28 ms·

Kids are far behind in school

140 points by whitepaint 4y ago

arrakis2021 4y ago
These kids will grow up remembering that a very specific group of people of a certain ideology kept them out of school, masked, and plugged into a zoom monitor for as long as possible.
oneoff786 4y ago
> But either way, children should not be stuck with the bill for a public-health measure taken on everyone’s behalf. That’s a generous take.
- voisin 4y ago
  Please expand?
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    The benefit of the lockdowns was very, very small for the kids.
    - mavhc 4y ago
      Not having dead parents is a great benefit for kids. Not having dead parents who you infected and caused to die is an even better benefit
      - nradov 4y ago
        Stop spreading misinformation. The data clearly shows that the death rate for parents is extremely low. It was only ever people in the 65+ age group that were at significant risk. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
      - oneoff786 4y ago
        Parents were mostly fine from it in the end. Look by all means lockdowns made a lot of sense early on in the face of an unknown disease. I hope we can all agree they no longer make sense for Covid.
        micromacrofoot 4y ago
        In the US 200,000+ children lost caregivers to covid. So technically most were fine, but that's also not a number to scoff at. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/200000-us-children-lost-parent-caregiver-covid-efforts-help-haphazard-rcna16140 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/200000-us-children-lost...
        oneoff786 4y ago
        That seems… impossible? There’s been about 70k deaths in the range of 20-49. What’s a child? What’s a caregiver? I’d also point out it’s not “technically most” it’s 99.7%
        micromacrofoot 4y ago
        It's from this study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01253-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Children are people under 18. > We considered parents and custodial grandparents as primary caregivers, and co-residing grandparents or older kin (aged 60–84 years) as secondary caregivers. Lot of kids are raised by their grandparents.
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        Unless their parents were obese retirees, the chances of that happening were a few orders of magnitude lower than the chances for plenty of other risks we deem acceptable and don't lock down society over.
    - carapace 4y ago
      Here's the thing about this sort of reasoning that really stumps me: Those kids will, if all goes to plan, grow up and be oldies someday, yes? And if another terrible pandemic like this sweeps the world (which is not unlikely) they will be the ones in the hospitals dying in agony, slowly drowning in their own dissolving lung tissue. It is at that (thankfully theoretical) moment when the FULL benefits of having made this current sacrifice with devolve upon them. Only then will they be able to look at the rest us and say, "We are all in this together. Please don't sacrifice me to a slow and painful death, please make the sacrifice for me instead, and, y'know, stay home and wear masks." We care for the elderly because we love them, but if that's not enough for you, remember that the selfish reason to care for them is there in the background, waiting for you to get old and slip in the tub: we want to be cared for when we get old. Respect your elders.
      - oneoff786 4y ago
        Everything is a balance. Are you supportive of china’s ridiculous Shanghai lockdown? Do I not respect my elders if I refuse that? Everything has costs and efficacy levels. One quality year of life of grandma vs. the economic opportunity of a new grad. It’s not easy at all. It is easy to claim that death outweighs all else and hide behind naive humanism
        carapace 4y ago
        > Are you supportive of china’s ridiculous Shanghai lockdown? I don't "support" anything the CCP does. I think that whole mode and form of government is destined to fail due to their fundamental denial of God. But that's a whole different kettle of fish, eh? The simple truth is that I have no idea how to manage a pandemic in a city like Shanghai. I'm glad it's not my problem. > With a population of 24.89 million as of 2021, Shanghai is the most populous urban area in China and the most populous city proper in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai > Do I not respect my elders if I refuse that? Do you live in Shanghai? > One quality year of life of grandma vs. the economic opportunity of a new grad. It’s not easy at all. It is easy to claim that death outweighs all else and hide behind naive humanism It's very easy for me: my mother is in the most-at-risk category. When her time comes I want it to be peaceful and painless, hopefully in her sleep. I do not want her to lungs to dissolve and drown her. The "economic opportunity" can go screw. Don't sacrifice my mom for that person's extra money. There are over a half dozen empty apartments next to our house, and dozens of families living in RV's a few blocks away. I make six figures and can't afford a to buy a home. You want me to risk my mom for someone else's "economic opportunity"? And you think I'm naive?
tallanvor 4y ago
At least in the US they're able to quantify the issue somewhat. In Norway they just canceled exams for multiple years in a row, and those students passed whether they were prepared or not.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Interesting that it can be quantified somewhat… but the suggested interventions (extra tutoring, summer school, longer days) are just not going to happen. That education is gone. If they happen anywhere, it’ll only be rich kids.
- satysin 4y ago
  > If they happen anywhere, it’ll only be rich kids. This is a very sad truth. We are very fortunate and were able to afford private tuition for our son along with more free time to put into home schooling during the lockdowns to ensure he didn't fall behind. Unfortunately a lot cannot afford private tutors nor have free time they can commit to consistent home schooling so it will further separate those on lower incomes. Something we will not truly see for maybe a decade or more when younger kids (my sons age) enter higher education. This is something I feel strongly about and have written to our local education governmental body about but all I have had back is generic soundbites :( Part of me is wondering if I should just take this into my own hands and try to organise something with the local schools and social centres directly for weekend and summer programmes.
  - makomk 4y ago
    The fundamental problem here is that when we chose to shut down society, most of the capacity that went unused is gone and cannot be brought forward into 2022 to fill in the gaps left behind. So for example, all of the teaching time that was wasted on ineffective distance learning or just didn't happen is gone. Want to organise a bunch of catch up sessions? You'll have to find a bunch of extra teaching time from somewhere (and likely a bunch of extra teachers) on top of normal teaching along with extra time in those kids' days - easy enough to do small scale for a wealthy few, much harder for all of society. The same has happened everywhere, from factory production to restaurant meals and hotel stays, which limits our ability to pay teachers to do this - in order to pay them more in real terms they have to be able to buy more, but the amount of stuff available to buy isn't even enough to support people's existing quality of life. Any attempt to pay teachers generous overtime to teach extra would have to come out of other peoples' real-terms income in a world where that is already dropping for most, and the bigger the program the more painful and broadly felt that would be.
kkfx 4y ago
There is a meaning issue here: school in Democracies, in substantial ones, are the tool to spread a certain level of culture needed to be Citizens, those who intellectually can get opportunities to going further, those less smart can still acquire a minimum culture to be Citizens peers between peers. In formal BUT not substantial democracies witch means in wannabe dictatorships school means just indoctrination so they are the same "entity" formally, but with different substantial targets. Oh, I forget to say that actually we humans live or in dictatorships of in only-formal democracies.......................
- usrn 4y ago
  The idea that modern US public schools communicate the culture of the sounding community is honestly a little ridiculous sounding.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Apparently, national polling is showing that about 80% of parents are concerned about what is being taught in the schools, so it’s likely that this schooling system has decoupled from the values that the citizens want to uphold.
    - spamizbad 4y ago
      But if you dig deeper most people rate their own schools higher. It’s the other schools, or schools in aggregate that are the problem in the eyes of the voters. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx For example, in 2021 only 46% were at least “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education. Pre-COVID numbers were only slightly better. But if you ask a parent about their child’s education 73% are at least “somewhat satisfied” and pre-COVID the numbers are about 5-10 points higher, indicating the vast majority of parents are fine with the education their kids are receiving. This is because of how public school works in the US. Yes, there are federal and state standards that dominate the curriculum but because so much of it is funded by local taxes, school boards do have some leeway in terms of how things get shaped. So maybe you’re appalled at what’s being taught in Texas schools, but why should you care if your kid goes to school in the Chicago suburbs?
