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Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

61 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

tboyd47 5y ago
> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The solution is not to generally apply more careful and scientific thinking, because the problem is not a lack of careful and scientific thinking. The agencies in charge are full of people who study this exact problem for a living and are fully qualified and trained for it. What we're really grappling with is a clear mismatch of priorities between the decision makers and the "decision-makees." Why didn't their study and training lead to a decision that we're all comfortable with? If someone is to blame for this poor decision, why have they not been indicted -- and if we, the public, are to blame for our complicity, why haven't yet we acknowledged our mistake? No one wants to point the finger out of fear of being called divisive. But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..."
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully It's just getting harder and harder, as more and more is revealed, to believe that the costs and risks weren't weighed based on what harm or benefit would come to specific individuals instead of how specific policies would help or hurt specific politicians and political interests. Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk, but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk.
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    > Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk Schools aren't closed to (primarily) protect the kids. Where did you get that idea? Schools are closed to protect the teachers, the families, and anyone those people contact that would be infected by those kids spreading infection at schools and then bringing the infection into households.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Children, who have the least agency and the least blame for the situation they find themselves in, were being asked to take a pretty big hit for the benefit of many of those who actually did have more agency and blame. We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.
      - CarelessExpert 5y ago
        > If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Absolutely, it did! But is that more harm than if their parents, siblings, grandparents, or friends got sick or died from covid? In short: Does that harm outweigh, balance, or is it overwhelmed by the harm caused but not closing schools? That's not an easy question. That being said, while I disagree with how the article's initial positioning on this topic (that governments didn't weigh the harms), I 100% agree with the rest of the article and I hope governments use this as an opportunity to improve education by learning from these experiences. > We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults. This is sounding suspiciously like a nirvana fallacy. All solutions for managing COVID are imperfect, and the defenses are layered. I struggle to believe there is any scenario where school closures are not a useful tool in the COVID prevention toolkit. Would it be nice if other measures were more effective and school closures could be used more sparingly? Sure. But we don't live in that world.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk. Yeah. Remind me who ordered that, and whether they're out of office over it? That's so blatantly wrong that it should rise to the level of criminal endangerment, even if nobody died from it. And I'm pretty sure that people did die from it, at which point it's at least manslaughter. Yes, I want that politician charged, because that was the clearly predictable result of that insanely wrong-headed decision.
- jfengel 5y ago
  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, "Fine, watch them yourselves." Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.
  - Natsu 5y ago
    Honestly, I wonder if remote learning couldn't be better for at least some student populations. I have family who were bullied terribly (think on the level of "attacked by a crazy person with a knife at school" and "sexually harassed by teachers") and they probably would've benefited from an easier way of getting away from their tormentors instead of having to quit school and get a GED. I know that's not a one-size-fits-all thing, people are social after all and isolation causes its own issues, but I sort of wonder if remote learning can't become an option for kids, especially those who are poorly-served by their local schools.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    > 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.
    - w-j-w 5y ago
      Does this pass for an argument now? Plenty of teachers are also severely at risk, and there is good reason to think that many would have died painful, preventable deaths had they taught in person.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Fauci admitted in the first month of the lockdown that he only considered medical concerns, not educational or economic. So: 1) He was the wrong guy to be setting policy during corona. 2) This was known a year before his emails were released, which point to an international conspiracy of virologists attempting to maintain corona, and likely GoF, funding. Without billions in govt. funding, their labs (and careers) disappear. The various virologists worked a circuit between US, Canada, Australia and China. All 4 countries are involved in a coverup that various journalists have exposed.
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  A loud minority of twitter mob participants shouted "You want to kill grandma!" every time anyone tried to discuss the full costs of the lockdowns. People don't want to risk their careers saying things that are unpopular with twitter mobs (especially in academia). So now we're effectively governed by emotional neurotics and government can no longer make reasonable decisions based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis.
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    Figuratively speaking, we did kill grandma. We've lost 603,000 human lives during this epidemic, and 90% happened within the first year.
  - acatnamedjoe 5y ago
