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I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NY

I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NYC and last year was bad... They did a test at the beginning of this year before the start of the first grade and her results were awful. This is an unprecedented event and everyone is clueless including in education. I don't make a big deal about the test results and it's the reality. Educators are aware but it's not enough, we should be aware too. These kids are more resilient than most people think and we still need to support them. I am lucky I can get paid support for her but not all families have that privilege. So please stop being pedantic about the article and instead maybe focus on how you might create solutions. And please exclude online classes from those solutions. Thank you.

johnla 5y ago
My kids are in NYC public schools too. My 3rd grader opted into the state assessment tests. They release the scores with breakdowns how the kids do by grade and school. This time they didn't. I'm pretty sure it's because of how terrible the results were that it'd be a scandal.
- ilteris 5y ago
  bingo
- throwoutway 5y ago
  Does NYC have some sort of freedom of information act that you can request this?
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  If you're a programmer (like many on this site are), I find it hard to see how you think state assessment tests can be objective or measure real learning for a student in any statistically meaningful way. They make whiteboard coding tests look extremely subjective, fair, and balanced in comparison. I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the mood of the kid that day. Some kids just idly click away, and the teacher has to tell them to actually read the damn question before clicking on an answer. A lot of the signal that those tests will give is just that kids weren't super attentive or feeling excited about giving the tests this year, for obvious pandemic reasons. Hard to be in a great mood when your parents are home all the time, everyone is out in masks, and all events and fun things are canceled or have restrictions. But that doesn't seem to prevent people from pretending like there's some big scandal backed up by objective data about "learning shortfalls" and such.
  - istjohn 5y ago
    Obviously tests are imperfect, but it's silly to dismiss them as useless. Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. Children of priveleged families will always do fine. Their parents have the knowledge and bandwidth to take a proactive role in their children's educations, but we can't leave behind all the kids who aren't so lucky.
    - piva00 5y ago
      > Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. It's a work of fiction but I'd like to refer to "The Wire Season 4" and how they portray standardised test taking to get you a fresh perspective outside of the utopian thought about curricula.
    - quadrifoliate 5y ago
      > Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. It's worse to present an experiment as objective without properly measuring its error bars. As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests. Claiming that you are "measuring outcomes in a rigorous way" from these tests without putting in the time and money to assess and control for all those factors makes for bad public policy. Worse, you'll end up providing incentives to focus only on test scores to the detriment of actual classroom learning.
      - onion2k 5y ago
        As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests. For individuals, yes. But for the entire cohort not really - the results are being compared to previous years, so the error bars should be approximately the same. Children are, on average, the same as two, five or ten years ago, so the test outcomes should be about the same. The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.
geoduck14 5y ago
My 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home". I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning
- chii 5y ago
  I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now. It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385 https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.
  - folli 5y ago
    From a practical perspective: outfitting every student with a VR setup sounds very expensive.
    - bronco21016 5y ago
      For now. But at the end of the day a Quest is essentially a smart phone with a nice screen attached to your face. There’s no reason this hardware can’t come down in price. I mean the thing is only $300 as it is. Plenty of wealthier schools send every kid home with a Chromebook of similar price. I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.
      - chii 5y ago
        yea, i agree that broadband access is vital - not just for education, but for everything. It's the new roads and rail of the 21st century. Broadband should be a public utility, regulated as such and invested in as such imho.
throwaway_52828 5y ago
[flagged]
quadrifoliate 5y ago
American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment. Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run and borderline volunteer-run, but funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic. The sooner you can come to terms with this, the better will be the outcome for your child. I recommend looking up resources on sharing childcare and teaching with other parents in addition to your kids' teachers.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  Research after research comes out pointing to the fact that parents should be directly involved in their children's education. > Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run It is sad that this is the case
  - syki 5y ago
    Consider the median in terms of intelligence. For each subject taught in school take the median in terms ability to explain things to a child in a constructive way. Almost everyone falls below the median in multiple categories. Hence what’s best for the child, and society too, is to attempt to organize things in such a way that the child is taught by people above the median in intelligence and above the median in teaching ability in the subject taught by that person. At scale this requires a government solution unless we are ok saying “screw you” to those who are less than rich.
- ilteris 5y ago
  Agreed, we should all come to terms with this and work towards is the point of my small rant as well. Thank you for clarifying.
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    Also, I wouldn't worry too much about standardized tests if you have any insight into the conditions that usually influence the results. I have details in my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805200 – in short, they can be quite easily influenced by factors extrinsic to knowledge retention even in non-pandemic times; and there have been a lot of those factors recently.
carlivar 5y ago
You should move, as soon as possible.
diebeforei485 5y ago
I feel like European countries handled school much better. Rapid tests 1-2 times a week for all students. Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.
- inciampati 5y ago
  This is absolutely not uniform in Europe. The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.
  - Ntrails 5y ago
    I hold to my initial opinion that the price of closing any schools at all for > 1 week was too high and simply should never have happened. I state that in the certainty that more people would have died of covid overall had schools been left open.
uniqueuid 5y ago
Thank you for this comment, it's incredibly true. Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school. * Kids go to school to get emotional care. * Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen. * Kids go to school to learn social behavior. * Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work. * Kids go to school to learn (from teachers or peers) how to tie shoe laces, wipe your nose, go to the bathroom and so on. In first and second grade, all of this makes up more than 50% of what kids actually learn, and this is what they are missing completely in home schooling.
- watwut 5y ago
  I kinda hope they go to bathroom at home too. I agree it is better for kids to be in school then not, but lets not pretend there is no basic learning going on at home.
  - uniqueuid 5y ago
    Haha sure! What I implied is: There are many things we need to learn about life in public spaces, including trivial things such as: What is a stall, where is the toilet paper, how do other people behave, what's the etiquette etc etc. Much of this is completely non-evident to small kids, because behavior at home is (naturally) so different.
    - ianai 5y ago
      That could be taught at the public library.
      - uniqueuid 5y ago
        Only if that involves watching people, since much of what kids learn is subconscious and sub-vocal. I.e. they learn many things we don't know they learn, and don't know exist, because we are taking them for granted all the time.
- 5y ago
yohannparis 5y ago
I don't understand your point, the article is clearly advocating for school to get back to normal despite of Covid, because their education and social development is so important in contrast to their risk to covid.

