Closing the world's schools caused children great harm • Hacker News Board

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#91

Post by robomartin » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

moistly wrote: post #89

robomartin wrote: post #25

This whole narrative is insane. I can't help but think there's an underlying objective to drive for additional funding to fix a problem that does not exist. Kids did not go from learning 100% to 0%. Let's make an argument that, perhaps (and I don't believe this either) they learned 50% of what they would have learned in person. Half. OK. How much harm does that cause? For reference, I have two kids who went remote th…

> We live in a reasonably decent school district… …proceeds to describe an unreasonably substandard school district. If your district really is decent, there is no good future. Without a well-educated population, the nation will fail.

> proceeds to describe an unreasonably substandard school district

What you might not understand is that these issues are not uncommon throughout the US. Not just in K-12 but also college/university. Otherwise excellent schools are stuck with bad teachers or professors who cannot be fired or otherwise dealt with because of the range of protections afforded to them. Job performance issues that would get anyone fired in any other job have no effect on teachers. More accurately, the process is long, difficult and very expensive.

So, no, my description of a couple of bad teachers in our district does not turn our district from good to bad. There are probably hundreds of teachers in the various schools we have in the district. Only a few of them are bad and, objectively speaking, should have been replaced years ago.

The best I can suggest is that you google "why bad teachers don't get fired" and read a few articles on the subject. You can be in a good school district and still have these issues.

The bottom line is that our system of education does not optimize for results that matter. Truly good/brilliant teachers should be recognized and paid more. Bad teachers should be filtered out of the system as quickly as possible.

Here we are, talking about an article that claims kids got shafted for having issues for ONE school year and we can't get rid of bad teachers who affect MILLIONS of kids over DECADES. How does that make any sense at all? The same bad teacher teaching science badly for twenty-five years is worse than what may have happened in 2020.

One of the things my kids tell me with some frequency is that when I teach them science I bring it to life, it is fun, engaging and interesting. Same subjects covered in school, we just explore deeper and wider than they would ever cover. Inspiration is massively important with kids. You can destroy a kids' interest in a subject by doing a shitty job teaching it.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#92

Post by intrepidhero » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:35 PM UTC

AndrewBissell wrote: post #86

intrepidhero wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My research says this claim is false. The mortality rate for COVID-19 for all age groups is much higher that mortality rates for drivers. How I compared the risks: In New York the mortality rate for COVID-19 for all age groups over 18 was found to be at least 0.2%[1]. The CDC[2] reports 18-29 years at 0.5%, 30-39 at 1.4%, 40-49 at 3.5%, 50-64 at 16.4%. There were 36,560[3] motor vehicle related deaths in 2018 in the…

Several problems with this analysis: - Using confirmed cases as the denominator significantly overstates the fatality rate, because a large share of the total infections is never confirmed - "All age groups over 18" elides huge disparities between the younger and older age groups. It also obscures large differences in risk between those with comorbidities vs those without. The CDC does not make this easy to parse out…

If you feel a different form of analysis would change the outcome please feel free to provide us with the data and your conclusions.

I took it as far as I felt I needed to. When I saw that the risk due to COVID to even a young and generally more healthy demographic was still an order of magnitude bigger I didn't feel I needed to dig further. Car accidents are already a big enough source of risk that I personally take measures to reduce it and support societal interventions to reduce it further. COVID is much worse.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#93

Post by AndrewBissell » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 12:01 AM UTC

intrepidhero wrote: post #92

AndrewBissell wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several problems with this analysis: - Using confirmed cases as the denominator significantly overstates the fatality rate, because a large share of the total infections is never confirmed - "All age groups over 18" elides huge disparities between the younger and older age groups. It also obscures large differences in risk between those with comorbidities vs those without. The CDC does not make this easy to parse out…

If you feel a different form of analysis would change the outcome please feel free to provide us with the data and your conclusions. I took it as far as I felt I needed to. When I saw that the risk due to COVID to even a young and generally more healthy demographic was still an order of magnitude bigger I didn't feel I needed to dig further. Car accidents are already a big enough source of risk that I personally take…

> When I saw that the risk due to COVID to even a young and generally more healthy demographic was still an order of magnitude bigger

You didn't see that though, you just goofed the numbers. Confusing CFR with IFR (and comparing that with absolute risk from car accidents) is just way off base.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#94

Post by moistly » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #91

moistly wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We live in a reasonably decent school district… …proceeds to describe an unreasonably substandard school district. If your district really is decent, there is no good future. Without a well-educated population, the nation will fail.

