15 ms·

It's amazing that private schools were somehow able to operate. Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-We

It's amazing that private schools were somehow able to operate. Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class. Give them more self directed study and homework. Have some pre-recorded video classes they can do on other days and have a proctor to help handle a larger # of kids. There are many alternatives to remote only learning.

artursapek 5y ago
Private schools didn't have insane months-long "remote learning" because they're accountable to their students/families, who pay tuition and choose to attend that school over other schools. It's free market capitalism at work and it's beautiful.
retrac 5y ago
The idea of split time was discussed in the public system here in Canada in many places, at the start. But come summer the general attitude and public discussion seems to have taken a very all-or-nothing turn.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  Somehow nobody seems to feel a need to justify why would we make any changes* to in-person schooling. Instead it just seems to be a foregone conclusion that having kids in school is dangerous. Why is split learning even on the table? Who are we trying to protect? The kids? The teachers? Are most people in these hyper-partisan democrat areas (I'm speaking from a US perspective, but it's largely the US that has voluntarily wrecked now almost 2 years of education) aware that the kids are not at serious risk of COVID? Are they aware that, not only is the mortality of common comparisons like Influenza way higher, but that the common rebuttal of "but what about long COVID" is basically an evidenceless assertion and there is no evidence that children are getting permanent damage from their largely asymptomatic COVID infections? Are they aware that, even if it were right to try to prevent kids from ever getting infected with SARS-2 (spoiler: it's not), that we don't even have quality studies proving that going to school is even associated with greater COVID infection? Are they aware that, unlike the H1N1 pandemic, it's actually pretty miraculous that SARS-2 almost entirely spares children? That therefore to undergo these measures like school closures and constant indoor masking of toddlers, and 6 foot distancing, and plastic dividers, and restricted extracurricular events, has no relation to actually keeping children safe, except insofar as those measures very clearly harm the wellbeing of children? I weep for what we've done to children throughout this. We as adults are supposed to be the ones saying, "hey, even if there's risk to us adults, you guys are more important, and we're never going to ask you to sacrifice your life out of some misguided effort to prevent the transmission of an endemic highly infectious human coronavirus, and on the contrary we will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to keep you guys growing and developing". Instead we turned around and said, "kids are inherently gross, they're spreading this killer virus like crazy, if they develop a cough and hug their grandmother and the grandmother later dies of COVID then they killed their grandma". As someone who lives in California - which together with New York and Illinois has led the country in absurd and ineffective and incredibly authoritarian COVID policy - I feel like I don't recognize my fellow citizens. * Well, any changes because of COVID specifically. Obviously there's things like later school start times for teenagers, etc that are no-brainers that should have been implemented long ago
  - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
    > Instead we turned around and said, "kids are inherently gross, they're spreading this killer virus like crazy, if they develop a cough and hug their grandmother and the grandmother later dies of COVID then they killed their grandma". But boy, wouldn't that suck? I have a couple thoughts here: 1) Kids spend a lot of time with adults, so yes, they could get grandma sick. They could also get their teacher sick, or the school nurse, or other support staff. Good luck convincing the teachers to put their health on the line; they're already underpaid and overworked. 2) Several metro areas have been running short on pediatric ICU beds. COVID is way less risky for kids, but still risky enough to overwhelm our medical system, so preventing spread should probably be given some level of priority. On the whole, I'm glad that our school systems moved fast to figure out an alternative solution during the pandemic. I'm less glad that we haven't tried other strategies as those alternative solutions have shown clear gaps in effectiveness, and I'm upset that children who depend on the school environment for socialization, focused learning, and even food have been left behind.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      I'm upset that there are children who depend on the school environment for food. And it isnt even a small number of children at that.
      - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
        Agreed! It’s a problem that the US hasn’t spent nearly enough effort on, and the pandemic pointed a big ugly spotlight at it.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > Why is split learning even on the table? Who are we trying to protect? The kids? The teachers? Are most people in these hyper-partisan democrat areas (I'm speaking from a US perspective, but it's largely the US that has voluntarily wrecked now almost 2 years of education) aware that the kids are not at serious risk of COVID? It was to protect staff & their families, and generally reduce community spread. Schools this year, that are fully back in person, are barely holding it together. There aren't enough subs. Trying to go fully in-person everywhere last year probably would have fallen apart, for that reason. It still might, this year. It's bad. I agree that the harm outweighed the benefit by a long shot if we're talking just about the kids, but I don't think we'd have been able to keep fully in-person school running last year anyway. The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online cohorts. The only way to fix it would have been a policy of having teachers & students who very likely were COVID-exposed but not actively ill-feeling come in until it was proven that they were COVID-positive—but that policy would also have increased spread, so I wouldn't guarantee that'd actually improve the situation of having too many staff out for quarantine.