mcv 4y ago
My oldest son started in secondary school last year, so his first two years were largely in lockdown. He's quite introverted (and by now extremely so), so he enjoyed not having to meet people, but his school discipline suffered enormously. I already caught him gaming instead of following classes during the lockdown, and he apparently never learned to finish his homework. He's got more failing than passing grades. Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  > Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is. It's sad to me that this is the way things work. Being smart and understanding the material are the important endpoints. If he's already achieving those then it's backwards to make him do lots of extra work just to jump through the hoops of exams.
  - philipov 4y ago
    I thought so too, until I got to a point in my education where it actually required work to continue making process, and the discipline to do it wasn't there. Habits are hard to break, and forming healthy study habits early is as valuable a result of education as the acquisition of that day's knowledge. Maybe more important. The school system often fails to do that effectively, but their failure does not invalidate the goal.
    - humanrebar 4y ago
      True, but a lot of people, including underage people, are motivated by reason. School ideally goes at an appropriate pace to challenge them. Partly so they pick up good study habits in a non-contrived scenario with obvious benefits. Saying busy work is important because they might need study habits in five years is not motivating.
ovi256 4y ago
I've heard from private school teachers that they expected exactly this to happen, and enrollment in private schools has boomed as parents that could used the schools that cared about staying open (and opened as soon as they could). This was well supported and non-controversial pre-pandemic, where we had research results showing that simply having participation in remote schooling lowers high school graduation rate by a significant fraction. But during the pandemic, we still closed schools for most pupils in the developed world. This was one more problem where the contemporary governance mechanism is "we pretend it won't/isn't/didn't happen because it's politically inconvenient as it contradicts high level leadership decisions (and we can't cause face loss to said leadership)".
- gilbetron 4y ago
  No idea why you were getting downvoted this month, what you said was largely fact. I have a son that went through 6th grade virtually, and 7th grade in-person but masked. We were able to stay on top of him, so he's doing well enough academically (honor roll for 3 terms so far this year, although the work has been easier). Socially and developmentally has been a big issue, and he suffered a lot, in a first world way. He'll be fine, but this has scarred his generation and the results will be felt on society in the coming decades - I don't know how, but it will. But he tells me of all the kids that are just simply failing, and have barely learning anything this year, let along last when many were sitting home by themselves all day. We did our kids dirty last year :(
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    It was that last sentence where he threw blame.
- mort96 4y ago
  I don't understand exactly what you're complaining about. Has anyone ignored the cost of closing schools? My impression has always been that everyone has known about the high cost, but, well, millions more dead isn't exactly a small cost either. I mean you may disagree with the choices which were made, but surely you have to recognize that it's a bit more complicated than what you're suggesting?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thorin 4y ago
Was interesting to see the variance between US states and countries with the various lockdowns and even quite a big variance between schools in the same region. In the UK aside from a couple of terms my kids were generally in school full time. Fortunately both kids were in early stages of primary school. My son has been hitting some good milestones with his maths and english, especially reading although perhaps understandably the teachers are reluctant to compare their abilities based on previous years. Conversely my friends in Asia and California saw their kids out of school for very extended periods.
criddell 4y ago
Any guesses what the long term consequences might be? I have a hard time imagining anything more dire than the immediate consequences of social isolation during the pandemic. In other words, I think the kids that make it through are going to be okay.
- usrn 4y ago
  I spent high school in the woods home schooled and only socialized at church. So did all my siblings and a number of people I met at college. We all turned out fine.
  - winphone1974 4y ago
    Very few people ever self identify as "not fine" so along with being a single data point yours is pretty biased
  - ryanbrunner 4y ago
    I think home schooling and large-class remote schooling are quite a bit different. We home schooled our kids for the 2020 / 2021 school year, while most other kids spent the majority of the year in remote learning. Our kids are doing great academically, while there's definitely some struggles among some of the other kids. This is another factor increasing inequality, by the way - we were exceptionally privileged to be able to have work schedules able to handle this, and a nanny who could watch our kids while we worked. Most parents wouldn't be able to do that.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      Chances are if you can afford a nanny you’re intelligent enough to teach your children well and the kids are intelligent enough to do well fairly independently. Most people that home school…not so much, in my experience.
  - howling 4y ago
    Standard application of selection bias. People that don't "turn up just fine" don't go to college or browse HN.
mynameishere 4y ago
One thing I don't think I've ever seen in my life and never expect to see is a statement along the following lines: "Yeah, those cranks and 'conspiracy theorists' were right again." And this will stay true no matter how many times they are right. The credit will always go to some academic who discovers the obvious after the damage is done.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  > the obvious after the damage is done This is survivorship bias.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  You can't easily conclude "right" here, but you can very easily adjust the narrative to fit certain biases. There's at least one study that tried to link loss of education with a greater long-term loss of life than the short-term losses avoided with closures... but there are a lot of holes and assumptions so it's far from reliable. https://www.npr.org/2021/01/31/962090342/did-closing-schools-save-lives-or-cost-lives-the-debate-continues https://www.npr.org/2021/01/31/962090342/did-closing-schools...
thejackgoode 4y ago
Wild speculation: interestingly, school's often underrated original function "to keep children off the streets" rephrased as "protecting against harmful influence of the world until your frontal lobe develops" means they might be reinvented to be digital limiting structures instead of physical limiting structures.
- scotty79 4y ago
  I think school is more about protecting parents working capacity from their children than protecing children from the world. Children compulsively and under duress are exposed to so many horrible people and behaviors at school that the rest of the world seems mostly like sheltered, peaceful place by comparison.
nverno 4y ago
> In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had. Is this referring to differences b/w students in the same schools, but of different ethnicity? I don't really understand the racial implications this article is making.
- taeric 4y ago
  My guess would be yes. The implication seems that pushing the school burden home is hardest on the homes that are already heavily burdened, and that that is more true of minority families?
  - nverno 4y ago
    It just seems lazy, using race as a proxy variable without positing a hypothesis for what it means. It doesn't tell us, as readers, anything about why some kids didn't perform as well as others.
    - taeric 4y ago
      This variable seems easy to equate to wealth and access to technology, though?
      - dymk 4y ago
        Then equate it to wealth and technology access…
        taeric 4y ago
        In this, I think I agree. Picking the proxy of minority is certainly playing to the current atmosphere more than it is helping to make the message. That said, it is the current atmosphere. Hard to have that as a major complaint on this article, and more against the atmosphere. Hate the game, as it were.
    - 4y ago
dncornholio 4y ago
