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Tell HN: How USA school closure seems to be working out

• bonzini 7y ago
  Northern Italy here, we're entering the third week of school closure. We have a platform that is usually used by teachers to record marks and other communications to parents, and they're using it to put homework. But it's barely an hour of work everyday and only ensuring that the kids do not forget the last things they did in class. They will not manage to finish all topics for their grade.
  • _red 7y ago
    godspeed to you guys. Regarding the outbreak in Northern Italy...the fatality rate seems much much higher than South Korea or Germany. Do you have any theories on why the fatalities are so much worse?
    • raverbashing 7y ago
      No need for theories, the disease is more fatal to those over 80 y.o. That's why the mortality is higher: demographics
      • _red 7y ago
        >No need for theories Germany has 700 cases and 0 deaths. Austria has 80 cases and 0 deaths...both of these countries are adjacent to Northern Italy region, in which 233+ have died. Saying "no theory needed" frankly raises more questions than provides answers.
        • raverbashing 7y ago
          Death rate being 0.5% in Italy, for 80 Austrian cases we might have one fatality soon. When was the 1st case in Germany and when was the 1st case in Italy?
          • xendo 7y ago
            233 out of 5883 is not 0.5%
            • raverbashing 7y ago
              Yes, you're right, bad mental math it's ~ 4% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
    • hamstercat 7y ago
      Wild guess here but fatality rate is based on the number of dead and the number of reported cases. High fatality rate means either high number of dead, or low number of reported cases. Knowing the real number of infected is really hard, especially in population less at risk (the young and healthy). For example, there was this anecdote this week about a woman in the US. She believes she's infected, but none of the responsible authorities will let her pass a test unless she's physically been to one of the high-risk countries. So she either self-quarantine or ignore all of it and go to work. The twist is that she's a health practitioner...
• cjbprime 7y ago
  > school staff trend older and are at highest risk. This part doesn't sound right -- the highest risk groups are 70+ years old. Hopefully the school staff retires before then. The mortality rate for people below 60 is only around 1%. The worry with young kids is that they may still be able to spread it, putting e.g. their grandparents at huge risk.
  • eugeniub 7y ago
    There are plenty of teachers in their 60s, where the death rate is 3.6%. If 30 teachers in their 60s get it, one of them will die on average. Even for people in their 50s the rate is still 1.3%, huge compared to the flu.
    • lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Source on the numbers? I’m having trouble believing that such accurate statistics could have been produced so quickly, especially when there is no idea how many people contracted the virus and got better themselves as if it were just another cold.
      • shanecleveland 7y ago
        I doubt a a 65-year-old teacher needs any more confirmation.
      • marvin 7y ago
        This looks like the numbers from the WHO-China joint COVID-19 mission. It likely overestimates the lethality somewhat. But even 1% is a big risk.
  • WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
    It seems that the risk of complications and death goes up with age. Also kids can be carriers even if they don't fall sick. Imagine kids bringing it home to grandparents. Suspending school meetings is the right call.
• PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  I wasn't a good self-directed learner until my late 30s :P Good luck with the remote schooling! Part of the world's biggest remote work experiment.
  • imglorp 7y ago
    Maturity and type-A self direction are the keys. Our district has some full-online charter schools. I have a miraculously self motivated family member who pulled off full time home self study her last 2 years of high school at one of these: she got up early and finished most of her homework before lunch. So it's definitely not for everyone, not even for most adults. I think many people need to learn as a group. But some children can thrive with self directed study.
  • watwut 7y ago
    The thing about self-directed learners in their 30s is that they are learning what they want to learn or have practical reason to learn. Unlike kids.
  • actfrench 7y ago
    Unfortunately kids are natural born self-directed learners but lose that impulse when we start to control their learning.