smileysteve 5y ago
Boys and Girls Clubs of America did this much of the Fall 2020-2021 school year while schools were remote; they created learning "pods" of 6 students to work remotely with one staff / volunteer. The idea being to limit the exposure / quarantine size, facilitate remote learning where it was otherwise unavailable.
michaelt 5y ago
> Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-Saturday. While that might be good for reducing the achievement gap, it doesn't help parents who are being kept from returning to work by the need to care for their children
- dantheman 5y ago
  Completely agree, but it's better than 100% remote which is what happened.
- conductr 5y ago
  > it doesn't help parents who are being kept from returning to work by the need to care for their children I’m not sympathetic to parents that view school as daycare. I feel bad for those kids, but the education system shouldn’t cater to this behavior. I feel like these kids are also consuming a larger share of education resources due to goofing off, etc because their parents may not be involved enough or setting higher standards/expectations for their kids. It always gets framed as the hard working low income family who values education as a generational vehicle of mobility. The stereotypical immigrant family with mom and dad both working 3 jobs. However, I feel like that is not the norm. There is a lot of people who just don’t care about education except for the free daycare and meals it provides. Many parents care more about their kids place on the sports team/etc than their test scores. They’ll let there kid play video games all day then cry about how remote learning doesn’t work.
handrous 5y ago
> Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class. Give them more self directed study and homework. Have some pre-recorded video classes they can do on other days and have a proctor to help handle a larger # of kids. A district I have good insight into did a split-week schedule similar to that, with online portions for the "off" days, plus a completely separate online program for parents who wanted their kids 100% remote. Unlike some other districts around here that outsourced the online program to one or another terrible companies when offering both options, this district ran their own fully-remote program. The results were that both groups did terribly but the in person group did worse, despite high levels of near-zero engagement at the online school (i.e. a double-digit percentage of kids basically didn't do school at all). The actual effect of that half-on-half-off schedule in practice was that ~half as much material was covered right off the bat—few of the kids took the online component for the "off" days seriously, and teachers had a hell of a time trying to arrange things so that even could work in the first place, and mostly failed at it or gave up—but then, it gets worse: in-person means people will get COVID, and will expose others, even with fewer kids around at a time reducing the rates, it still happens. So now you've got some weeks with whole classes at home, pretty much not doing school, lots of teachers out and calling for subs, and sub shortages leading to baby-sitting rooms, basically, with too many kids in them to realistically teach—incidentally, this is still happening all over in our city, as the sub shortage remains very bad. > It's amazing that private schools were somehow able to operate. Our kids are now in a private school for this school year (the above was not our district last year, incidentally, but another nearby one) that stayed open all of last year and had minimal issues with "quarantining" or viral spread. How? 1) Cut extracurriculars, especially sports—public school parents would never allow this, sports kept running through all of last year and were only barely interrupted the year before, shutting them down was not an option unless school board members all wanted to lose their next election and probably get some death threats and experience some vandalism, 2) powerful air purifiers in every room, 3) everyone masked & distanced and took it seriously—again, compliance issues at public schools are less of a problem at some private schools, 4) no-one constantly pushing to relax measures the second the local infection rates trended slightly down—they had much better and more consistent planning. This year? Vaccine mandates for staff, and high levels of (voluntary) vaccination among eligible kids. As with other cases where (some) private schools do better than most public schools, dealing with COVID better mostly had to do with those schools getting to select who they have to deal with.
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
>Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class. In practice this would get you two groups of 30-40 kids in each class - but they didn't need to build a new school they were planning on. I'm from an area that used to have one high school. It now has 8 in the area. I had a class of 1100. This year with the additional schools it is around 1000.
ativzzz 5y ago
I live next to a private school, and they did not close down at all. It's a pre-k - 5th grade school and the kids have been wearing masks the whole time (still do) even at recess. IDK what other measures they have taken, but they certainly have had in person school the entire pandemic
bzbarsky 5y ago
A lot of public schools in MA did just that. Our school district had two cohorts, one of which was in school Mon, Tue, Thurs, Fri one week, the other the next week, alternating. Fully remote Wednesdays, ostensibly to do cleaning/sanitizing. Parents could also opt for their kids to be fully remote, and some kids (e.g. those whose parents were teachers, not necessarily in our district) were in school full-time, except Wednesdays. It was definitely much better than remote-only.

artursapek 5y ago

Private schools didn't have insane months-long "remote learning" because they're accountable to their students/families, who pay tuition and choose to attend that school over other schools. It's free market capitalism at work and it's beautiful.

retrac 5y ago

The idea of split time was discussed in the public system here in Canada in many places, at the start. But come summer the general attitude and public discussion seems to have taken a very all-or-nothing turn.