> proceeds to describe an unreasonably substandard school district What you might not understand is that these issues are not uncommon throughout the US. Not just in K-12 but also college/university. Otherwise excellent schools are stuck with bad teachers or professors who cannot be fired or otherwise dealt with because of the range of protections afforded to them. Job performance issues that would get anyone fired i…

Seems to me that they should never have been hired in the first place … and you can’t hold unions responsible for that.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#95

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #62

AndrewBissell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.

No, they weren't. There are half a million COVID deaths last year. There are around 30,000 deaths a year from automobile accidents. COVID is more deadly than automobile accidents, by an order of magnitude.

[deleted]

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#96

Post by musicale » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

AndrewBissell wrote: post #12

jfengel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu. If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fin…

> And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.

I found this for Sweden:

Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670

19 teachers per 100000 received intensive care through June 2020, and it's unclear if any died. Sweden's motor vehicle death rate is relatively low, 2 per 100,000 over an entire year (vs. 11 in the US), but that's over the entire population, not just teachers.

The effects of school closures on SARS-CoV-2 among parents and teachers

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2020834118

This article says that keeping schools open without masks or quarantines doubled covid risk for teachers and also affected partners as well as students' parents. It concluded that "keeping lower-secondary schools open had minor consequences for the overall transmission" but "results for teachers suggest that measures to protect teachers should be considered." They estimated 9 parents (out of 646K), 1 teacher (out of 73K), and 1 partner (out of 47K) died from covid. However the data only appear to be through July.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#97

Post by a0-prw » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 9:14 AM UTC

I'm a teacher (in Denmark, of 7th to 9th grade). I have been against lockdowns from the beginning. Personally, it was easy for me. I got paid and had more control over my work life under the lockdowns.

Online teaching is bullshit and everyone who has the slightest knowledge of kids knows it. I have no doubt whatsoever that the lost months are going to cost my pupils in their further education.

My own children are at university and are both now seeing therapists, despite being robust, smart, high achievers.

I know lots of people who have tested positive for Coronavirus: my son, numerous colleagues, lots of my pupils. Nobody was hospitalised. Most of them had no or very few symptoms.

Lockdowns were a mistake, a very serious, media-fuelled mistake that is going to continue fucking us for many years to come.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#98

Post by kurthr » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

AndrewBissell wrote: post #88

kurthr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be accurate, if only those school age children didn't have older teachers or parents. Although children are rarely (though in some cases fatal) symptomatic there is evidence that they spread COVID, just as they spread many other colds and flus every school year. This is not a virus that should make us question the germ theory of disease. I understand the want for children's education and emotional well bei…

> This would be accurate, if only those school age children didn't have older teachers or parents. Then this should have been handled on a case-by-case basis. What share of families actually have an elderly or otherwise at-risk relative living at home with them? What share of teachers were actually in a high risk category? These questions were easily answerable by the middle of 2020 but all such nuance was thrown out…

Yearly flu vaccines are available for elderly and high risk populations. Typically all personnel (medical, orderly, food service) in hospitals are required to take flu vaccines (as well a TB and others) every year. Not available with COVID until Jan-March.

With a death rate (using ICU intervention and the latest treatments) death rates in developed countries are still 5-15x higher than typical flus, and hospitalization rates are more than 10x higher. It also appears to be much more (r0 2x higher) transmissible (especially the delta variant). Those are differences in degree that create difference in kind. They cause the overload of ICUs, preventing treatment of other diseases and increasing all death rates!

Influenza does not normally kill 600k people in the US (with masks, social distancing, remote schooling, etc the flu effectively didn't exist this year). Hospitals don't normally run out of respirators and morgue space. These are all well reported and documented.

Three months after the publication you site, the nuance you're looking for was available (in Jan-Feb) when many schools partially opened (with lower density and masks). So all I see is a straw man.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#99

Post by mk81 » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #62

AndrewBissell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.

No, they weren't. There are half a million COVID deaths last year. There are around 30,000 deaths a year from automobile accidents. COVID is more deadly than automobile accidents, by an order of magnitude.

>There are half a million COVID deaths last year.

What a joke. Please read about excess mortality before saying stupid things. Most people who die in car crashes wouldn't have died otherwise. Huge numbers of people who died "from COVID" would have died from something else.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#100

Post by guidoism » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

ryathal wrote: post #78

guidoism wrote: post #4

This is crazy. No. Lack of school doesn’t create harm. Attempting to shoehorn traditional schooling into an online form certainly can.

Lack of School can cause harm. We know there is a fairly limited window in which learning is significantly easier and more effective.

Can you cite something that describes this? As far as I know all the research suggests that you can learn certain things at any time after your brain has matured enough for the skill but not before. So putting off a year of school has no negative effects.