• craftinator 7y ago
  It will be interesting to see what the outcome of this is. I had a really hard time with the "forced education" programs in primary school; some subjects were interesting, thus felt easy and fun. I would excel in these, but grow bored when the pace didn't keep up with my learning speed. Other subjects I found boring, thus were hard, and I would actively try to procrastinate. The pressure was a huge motivation killer, and the lack of freedom to explore seriously stunted my learning. Only later on, when I was doing self-directed learning, did I really start to flourish. Maybe this will be a chance for kids like me!
• indymike 7y ago
  Hasn't happened here yet. The issue in the US will be dual income families where mom or dad HAVE TO GO to their pleace of work. This is going to make a mess for many, many families.
  • electriclove 7y ago
    Yup, it will be a mess and we need to come up with solutions. But we shouldn't let that influence the decision.
    • david-s 7y ago
      Why should we not let it influence the decision? It's seems to me entirely possible that closing the schools could result in worse outcomes.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
• TrueGeek 7y ago
  We did some remote learning out here (Gwinnett county - north of Atlanta) during weather closures. The software was awful and crashed the first day under high load. They used it again during a single day closure and the software worked fine that time. However, many students didn’t do it, opting instead to play in the snow. Or, some children had to go to day care since their parents weren’t staying home. When they returned to school the teachers just repeated the same lesson since not every one was on the same page. I think remote learning is possible, but we are a far way from having the kinks worked out.
• ma2rten 7y ago
  Kids are at lowest risk of serious infection [...] Also kids might get infected and infect other members of their household.
• ouid 7y ago
  One major quarantine benefit of closing schools is that it forces parents to stay home. Bad for the economy, good for R_0.
  • tobltobs 7y ago
    Or grandma will help out, bad for the death rate.
• adolph 7y ago
  I wonder what is the best concise resource on effectively starting a public-school affiliated home-school program? Preferably something with how to balance ones own telecommuting while the kids telelearn.
  • eries 7y ago
    If you need support with this, there are lots of resources (both human and online) like https://www.modulo.app/ https://www.modulo.app/ Let me know if you need help, I can only imagine how stressful this would be for families who aren’t used to it
    • adolph 7y ago
      Thanks, that looks fascinating and I’m digging into it.
• nugget 7y ago
  Have you thought about organizing a small group of 3-5 kids to get together and work through the material, under the guidance of a parent? I homeschooled for a couple years and this was pretty effective within that community.
  • lostlogin 7y ago
    Don’t that just start to create the same environment that the school closure was supposed to prevent?
    • craftinator 7y ago
      That was my first thought too; but, with smaller numbers like that it is much more manageable to keep an eye out for symptoms and implement quarantine. Also, from a simplistic maths point of view, in a classroom with 20-30 children, with each child having an infection vector from each other child, so a 16-27x higher chance of being infected than in a classroom of 3-4.
• WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
  Thanks for the post. It seems that we need a way to set a virtual class schedule where a teacher teaches and kids can ask questions. Reading lesson is too hard for kids. Specifically if you're not used to learning that way.
• gdubs 7y ago
  Santa Clara county hasn’t closed schools yet, but are preparing for remote-learning should closures happen. If you’re a parent in Silicon Valley, then you’re probably aware from the district emails. From what I’ve parsed, it sounds like they’re going to make a decision based on recommendations of the County health board (though I’d think the school has autonomy on making the decision on their own if they chose to, but I don’t know).
  • nerdface 7y ago
    From Santa Clara county's official statement: “The reason we are not recommending school closures at this time is because children have not been shown to be a high-risk group for serious illness from this virus.” https://files.constantcontact.com/82fe691f001/dc8c682d-3257-4ee1-90eb-4b322b30a445.pdf https://files.constantcontact.com/82fe691f001/dc8c682d-3257-...
    • skhavari 7y ago
      Would be nice to see a statement on retransmission vs impact of infection. Seems shortsighted.
    • electriclove 7y ago
      And the same statement says those 50 and over should basically stay home. I'm sure that a significant % of school staff fall into that grouping. In regards to the quote, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
    • cronix 7y ago
      Yeah, only the parents and grandparents who they then go home to.
• gorbachev 7y ago
  It's going to work differently in each school district. Some will have capabilities to do online learning like yours, and some won't.