__blockcipher__ 5y ago
Somehow nobody seems to feel a need to justify why would we make any changes* to in-person schooling. Instead it just seems to be a foregone conclusion that having kids in school is dangerous. Why is split learning even on the table? Who are we trying to protect? The kids? The teachers? Are most people in these hyper-partisan democrat areas (I'm speaking from a US perspective, but it's largely the US that has voluntarily wrecked now almost 2 years of education) aware that the kids are not at serious risk of COVID? Are they aware that, not only is the mortality of common comparisons like Influenza way higher, but that the common rebuttal of "but what about long COVID" is basically an evidenceless assertion and there is no evidence that children are getting permanent damage from their largely asymptomatic COVID infections? Are they aware that, even if it were right to try to prevent kids from ever getting infected with SARS-2 (spoiler: it's not), that we don't even have quality studies proving that going to school is even associated with greater COVID infection? Are they aware that, unlike the H1N1 pandemic, it's actually pretty miraculous that SARS-2 almost entirely spares children? That therefore to undergo these measures like school closures and constant indoor masking of toddlers, and 6 foot distancing, and plastic dividers, and restricted extracurricular events, has no relation to actually keeping children safe, except insofar as those measures very clearly harm the wellbeing of children? I weep for what we've done to children throughout this. We as adults are supposed to be the ones saying, "hey, even if there's risk to us adults, you guys are more important, and we're never going to ask you to sacrifice your life out of some misguided effort to prevent the transmission of an endemic highly infectious human coronavirus, and on the contrary we will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to keep you guys growing and developing". Instead we turned around and said, "kids are inherently gross, they're spreading this killer virus like crazy, if they develop a cough and hug their grandmother and the grandmother later dies of COVID then they killed their grandma". As someone who lives in California - which together with New York and Illinois has led the country in absurd and ineffective and incredibly authoritarian COVID policy - I feel like I don't recognize my fellow citizens. * Well, any changes because of COVID specifically. Obviously there's things like later school start times for teenagers, etc that are no-brainers that should have been implemented long ago
- brendoelfrendo 5y ago
  > Instead we turned around and said, "kids are inherently gross, they're spreading this killer virus like crazy, if they develop a cough and hug their grandmother and the grandmother later dies of COVID then they killed their grandma". But boy, wouldn't that suck? I have a couple thoughts here: 1) Kids spend a lot of time with adults, so yes, they could get grandma sick. They could also get their teacher sick, or the school nurse, or other support staff. Good luck convincing the teachers to put their health on the line; they're already underpaid and overworked. 2) Several metro areas have been running short on pediatric ICU beds. COVID is way less risky for kids, but still risky enough to overwhelm our medical system, so preventing spread should probably be given some level of priority. On the whole, I'm glad that our school systems moved fast to figure out an alternative solution during the pandemic. I'm less glad that we haven't tried other strategies as those alternative solutions have shown clear gaps in effectiveness, and I'm upset that children who depend on the school environment for socialization, focused learning, and even food have been left behind.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    I'm upset that there are children who depend on the school environment for food. And it isnt even a small number of children at that.
    - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
      Agreed! It’s a problem that the US hasn’t spent nearly enough effort on, and the pandemic pointed a big ugly spotlight at it.
- handrous 5y ago
  > Why is split learning even on the table? Who are we trying to protect? The kids? The teachers? Are most people in these hyper-partisan democrat areas (I'm speaking from a US perspective, but it's largely the US that has voluntarily wrecked now almost 2 years of education) aware that the kids are not at serious risk of COVID? It was to protect staff & their families, and generally reduce community spread. Schools this year, that are fully back in person, are barely holding it together. There aren't enough subs. Trying to go fully in-person everywhere last year probably would have fallen apart, for that reason. It still might, this year. It's bad. I agree that the harm outweighed the benefit by a long shot if we're talking just about the kids, but I don't think we'd have been able to keep fully in-person school running last year anyway. The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online cohorts. The only way to fix it would have been a policy of having teachers & students who very likely were COVID-exposed but not actively ill-feeling come in until it was proven that they were COVID-positive—but that policy would also have increased spread, so I wouldn't guarantee that'd actually improve the situation of having too many staff out for quarantine.