    There is no such thing as dispassionate cost benefit analysis (or at least, there isn't outside of a very narrow range of specific cases). Cost benefit analysis for big complex issues like coronavirus requires the identification and quantification of things that are really difficult to identify and quantify, and there's no easy way to do that without some form of subjective value judgement. CBA done properly is a good way to make these judgements explicit and transparent. CBA done badly is a good way to hide those judgements behind a load of figures. Neither is dispassionate.
    - ryathal 5y ago
      The entire point of a republic and bureaucracy is to have that dispassionate cost benefit analysis. It's to be done by people that shouldn't be subject to the mob mentality.
      - tboyd47 5y ago
        The point of a republic is to limit government, not ensure technocrats can never get fired.
        ryathal 5y ago
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  > But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..." It's a good lesson that life is messy and unpredictable and society can only do so much to shield us from that. If they cannot come to grips with the idea that a year of their education was sacrificed to try and save lives during a global pandemic, that's on them. Kids around the world and throughout history lose education for way worse reasons. For instance, when I was growing up I lost at least a year to teacher strikes. My teachers went on strike for months at least once at every level of my education, Elementary, Secondary, and University (Yes, I was paying for it. I lost more than half a semester. No I wasn't refunded or credited for the next year or anything.) I wish I could say I lost that time because we were trying to save lives, instead of "My teachers union was happy to use my education as a bargaining chip in trying to negotiate for a better collective agreement, and my school board would rather let me and everyone else go without than give the teachers union what they wanted" At least "we were trying to slow a pandemic and save lives" sounds heroic.
hypnoscripto 5y ago
I live in a city with 95% adult vaccination (at least one dose) and the government has just announced that they are exploring how to open schools at an indeterminate date in the future. If we can’t just go back to normal now, then why don’t we just give up?
- stuaxo 5y ago
  Adults don't go to school. It's not that much further to vaccinate kids though, we are almost there. In the UK schools have been open, and the new variant is rampaging through, if we hit vaccine escape it will be because of actions like this.
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    Once all the kids are vaccinated (and BTW even the WHO is taking a cautious approach on this given that it's unclear whether young children are at more risk from Covid or the shots), what's the plan for preventing variants from developing in the developed world? In animal reservoirs? In the large numbers of vaccinated people who still wind up hosting (usually minor and asymptomatic) infections? If vaccine escape happens because the UK had its schools open then I find it very difficult to believe "we vaccinate everyone at once and the virus just goes away" was ever a realistic prospect in the first place.
    - morsch 5y ago
      From what I understand, there is a good chance that the pool for variants is limited, and that vaccinations (or a past infection) give decent immunity for new variants. Even for a variant with an immune escape, ie. you are not immune and might even spread it, your past exposures will make a serious case with hospitalisation unlikely. Immune escape is not a boolean attribute.
- chollida1 5y ago
  I do feel for you. I"m Canadian, Ontario specifically. We've done well with vaccinations, though nowhere near close to 95% and we're still in the longest lock down world wide with no real signs of things going back to normal. But there are signs that things are getting better. Its a long time betweeen now and September, let's give it time to see how things go. As long as the trend is moving in the right direction and governments give back their emergency powers( we have an Ontario government that just granted themselves a longer stay on their power even though we're doing really well in terms of vaccinations nd case counts) then maybe be patient and let things play out.
guidoism 5y ago
This is crazy. No. Lack of school doesn’t create harm. Attempting to shoehorn traditional schooling into an online form certainly can.
- dogma1138 5y ago
  These aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s not like there was enough time to come up with something better. Wealthier households with a well functioning family unit did well perhaps even better than normal, poorer ones and or ones that had family issues most likely resulted in a much poorer outcome than normal schooling. How much did it actually impact children we won’t know for quite some time, it would all depend on how many of them will catch up and how the education system would adapt to the new gap(s).
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  So much of school is socialization with other human beings. Beyond academics, children need to experience being in a group and learning about how people are supposed to interact with each other. And most of this is not explicitly taught, but acquired through trial and error and simple monkey-see, monkey-do. You can't get that level of interaction and fidelity online.
  - adamnemecek 5y ago
    Sure. But then you end up with adults who are incapable of socialization outside of school. Maybe having children develop making friends outside of school is a good idea.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I'm looking at it in terms of critical periods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period), and mostly geared toward elementary school children. Where they would be acquiring the basic stuff of interacting with other people. I wasn't trying to imply that children cannot learn these things outside of school. But being around so many peers in an environment geared towards interaction seems ideal.
deleted 5y ago
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JoeCianflone 5y ago