... and they will absolutely be fine. Learning is not being done only on schools. Also schools aren't as efficient every day of the week. Some years or semesters are a lot more important than others. In any case, I have no doubt kids will catch up.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  They will not catch up. It will be a feature of this generation. You can't just remove a year of education and expect things to normalize without intervention. You see similar effects throughout history in education, workforces, etc due to life-disrupting events like war. "Fine" is relative. Individuals will continue on as always... and many won't notice any change... but this will likely be an ongoing measurable difference when society is more cumulatively studied.
christkv 4y ago
I don't know how it's in other countries but in Spain school is glorified children care to ensure kids below 12 are kept occupied until at least 5 and even 6 with additional after school activities. The reason we moved to a private school. Kids under 12 should not be 9 hours at school everyday.
woleium 4y ago
- vmception 4y ago
  > at the moment The key part of their reaction to their education boogeyman is to squash any attempt at showing how broken its always been
- lowkey_ 4y ago
  This is the same logic behind the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, the idea that Democratic politicians in the US will encourage mass immigration so that they get more voters. However much we want to doubt our politicians, I really don't think they would change the demographic makeup or worsen the education of our country simply for votes.
  - yonaguska 4y ago
    If you don't believe they're doing it for votes, why do you think they're doing it? I'm not even white, and it seems obvious to me that it's happening. In some cases, people support this because they are racist, and simply hate all things white. Going through college, I had several professors that were outright about their position on immigration and how it will fix the racism problem in America by making whites a minority. Classmates as well, that were quite open about this around me, as I wasn't totally white, I was mixed. It was insane. But in the real world, I see politicians not outright saying this is the goal, but they cheer it on, because they anticipate the demographic changes actually changing voter demographics. Even in Mexico, I've been asked why American politicians keep encouraging people to come up to the US. Maybe they aren't actively encouraging immigration, but the people that I met and my relatives in Mexico seemed to think so. I'm not sure if this is a product of cartel or political marketing, but the Cartels are literally using democrats messaging to advertise to potential immigrants, or so I'm told.
    - woleium 4y ago
      Encouraging unskilled immigrants from Mexico is preferable to fruit rotting in the fields. This is more than a one dimensional issue :)
lapcat 4y ago
What does being "behind" even mean? The dirty truth of the US educational "system" is that there is no system. Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth (i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded). When I was a kid, my family moved from one city to another within the same state, and suddenly I was way behind in my new school, especially in math, simply because my new school moved at a significantly faster pace and had higher expectations of students. But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated. It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. We rely a lot on "social promotion", where mere age and time spent in seats is taken as the standard for educational level.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  > So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated. > It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. Huh? So you think the problem of being behind is overstated, but observed many students not being properly prepared yourself when you taught?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > Huh? There's a typo: it should have said "a lot of students". Not sure whether that was the confusion here.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      You're saying that you taught and felt people were not properly prepared, but also believe people are not behind?
      - lapcat 4y ago
        What I'm saying is that there's no uniformity. Incoming college freshman are mostly the same age, but their preparation for college varies dramatically, depending largely on where they came from. At any given age, many US students are "behind" their peers, because they're not all receiving the same education.
scotty79 4y ago
I'd like to see how well the knowledge is retained in kids after let's say 3 years. I believe most of the knowledge the kids were taught that long ago is not present in their memory anymore as if it was never taught. I remember happily forgetting all information I learned and it took me just summer vacation to do that.
- Cerium 4y ago
  Most of the facts get forgotten, though I can conjure up quite a few on any class I think of having taken. The important part of education is not the facts, it is the skills. School taught me to think scientifically and critically, to write and to speak, as well as made me confident interacting in the society I live. Those skills have served me well.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    > School taught me to think scientifically and critically, to write and to speak, as well as made me confident interacting in the society I live. I had completely opposite expeirience from primary and to some degree secondary school. Especially on the last item. But also speaking and writing and thinking. It didn't develop me in those areas. If anything it stunted me for life. I had to painstakingly recover from it after it was finally over and I'm sure I'll never recover 100%.
buildsjets 4y ago
Especially in high school, an astounding amount of time, money, space, and personnel are dedicated to sports, and this does not just impact the athletes. In many schools the entire day is structured around the football team's practice schedule. Make school sports a truly after-hours extracurricular activity and remove their impact from non-participants, and I'd estimate you could see around 20% improvement time spent on classroom instruction on core subjects.
- brightball 4y ago
  The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event. You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it. There’s no sport in high school that comes close to pulling everybody together the same way as football. There’s more to it than just classroom education vs sports in this case. It’s helping to foster a sense of community and school pride. Often there will be charity drives that coincide using the games as a place to make announcements.
  - buildsjets 4y ago
    If football is so disruptive to the primary purpose of school, which is education, then it should be completely eliminated from schools. No taxpayer money should be used for this entertainment nonsense.
    - taeric 4y ago
      I mean... Good luck? Often accounting tricks will be used such that it can look like taxes don't support it, too.
    - izzydata 4y ago
      This is what I'd personally like to see. Anything not related to education should not be part of the education system. If some third party wants to establish various sport systems then that's fine. There are so many non-traditional ways and skills to teach kids that I think would be worth exploring, but sport doesn't even register on the scale of usefulness. Apparently we don't even teach finance in highschool yet or any kind of professional development skills.
lordnacho 4y ago
Being 19 weeks behind doesn't sound that bad to me. It sounds like one of those things you can measure but you can't notice otherwise. Sure, still a thing to think about. But haven't you all had a friend who got sick and missed a lot of school? Can you tell from meeting adults that they were ill for half a year during their childhood? Maybe the numbers will capture it, but it doesn't seem like enough to worry about. What I can say is I'm not surprised if people get lower scores after missing school, because a lot of exams benefit from freshness. You sit there and memorize things that are only useful for the exam, you do the exam, and then you flush the double angle formulas from your cache. What really matters is that you have some tools, both intellectual and psychological, to keep learning new things for the rest of your life.
- namelessoracle 4y ago
  19 weeks is enough to make a kid college ready or not. And it's enough to push a kid that would be eligible to high achieving school to a lesser one.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Yes because they won't be prepared for exams. But not because they aren't educated.
    - namelessoracle 4y ago
      I dont think you understand how certain key points and milestones can completely make certain educational goals almost unachievable. Let me give you an example. In 8th grade a kid will learn math that will basically put them on STEM trajectory or not. They learn Algebra that sets them up for taking high school calculus or they dont. If they dont, they may get into college, but they will have an up hill battle with STEM trying to learn it there.
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        Well yes if they don't have the prerequisites then they can't progress. But there's no reason you have to have that exact set of lessons to learn algebra. There's the books that you're given, you can read them yourself, there's other books by other people, there's videos, there's catch-up classes, there's tutors you can hire.
alamortsubite 4y ago
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school...
linuxftw 4y ago