• matheweis 7y ago
  It’s been interesting to watch the varied responses. In Seattle (Seattle Public SD) the school districts have adamantly refused to close. For better or worse this will end up being a wild A/B test (between Northshore and Seattle) with extremely long term implications. So far the explanations have mostly centered around these three points: * Many students’ parents are health care providers or work in the health care industry on the front lines of the COVID-19 response. If schools close, fewer people will be able to provide front-line support. * Many families rely on the schools and staff for basic needs, including regular meals, health care, and child care. * Seattle can’t provide online learning because Seattle serves a diverse community with varied access to technology ... including those who do not have access to technology or internet at home. See: https://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_s_new/coronavirus_update https://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_...
  • amscanne 7y ago
    The explanation that I’ve seen is that closing is not an effective mitigation anyways, as children often end up congregating elsewhere in even closer contact: e.g. backup care with groups of kids, older kids getting together while schools are closed. Given the well-known downsides that you list, and the fact that it doesn’t help much, it makes sense to stay open until there are actual cases associated with the schools.
    • trimbo 7y ago
      A coworker asked the other day: what's the end point on WFH and school closure? I think it's a good question. In this specific case, for Northshore, have they specified? Is it some number of weeks, months, years? Is there some inflection point in the spread they've predetermined it will go back to normal?
      • vkou 7y ago
        > A coworker asked the other day: what's the end point on WFH and school closure? At minimum, producing enough test kits so that we could actually test every hypochondriac with the sniffles. Since there's a mind-boggling shortage of test kits, reducing transmission rates for as long as possible is all that we can do.
• jl2718 7y ago
  I took an online class in high school. They told me it was the first ever such class taken for credit in the US. It was pretty bad, but I didn’t expect much. It’s easier to learn the answers this way, but much harder to ask the questions. As an adult looking back on who in my class became a teacher, I also realize that teachers in general are usually not the people you most want your kids learning from. Not the worst though. Curriculum is mostly just a vehicle for inquiry, and should be treated as such. Expect no results from this online platform. The kids will get the material done just fine, but they won’t engage with it unless you make it relevant to their imagination. Maybe it’s not that important though. Maybe they should be interested in other things.
• eldavido 7y ago
  Funny, when I first read this, I thought of school closures in public districts where budget concerns are forcing long-term, permanent closures, not temporary ones due to CoVID-19. Maybe I live in a bubble? I live in the Bay Area now and reading this thread makes me miss Seattle (lived there 2009-2011). It's one of the better cities in a pretty well-run state, with funded pensions, responsive politics that seem more resistant to special-interest capture (unions, ultra-rich), and a well-informed populace and leaders capable of doing the right thing. Oakland, by way of comparison (where I live now) regularly has school board meetings that get shouted down by angry mobs (https://www.kqed.org/news/11781890/parent-protests-against-school-closures-turn-violent-at-oakland-school-board-meeting https://www.kqed.org/news/11781890/parent-protests-against-s...), a school district with a chronic major deficits (https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/budget-deficit-forces-oakland-unified-school-district-to-consider-closing-some-campuses/6628/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/budget-deficit-forces-...) and accounting scandals (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-schools-in-new-mess-over-financial-13012105.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-schools-...), and unsurprisingly, striking teachers are demanding even higher pay in the face of all this. With such gross mismanagement and leadership without the backbone to address it, it feels almost unconscionable that I'd let my kids attend this school. I'm not sure what to make of this other than that, if you live in an area with a healthy political culture, be thankful for it. And if you don't, pay attention, and get involved.
  • selimthegrim 7y ago
    Oakland has overseen a substantial reduction in gun violence over the last decade to 13 years but you don’t see fit to mention that
• sys_64738 7y ago
  I doubt very much that these online days will count towards the minimum allocation of school attendance days. That means lots of children might need to repeat a year due to the gaps. Online courses are no substitute for real schooling as they are all lousy. Interaction is woeful and teenage children certainly don't have self-direction as a majority.