Oy. This article is silly. In March of 2020 when schools started to close we did not know the full impact of COVID. decisions were made with the best knowledge AT THE TIME. Also we still don’t know the full impact of COVID. This article has a sample size of 1 year. As a parent of 3 with a child who started Kindergarten in September and did the entire year virtually—I’d rather deal with the fallout of having to “catch her up” than the fallout of her being asymptomatic and potentially killing me, my wife, one of her brothers or her teacher. I feel like that would be greater harm. We made/make decisions in real time with limited information—I regret none of my decisions with my kids schooling.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  This yes. Though, I'm still mad that they vaccinated old people first instead of children so that they could return to school sooner. Old people are retired and can stay at home. Yes it sucks, they're lonely yada yada but ffs they already lived their lives, why should the next generation botch their edication just so the old people can travel again sooner?
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    This was entirely the correct decision given that old people are often at substantial risk from Covid, and children almost none. "Old people are retired and can stay at home" betrays huge ignorance of differing socioeconomic conditions as well as social needs of the elderly.
    - iforgotpassword 5y ago
      But old people can self isolate. How are they at risk if they stay at home? Children might not be affected that much, but still spread it, and apparently much harder to keep inside 24/7. Playgrounds were as crowded as always. My neighbor told me that her daughter was one of five children from the entire class staying at home, for the remaining 20 kids, their parents got a written confirmation from their employers stating they're essential, and thus their children were eligible for "emergency care". Ridiculous. I'm not entirely sure things would have dragged along so much had we just eliminated children as spreaders first.
throwaway49274 5y ago
My kid is <6 and goes to a private daycare run by a publicly traded company in partnership with my wife's employer, a large biotech. They figured out PPE and distancing protocols about six weeks after initial shutdown and all kids were back in class. To our knowledge, there were no known covid outbreaks (all parents and staff are emailed when a staff or student is diagnosed). Capitalism wins again.
- jchallis 5y ago
  Hi Throwaway - sounds like Bright Horizons at Genentech? My 3 year old was at Bright Horizons at UCSF and they were even faster (~5 days) to figure out protocols to keep kids in the program so their essential worker parents could fight this war. Hard decisions were made and tradeoffs happened.
codingwageslave 5y ago
Traditional schooling is childhood slavery. It’s a shame that such a special time in life is spent in a desk memorizing facts.
robomartin 5y ago
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 the entire year. I am very aware of what work they did. OK. What's the lifelong harm of learning half of history, health, geography, social studies and underwater basket weaving for a single school year? None. Zero. Less than a rounding error. Please raise your hand if missing half of what you learned in tenth grade history (or almost any subject for that matter) would have destroyed your life as an adult? From my perspective, the only subjects that could suffer would be the sciences, math. This, because they are incremental. Half of math in a year does mean you lost half of the incremental steps needed to go on to the next stage. How bad is this? Not bad at all. Just do some remedial work next year and stop whining about it. Seriously, kids today have no clue how hard we had to work in school decades ago. In high school I regularly had to stay up until midnight or so to do homework. The point is: Adult life isn't easy. It requires hard work and sacrifice. What better time to teach kids about reality than in school, when all they have to worry about is school? Well, they don't have the time in a new school year to do that? Drop some of the bullshit courses and add extra time with what matters! This is where I go into a rant. Sorry. I'll keep this comment to the US for now. Our K-12 educational system is an abject disaster. We give our kids to this system for well over a decade and what we get in return isn't something to be proud of. What? Answer a very simple question: What is a high school graduate in the US good for? If you had to hire a high school graduate in the US, what job would you give them? Let's make a list: - Stacking boxes - Answering the phone - Making coffee (with training) - Washing dishes - Waiting tables - Fast food order taking - Amusement park "associate" - etc. In other words, after spending over a dozen years in the educational system we graduate young adults devoid of marketable skills, to the point they barely qualify for the simplest minimum wage jobs. College? Sure. Yet, not everyone goes to college. And if you truly care about raising the poverty line you have to deliver more out of a dozen years in an educational path than barely being good enough to stack boxes. As my oldest kid approached the end of his "stay" in high school I made it a point to put him through actually useful learning, bot formal and informal. He came out of high school with a nanodegree from Udacity as well as a solid range of skills he learned from me, from woodworking to manual and CNC machining, welding, electronics and coding. While his college friends were struggling to find anything that paid more than minimum wage he was making triple minimum wage in his first job with no prior work experience. That is the value of an education that develops real marketable skills vs. the bullshit we like to call "education". Harsh words? Sure. Please provide me with your list of what a high school graduate could be hired to do without significant further instruction to earn anything above minimum wage. I'll wait. That's the perspective from which I say that this idea that missing some instruction for a year caused kids irreparable harm. From my point of view we cause more harm --lifelong