> High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction Yes, more anxiety inducing pointless education is what kids need. I like how they're trying to sell the idea of measuring students in 'weeks of instruction' as if they're mechanical objects. More hours of education doesn't make kids smarter. It might make them more knowledgeable in certain subject areas (many of which are completely useless to both children and adults), but it definitely gives them anxiety. The education establishment is trying to encroach on ever more of our kids and young adult's lives, and to what end? Let's get back to being human. Let's go outside for 7 hours a day, we can probably limit education instruction to just 3-4 hours 3 or 4 days per week, and we'll have more functional adults.
carapace 4y ago
It's the ratio of (sane, emotionally mature) adults to children that's important. A decent ratio is no greater than 6:1. Most of our schools are more like 30:1. In other words the "dosage" of tutoring (to use the article's bizarre metaphor) is ~5x too low. - - - - The second major problem, after chronic and extreme under-staffing, is that our didactic methods are designed (inadvertently but surely) to be slow and ineffective. If you teach children well they learn happily and rapidly. What we do instead is teach poorly and so "eduction" is slow, boring, uncool, and ephemeral (i.e. people forget what they "learned".)
mattmcknight 4y ago
Simply end social promotion. You shouldn't move up to the next level of a class until you've mastered the current level. (Levels can be much smaller than a year.) Being at a different pace isn't a problem if you can just make up the time. The side effect bonus is letting other students test out of levels they don't need, they can finish early while others end later.
- spiderice 4y ago
  This solution appeals to me, though I'm wondering what the implications are. Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years? Early college? Continue to go to public school anyway even though they've mastered everything? I'm not suggesting the solution wouldn't work. Just interesting to think about the new problems that would arise from it. Especially given that public school doubles as "babysitting" for a lot of working parents.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doogie_Howser,_M.D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doogie_Howser,_M.D.
  - beej71 4y ago
    > Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years? Don't have a curriculum that "finishes". Put more material out there, even college-level. Maybe a student gets their PhD by 18, but they're unlikely to get it but 12. And if they do, congratulations. I think the concepts of grade levels and even different school types (elementary, high, college), useful as they are socially, are getting in the way. We should be trying to make it a granular, smooth progression all the way up.
  - mattmcknight 4y ago
    I remember a girl in my area who had a masters before she got her high school diploma. https://www.gmu.edu/news/2017-05/class-2017-masons-youngest-graduate-will-be-just-17-when-she-receives-her-masters https://www.gmu.edu/news/2017-05/class-2017-masons-youngest-...
twox2 4y ago
School is arguably mostly worthless in the first place.
tfandango 4y ago
My wife teaches 2nd grade in a public school. She has kids this year who had not been in school since kindergarten. It is difficult to cover such an achievement gap when other kids in the class are on level. It's worse yet when our state has outsourced federal pandemic education fund distribution to 3rd parties which allowed people to purchase Xboxes and TVs. And even worse yet as her district is focusing on putting AppleTVs in every room while buying curriculum that has no books. Last week we had a family emergency and had to leave town for 1 day, she spent all day Sunday working on a plan and preparing work for her class and the "substitute" played youtube videos and let them draw all day, did not even move the plan she put on the desk. I hope other districts are taking this seriously because there are lots of good teachers flooding away from this one and it directly relates to the actions taken by the district admin and it's not good for our kids even after the pandemic has subsided, mostly.
- beej71 4y ago
  Over a decade ago my aunt taught 4th grade. She told me that a lot of kids were getting there who couldn't read and it was impossible to teach them 4th grade material. This seems like that on greater scale. More granular mastery-based progression seems like it would be a good start.
- andreilys 4y ago
  Serious question, what are you learning between kindergarten and 2nd grade that's so important? I remember my time there being effectively day-care, I learned more outside of class than inside it. The only real benefit was socializing with kids my age but otherwise everything I learned in those 2 years could've been taught in a week.
  - sodality2 4y ago
    It's not just those grades; I see the same in high school. To a lesser extent, but a lot of the classes that are non-advanced are, here's a 5 question quiz and 15 minutes of content every week, turn it in whenever.
    - 4y ago
vonnik 4y ago
@dang The title of the piece is "Kids are far, far behind in school".
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  The title now is "Kids are far in school" which makes no sense. The auto title rewriting system does weird stuff sometimes!
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Pre pandemic the US educational system was behind compared to most other developed countries. Now it's just sad. People don't seem to care. And those that do put their kids in private schools that provide better education. I remember feeling smart for the first time in my life when I went to a public high school. My peers were not dumb but the average level of knowledge was pretty shallow and not so wide. This was a smallish high school in a small state (2000ish kids in new england) in the early 2000s. I know its worse now.
cassac 4y ago
Well when you focus on activism and not academics, why would anyone be surprised that the academics suffer? Easy fix though, lower standards! Lots of districts are already figuring that out. If you take away the primary means to hold the educational system accountable then you have teachers who are unaccountable. All of the sudden all of them are good at their jobs and the teacher mafia… I mean union… can continue to demand more money for the children and won’t even have to deliver anything measurable. It’s genius!
- annyeonghada 4y ago
  Speaking as someone living in Italy sometimes it's worse than activism: it's pure laziness. I (27 y/o) recently discovered that my sister's (16 y/0) History teacher hasn't done more than a week of lessons in the entire year: he comes in class, turn on the IWB (Interactive Whiteboard, the last unnecessary technology creeping in school), put on a video and let them watch while she do whatever she fancies. During the entire year, out of a 400 page History textbook, they have done 39 pages. Now it is clear why there was so much opposition to the idea of online lessons: parents could finally see that their kids were not lying when they said that the teachers were incompetent. The worst thing is that the teachers' mafia here refuse any kind of evaluation while teachers while touting the necessity of evaluation for the students: they are basically unfirable and devoid of any form of accountability. I could stay entire evenings recalling events that should never happen in a normal school set[1], and that would be easily prevented with some quality control: they do not even need to be good teachers, just decent persons. [1]One of my "teachers" used the fact the a dear friend of my classmate was killed in a car crash to mock her, the only satisfaction was having the entire class scream that she was a "dumb bitch": this in a very high-income, sophisticated, old money school.
gnicholas 4y ago
Why is the title missing "behind"? I get that the second "far" is perhaps sensationalistic, but without "behind" the meaning is lost and perhaps inverted.
itronitron 4y ago
The author lost me with their mention of 'achievement loss' ... how can you lose something that you haven't 'achieved'? Consider that the primary goal of marketing is to create the perception of a need/want on the part of the target segment. I would be more interested in seeing a survey on what students have actually learned and done over the past two years (both inside and outside the standard curriculum) instead of this pervasive whining by the educational industry.
redlights 4y ago
Doesn't this just prove the fact that the US education system was never good in the first place (especially for the lower and middle class)? There's absolutely nothing scientific or moral about forcing a kid from age 6 to sit in a classroom for 8 hours straight twiddling their thumbs longingly looking outside the window. Forcing them from a young age to do regimented work that is clearly meant to be done at a later developmental stage will just cause them to hate it and zone out, which is what caused the problem the author is describing. If you're not truly engaging with kids, how will you get the results you want? None of those suggestions will solve the fact that the education system itself is incredibly flawed and near collapse.
dehrmann 4y ago
Good thing colleges are going test optional.
3qz 4y ago
Most universities in Canada were completely online for almost 2 years. Was it the same for grade schools in the states? I have no idea what level of restrictions this article is about

