Kids are far behind in school

Are the metrics:

1. Based on university entrance (in which case you need to recourse and ask the same questions of that) or

2. Based on some pragmatic list of things that will help the child become a good part of society or

3. Completely arbitrary.

I agree that Apple TVs in classrooms is a waste of money, but I don't remember text books being particularly useful, either. We covered between 25% and 50% of the contents of the book, and maybe had assigned reading for half of what was covered.

Textbooks are also a bit of a racket, too. The contents and pedagogy generally move very slowly, but legislators and parents like to micromanage contents, and textbook makers are happy to oblige. The number of, say, algebra, books across the US is probably embarrassing, as is the fact that there isn't a movement for public domain textbooks.

Novels are different. With 5 books per year at $4 per book with books lasting a few years, I'm less concerned.

Most of the protocols (besides the baseline, do-nothing protocol) have some effect, but aren’t perfect.

> None of the mitigation protocols we modeled, initiated by a positive test in a symptomatic individual, are able to prevent large transmission clusters unless the transmission rate is low (in which case large clusters do not occur in any case). Among the measures we modeled, only rapid universal monitoring (for example by regular, onsite, pooled testing) accomplished this prevention.

But as it says there, prevention can be achieved by emphasizing frequent on-site testing (which is super consistent with what we know about avoiding spread events generally).

> Without closing schools down entirely, if we want to prevent large clusters from occurring altogether, this leaves approaches to detect potential index cases before they show symptoms. Pooled testing, wastewater monitoring and airflow monitoring have all been proposed with this aim [42, 43]. We simulated introduced cases and resulting transmission under the baseline of no regular testing (with the same baseline as above, symptomatic individuals going home) and compared this to weekly or every three day testing or environmental monitoring covering all individuals in the class. The results for the total cluster size are shown in Fig 6. Regular pooled or otherwise universal testing dramatically reduces the sizes of even the most unfortunate clusters (infectious index, higher-risk room), for example from a median of 12 to a median size of 3 if the index is asymptomatic. But even with regular pooled or otherwise universal testing, testing in a matter of hours (e.g. onsite) has a substantially greater impact than testing at a centralized laboratory (if that takes 2 days including shipping time).

This doesn’t seem like a strong argument in favor of virtual school?

We did not know how the pandemic was interacting with children and the school system. But we did know that it had deathly, chaotic, fast moving properties. The worst case outcome was not a fantasy. We had reasons to think that the worst case outcome was not improbable. Because we were dealing with an existential threat to possibly our most precious resource, we acted defensively, even though many of us were aware of the deep, problematic tradeoffs.

It was the right decision.