harm-- by not delivering young adults with a reasonable set of marketable skills after a dozen+ years in educational institutions. One way to look at it is that this is a massive waste of a dozen years. One of my kids regularly tells me he learns more about a range of subjects at home from my wife and I than he does at school. This is certainly true of the sciences. That's another rant. As an example, his middle school science teacher was a Chiropractor. While I am not here to disparage Chiropractors, this guy knew nothing about nothing. It was horrible. This guy had no business teaching almost any subject in science. He regularly taught falsehoods and he clearly did not have the background in math, physics and chemistry to qualify for the job. We live in a reasonably decent school district, and yet, due to the iron-grip labor unions have on education in the US (an other big problem) there was absolutely no way to object to or get rid of this guy. Here's an example of how bad this guy is: He told the kids the moon does not rotate about its axis. That statement defies even the most basic logical exploration of the concept. He actually argued with me when I pointed out that it does and refused to correct what he taught his class. Missing half a year of this moron's "science" class was likely a good thing for every kid in that class. Another one of my kids had "robotics" class in middle school. The teacher would go into the classroom, sit down and read a magazine while the kids played with legos on their own. She earned an extra boost in income and retirement by being a "robotics" teacher while the kids go NOTHING out of it for a year. I volunteered to go teach these kids something actually useful that year but the school did not take-up my offer. And we complain about 2020? Really? In another case, a math teacher, middle school, her "teaching" consisted of copying from the book onto the blackboard. If kids had a question they had to write them down on a piece of paper and she would answer them next class (if at all). I can only imagine the horror stories we might be able to compile if we did an honest appraisal of the level of instruction our kids get from substandard teachers protected by a system that cares not one bit about the students. This is far worse than almost anything that could have happened in 2020. To be repetitive: If we are so concerned about a partial deficiency created by a difficult year, we ought to look at the damage this system is causing kids after 12+ years. What happened in 2020 is a rounding error in the context of a person's entire life. If a half year of deficiency in education is so significant, 12+ years is just-about criminal.
seasoup 5y ago
This article doesn't take into account that maybe the kids didn't all get sick because closing the schools helped stop the spread of COVID in kids. It's like saying I exercised and lost weight so clearly that exercise was a waste of time, I would have lost weight anyway.
- beaner 5y ago
  Isn't the Covid rate in kids exceptionally low? Closing offices only barely slowed the rate of progress in adults but closing schools helped children, who are less at risk, a lot?
  - tzs 5y ago
    > Isn't the Covid rate in kids exceptionally low? No. The rate for ages 5-17 was actually slightly higher than that of adults 18-49, which was higher than the rate for 50-64, which was higher than the rate for 65+. What was much lower for kids was the severity of their illness. For every 100k kids that got it, about 600 were hospitalized. For 18-49 it was about 2400. For 50-64, 7200. For 65+, 21000. See the CDC data on the page mulvya linked in a parallel comment.
- mulvya 5y ago
  41% of school-aged US kids are estimated to have gotten COVID. Not such a great success. See Table 2 of https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
- briffle 5y ago
  We had a person running for government office in Oregon loudly proclaim over and over, "Why do we have have to have these mask mandates and rules. Oregon has one of the lowest infection rates".. Some people just seem to get cause and effect mixed up. Or the threads all over twitter this winter alleging 'funny numbers' because the flu cases were so low last year.. Imagine that, when everyone is social distancing, we have our lowest amount of influenza ever.. it must be a great conspiracy to manipulate the numbers..
dukeofdoom 5y ago
They're learning from playing with other kids. I've seen more parents go for walks and kids playing outside than ever before. They don't want to sit at home all day. So they socialize and play sports more now. Pickup Soccer, Biking, and so on. It's great for their mental health and development to be doing things on their own, figuring out the world, without parental supervision. You can learn so much from team sports.
jchallis 5y ago
Private schools in the Bay Area quickly adapted to the situation and stayed open, while even the wealthiest district public schools took a long time to follow. My two cents: school boards were much, much slower to adapt lessons from elsewhere in teaching students when compared with how fast healthcare adapted to managing patients. The lack of adaptability in a changing environment is the true damning weakness.
jacob171714 5y ago
Um, children can still spread covid. Even if they have a low chance of dying ignoring that its not binary and you can have long term health effects even if you don't die they can make family members and teachers/staff sick and get them killed. Children are really good at spreading illness.
- isolli 5y ago
  No, you should stop spreading misinformation. Children are micro-spreaders. In countries that kept schools open, teachers have not fallen ill at a higher rate than other adults in the community.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/Nb6d8 https://archive.is/Nb6d8
kova12 5y ago
What's most annoying in this situation is that this conclusion was clear from the very beginning, and we hear it only now, when it is too late. And should you have brought this up when it should have been brought up, you would have been branded as insensitive murdering killer Trump supporter. Good job journalists speaking out when it doesn't matter.
a0-prw 5y ago
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.

