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Kids are far behind in school

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Re: Kids are far behind in school

#371

Post by croon »

mattcwilson wrote: post #351
croon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a worrisome dilemma, in which you are forced to reason. There is no win scenario, only varying degrees of unknown loss states.

It’s not, though. “Dilemma” implies only two possibilities, but “varying degrees” implies many. This argument is incoherent. There were lots of alternate futures, ranging from “the whole world, everywhere, utterly locked down schools for the past 2+ years” to “the whole world, everywhere, utterly refused to lock down schools for the past 2+ years”, and everywhere in between in terms of which schools, which policies,…

Merriam Webster [0] disagrees with your limiting definition (while etymologically correct). And even if it hadn't, it doesn't affect the coherence of the argument.

> We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.

Sure, and again, after the fact.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dilemma

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#372

Post by throwaway0a5e »

Steltek wrote: post #131
buildsjets wrote: post #64

Especially in high school, an astounding amount of time, money, space, and personnel are dedicated to sports, and this does not just impact the athletes. In many schools the entire day is structured around the football team's practice schedule. Make school sports a truly after-hours extracurricular activity and remove their impact from non-participants, and I'd estimate you could see around 20% improvement time spent…

Well, to anecdotally back you up, in Massachusetts with the #1 public schools in the country, I hear and see nothing about football. I think I hear more about the HS plays and concerts than HS football. The last football funding discussion at the town level was whether to fund better helmets to protect against CTE or make the players' parents pay for it, so the town isn't seen supporting/encouraging brain damage to c…

>Massachusetts with the #1 public schools in the country,

That's just lying with statistics. Adjust for parental income and see what you get. The state has few poor and rural areas to "drag the average down" so of course they look good. VA would look good too if they had the luxury of counting just NOVA and the coast in their stats.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#373

Post by throwaway0a5e »

sndean wrote: post #155
Steltek wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to anecdotally back you up, in Massachusetts with the #1 public schools in the country, I hear and see nothing about football. I think I hear more about the HS plays and concerts than HS football. The last football funding discussion at the town level was whether to fund better helmets to protect against CTE or make the players' parents pay for it, so the town isn't seen supporting/encouraging brain damage to c…

And to add another anecdote, the overall #1 high school in the US in Virginia (by some rankings at least) doesn't have a football team. Sports like cross country get more attention.

That's just a fancy way of having a proxy for "rich people". Football, baseball, basketball, hockey. Those are the sports of the unwashed masses.

That a magnet school that attracts the students of wealthy parents who are deeply invested in their kids eduction doesn't have a sport the those demographics turn their nose up at is expected. I bet they have rowing and lacross to make up for it.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#374

Post by oneoff786 »

carapace wrote: post #317
oneoff786 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a balance. Are you supportive of china’s ridiculous Shanghai lockdown? Do I not respect my elders if I refuse that? Everything has costs and efficacy levels. One quality year of life of grandma vs. the economic opportunity of a new grad. It’s not easy at all. It is easy to claim that death outweighs all else and hide behind naive humanism

> Are you supportive of china’s ridiculous Shanghai lockdown? I don't "support" anything the CCP does. I think that whole mode and form of government is destined to fail due to their fundamental denial of God. But that's a whole different kettle of fish, eh? The simple truth is that I have no idea how to manage a pandemic in a city like Shanghai. I'm glad it's not my problem. > With a population of 24.89 million as o…

> The simple truth is that I have no idea how to manage a pandemic in a city like Shanghai. I'm glad it's not my problem.

Cop out answer. That this problem is difficult and accepting deaths will occur in any scenario is the entire point. In the very least you can’t take a moralistic hardline stance when it personally affects you and say wel it’s hard when it affects other people only.

> The "economic opportunity" can go screw. Don't sacrifice my mom for that person's extra money. There are over a half dozen empty apartments next to our house, and dozens of families living in RV's a few blocks away. I make six figures and can't afford a to buy a home. You want me to risk my mom for someone else's "economic opportunity"? And you think I'm naive?

I do think you’re naive.

Because you’re saying you make six figures and this isn’t about you. It’s about the person making low five figures, or maybe no figures. Oh no, you can’t afford a house. That sucks, but it’s also far from the bottom.

Your mom can isolate herself without a lockdown. She may get sick either way. I’m in Massachusetts currently entering its 4th wave. This stuff is endemic now. What’s the probability that your mom does not get covid with another lockdown vs the probability she does? Is there a level improvement? Is it just a delay?

What’s the probability that another lockdown causes a child to go hungry?