  • closeparen 7y ago
    As a teenager I always found it suspicious that when I would miss a 7-hour school day, it would take 3 hours at most to do the make up work. If we did that all the time, we could learn twice as much!
    • imtringued 7y ago
      That's just a pragmatic decision. If you have to make up the whole 7 hour school day then you could be in a situation where you are so far behind that you could never catch up. There is this game called Warframe that has a daily login bonus. There is no mechanism to partially skip days if you missed them. New rewards are always added as a new milestone. The end result is that there are rewards that are only available after getting the login bonus for 1000 days. If you stop playing for a year and then come back you will never catch up to the latest rewards.
      • closeparen 7y ago
        I can find 2.25 clearly accountable hours without losing any academic content: - Lunch and recess (45-60 minutes). - Passing periods (27-28 minutes). - Lifestyle activities: art, health, gym, music, etc. (45 minutes). Now some fluffier ones: - Suppose, like a typical Coursera user, I can understand the content at 1.2x classroom speed. There's 60 minutes. - The door-to-door transition period is four minutes. But settling in, packing up, pleasantries, and administrivia probably put the lecture-content-to-lecture-content time at closer to 10 minutes. So there's another 42 minutes. There. I just found 4 hours with losing a drop of college-relevant material.
  • Someone1234 7y ago
• giantg2 7y ago
  The schools have curriculums for each grade which are usually mandated or approved by the state. The teachers create lesson plans based on that curriculum. In theory, the lesson plans could be distributed to parents (or whoever is supervising) and they can teach it. For older students home alone or students who's parents are not able to teach the subject, there are many great teaching videos just an internet search away. The discipline to self-learn is something that would need to have been instilled by the parents. It seems to me that as a society we have forgotten that the primary responsibility for teaching (let alone raising) our children is our own. Instead we pass it off to 'the system' and make a big deal about having to raise our own kids.
  • waholleyiv 7y ago
    TLDR: opportunity cost It is the primarily responsibility in some domains. For others, the system is designed to allocate responsibility to the education system in order to balance with the time demands of fully employed parent(s) (to support the family) and the cost that would be otherwise incurred.
    • giantg2 7y ago
      So the system goes to jail if it doesn't enroll all school aged children? So the system decides which children go to public schools, charter schools, private schools, or homeschool? Of course not. At it's very core the responsibility for a child's education falls to the parents. Even if you send your kids off to school, you still need to be involved to motivate them, help them with assignments, etc. You can even see that the most influential factor in a child's success is whether or not the child has 2 parents (Harvard study). Yes, you can take into account opportunity cost. However, that won't shift the responsibility, it's just the outsourcing of the labor. You can see this in any power structure (corporate, military, etc).
• Haga 7y ago
  Augment with discord?
• sschueller 7y ago
  Here in Switzerland they specifically do not want to close schools (yet) unless the school had a positive test and kids are in self quarantine. The reason given is that if the kids are home it is likely that the grand parents will have to care for them as the parents have to work and the elderly are the high risk group.
• blululu 7y ago
  I recently saw an article where the Education minister of Singapore articulated some reasons to not close schools. Basically his case is that this alleviates burden from parents, and the school can provide food + sanitation for the kids. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/no-plans-to-close-schools-for-now-says-education-minister-ong-ye-kung https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/no-plans-to-cl...
• carapace 7y ago
  The underlying assumption that there's some crucial process "education" happening at these buildings that mustn't be interrupted is daft. The damned things close every summer and nobody loses their minds. Keep your kids home. They won't turn into mindless thralls from missing a few weeks of "education".
• mxuribe 7y ago
  Thanks so much for sharing; very helpful!!
• jedberg 7y ago
  My friend is an English teacher in China. He's been "teaching from home" for a few weeks now. His comment was this: "If this has shown me one thing, teaching from home has a long way to go before it's feasible".