61 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The solution is not to generally apply more careful and scientific thinking, because the problem is not a lack of careful and scientific thinking. The agencies in charge are full of people who study this exact problem for a living and are fully qualified and trained for it. What we're really grappling with is a clear mismatch of priorities between the decision makers and the "decision-makees." Why didn't their study and training lead to a decision that we're all comfortable with? If someone is to blame for this poor decision, why have they not been indicted -- and if we, the public, are to blame for our complicity, why haven't yet we acknowledged our mistake? No one wants to point the finger out of fear of being called divisive. But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..."

commandlinefan 5y ago
> the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully It's just getting harder and harder, as more and more is revealed, to believe that the costs and risks weren't weighed based on what harm or benefit would come to specific individuals instead of how specific policies would help or hurt specific politicians and political interests. Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk, but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk Schools aren't closed to (primarily) protect the kids. Where did you get that idea? Schools are closed to protect the teachers, the families, and anyone those people contact that would be infected by those kids spreading infection at schools and then bringing the infection into households.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Children, who have the least agency and the least blame for the situation they find themselves in, were being asked to take a pretty big hit for the benefit of many of those who actually did have more agency and blame. We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.
    - CarelessExpert 5y ago
      > If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Absolutely, it did! But is that more harm than if their parents, siblings, grandparents, or friends got sick or died from covid? In short: Does that harm outweigh, balance, or is it overwhelmed by the harm caused but not closing schools? That's not an easy question. That being said, while I disagree with how the article's initial positioning on this topic (that governments didn't weigh the harms), I 100% agree with the rest of the article and I hope governments use this as an opportunity to improve education by learning from these experiences. > We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults. This is sounding suspiciously like a nirvana fallacy. All solutions for managing COVID are imperfect, and the defenses are layered. I struggle to believe there is any scenario where school closures are not a useful tool in the COVID prevention toolkit. Would it be nice if other measures were more effective and school closures could be used more sparingly? Sure. But we don't live in that world.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk. Yeah. Remind me who ordered that, and whether they're out of office over it? That's so blatantly wrong that it should rise to the level of criminal endangerment, even if nobody died from it. And I'm pretty sure that people did die from it, at which point it's at least manslaughter. Yes, I want that politician charged, because that was the clearly predictable result of that insanely wrong-headed decision.
jfengel 5y ago
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, "Fine, watch them yourselves." Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.
- Natsu 5y ago
  Honestly, I wonder if remote learning couldn't be better for at least some student populations. I have family who were bullied terribly (think on the level of "attacked by a crazy person with a knife at school" and "sexually harassed by teachers") and they probably would've benefited from an easier way of getting away from their tormentors instead of having to quit school and get a GED. I know that's not a one-size-fits-all thing, people are social after all and isolation causes its own issues, but I sort of wonder if remote learning can't become an option for kids, especially those who are poorly-served by their local schools.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > 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.
  - w-j-w 5y ago
    Does this pass for an argument now? Plenty of teachers are also severely at risk, and there is good reason to think that many would have died painful, preventable deaths had they taught in person.
redis_mlc 5y ago
Fauci admitted in the first month of the lockdown that he only considered medical concerns, not educational or economic. So: 1) He was the wrong guy to be setting policy during corona. 2) This was known a year before his emails were released, which point to an international conspiracy of virologists attempting to maintain corona, and likely GoF, funding. Without billions in govt. funding, their labs (and careers) disappear. The various virologists worked a circuit between US, Canada, Australia and China. All 4 countries are involved in a coverup that various journalists have exposed.
gotoeleven 5y ago
A loud minority of twitter mob participants shouted "You want to kill grandma!" every time anyone tried to discuss the full costs of the lockdowns. People don't want to risk their careers saying things that are unpopular with twitter mobs (especially in academia). So now we're effectively governed by emotional neurotics and government can no longer make reasonable decisions based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  Figuratively speaking, we did kill grandma. We've lost 603,000 human lives during this epidemic, and 90% happened within the first year.
- acatnamedjoe 5y ago
  There is no such thing as dispassionate cost benefit analysis (or at least, there isn't outside of a very narrow range of specific cases). Cost benefit analysis for big complex issues like coronavirus requires the identification and quantification of things that are really difficult to identify and quantify, and there's no easy way to do that without some form of subjective value judgement. CBA done properly is a good way to make these judgements explicit and transparent. CBA done badly is a good way to hide those judgements behind a load of figures. Neither is dispassionate.
  - ryathal 5y ago
    The entire point of a republic and bureaucracy is to have that dispassionate cost benefit analysis. It's to be done by people that shouldn't be subject to the mob mentality.
    - tboyd47 5y ago
      The point of a republic is to limit government, not ensure technocrats can never get fired.
      - ryathal 5y ago
bluefirebrand 5y ago
> But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..." It's a good lesson that life is messy and unpredictable and society can only do so much to shield us from that. If they cannot come to grips with the idea that a year of their education was sacrificed to try and save lives during a global pandemic, that's on them. Kids around the world and throughout history lose education for way worse reasons. For instance, when I was growing up I lost at least a year to teacher strikes. My teachers went on strike for months at least once at every level of my education, Elementary, Secondary, and University (Yes, I was paying for it. I lost more than half a semester. No I wasn't refunded or credited for the next year or anything.) I wish I could say I lost that time because we were trying to save lives, instead of "My teachers union was happy to use my education as a bargaining chip in trying to negotiate for a better collective agreement, and my school board would rather let me and everyone else go without than give the teachers union what they wanted" At least "we were trying to slow a pandemic and save lives" sounds heroic.