140 points by whitepaint 4y ago

arrakis2021 4y ago

These kids will grow up remembering that a very specific group of people of a certain ideology kept them out of school, masked, and plugged into a zoom monitor for as long as possible.

oneoff786 4y ago

> But either way, children should not be stuck with the bill for a public-health measure taken on everyone’s behalf. That’s a generous take.

voisin 4y ago
Please expand?
- oneoff786 4y ago
  The benefit of the lockdowns was very, very small for the kids.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Not having dead parents is a great benefit for kids. Not having dead parents who you infected and caused to die is an even better benefit
    - nradov 4y ago
      Stop spreading misinformation. The data clearly shows that the death rate for parents is extremely low. It was only ever people in the 65+ age group that were at significant risk. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      Parents were mostly fine from it in the end. Look by all means lockdowns made a lot of sense early on in the face of an unknown disease. I hope we can all agree they no longer make sense for Covid.
      - micromacrofoot 4y ago
        In the US 200,000+ children lost caregivers to covid. So technically most were fine, but that's also not a number to scoff at. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/200000-us-children-lost-parent-caregiver-covid-efforts-help-haphazard-rcna16140 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/200000-us-children-lost...
        oneoff786 4y ago
        That seems… impossible? There’s been about 70k deaths in the range of 20-49. What’s a child? What’s a caregiver? I’d also point out it’s not “technically most” it’s 99.7%
        micromacrofoot 4y ago
        It's from this study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01253-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Children are people under 18. > We considered parents and custodial grandparents as primary caregivers, and co-residing grandparents or older kin (aged 60–84 years) as secondary caregivers. Lot of kids are raised by their grandparents.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      Unless their parents were obese retirees, the chances of that happening were a few orders of magnitude lower than the chances for plenty of other risks we deem acceptable and don't lock down society over.
  - carapace 4y ago
    Here's the thing about this sort of reasoning that really stumps me: Those kids will, if all goes to plan, grow up and be oldies someday, yes? And if another terrible pandemic like this sweeps the world (which is not unlikely) they will be the ones in the hospitals dying in agony, slowly drowning in their own dissolving lung tissue. It is at that (thankfully theoretical) moment when the FULL benefits of having made this current sacrifice with devolve upon them. Only then will they be able to look at the rest us and say, "We are all in this together. Please don't sacrifice me to a slow and painful death, please make the sacrifice for me instead, and, y'know, stay home and wear masks." We care for the elderly because we love them, but if that's not enough for you, remember that the selfish reason to care for them is there in the background, waiting for you to get old and slip in the tub: we want to be cared for when we get old. Respect your elders.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      Everything is a balance. Are you supportive of china’s ridiculous Shanghai lockdown? Do I not respect my elders if I refuse that? Everything has costs and efficacy levels. One quality year of life of grandma vs. the economic opportunity of a new grad. It’s not easy at all. It is easy to claim that death outweighs all else and hide behind naive humanism
      - carapace 4y ago
        > Are you supportive of china’s ridiculous Shanghai lockdown? I don't "support" anything the CCP does. I think that whole mode and form of government is destined to fail due to their fundamental denial of God. But that's a whole different kettle of fish, eh? The simple truth is that I have no idea how to manage a pandemic in a city like Shanghai. I'm glad it's not my problem. > With a population of 24.89 million as of 2021, Shanghai is the most populous urban area in China and the most populous city proper in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai > Do I not respect my elders if I refuse that? Do you live in Shanghai? > One quality year of life of grandma vs. the economic opportunity of a new grad. It’s not easy at all. It is easy to claim that death outweighs all else and hide behind naive humanism It's very easy for me: my mother is in the most-at-risk category. When her time comes I want it to be peaceful and painless, hopefully in her sleep. I do not want her to lungs to dissolve and drown her. The "economic opportunity" can go screw. Don't sacrifice my mom for that person's extra money. There are over a half dozen empty apartments next to our house, and dozens of families living in RV's a few blocks away. I make six figures and can't afford a to buy a home. You want me to risk my mom for someone else's "economic opportunity"? And you think I'm naive?

tallanvor 4y ago

At least in the US they're able to quantify the issue somewhat. In Norway they just canceled exams for multiple years in a row, and those students passed whether they were prepared or not.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Interesting that it can be quantified somewhat… but the suggested interventions (extra tutoring, summer school, longer days) are just not going to happen. That education is gone. If they happen anywhere, it’ll only be rich kids.

satysin 4y ago
> If they happen anywhere, it’ll only be rich kids. This is a very sad truth. We are very fortunate and were able to afford private tuition for our son along with more free time to put into home schooling during the lockdowns to ensure he didn't fall behind. Unfortunately a lot cannot afford private tutors nor have free time they can commit to consistent home schooling so it will further separate those on lower incomes. Something we will not truly see for maybe a decade or more when younger kids (my sons age) enter higher education. This is something I feel strongly about and have written to our local education governmental body about but all I have had back is generic soundbites :( Part of me is wondering if I should just take this into my own hands and try to organise something with the local schools and social centres directly for weekend and summer programmes.
- makomk 4y ago
  The fundamental problem here is that when we chose to shut down society, most of the capacity that went unused is gone and cannot be brought forward into 2022 to fill in the gaps left behind. So for example, all of the teaching time that was wasted on ineffective distance learning or just didn't happen is gone. Want to organise a bunch of catch up sessions? You'll have to find a bunch of extra teaching time from somewhere (and likely a bunch of extra teachers) on top of normal teaching along with extra time in those kids' days - easy enough to do small scale for a wealthy few, much harder for all of society. The same has happened everywhere, from factory production to restaurant meals and hotel stays, which limits our ability to pay teachers to do this - in order to pay them more in real terms they have to be able to buy more, but the amount of stuff available to buy isn't even enough to support people's existing quality of life. Any attempt to pay teachers generous overtime to teach extra would have to come out of other peoples' real-terms income in a world where that is already dropping for most, and the bigger the program the more painful and broadly felt that would be.

kkfx 4y ago

There is a meaning issue here: school in Democracies, in substantial ones, are the tool to spread a certain level of culture needed to be Citizens, those who intellectually can get opportunities to going further, those less smart can still acquire a minimum culture to be Citizens peers between peers. In formal BUT not substantial democracies witch means in wannabe dictatorships school means just indoctrination so they are the same "entity" formally, but with different substantial targets. Oh, I forget to say that actually we humans live or in dictatorships of in only-formal democracies.......................

usrn 4y ago
The idea that modern US public schools communicate the culture of the sounding community is honestly a little ridiculous sounding.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Apparently, national polling is showing that about 80% of parents are concerned about what is being taught in the schools, so it’s likely that this schooling system has decoupled from the values that the citizens want to uphold.
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    But if you dig deeper most people rate their own schools higher. It’s the other schools, or schools in aggregate that are the problem in the eyes of the voters. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx For example, in 2021 only 46% were at least “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education. Pre-COVID numbers were only slightly better. But if you ask a parent about their child’s education 73% are at least “somewhat satisfied” and pre-COVID the numbers are about 5-10 points higher, indicating the vast majority of parents are fine with the education their kids are receiving. This is because of how public school works in the US. Yes, there are federal and state standards that dominate the curriculum but because so much of it is funded by local taxes, school boards do have some leeway in terms of how things get shaped. So maybe you’re appalled at what’s being taught in Texas schools, but why should you care if your kid goes to school in the Chicago suburbs?

mcv 4y ago

My oldest son started in secondary school last year, so his first two years were largely in lockdown. He's quite introverted (and by now extremely so), so he enjoyed not having to meet people, but his school discipline suffered enormously. I already caught him gaming instead of following classes during the lockdown, and he apparently never learned to finish his homework. He's got more failing than passing grades. Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is.

