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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

#671

Post by neverartful »

japhyr wrote: post #500
neverartful wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All good questions. If it were me I would join forces with other teachers and parents to bring the questions to the principal and school board (or district). I suspect that in many cases, teachers and parents will need to put significant pressure on the PTB to force them to confront these important questions. edit - If your wife belongs to a teachers union, this would be a great thing for the teachers union to push f…

You can push for answers from those people, but there's probably no real answers to give. The federal response to the pandemic has been so ineffective, to put it kindly, that it leaves people at all levels with no meaningful responses. Principals, superintendents, and school boards can want to offer the support described in this thread, but have no real way to actually deliver it.

"but there's probably no real answers to give"

For sure, there aren't any easy answers. I believe that smaller school districts can come up with creative answers if there's sufficient support for the schools in the community. If the school policies are dictated at the state level, then the ability to do this is made much more difficult (if not impossible).

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

#672

Post by jennasys »

rayiner wrote: post #440
not2b wrote: 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…

We’re not a “country.” We’re 50 different states with a federal government, which doesn’t have public health as one of its assigned roles. This isn’t an ideological point, it’s a bare recitation of fact. Somehow, other federal republics like Germany managed to engage in an effective pandemic response while leaving most of the work to the states. For example, while Germany eventually had a mask order everywhere, the s…

While the states may be responsible for what happens on the ground, it is certainly the role of the federal government to provide coordination in the case of a nationwide public health issue. Clearly, that was not done in this case. The CDC, NIH, FEMA, and the surgeon general should have all been playing a role in this pandemic. The states shouldn't have had to ultimately go about creating their own regional coalitions of their own accord out of desperation.

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

#673

Post by chrisseaton »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #643
chrisseaton wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a child refuses to do anything when they were physically in school what was being done about it then? You can’t physically force someone to learn then and you can’t now. Not sure anything’s changed really. All they did before was remove disruptive children and now I guess they remove themselves. Remains an unsolved problem!

You'd send them to in-school expulsion (basically an empty room for 8 hours, no talking, no phones allowed.

Why would they do anything more there if they weren't willing to do anything in the classroom?

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

#674

Post by dmoy »

samatman wrote: post #665
electriclove wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very pleased by the decision from the top in California today about keeping schools remote until things get better. The only complaint I have is how long it took to get there. Tons of people at hundreds/thousands of school districts and private schools throughout the state have spent incredible effort debating and planning and so much effort could have been saved if the decision from the top was made earlier.

I share your pleasure in the decision, but staunchly disagree with you about the method used to reach it. The correct decision was reached, in time (before the start of the school year) for it to make a difference. Tons of people and thousands of schools vigorously debating is the democratic process. A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism, and as we've seen repeatedly this year, authoritarian decis…

I think you are at least a bit misconstruing direct democracy vs representative democracy and instead calling it democracy vs authoritarianism.

The people handing down the aforementioned decisions were elected specifically to do things like this. That doesn't outright make it authoritarianism. (Yes, most elected US politicians on both sides of the aisle skew fairly authoritarian, but that doesn't mean the process itself is authoritarian)

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

#676

Post by bjustin »

sfteus wrote: post #648
isthispermanent wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. All sorts of problems with that Statista chart. Just for starters it doesn't take into account number of tests being performed per 1m/pp. 2. Would it be astronomical? Total speculation. That's just a hysterical statement that doesn't point to a problem or a solution. There is some anecdotal evidence that a small fraction of those that develop symptoms but do not become fatal can have lasting effects from the virus…

1) Chile, Kuwait, and Singapore have similar rates of testing to the US [1] 2) Current studies show roughly somewhere between 10-20% of hospitalized patients ending up with heart damage, increasing their future risks of heart attacks and strokes.[2][3] Up to 36% of hospitalized patients are displaying neurological symptoms, with possible damage.[4] Up to 60% are ending up with ARDS which may be permanent.[5] Extracti…

The sheer number of people likely to come out of this with disabilities or serious-but-not-disabled level chronic problems is really depressing. Just the lung issues (didn't know the term ARDS, thanks for that) will be terrible.

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

#677

Post by hn_check »

thomasahle wrote: post #524
mtgp1000 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb. No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus…

> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. Sweden did a voluntary lock down, which was in practice pretty comprehensive. Even then they still had a death rate per capita many times higher than its neighbours, and it was economically hit just as hard. Perhaps it was worth a try, but it didn't pan out. Their government even formed a commission to fig…

This is the critical aspect of the Sweden example: the people of Sweden are rational and everything isn't hyper politicized. Even though they tried a different approach, many still took reasonable precautions. There still were significant restrictions on operations like bars and restaurants.

Sweden was never like the "COVID denier" communities in the United States.

And still its results are relatively terrible compared to its neighbours and peers.

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

#678

Post by rayiner »

dragonwriter wrote: post #616
rayiner wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there is theory and practice. In theory, public health is a purely state issue. In practice, it’s a mostly state issue. But there is a real legal limit here: the federal government has no general police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_co... > In United States constitutional law, police power is the capacity of the states to regulate behavior and enforce order within their territory…

> In theory, public health is a purely state issue No, it's not. The federal government is, in theory, fully empowered to use any of it's enumerated powers for any purpose not expressly prohibited, which public health is not, and has quite emphatically adopted policy around exercising its power for that purpose, starting at least as far back as the establishment of the marine hospitals in 1798 , later, in many steps,…

The Marine Hospital Service wasn’t a “public health” service. It was for taking care of disabled and ill federal beneficiaries. Until 1878, it was concerned with treating members of the military. The first exercise of general public health powers seems to be in the Quarantine Act of 1878, but that was directed specifically at preventing vessels with infected people from entering US ports or informing relevant state and local officials if they did: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/45th-congress.... This was focused on infectious disease screening of Ellis Island immigrants. Maybe by this point you can say that public health is within the federal government’s jurisdiction insofar as it’s an adjunct to the government’s power over the border, which is fair. But because the government’s power over the border is plenary, you can shoehorn many things that would otherwise be purely state issues into that.

The reorganization into the US Public Health Service was in 1912, and that’s when it picked up general authority to study infectious diseases. But that era isn’t really relevant to what’s constitutional.

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

#679

Post by pixl97 »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #614
shreyansj wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if everyone had stayed locked in for 6 weeks and if that had prevented 50000 deaths, how is that not worth it?

How could that possibly have happened? Food needs to be planted, harvested(in many situations primarily by migratory workers from other countries) and delivered, power needs to be kept up, necessary medical supplies needs manufactoring, water needs to be cleaned and delivered. There's no scenario where the world gets to collectively take a break

And beer must be drank "Bar lives matters", as Austin Texas bar owner said.

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

#680

Post by aggie »

isthispermanent wrote: post #608
ihumanable wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. Interesting, Sweden suffered more deaths than their neighbors and does not appear to be any better off economically. Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c... Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors - https://www.cnbc.com…

Except for your NYT article, these are all pieces from more than 2 months ago. And the NYT has been exceptionally poor at reporting on covid with an even hand. What it fails to mention is that though Sweden's economy will contract by the same amount as it's Scandanavian neighbors, about -8%, it's a huge win compared to UK/Italy/France which will contract by 22-30%. src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06…

> Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges.

Your logic is simply wrong here. If you want to assess the effect of the lockdown, you compare effects between similar countries that did and didn't have a lockdown. Apple trees with fertilizer vs apple trees without fertilizer. You don't learn about the effect of fertilizer by comparing apple trees with fertilizer vs orange trees with fertilizer.

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