hypnoscripto 5y ago

I live in a city with 95% adult vaccination (at least one dose) and the government has just announced that they are exploring how to open schools at an indeterminate date in the future. If we can’t just go back to normal now, then why don’t we just give up?

stuaxo 5y ago
Adults don't go to school. It's not that much further to vaccinate kids though, we are almost there. In the UK schools have been open, and the new variant is rampaging through, if we hit vaccine escape it will be because of actions like this.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  Once all the kids are vaccinated (and BTW even the WHO is taking a cautious approach on this given that it's unclear whether young children are at more risk from Covid or the shots), what's the plan for preventing variants from developing in the developed world? In animal reservoirs? In the large numbers of vaccinated people who still wind up hosting (usually minor and asymptomatic) infections? If vaccine escape happens because the UK had its schools open then I find it very difficult to believe "we vaccinate everyone at once and the virus just goes away" was ever a realistic prospect in the first place.
  - morsch 5y ago
    From what I understand, there is a good chance that the pool for variants is limited, and that vaccinations (or a past infection) give decent immunity for new variants. Even for a variant with an immune escape, ie. you are not immune and might even spread it, your past exposures will make a serious case with hospitalisation unlikely. Immune escape is not a boolean attribute.
chollida1 5y ago
I do feel for you. I"m Canadian, Ontario specifically. We've done well with vaccinations, though nowhere near close to 95% and we're still in the longest lock down world wide with no real signs of things going back to normal. But there are signs that things are getting better. Its a long time betweeen now and September, let's give it time to see how things go. As long as the trend is moving in the right direction and governments give back their emergency powers( we have an Ontario government that just granted themselves a longer stay on their power even though we're doing really well in terms of vaccinations nd case counts) then maybe be patient and let things play out.

guidoism 5y ago

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

dogma1138 5y ago
These aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s not like there was enough time to come up with something better. Wealthier households with a well functioning family unit did well perhaps even better than normal, poorer ones and or ones that had family issues most likely resulted in a much poorer outcome than normal schooling. How much did it actually impact children we won’t know for quite some time, it would all depend on how many of them will catch up and how the education system would adapt to the new gap(s).
BitwiseFool 5y ago
So much of school is socialization with other human beings. Beyond academics, children need to experience being in a group and learning about how people are supposed to interact with each other. And most of this is not explicitly taught, but acquired through trial and error and simple monkey-see, monkey-do. You can't get that level of interaction and fidelity online.
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  Sure. But then you end up with adults who are incapable of socialization outside of school. Maybe having children develop making friends outside of school is a good idea.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I'm looking at it in terms of critical periods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period), and mostly geared toward elementary school children. Where they would be acquiring the basic stuff of interacting with other people. I wasn't trying to imply that children cannot learn these things outside of school. But being around so many peers in an environment geared towards interaction seems ideal.

deleted 5y ago

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JoeCianflone 5y ago

Oy. This article is silly. In March of 2020 when schools started to close we did not know the full impact of COVID. decisions were made with the best knowledge AT THE TIME. Also we still don’t know the full impact of COVID. This article has a sample size of 1 year. As a parent of 3 with a child who started Kindergarten in September and did the entire year virtually—I’d rather deal with the fallout of having to “catch her up” than the fallout of her being asymptomatic and potentially killing me, my wife, one of her brothers or her teacher. I feel like that would be greater harm. We made/make decisions in real time with limited information—I regret none of my decisions with my kids schooling.