OscarCunningham 4y ago
> Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is. It's sad to me that this is the way things work. Being smart and understanding the material are the important endpoints. If he's already achieving those then it's backwards to make him do lots of extra work just to jump through the hoops of exams.
- philipov 4y ago
  I thought so too, until I got to a point in my education where it actually required work to continue making process, and the discipline to do it wasn't there. Habits are hard to break, and forming healthy study habits early is as valuable a result of education as the acquisition of that day's knowledge. Maybe more important. The school system often fails to do that effectively, but their failure does not invalidate the goal.
  - humanrebar 4y ago
    True, but a lot of people, including underage people, are motivated by reason. School ideally goes at an appropriate pace to challenge them. Partly so they pick up good study habits in a non-contrived scenario with obvious benefits. Saying busy work is important because they might need study habits in five years is not motivating.

ovi256 4y ago

I've heard from private school teachers that they expected exactly this to happen, and enrollment in private schools has boomed as parents that could used the schools that cared about staying open (and opened as soon as they could). This was well supported and non-controversial pre-pandemic, where we had research results showing that simply having participation in remote schooling lowers high school graduation rate by a significant fraction. But during the pandemic, we still closed schools for most pupils in the developed world. This was one more problem where the contemporary governance mechanism is "we pretend it won't/isn't/didn't happen because it's politically inconvenient as it contradicts high level leadership decisions (and we can't cause face loss to said leadership)".

gilbetron 4y ago
No idea why you were getting downvoted this month, what you said was largely fact. I have a son that went through 6th grade virtually, and 7th grade in-person but masked. We were able to stay on top of him, so he's doing well enough academically (honor roll for 3 terms so far this year, although the work has been easier). Socially and developmentally has been a big issue, and he suffered a lot, in a first world way. He'll be fine, but this has scarred his generation and the results will be felt on society in the coming decades - I don't know how, but it will. But he tells me of all the kids that are just simply failing, and have barely learning anything this year, let along last when many were sitting home by themselves all day. We did our kids dirty last year :(
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  It was that last sentence where he threw blame.
mort96 4y ago
I don't understand exactly what you're complaining about. Has anyone ignored the cost of closing schools? My impression has always been that everyone has known about the high cost, but, well, millions more dead isn't exactly a small cost either. I mean you may disagree with the choices which were made, but surely you have to recognize that it's a bit more complicated than what you're suggesting?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thorin 4y ago

Was interesting to see the variance between US states and countries with the various lockdowns and even quite a big variance between schools in the same region. In the UK aside from a couple of terms my kids were generally in school full time. Fortunately both kids were in early stages of primary school. My son has been hitting some good milestones with his maths and english, especially reading although perhaps understandably the teachers are reluctant to compare their abilities based on previous years. Conversely my friends in Asia and California saw their kids out of school for very extended periods.

criddell 4y ago

Any guesses what the long term consequences might be? I have a hard time imagining anything more dire than the immediate consequences of social isolation during the pandemic. In other words, I think the kids that make it through are going to be okay.

usrn 4y ago
I spent high school in the woods home schooled and only socialized at church. So did all my siblings and a number of people I met at college. We all turned out fine.
- winphone1974 4y ago
  Very few people ever self identify as "not fine" so along with being a single data point yours is pretty biased
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  I think home schooling and large-class remote schooling are quite a bit different. We home schooled our kids for the 2020 / 2021 school year, while most other kids spent the majority of the year in remote learning. Our kids are doing great academically, while there's definitely some struggles among some of the other kids. This is another factor increasing inequality, by the way - we were exceptionally privileged to be able to have work schedules able to handle this, and a nanny who could watch our kids while we worked. Most parents wouldn't be able to do that.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    Chances are if you can afford a nanny you’re intelligent enough to teach your children well and the kids are intelligent enough to do well fairly independently. Most people that home school…not so much, in my experience.
- howling 4y ago
  Standard application of selection bias. People that don't "turn up just fine" don't go to college or browse HN.

mynameishere 4y ago

One thing I don't think I've ever seen in my life and never expect to see is a statement along the following lines: "Yeah, those cranks and 'conspiracy theorists' were right again." And this will stay true no matter how many times they are right. The credit will always go to some academic who discovers the obvious after the damage is done.

cassianoleal 4y ago
> the obvious after the damage is done This is survivorship bias.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
You can't easily conclude "right" here, but you can very easily adjust the narrative to fit certain biases. There's at least one study that tried to link loss of education with a greater long-term loss of life than the short-term losses avoided with closures... but there are a lot of holes and assumptions so it's far from reliable. https://www.npr.org/2021/01/31/962090342/did-closing-schools-save-lives-or-cost-lives-the-debate-continues https://www.npr.org/2021/01/31/962090342/did-closing-schools...

thejackgoode 4y ago

Wild speculation: interestingly, school's often underrated original function "to keep children off the streets" rephrased as "protecting against harmful influence of the world until your frontal lobe develops" means they might be reinvented to be digital limiting structures instead of physical limiting structures.

scotty79 4y ago
I think school is more about protecting parents working capacity from their children than protecing children from the world. Children compulsively and under duress are exposed to so many horrible people and behaviors at school that the rest of the world seems mostly like sheltered, peaceful place by comparison.

nverno 4y ago

> In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had. Is this referring to differences b/w students in the same schools, but of different ethnicity? I don't really understand the racial implications this article is making.

taeric 4y ago
My guess would be yes. The implication seems that pushing the school burden home is hardest on the homes that are already heavily burdened, and that that is more true of minority families?
- nverno 4y ago
  It just seems lazy, using race as a proxy variable without positing a hypothesis for what it means. It doesn't tell us, as readers, anything about why some kids didn't perform as well as others.
  - taeric 4y ago
    This variable seems easy to equate to wealth and access to technology, though?
    - dymk 4y ago
      Then equate it to wealth and technology access…
      - taeric 4y ago
        In this, I think I agree. Picking the proxy of minority is certainly playing to the current atmosphere more than it is helping to make the message. That said, it is the current atmosphere. Hard to have that as a major complaint on this article, and more against the atmosphere. Hate the game, as it were.
  - 4y ago

dncornholio 4y ago

... and they will absolutely be fine. Learning is not being done only on schools. Also schools aren't as efficient every day of the week. Some years or semesters are a lot more important than others. In any case, I have no doubt kids will catch up.

