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>useless without quantitative data Here's some. It's a report commissioned by the government where I live, on the school attendance rates post-Covid. Even allo

>useless without quantitative data Here's some. It's a report commissioned by the government where I live, on the school attendance rates post-Covid. Even allowing for direct Covid-related absences, attendance rates continue to fall. Take a look at Table 3 in the report - attendance among disadvantaged groups has dropped in the medium double digit range. The spell of universal school attendance has been broken. Many kids and families will be permanently left behind - this lines up with what teacher friends have told me. https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2022-04/attendance-review-implications-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-for-school-attendance.pdf https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2022-04/a...

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Thank you for being constructive. This is a very sad effect indeed. I'm not sure it could be seen as intrinsic to lockdown though, but could be more of an issue with the implementation of it. Closing schools and online teaching was a a controversial topic in the discourse here in Norway. This study[1] from Norway surveyed teachers about the attendance of students with pre-existing School Attendance Problems(SAP) during online homeschooling: >Teachers rated their experiences of their students’ participation in homeschooling compared to regular school attendance. The findings indicate that teachers very slightly perceived better/much better participation during homeschooling (35 percent) than worse/much worse participation (31 percent) (Table 5). There were no significant gender differences; however, teachers reported that more boys than girls participated better/much better during homeschooling (42 percent boys and 27 percent girls). So in this case there was a slight overall improvement, it seems. [0]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.720014/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.7200...
- fderwgtjrsewa 4y ago
  That's a very mixed response, for a student that was attending - it ignores those who were not attending. The paper you linked also states that: "A total of 79.8 percent of the students participated during homeschooling, while 20.2 percent (50 students) did not. The number of students not participating in homeschooling increased gradually from 5th to 10th grade (0.4 percent in 5th grade and 7.3 percent in 10th grade). Regarding the number of students in each grade level, 8 percent did not participate in 5th grade, 13 percent in 6th grade, 13 percent in 7th grade, 17 percent in 8th grade, 23 percent in 9th grade and 29 percent in 10th grade." Tables 6 and 7 also have some interesting results, showing that teachers felt that students' quality of life was worse under these circumstances. All of this paints a pretty clear picture - the general response to Covid had huge side-effects, and the already disadvantaged will feel them harder. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. As a member of the priviledged (relatively) elite, my life is doing pretty darn good right now. Maybe I should embrace this new dismissal of the disadvantaged. Edit: You talk about "implementation problems" - well the implementation of School Covid policies was set here in Wales by our ever-benevolent Welsh Labour party. Think how much worse it would be under the Tories, eh?
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Yeah, it's not ideal. And 20% dropped attendance is pretty extreme for Norway. However, we did also try to leave schools open while having everyone else WFH during subsequent waves, and that led to a host of other problems. Preventative measure were constantly being micromanaged, leading to student and teacher confusion, teacher and student abscence due to Covid skyrocketed and students were stuck with increasingly poor substitute teachers, etc. I'm not aware of any detailed comission on the tradeoffs between the two approaches yet, but both seem to have had severe problems. Of course there was also the giant elephant in the room: the assumption that letting school children be massively infected couldn't have any long term health effects. There was no evidence that it could at the time, but also that evidence wouldn't have had time to exist yet, and so it's essentially just a gamble. Time will tell I suppose, fingers crossed...
    - fderwgtjrsewa 4y ago
      Everyone caught Covid anyway, despite all the measures (and masks, vaccines, etc). If Covid really is some long-term horror, we were doomed from the start. If it isn't, then we screwed up our kids for nothing. I don't think it's controversial any more to say that Covid was a lab-generated virus. I have a personal theory that it was supposed to be much worse than it turned out to be, and even then it quickly mutated to more mild strains. If certain cultures are not allowed to admit a loss of face, it would explain why one country in particular is still acting like Covid is the worst....

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

Thank you for being constructive. This is a very sad effect indeed. I'm not sure it could be seen as intrinsic to lockdown though, but could be more of an issue with the implementation of it. Closing schools and online teaching was a a controversial topic in the discourse here in Norway. This study[1] from Norway surveyed teachers about the attendance of students with pre-existing School Attendance Problems(SAP) during online homeschooling: >Teachers rated their experiences of their students’ participation in homeschooling compared to regular school attendance. The findings indicate that teachers very slightly perceived better/much better participation during homeschooling (35 percent) than worse/much worse participation (31 percent) (Table 5). There were no significant gender differences; however, teachers reported that more boys than girls participated better/much better during homeschooling (42 percent boys and 27 percent girls). So in this case there was a slight overall improvement, it seems. [0]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.720014/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.7200...

fderwgtjrsewa 4y ago
That's a very mixed response, for a student that was attending - it ignores those who were not attending. The paper you linked also states that: "A total of 79.8 percent of the students participated during homeschooling, while 20.2 percent (50 students) did not. The number of students not participating in homeschooling increased gradually from 5th to 10th grade (0.4 percent in 5th grade and 7.3 percent in 10th grade). Regarding the number of students in each grade level, 8 percent did not participate in 5th grade, 13 percent in 6th grade, 13 percent in 7th grade, 17 percent in 8th grade, 23 percent in 9th grade and 29 percent in 10th grade." Tables 6 and 7 also have some interesting results, showing that teachers felt that students' quality of life was worse under these circumstances. All of this paints a pretty clear picture - the general response to Covid had huge side-effects, and the already disadvantaged will feel them harder. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. As a member of the priviledged (relatively) elite, my life is doing pretty darn good right now. Maybe I should embrace this new dismissal of the disadvantaged. Edit: You talk about "implementation problems" - well the implementation of School Covid policies was set here in Wales by our ever-benevolent Welsh Labour party. Think how much worse it would be under the Tories, eh?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Yeah, it's not ideal. And 20% dropped attendance is pretty extreme for Norway. However, we did also try to leave schools open while having everyone else WFH during subsequent waves, and that led to a host of other problems. Preventative measure were constantly being micromanaged, leading to student and teacher confusion, teacher and student abscence due to Covid skyrocketed and students were stuck with increasingly poor substitute teachers, etc. I'm not aware of any detailed comission on the tradeoffs between the two approaches yet, but both seem to have had severe problems. Of course there was also the giant elephant in the room: the assumption that letting school children be massively infected couldn't have any long term health effects. There was no evidence that it could at the time, but also that evidence wouldn't have had time to exist yet, and so it's essentially just a gamble. Time will tell I suppose, fingers crossed...
  - fderwgtjrsewa 4y ago
    Everyone caught Covid anyway, despite all the measures (and masks, vaccines, etc). If Covid really is some long-term horror, we were doomed from the start. If it isn't, then we screwed up our kids for nothing. I don't think it's controversial any more to say that Covid was a lab-generated virus. I have a personal theory that it was supposed to be much worse than it turned out to be, and even then it quickly mutated to more mild strains. If certain cultures are not allowed to admit a loss of face, it would explain why one country in particular is still acting like Covid is the worst....