iforgotpassword 5y ago
This yes. Though, I'm still mad that they vaccinated old people first instead of children so that they could return to school sooner. Old people are retired and can stay at home. Yes it sucks, they're lonely yada yada but ffs they already lived their lives, why should the next generation botch their edication just so the old people can travel again sooner?
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  This was entirely the correct decision given that old people are often at substantial risk from Covid, and children almost none. "Old people are retired and can stay at home" betrays huge ignorance of differing socioeconomic conditions as well as social needs of the elderly.
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    But old people can self isolate. How are they at risk if they stay at home? Children might not be affected that much, but still spread it, and apparently much harder to keep inside 24/7. Playgrounds were as crowded as always. My neighbor told me that her daughter was one of five children from the entire class staying at home, for the remaining 20 kids, their parents got a written confirmation from their employers stating they're essential, and thus their children were eligible for "emergency care". Ridiculous. I'm not entirely sure things would have dragged along so much had we just eliminated children as spreaders first.

throwaway49274 5y ago

My kid is <6 and goes to a private daycare run by a publicly traded company in partnership with my wife's employer, a large biotech. They figured out PPE and distancing protocols about six weeks after initial shutdown and all kids were back in class. To our knowledge, there were no known covid outbreaks (all parents and staff are emailed when a staff or student is diagnosed). Capitalism wins again.

jchallis 5y ago
Hi Throwaway - sounds like Bright Horizons at Genentech? My 3 year old was at Bright Horizons at UCSF and they were even faster (~5 days) to figure out protocols to keep kids in the program so their essential worker parents could fight this war. Hard decisions were made and tradeoffs happened.

codingwageslave 5y ago

Traditional schooling is childhood slavery. It’s a shame that such a special time in life is spent in a desk memorizing facts.

robomartin 5y ago

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 the entire year. I am very aware of what work they did. OK. What's the lifelong harm of learning half of history, health, geography, social studies and underwater basket weaving for a single school year? None. Zero. Less than a rounding error. Please raise your hand if missing half of what you learned in tenth grade history (or almost any subject for that matter) would have destroyed your life as an adult? From my perspective, the only subjects that could suffer would be the sciences, math. This, because they are incremental. Half of math in a year does mean you lost half of the incremental steps needed to go on to the next stage. How bad is this? Not bad at all. Just do some remedial work next year and stop whining about it. Seriously, kids today have no clue how hard we had to work in school decades ago. In high school I regularly had to stay up until midnight or so to do homework. The point is: Adult life isn't easy. It requires hard work and sacrifice. What better time to teach kids about reality than in school, when all they have to worry about is school? Well, they don't have the time in a new school year to do that? Drop some of the bullshit courses and add extra time with what matters! This is where I go into a rant. Sorry. I'll keep this comment to the US for now. Our K-12 educational system is an abject disaster. We give our kids to this system for well over a decade and what we get in return isn't something to be proud of. What? Answer a very simple question: What is a high school graduate in the US good for? If you had to hire a high school graduate in the US, what job would you give them? Let's make a list: - Stacking boxes - Answering the phone - Making coffee (with training) - Washing dishes - Waiting tables - Fast food order taking - Amusement park "associate" - etc. In other words, after spending over a dozen years in the educational system we graduate young adults devoid of marketable skills, to the point they barely qualify for the simplest minimum wage jobs. College? Sure. Yet, not everyone goes to college. And if you truly care about raising the poverty line you have to deliver more out of a dozen years in an educational path than barely being good enough to stack boxes. As my oldest kid approached the end of his "stay" in high school I made it a point to put him through actually useful learning, bot formal and informal. He came out of high school with a nanodegree from Udacity as well as a solid range of skills he learned from me, from woodworking to manual and CNC machining, welding, electronics and coding. While his college friends were struggling to find anything that paid more than minimum wage he was making triple minimum wage in his first job with no prior work experience. That is the value of an education that develops real marketable skills vs. the bullshit we like to call "education". Harsh words? Sure. Please provide me with your list of what a high school graduate could be hired to do without significant further instruction to earn anything above minimum wage. I'll wait. That's the perspective from which I say that this idea that missing some instruction for a year caused kids irreparable harm. From my point of view we cause more harm --lifelong harm-- by not delivering young adults with a reasonable set of marketable skills after a dozen+ years in educational institutions. One way to look at it is that this is a massive waste of a dozen years. One of my kids regularly tells me he learns more about a range of subjects at home from my wife and I than he does at school. This is certainly true of the sciences. That's another rant. As an example, his middle school science teacher was a Chiropractor. While I am not here to disparage Chiropractors, this guy knew nothing about nothing. It was horrible. This guy had no business teaching almost any subject in science. He regularly taught falsehoods and he clearly did not have the background in math, physics and chemistry to qualify for the job. We live in a reasonably decent school district, and yet, due to the iron-grip labor unions have on education in the US (an other big problem) there was absolutely no way to object to or get rid of this guy. Here's an example of how bad this guy is: He told the kids the moon does not rotate about its axis. That statement defies even the most basic logical exploration of the concept. He actually argued with me when I pointed out that it does and refused to correct what he taught his class. Missing half a year of this moron's "science" class was likely a good thing for every kid in that class. Another one of my kids had "robotics" class in middle school. The teacher would go into the classroom, sit down and read a magazine while the kids played with legos on their own. She earned an extra boost in income and retirement by being a "robotics" teacher while the kids go NOTHING out of it for a year. I volunteered to go teach these kids something actually useful that year but the school did not take-up my offer. And we complain about 2020? Really? In another case, a math teacher, middle school, her "teaching" consisted of copying from the book onto the blackboard. If kids had a question they had to write them down on a piece of paper and she would answer them next class (if at all). I can only imagine the horror stories we might be able to compile if we did an honest appraisal of the level of instruction our kids get from substandard teachers protected by a system that cares not one bit about the students. This is far worse than almost anything that could have happened in 2020. To be repetitive: If we are so concerned about a partial deficiency created by a difficult year, we ought to look at the damage this system is causing kids after 12+ years. What happened in 2020 is a rounding error in the context of a person's entire life. If a half year of deficiency in education is so significant, 12+ years is just-about criminal.