micromacrofoot 4y ago
They will not catch up. It will be a feature of this generation. You can't just remove a year of education and expect things to normalize without intervention. You see similar effects throughout history in education, workforces, etc due to life-disrupting events like war. "Fine" is relative. Individuals will continue on as always... and many won't notice any change... but this will likely be an ongoing measurable difference when society is more cumulatively studied.

christkv 4y ago

I don't know how it's in other countries but in Spain school is glorified children care to ensure kids below 12 are kept occupied until at least 5 and even 6 with additional after school activities. The reason we moved to a private school. Kids under 12 should not be 9 hours at school everyday.

woleium 4y ago

vmception 4y ago
> at the moment The key part of their reaction to their education boogeyman is to squash any attempt at showing how broken its always been
lowkey_ 4y ago
This is the same logic behind the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, the idea that Democratic politicians in the US will encourage mass immigration so that they get more voters. However much we want to doubt our politicians, I really don't think they would change the demographic makeup or worsen the education of our country simply for votes.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  If you don't believe they're doing it for votes, why do you think they're doing it? I'm not even white, and it seems obvious to me that it's happening. In some cases, people support this because they are racist, and simply hate all things white. Going through college, I had several professors that were outright about their position on immigration and how it will fix the racism problem in America by making whites a minority. Classmates as well, that were quite open about this around me, as I wasn't totally white, I was mixed. It was insane. But in the real world, I see politicians not outright saying this is the goal, but they cheer it on, because they anticipate the demographic changes actually changing voter demographics. Even in Mexico, I've been asked why American politicians keep encouraging people to come up to the US. Maybe they aren't actively encouraging immigration, but the people that I met and my relatives in Mexico seemed to think so. I'm not sure if this is a product of cartel or political marketing, but the Cartels are literally using democrats messaging to advertise to potential immigrants, or so I'm told.
  - woleium 4y ago
    Encouraging unskilled immigrants from Mexico is preferable to fruit rotting in the fields. This is more than a one dimensional issue :)

lapcat 4y ago

What does being "behind" even mean? The dirty truth of the US educational "system" is that there is no system. Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth (i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded). When I was a kid, my family moved from one city to another within the same state, and suddenly I was way behind in my new school, especially in math, simply because my new school moved at a significantly faster pace and had higher expectations of students. But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated. It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. We rely a lot on "social promotion", where mere age and time spent in seats is taken as the standard for educational level.

endisneigh 4y ago
> So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated. > It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. Huh? So you think the problem of being behind is overstated, but observed many students not being properly prepared yourself when you taught?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Huh? There's a typo: it should have said "a lot of students". Not sure whether that was the confusion here.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    You're saying that you taught and felt people were not properly prepared, but also believe people are not behind?
    - lapcat 4y ago
      What I'm saying is that there's no uniformity. Incoming college freshman are mostly the same age, but their preparation for college varies dramatically, depending largely on where they came from. At any given age, many US students are "behind" their peers, because they're not all receiving the same education.

scotty79 4y ago

I'd like to see how well the knowledge is retained in kids after let's say 3 years. I believe most of the knowledge the kids were taught that long ago is not present in their memory anymore as if it was never taught. I remember happily forgetting all information I learned and it took me just summer vacation to do that.

Cerium 4y ago
Most of the facts get forgotten, though I can conjure up quite a few on any class I think of having taken. The important part of education is not the facts, it is the skills. School taught me to think scientifically and critically, to write and to speak, as well as made me confident interacting in the society I live. Those skills have served me well.
- scotty79 4y ago
  > School taught me to think scientifically and critically, to write and to speak, as well as made me confident interacting in the society I live. I had completely opposite expeirience from primary and to some degree secondary school. Especially on the last item. But also speaking and writing and thinking. It didn't develop me in those areas. If anything it stunted me for life. I had to painstakingly recover from it after it was finally over and I'm sure I'll never recover 100%.

buildsjets 4y ago

Especially in high school, an astounding amount of time, money, space, and personnel are dedicated to sports, and this does not just impact the athletes. In many schools the entire day is structured around the football team's practice schedule. Make school sports a truly after-hours extracurricular activity and remove their impact from non-participants, and I'd estimate you could see around 20% improvement time spent on classroom instruction on core subjects.

brightball 4y ago
The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event. You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it. There’s no sport in high school that comes close to pulling everybody together the same way as football. There’s more to it than just classroom education vs sports in this case. It’s helping to foster a sense of community and school pride. Often there will be charity drives that coincide using the games as a place to make announcements.
- buildsjets 4y ago
  If football is so disruptive to the primary purpose of school, which is education, then it should be completely eliminated from schools. No taxpayer money should be used for this entertainment nonsense.
  - taeric 4y ago
    I mean... Good luck? Often accounting tricks will be used such that it can look like taxes don't support it, too.
  - izzydata 4y ago
    This is what I'd personally like to see. Anything not related to education should not be part of the education system. If some third party wants to establish various sport systems then that's fine. There are so many non-traditional ways and skills to teach kids that I think would be worth exploring, but sport doesn't even register on the scale of usefulness. Apparently we don't even teach finance in highschool yet or any kind of professional development skills.

lordnacho 4y ago

Being 19 weeks behind doesn't sound that bad to me. It sounds like one of those things you can measure but you can't notice otherwise. Sure, still a thing to think about. But haven't you all had a friend who got sick and missed a lot of school? Can you tell from meeting adults that they were ill for half a year during their childhood? Maybe the numbers will capture it, but it doesn't seem like enough to worry about. What I can say is I'm not surprised if people get lower scores after missing school, because a lot of exams benefit from freshness. You sit there and memorize things that are only useful for the exam, you do the exam, and then you flush the double angle formulas from your cache. What really matters is that you have some tools, both intellectual and psychological, to keep learning new things for the rest of your life.

namelessoracle 4y ago
19 weeks is enough to make a kid college ready or not. And it's enough to push a kid that would be eligible to high achieving school to a lesser one.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Yes because they won't be prepared for exams. But not because they aren't educated.
  - namelessoracle 4y ago
    I dont think you understand how certain key points and milestones can completely make certain educational goals almost unachievable. Let me give you an example. In 8th grade a kid will learn math that will basically put them on STEM trajectory or not. They learn Algebra that sets them up for taking high school calculus or they dont. If they dont, they may get into college, but they will have an up hill battle with STEM trying to learn it there.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      Well yes if they don't have the prerequisites then they can't progress. But there's no reason you have to have that exact set of lessons to learn algebra. There's the books that you're given, you can read them yourself, there's other books by other people, there's videos, there's catch-up classes, there's tutors you can hire.

alamortsubite 4y ago

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school...

linuxftw 4y ago

> High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction Yes, more anxiety inducing pointless education is what kids need. I like how they're trying to sell the idea of measuring students in 'weeks of instruction' as if they're mechanical objects. More hours of education doesn't make kids smarter. It might make them more knowledgeable in certain subject areas (many of which are completely useless to both children and adults), but it definitely gives them anxiety. The education establishment is trying to encroach on ever more of our kids and young adult's lives, and to what end? Let's get back to being human. Let's go outside for 7 hours a day, we can probably limit education instruction to just 3-4 hours 3 or 4 days per week, and we'll have more functional adults.