johnla 5y ago

My kids are in NYC public schools too. My 3rd grader opted into the state assessment tests. They release the scores with breakdowns how the kids do by grade and school. This time they didn't. I'm pretty sure it's because of how terrible the results were that it'd be a scandal.

ilteris 5y ago
bingo
throwoutway 5y ago
Does NYC have some sort of freedom of information act that you can request this?
quadrifoliate 5y ago
If you're a programmer (like many on this site are), I find it hard to see how you think state assessment tests can be objective or measure real learning for a student in any statistically meaningful way. They make whiteboard coding tests look extremely subjective, fair, and balanced in comparison. I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the mood of the kid that day. Some kids just idly click away, and the teacher has to tell them to actually read the damn question before clicking on an answer. A lot of the signal that those tests will give is just that kids weren't super attentive or feeling excited about giving the tests this year, for obvious pandemic reasons. Hard to be in a great mood when your parents are home all the time, everyone is out in masks, and all events and fun things are canceled or have restrictions. But that doesn't seem to prevent people from pretending like there's some big scandal backed up by objective data about "learning shortfalls" and such.
- istjohn 5y ago
  Obviously tests are imperfect, but it's silly to dismiss them as useless. Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. Children of priveleged families will always do fine. Their parents have the knowledge and bandwidth to take a proactive role in their children's educations, but we can't leave behind all the kids who aren't so lucky.
  - piva00 5y ago
    > Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. It's a work of fiction but I'd like to refer to "The Wire Season 4" and how they portray standardised test taking to get you a fresh perspective outside of the utopian thought about curricula.
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    > Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. It's worse to present an experiment as objective without properly measuring its error bars. As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests. Claiming that you are "measuring outcomes in a rigorous way" from these tests without putting in the time and money to assess and control for all those factors makes for bad public policy. Worse, you'll end up providing incentives to focus only on test scores to the detriment of actual classroom learning.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests. For individuals, yes. But for the entire cohort not really - the results are being compared to previous years, so the error bars should be approximately the same. Children are, on average, the same as two, five or ten years ago, so the test outcomes should be about the same. The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.