seasoup 5y ago

This article doesn't take into account that maybe the kids didn't all get sick because closing the schools helped stop the spread of COVID in kids. It's like saying I exercised and lost weight so clearly that exercise was a waste of time, I would have lost weight anyway.

beaner 5y ago
Isn't the Covid rate in kids exceptionally low? Closing offices only barely slowed the rate of progress in adults but closing schools helped children, who are less at risk, a lot?
- tzs 5y ago
  > Isn't the Covid rate in kids exceptionally low? No. The rate for ages 5-17 was actually slightly higher than that of adults 18-49, which was higher than the rate for 50-64, which was higher than the rate for 65+. What was much lower for kids was the severity of their illness. For every 100k kids that got it, about 600 were hospitalized. For 18-49 it was about 2400. For 50-64, 7200. For 65+, 21000. See the CDC data on the page mulvya linked in a parallel comment.
mulvya 5y ago
41% of school-aged US kids are estimated to have gotten COVID. Not such a great success. See Table 2 of https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
briffle 5y ago
We had a person running for government office in Oregon loudly proclaim over and over, "Why do we have have to have these mask mandates and rules. Oregon has one of the lowest infection rates".. Some people just seem to get cause and effect mixed up. Or the threads all over twitter this winter alleging 'funny numbers' because the flu cases were so low last year.. Imagine that, when everyone is social distancing, we have our lowest amount of influenza ever.. it must be a great conspiracy to manipulate the numbers..

dukeofdoom 5y ago

They're learning from playing with other kids. I've seen more parents go for walks and kids playing outside than ever before. They don't want to sit at home all day. So they socialize and play sports more now. Pickup Soccer, Biking, and so on. It's great for their mental health and development to be doing things on their own, figuring out the world, without parental supervision. You can learn so much from team sports.

jchallis 5y ago

Private schools in the Bay Area quickly adapted to the situation and stayed open, while even the wealthiest district public schools took a long time to follow. My two cents: school boards were much, much slower to adapt lessons from elsewhere in teaching students when compared with how fast healthcare adapted to managing patients. The lack of adaptability in a changing environment is the true damning weakness.

jacob171714 5y ago

Um, children can still spread covid. Even if they have a low chance of dying ignoring that its not binary and you can have long term health effects even if you don't die they can make family members and teachers/staff sick and get them killed. Children are really good at spreading illness.

isolli 5y ago
No, you should stop spreading misinformation. Children are micro-spreaders. In countries that kept schools open, teachers have not fallen ill at a higher rate than other adults in the community.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/Nb6d8 https://archive.is/Nb6d8

kova12 5y ago

What's most annoying in this situation is that this conclusion was clear from the very beginning, and we hear it only now, when it is too late. And should you have brought this up when it should have been brought up, you would have been branded as insensitive murdering killer Trump supporter. Good job journalists speaking out when it doesn't matter.

a0-prw 5y ago

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.