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Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

medrxiv.org

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Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#341

Post by kbenson »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #340
kbenson wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close. What we have now is a system where we for the most part try to remove market influences so wealth doesn't advantage/disadvantage children, but with the constant thorn of wealthier parents const…

> Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close. Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. The problem with the status quo is that knowing…

> Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Not only are poorer people less likely to have the time in the morning to get their children to schools farther away, they're also less likely to even have vehicles to do some in some cases.

That's why maybe opening up schools to any student, ignoring criteria such as geography or testing, and providing free bussing to a certain range/degree might be a market approach way to allow those resources to be more evenly spread across children (if the poorer schools have 25% less children each but the richer schools have 50% more children, that might even out some of the funding issues and allow for other reform to take place, such as not using property taxes).

Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.

As for testing to get into wealthier schools, to some degree that might be a chicken and egg problem. What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? You could heavily regulate the testing, but I think heavy regulation often leads to people finding and abusing the loopholes. I think I favor lighter regulation (but not the lack of any, for sure), and incentives and disincentives towards desired behavior what are viewed less as a sacrosanct set of rules that must be preserved and more as an ever changing set of nudges to move us towards the outcomes we want.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#342

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kbenson wrote: post #341
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close. Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. The problem with the status quo is that knowing…

> Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Not only are poorer people less likely to have the time in the morning to get their children to schools farther away, they're also less likely to even have vehicles to do some in some cases. That's why maybe opening up schools to any stude…

> Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.

There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income.

> What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another?

This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria.

The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school.

It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#343

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mnd999 wrote: post #214
twoodfin wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that poor parents don’t care about their kids’ success enough to want to choose what they perceive to be better schools is belied by the lengthy waiting lists for slots in charter or magnet schools and voucher programs. What we have now is a market-based approach, where the price of admission to a top flight public school system is a $1M mortgage.

So we are in agreement that what you suggest doesn’t work.

The existing system is the inverse of what we need.

Right now you have good schools and bad schools and the way to get into the good schools is to have money and pay a lot for a house. The cost is more not because the good school actually costs more to operate, but because "having money" is being used as the admissions criteria, as a heuristic for not being a destructive influence.

It's pretending that public schools don't have any admissions criteria and then having one anyway. But because it's only that one, the market is broken. Dumb rich kids go to the good school and smart poor kids go to the bad school.

We could do the opposite. Give everyone a fixed amount of money for school, untethering the choice of school from your income, and then use anything else as the admissions criteria. Let the school choose its own. The schools with better-than-cheap-heuristic admissions criteria will be the most desirable, but will also accept desirable classmates regardless of parental income, because that's part of what makes it a desirable school.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#344

Post by gwern »

heartbeats wrote: post #228
gwern wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leveraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have b…

That's true in the United States, but not in other countries: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/36/e2105709118 There were statistically insignificant increases in Slovenia, Norway, Denmark, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Going by this, I also think that you may have the correlation wrong. If the study is correct (more generous welfare systems => less decrease in birth rates), that…

> Going by this, I also think that you may have the correlation wrong. If the study is correct (more generous welfare systems => less decrease in birth rates), that seems like it would mean that people who can afford it will keep having kids.

It does not matter direction what the relationship is, only that it exists at the family level and so family-level correlations are non-causal for the effect of coronavirus as claimed by OP. We should be equally skeptical for the same reason if the result had instead came out as "kids during coronavirus have 10 higher IQ points because their parents played with them more thanks to remote working and subsidies"; there is no reason to believe that changes in childbearing during coronavirus has been, in any place, exogenous and randomized, and we know that pretty much all of these relationships are partially to completely confounded, thanks to studies which do include family controls (like all the Scandinavian population registry studies which exploit siblings). The burden of proof is on anyone who wants to argue that their correlation is the one special snowflake immune to this general trend, and should be taken at 100% face value.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#345

Post by dang »

hubb wrote: post #104
vldchk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents. Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.

no chance this guy has kids. ppl said this same thing about television. if you read newspaper clippings from the early 20th century you can find letters to the editor about parents concerned their kids read too many books

Please do not cross into personal attack on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#346

Post by zzzeek »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #132
zzzeek wrote: post #88

you know what really impacts early cognitive performance? having one's parents die from covid. So while social distancing, closings, and masks completely suck, they have been necessary in order to attempt to maintain public health, and without them, there would have been vastly more deaths.

That may be true for grandparents. We should do something about heart diseases or car accidents which are far more worrisome for parents.

we did, we mandate seatbelts in cars, stringent safety guidelines for cars, trans fats in food were banned, and such. The actors who would otherwise be irresponsible, car drivers, car manufacturers, food providers, and in this case, people who spread disease by not being vaxxed or masked, are coerced into acting responsibly by government.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#347

Post by [deleted] »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #330
maxwellb wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A really easy benchmark would be to check whether funding pays for basic classroom supplies (tissues, chalk, paper for assignments, etc.), or if teachers commonly pay for that stuff out-of-pocket. In the US the latter is common.

Read the thread, this is not a problem of funding but allocation of funds. I know schools that can't find $50 for supplies still find $80,000 each for 3 assistant principals who don't do any work, even in theory.

[deleted]

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#348

Post by dessant »

philovivero wrote: post #71
dessant wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, times are tough for everyone, including children. I find it even more abhorrent to single out masks because "you can't see people's faces", while ignoring what their purpose is and what can they prevent. We've seen enough idiots decimate their family and friends while repeating this exact same argument.

This sort of over-the-top rhetoric gives anti-maskers their ammo. I am unaware of a single family, anywhere on the planet, that was "decimated" by Covid. I hope you really mean "devastated," because then at least you'd be making some semblance of sense. Also, to ignore that there are studies and experts that back their opinion is a little rich. Sure, you can say you think your studies and your experts are better, but…

> I am unaware of a single family, anywhere on the planet, that was "decimated" by Covid.

Then perhaps this is a good time to start paying attention to your surroundings.

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