smileysteve 5y ago

Boys and Girls Clubs of America did this much of the Fall 2020-2021 school year while schools were remote; they created learning "pods" of 6 students to work remotely with one staff / volunteer. The idea being to limit the exposure / quarantine size, facilitate remote learning where it was otherwise unavailable.

michaelt 5y ago

> Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-Saturday. While that might be good for reducing the achievement gap, it doesn't help parents who are being kept from returning to work by the need to care for their children

dantheman 5y ago
Completely agree, but it's better than 100% remote which is what happened.
conductr 5y ago
> it doesn't help parents who are being kept from returning to work by the need to care for their children I’m not sympathetic to parents that view school as daycare. I feel bad for those kids, but the education system shouldn’t cater to this behavior. I feel like these kids are also consuming a larger share of education resources due to goofing off, etc because their parents may not be involved enough or setting higher standards/expectations for their kids. It always gets framed as the hard working low income family who values education as a generational vehicle of mobility. The stereotypical immigrant family with mom and dad both working 3 jobs. However, I feel like that is not the norm. There is a lot of people who just don’t care about education except for the free daycare and meals it provides. Many parents care more about their kids place on the sports team/etc than their test scores. They’ll let there kid play video games all day then cry about how remote learning doesn’t work.

handrous 5y ago

> Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class. Give them more self directed study and homework. Have some pre-recorded video classes they can do on other days and have a proctor to help handle a larger # of kids. A district I have good insight into did a split-week schedule similar to that, with online portions for the "off" days, plus a completely separate online program for parents who wanted their kids 100% remote. Unlike some other districts around here that outsourced the online program to one or another terrible companies when offering both options, this district ran their own fully-remote program. The results were that both groups did terribly but the in person group did worse, despite high levels of near-zero engagement at the online school (i.e. a double-digit percentage of kids basically didn't do school at all). The actual effect of that half-on-half-off schedule in practice was that ~half as much material was covered right off the bat—few of the kids took the online component for the "off" days seriously, and teachers had a hell of a time trying to arrange things so that even could work in the first place, and mostly failed at it or gave up—but then, it gets worse: in-person means people will get COVID, and will expose others, even with fewer kids around at a time reducing the rates, it still happens. So now you've got some weeks with whole classes at home, pretty much not doing school, lots of teachers out and calling for subs, and sub shortages leading to baby-sitting rooms, basically, with too many kids in them to realistically teach—incidentally, this is still happening all over in our city, as the sub shortage remains very bad. > It's amazing that private schools were somehow able to operate. Our kids are now in a private school for this school year (the above was not our district last year, incidentally, but another nearby one) that stayed open all of last year and had minimal issues with "quarantining" or viral spread. How? 1) Cut extracurriculars, especially sports—public school parents would never allow this, sports kept running through all of last year and were only barely interrupted the year before, shutting them down was not an option unless school board members all wanted to lose their next election and probably get some death threats and experience some vandalism, 2) powerful air purifiers in every room, 3) everyone masked & distanced and took it seriously—again, compliance issues at public schools are less of a problem at some private schools, 4) no-one constantly pushing to relax measures the second the local infection rates trended slightly down—they had much better and more consistent planning. This year? Vaccine mandates for staff, and high levels of (voluntary) vaccination among eligible kids. As with other cases where (some) private schools do better than most public schools, dealing with COVID better mostly had to do with those schools getting to select who they have to deal with.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

>Perhaps instead of doing something didn't work, we just split the kids into 2 groups, Monday-Wednesday, and then Tuesday-Saturday. Then we'd only have 10 - 15 kids per class. In practice this would get you two groups of 30-40 kids in each class - but they didn't need to build a new school they were planning on. I'm from an area that used to have one high school. It now has 8 in the area. I had a class of 1100. This year with the additional schools it is around 1000.

ativzzz 5y ago

I live next to a private school, and they did not close down at all. It's a pre-k - 5th grade school and the kids have been wearing masks the whole time (still do) even at recess. IDK what other measures they have taken, but they certainly have had in person school the entire pandemic

bzbarsky 5y ago

A lot of public schools in MA did just that. Our school district had two cohorts, one of which was in school Mon, Tue, Thurs, Fri one week, the other the next week, alternating. Fully remote Wednesdays, ostensibly to do cleaning/sanitizing. Parents could also opt for their kids to be fully remote, and some kids (e.g. those whose parents were teachers, not necessarily in our district) were in school full-time, except Wednesdays. It was definitely much better than remote-only.