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#375

Post by mattcwilson »

makeitdouble wrote: post #362
mattcwilson wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! A little confused though, the protocols run here all assume the classroom stays in-person and just goes into different isolation measures. 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 trans…

As I understand, the base premise of the research here is that remote schooling is the proven no-risk solution, and their goal is to evaluate other strategies that could somewhat keep contamination at manageable levels for in-person classrooms. It is in particular useful for cases where virtual schools are just not an option (on the top of my head, toddlers and lower age kids for instance. If their parents can't teac…

“Remote schooling is the proven no-risk solution” - where are you getting that? The abstract you cited is talking about the harms of remote learning.

The paper concludes that an effective testing regimen can, in fact, contain spread. This is the lesson we should take from this whole experience. This is the heart of why Japan and South Korea did so comparatively well during the pandemic: test, trace, and isolate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7688188/

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#376

Post by mattcwilson »

croon wrote: post #371
mattcwilson wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not, though. “Dilemma” implies only two possibilities, but “varying degrees” implies many. This argument is incoherent. There were lots of alternate futures, ranging from “the whole world, everywhere, utterly locked down schools for the past 2+ years” to “the whole world, everywhere, utterly refused to lock down schools for the past 2+ years”, and everywhere in between in terms of which schools, which policies,…

Merriam Webster [0] disagrees with your limiting definition (while etymologically correct). And even if it hadn't, it doesn't affect the coherence of the argument. > We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes. Sure, and again, after the fact. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dilemma

Handwringing cowardice and whimpering inaction got people killed in this pandemic.

Refusing to take action as soon as data were available to justify better methods got people killed.

(Thanks for the link, btw. Had no idea “dildo” dates to the 16th century. The things you learn...)

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#377

Post by mattcwilson »

ryanklee wrote: post #358
mattcwilson wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can’t evaluate decisions or experiments on outcome, what can you measure them on? And why would you bother to? How would you learn from those decisions? The worst case scenario is bound to be horrifying, by definition. That’s not an excuse for waffling out of making a tough call.

The evaluation of the quality of the decision should be made by taking into account the constraints and quality of priors that were inputs into the decision. Outcomes are probabilistic. Using results as the evaluation metric is mistake. 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…

Nonsense.

Yes, at the very earliest part of the pandemic, we had no data. We had to prepare for the worst.

Very quickly, we started to see the relative impact of different measures taken in different jurisdictions, we learned about the relative impact of the disease on different age groups and populations, and we started having tools and strategies for detecting, tracing, and inhibiting the disease.

These became the priors that informed (or should have informed) the evolving decision-making process for disease response. But instead, in many cases, we saw a ton of inertia on many fronts, due to fear, political face-saving / ass-covering, or willful ignorance.

That’s the part I take issue with. It wasn’t “the” right decision, it was “an” early and uninformed decision, followed by many opportunities for additional, more informed, better decisions.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#378

Post by bluGill »

mattcwilson wrote: post #349
bluGill wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not possible to have all the data in time to make decisions. We didn't know how covid spread in the early days, just that it was spreading fast in China, killing a lot of people (we didn't know what a lot was), and popping up all over the world. 3 Months after the decisions needed to be made we had a lot more data.

... and twelve or more months after that, many schools were still fully virtual. What’s your point?

That the data was ignored (by everyone!) months latter is a very different point.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#379

Post by mk81 »

curun1r wrote: post #331
nemo44x wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. It's really that simple. And that means parental involvement. It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken c…

> It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's Where it ventures into racist territory is to present these statistics on their own absent the context of mass incarceration, over policing and manufactured black criminality that play such a large role in the disparity that you’re pointing out. To blame it on culture more so th…

No post body was provided.

Re: Kids are far behind in school

#380

Post by tfandango »

dehrmann wrote: post #354
tfandango wrote: post #182

My wife teaches 2nd grade in a public school. She has kids this year who had not been in school since kindergarten. It is difficult to cover such an achievement gap when other kids in the class are on level. It's worse yet when our state has outsourced federal pandemic education fund distribution to 3rd parties which allowed people to purchase Xboxes and TVs. And even worse yet as her district is focusing on putting…

> And even worse yet as her district is focusing on putting AppleTVs in every room while buying curriculum that has no books. 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 c…

I too remember hauling around really heavy books and only reading parts of them. My wife seems to use much of her reading curriculum which comes with workbooks they use up throughout the year. This next year they are switching to an electronic curriculum apparently, but she only has 7 iPads for 20 kids. I think she would be happier if she had 20 devices. They could have probably purchased more if they chose Chromebooks over iPads.
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