug.

If that's true, why does it not also apply to the weighting of the Presidency between those two poles?

What they were describing applies to every federally elected position, in different amounts. Whether it's a bug or a feature (as a whole or for each position) is very much up for discussion, but it's orthogonal.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#348

The federal government is doing this on purpose to kill public schools.

Honestly, outside of teacher unions who is in favor of the public school status quo right now?

Public school performance is pretty universally reviled. By all object measurements it's been failing for a long time.

Let's tear public education down and rebuild it. We seem to be doing that with police forces so why not rethink education also?

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#349
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 800 healthcare workers have died since this began. https://khn.org/news/lost-on-the-frontline-health-care-worke... It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term. Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, t…

This is ridiculous fear mongering. There are 5.1 million people working in hospitals. https://datausa.io/profile/naics/hospitals 800/5100000 = .00016 They are therefore three times less likely to die from Covid than the general population. Schools across Europe have opened. Children rarely spread the disease. Doctors recommend schools open. Twenty times as many children died of the flu last year than from COVID. Deat…

You can't honestly be saying that we're overreacting to COVID?

I would hope someone in full PPE everyday has a much lower rate of COVID deaths.

The US alone has more than 25% of global cases - comparing Europe to the US doesn't really make sense. They largely beat covid, the US obviously hasn't (see 70k new cases yesterday)

More people die in car crashes than the flu - doesn't mean we don't spend trillions on road safety, seat belts, etc.

Death rates are surging in proportion to cases, with the expected 2 week delay from infection to death. Yesterday Florida had 116 deaths.

CFR isn't the metric that informs policy... its deaths and potential deaths? IE 141,000 Americans dying this year, which were largely avoidable.

Re: Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk

#350
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system you describe only applies to Presidential elections. The federal government is a lot more than just the President, and so are its problems.

No, the votes of people in certain states being more valuable than those in others is also true of the House and Senate. In fact, the inequity in voting power produced by the Electoral College is a direct consequence of that in the structure of the House and Senate, since the latter is apportioned simply (except for DC) by adding the apportionment of House and Senate seats.

I responded to a similar point by not2b downthread. The following are some additional points I didn't make there.

To some extent the inequity you describe can be corrected by forcing particular methods for apportionment that can better prevent gerrymandering, and by increasing the size of the House to reduce the difference between the populations of the least and most populous districts. A certain amount of inequity of this type is, however, unavoidable in any representative democracy.

Also, this particular inequity is important to people only to the extent that what the Federal government does directly affects their lives. So an obvious way to reduce the impact of this inequity is to reduce the ways in which the Federal government can affect individual people's lives. The idea that Federal laws and regulations should be able to micromanage so many aspects of everyone's lives would have been horrifying to any of the Founders. Not only that, but it also disempowers people by making them much less aware of everyone's ability to find local solutions to local problems.

Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions; they can continue to make them with impunity since they know they are not risking reelection by doing so. (For example, in all the furor over the CDC and FDA bungling COVID-19 testing, nobody to my knowledge has observed that the only reason the FDA had the power to prohibit State and local health authorities from developing their own tests is that Congress gave it that power, and legislation to rethink bad policy decisions like that is not even on the table.) That is not something that can be fixed by adopting a different system for apportionments.

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