• tomjen3 7y ago
  In the nineties when I was in second or third grade I spent little less than a month attending school from home, recovering from surgery. This being the ninteties we didn’t have this new-fangeled internet at home. One a week a teacher would come by for a few hours and talk about school and what they were up to, and hand over some assignments and talk about what I had done so far. As I recall it I spend a lot less time on the assignments than I would in school and I learned most of what the other kinds learned (the rest was easily learned when I was back in school) - but this obviously only worked because mum was a stay at home mum and it was early enough that she could teach me. Most of early schooling is about warehousing and training kids to behave so that adults can be around them and parents can do that in most cases. The real issues isn’t that the kids don’t learn, it is that they end up staying with the grandparents and infecting them.
• threedots 7y ago
  This is going to be brutal on working low income parents and their children. It seems no matter what happens there's always some justification for why poor people end up being the collateral damage.'Prevent the virus no matter what' is a position that's much easier for a well off software engineer (who can work from home and pay for childcare) to hold than for a single mother who gets paid by the hour on a zero hours contract. Many people would prefer to take their chances on the mortality rate than suffer through the measures intended to bring it down.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Sucks to be poor, almost by definition. This isn't some special harm directed at the poor; its a normal result of being poor. Not to say anybody deserves to be poor; save the rhetoric on that. Just that its not some made-up justification; its an expected result just like physics. We can be comforted by the fact that the poor are protected by these measures exactly as much as the wealthy (and everybody in between) - they live.
    • threedots 7y ago
      It is a special harm directed at the poor with the justification that it's for the greater good. Much like low interest rates /monetary stimulus policies. They're justified on the basis that they are necessary/for the greater good. There's no law of physics here that ensures poor people get the short end of the stick. Interest rates could be higher, schools could be kept open. They aren't though, maybe for good reasons but it's funny how often 'objectively good reasons' turn out to be conveniently (relatively) better for the rich.
      • bagacrap 7y ago
        I think being poor by definition is the short end of the stick.
        • quickthrower2 7y ago
          Yes, but do they need even more of short ends of sticks?
• Aeolun 7y ago
  I honestly think ‘closing the schools’ is a huge overreaction for what essentially amounts to a bad flu season.
  • frosted-flakes 7y ago
    > a bad flu season It's not though, that's the point. A bad flu season never even reaches a 1% case-fatality ratio (CFR). Even the 1968 flu pandemic had a CFR below 0.5%. COVID-19 has a CFR of 2–3%.
• polishdude20 7y ago
  I think your concerns with having to check up on your kids because they have tons of questions stems from the teacher not being prepared for this. I'm sure their teacher has materials based on the fact that they will be in class in person and can answer any questions and explain things better. If this teacher had more time, I'm sure they could structure their coursework to fit the online format much better
• datingscientist 7y ago
  Kids can catch and transmit the virus to other household members; this was the main path through the community in a few flu models a while back (spread through daycare and the elementary schools first, then families, then everyone else). Household transmission rate was about 15% in china. (so a 15% chance of infecting another member of your household). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• matty22 7y ago
  I'm honestly surprised that the Northshore school district doesn't have a lawsuit on its hands from the WA teachers' union. Requiring teachers to do something they aren't trained for, aren't qualified for, and aren't contractually required to do seems like a pretty good recipe for a lawsuit. Not to mention any privacy issues when/if online teaching requires video recordings of the teacher to be posted online. I know a few people in the school systems here in Washington, and from what I can gather, there would be riots in the streets if this was required state wide.
  • baumandm 7y ago
    Right or wrong, the school district is taking preventative measures in an attempt to protect public health. Suing them over that would not look particularly good for the union.
• actfrench 7y ago
  It sounds a bit more like self-directed study than self-directed learning. If you want a resource that can help them reinforce their learning in a totally self-directed way, I'd try Khan Academy or Khan App Kids. It will help them learn, but might not be as useful for specific information they are supposed to retain for a test or a specific method of doing math or reading or writing an essay the teacher wants everyone to learn. Here's a bit more I've written on Khan and Khan App Kids. It's a fantastic resource. https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/khan-app-kids https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/khan-app-kids