geoduck14 5y ago

My 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home". I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning

chii 5y ago
I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now. It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385 https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.
- folli 5y ago
  From a practical perspective: outfitting every student with a VR setup sounds very expensive.
  - bronco21016 5y ago
    For now. But at the end of the day a Quest is essentially a smart phone with a nice screen attached to your face. There’s no reason this hardware can’t come down in price. I mean the thing is only $300 as it is. Plenty of wealthier schools send every kid home with a Chromebook of similar price. I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.
    - chii 5y ago
      yea, i agree that broadband access is vital - not just for education, but for everything. It's the new roads and rail of the 21st century. Broadband should be a public utility, regulated as such and invested in as such imho.

throwaway_52828 5y ago

[flagged]

quadrifoliate 5y ago

American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment. Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run and borderline volunteer-run, but funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic. The sooner you can come to terms with this, the better will be the outcome for your child. I recommend looking up resources on sharing childcare and teaching with other parents in addition to your kids' teachers.

throwoutway 5y ago
Research after research comes out pointing to the fact that parents should be directly involved in their children's education. > Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run It is sad that this is the case
- syki 5y ago
  Consider the median in terms of intelligence. For each subject taught in school take the median in terms ability to explain things to a child in a constructive way. Almost everyone falls below the median in multiple categories. Hence what’s best for the child, and society too, is to attempt to organize things in such a way that the child is taught by people above the median in intelligence and above the median in teaching ability in the subject taught by that person. At scale this requires a government solution unless we are ok saying “screw you” to those who are less than rich.
ilteris 5y ago
Agreed, we should all come to terms with this and work towards is the point of my small rant as well. Thank you for clarifying.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  Also, I wouldn't worry too much about standardized tests if you have any insight into the conditions that usually influence the results. I have details in my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805200 – in short, they can be quite easily influenced by factors extrinsic to knowledge retention even in non-pandemic times; and there have been a lot of those factors recently.

carlivar 5y ago

You should move, as soon as possible.

diebeforei485 5y ago

I feel like European countries handled school much better. Rapid tests 1-2 times a week for all students. Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.

inciampati 5y ago
This is absolutely not uniform in Europe. The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.
- Ntrails 5y ago
  I hold to my initial opinion that the price of closing any schools at all for > 1 week was too high and simply should never have happened. I state that in the certainty that more people would have died of covid overall had schools been left open.

uniqueuid 5y ago

Thank you for this comment, it's incredibly true. Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school. * Kids go to school to get emotional care. * Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen. * Kids go to school to learn social behavior. * Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work. * Kids go to school to learn (from teachers or peers) how to tie shoe laces, wipe your nose, go to the bathroom and so on. In first and second grade, all of this makes up more than 50% of what kids actually learn, and this is what they are missing completely in home schooling.

watwut 5y ago
I kinda hope they go to bathroom at home too. I agree it is better for kids to be in school then not, but lets not pretend there is no basic learning going on at home.
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  Haha sure! What I implied is: There are many things we need to learn about life in public spaces, including trivial things such as: What is a stall, where is the toilet paper, how do other people behave, what's the etiquette etc etc. Much of this is completely non-evident to small kids, because behavior at home is (naturally) so different.
  - ianai 5y ago
    That could be taught at the public library.
    - uniqueuid 5y ago
      Only if that involves watching people, since much of what kids learn is subconscious and sub-vocal. I.e. they learn many things we don't know they learn, and don't know exist, because we are taking them for granted all the time.
5y ago

yohannparis 5y ago

I don't understand your point, the article is clearly advocating for school to get back to normal despite of Covid, because their education and social development is so important in contrast to their risk to covid.