carapace 4y ago

It's the ratio of (sane, emotionally mature) adults to children that's important. A decent ratio is no greater than 6:1. Most of our schools are more like 30:1. In other words the "dosage" of tutoring (to use the article's bizarre metaphor) is ~5x too low. - - - - The second major problem, after chronic and extreme under-staffing, is that our didactic methods are designed (inadvertently but surely) to be slow and ineffective. If you teach children well they learn happily and rapidly. What we do instead is teach poorly and so "eduction" is slow, boring, uncool, and ephemeral (i.e. people forget what they "learned".)

mattmcknight 4y ago

Simply end social promotion. You shouldn't move up to the next level of a class until you've mastered the current level. (Levels can be much smaller than a year.) Being at a different pace isn't a problem if you can just make up the time. The side effect bonus is letting other students test out of levels they don't need, they can finish early while others end later.

spiderice 4y ago
This solution appeals to me, though I'm wondering what the implications are. Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years? Early college? Continue to go to public school anyway even though they've mastered everything? I'm not suggesting the solution wouldn't work. Just interesting to think about the new problems that would arise from it. Especially given that public school doubles as "babysitting" for a lot of working parents.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doogie_Howser,_M.D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doogie_Howser,_M.D.
- beej71 4y ago
  > Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years? Don't have a curriculum that "finishes". Put more material out there, even college-level. Maybe a student gets their PhD by 18, but they're unlikely to get it but 12. And if they do, congratulations. I think the concepts of grade levels and even different school types (elementary, high, college), useful as they are socially, are getting in the way. We should be trying to make it a granular, smooth progression all the way up.
- mattmcknight 4y ago
  I remember a girl in my area who had a masters before she got her high school diploma. https://www.gmu.edu/news/2017-05/class-2017-masons-youngest-graduate-will-be-just-17-when-she-receives-her-masters https://www.gmu.edu/news/2017-05/class-2017-masons-youngest-...

twox2 4y ago

School is arguably mostly worthless in the first place.

tfandango 4y ago

My wife teaches 2nd grade in a public school. She has kids this year who had not been in school since kindergarten. It is difficult to cover such an achievement gap when other kids in the class are on level. It's worse yet when our state has outsourced federal pandemic education fund distribution to 3rd parties which allowed people to purchase Xboxes and TVs. And even worse yet as her district is focusing on putting AppleTVs in every room while buying curriculum that has no books. Last week we had a family emergency and had to leave town for 1 day, she spent all day Sunday working on a plan and preparing work for her class and the "substitute" played youtube videos and let them draw all day, did not even move the plan she put on the desk. I hope other districts are taking this seriously because there are lots of good teachers flooding away from this one and it directly relates to the actions taken by the district admin and it's not good for our kids even after the pandemic has subsided, mostly.

beej71 4y ago
Over a decade ago my aunt taught 4th grade. She told me that a lot of kids were getting there who couldn't read and it was impossible to teach them 4th grade material. This seems like that on greater scale. More granular mastery-based progression seems like it would be a good start.
andreilys 4y ago
Serious question, what are you learning between kindergarten and 2nd grade that's so important? I remember my time there being effectively day-care, I learned more outside of class than inside it. The only real benefit was socializing with kids my age but otherwise everything I learned in those 2 years could've been taught in a week.
- sodality2 4y ago
  It's not just those grades; I see the same in high school. To a lesser extent, but a lot of the classes that are non-advanced are, here's a 5 question quiz and 15 minutes of content every week, turn it in whenever.
  - 4y ago

vonnik 4y ago

@dang The title of the piece is "Kids are far, far behind in school".

Aardwolf 4y ago
The title now is "Kids are far in school" which makes no sense. The auto title rewriting system does weird stuff sometimes!

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Pre pandemic the US educational system was behind compared to most other developed countries. Now it's just sad. People don't seem to care. And those that do put their kids in private schools that provide better education. I remember feeling smart for the first time in my life when I went to a public high school. My peers were not dumb but the average level of knowledge was pretty shallow and not so wide. This was a smallish high school in a small state (2000ish kids in new england) in the early 2000s. I know its worse now.

cassac 4y ago

Well when you focus on activism and not academics, why would anyone be surprised that the academics suffer? Easy fix though, lower standards! Lots of districts are already figuring that out. If you take away the primary means to hold the educational system accountable then you have teachers who are unaccountable. All of the sudden all of them are good at their jobs and the teacher mafia… I mean union… can continue to demand more money for the children and won’t even have to deliver anything measurable. It’s genius!

annyeonghada 4y ago
Speaking as someone living in Italy sometimes it's worse than activism: it's pure laziness. I (27 y/o) recently discovered that my sister's (16 y/0) History teacher hasn't done more than a week of lessons in the entire year: he comes in class, turn on the IWB (Interactive Whiteboard, the last unnecessary technology creeping in school), put on a video and let them watch while she do whatever she fancies. During the entire year, out of a 400 page History textbook, they have done 39 pages. Now it is clear why there was so much opposition to the idea of online lessons: parents could finally see that their kids were not lying when they said that the teachers were incompetent. The worst thing is that the teachers' mafia here refuse any kind of evaluation while teachers while touting the necessity of evaluation for the students: they are basically unfirable and devoid of any form of accountability. I could stay entire evenings recalling events that should never happen in a normal school set[1], and that would be easily prevented with some quality control: they do not even need to be good teachers, just decent persons. [1]One of my "teachers" used the fact the a dear friend of my classmate was killed in a car crash to mock her, the only satisfaction was having the entire class scream that she was a "dumb bitch": this in a very high-income, sophisticated, old money school.

gnicholas 4y ago

Why is the title missing "behind"? I get that the second "far" is perhaps sensationalistic, but without "behind" the meaning is lost and perhaps inverted.

itronitron 4y ago

The author lost me with their mention of 'achievement loss' ... how can you lose something that you haven't 'achieved'? Consider that the primary goal of marketing is to create the perception of a need/want on the part of the target segment. I would be more interested in seeing a survey on what students have actually learned and done over the past two years (both inside and outside the standard curriculum) instead of this pervasive whining by the educational industry.

redlights 4y ago

Doesn't this just prove the fact that the US education system was never good in the first place (especially for the lower and middle class)? There's absolutely nothing scientific or moral about forcing a kid from age 6 to sit in a classroom for 8 hours straight twiddling their thumbs longingly looking outside the window. Forcing them from a young age to do regimented work that is clearly meant to be done at a later developmental stage will just cause them to hate it and zone out, which is what caused the problem the author is describing. If you're not truly engaging with kids, how will you get the results you want? None of those suggestions will solve the fact that the education system itself is incredibly flawed and near collapse.

dehrmann 4y ago

Good thing colleges are going test optional.

3qz 4y ago

Most universities in Canada were completely online for almost 2 years. Was it the same for grade schools in the states? I have no idea what level of restrictions this article is about