9 ms·

Public Schools Lost More Than One Million Students During Pandemic

56 points by lxm 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
sokoloff 4y ago
https://archive.is/1qwzU https://archive.is/1qwzU
treis 4y ago
Unfortunately the article doesn't answer the important question of "where did they go?".
- softwaredoug 4y ago
  Anecdotally - in my area, private school attendance has surged. I know other families who have taken to home schooling. My son is in a private middle school. There's a good chance they wouldn't be in private middle school if the pandemic didn't happen. He was very frustrated being at home with Mom and Dad. After a year, he was getting very angry and depressed. I didn't expect to be paying for private school, but given his situation, here we are...
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Yes... but one million students, what percentage surge would that be in private schools if they all ended up there? I think it would have to be much larger, especially considering many private schools don't have that much additional capacity. (Edit: Also considering marginalized groups are the most likely to drop out... they are the least likely to afford private schools.) I strongly suspect many students have just completely fallen off the radar. Who knows what will happen to them.
    - softwaredoug 4y ago
      Also anecdotally, I don't think truancy enforcement has been particularly strict during the pandemic. I know our school has given a lot of grace to students going on vacation, etc compared to pre-pandemic.
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      The private school my kids attend grew like 20%. I think there are enough private schools to handle much of this. And homeschooling is not “fallen off the radar” either. But I don’t doubt some have fallen off the radar.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - certifiedloud 4y ago
      Even then, households that choose to homeschool or private school their children still contribute to public schools. So the article's claim of needing to close schools due to fewer pupils and lack of funding is left unanswered. There may be migration involved.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Federal & state funding is often tied to student attendance.
      - toast0 4y ago
        Every state manages school fundig differently, and within states, it can vary, too. But in California, most districts are funded by the state, and the funding formula is based on attendence (and details about the student population). Some districts opt to get their funding directly from local property taxes which don't vary by attendance, but most districts get more funding by accepting the state funding and choose that instead. If public school attendence goes down in such a system, the school districts (and therefore the schools) get less funding, but tax collection probably doesn't change. Instead there will be a surplus in the general fund. California has a lot of formulaic budget requirements, so if attendence dropped enough, it might derail the rest of the budget, but I'm not familiar with how close to the requirements the school budget tracks.
- justin66 4y ago
  Paragraph #3.
  - treis 4y ago
    A vague and meaningless paragraph that I wasted 30 seconds of my life reading again
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  This website claims there are ~160k fewer 10 to 14 year olds than 15 to 19 year olds in the US. I presume that means 40k to 50k kids age out every year and who will not be replaced by kids in the class under them for high school. https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/ The 5 to 9 population is more than 1M less than the 10 to 14 population, and the 0 to 4 is ~300k less than the 5 to 9. Unless a lot more kids immigrate to the US, school enrollment will fall by 250k per year in a few years just due to fewer kids.
- flerchin 4y ago
  Anecdotally, home-school. My friends have not sent their kids back. Mom dropped out of work to full-time home-school, and they like it better. They have not asked for my opinion, but I worry for their kids.
  - asynchronous 4y ago
    And I worry had they stayed in public school.
- irrational 4y ago
  Uh… it says right there in the article that some went to private schools, some are now home schooled, and some were never born (declining birth rates means overall number of potential students dropping). Anecdotally, I heard from some public school teachers that when they moved to online school during the pandemic, some students, who previously were failing, blossomed and excelled, but went back to failing when in-person school was brought back. It turns out that in-person school doesn’t work well for everyone.
softwaredoug 4y ago
It's not just public school, but in general many forms of social capital[1] have taken a huge hit and will take a while to recover. Other kinds of social interaction and organization have taken a hit. Whether its local tech meetups, your school's PTA, concerts, farmers markets, etc, society has taken a hit. We see the impact in heightened crime, panhandling, and other signs of social distress. Even these small, seemingly trivial, kinds of organized social interactions created community and a chance for people to actually care about the state of organized society. Pre pandemic, I feel we were in a positive cycle of renewed cities, increased social capital. Now it feels like we're in a negative cycle of people avoiding each other, leading to negative feedback loops and lack of social support. 1 - https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-social-capital https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-soci...
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  The violent crime rate has not gone up. Murder in particular has gone up, but not broader measures of violent crime: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/31/violent-crime-is-a-key-midterm-voting-issue-but-what-does-the-data-say/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/31/violent-cri...
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Murder rates are an important indicator because virtually no murders go unreported, while reporting of other violent crimes can vary. For example, as your source notes, NYC doesn’t even report violent crimes to the FBI: > In the latest FBI study, around four-in-ten police departments – including large ones such as the New York Police Department – did not submit data, so the FBI estimated data for those areas The homicide rate rose 30% during 2020, taking us back to roughly mid-late 1990s levels: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-know-about-the-increase-in-u-s-murders-in-2020/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-kno....
    - treis 4y ago
      Their cite includes the national crime victimization survey which surveys a 100-200 thousand people and asks if they've been a victim of a crime. Theoretically that's independent of anything else and should accurately reflect the true crime rate. But these days I'm not sure how you can get an accurate sample. That said, I think this somewhat misses the point. Large numbers of cities saw violent disturbances over the last couple years. Anecdotally, I've noticed an increase in street racing and those sorts of general jackassery. Technically I'm not the victim of a violent crime but there definitely seems to be more of an edge to life these days. Understandable that people feel less safe and violent crime technically not going up isn't much solace.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
https://archive.is/1qwzU https://archive.is/1qwzU
mistrial9 4y ago
public schools in this coastal California urban area include a litany of daily, relentless vices; are some of the only school districts in US history to be seized by State government (more than once now) for gross fiscal mismanagement, and have had shooting resulting in death often enough that it is not reported in the news generally. There are more than forty human languages spoken at home in the greater county schools, and many, many homes are dysfunctional including abuse and neglect.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
"Declining birthrates, a rise in home schooling and growing competition from private and charter schools are contributing to the decline in traditional public school enrollment, according to school officials." I think the problem with public schools is really the teachers. They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex. After the chaos of the pandemic, we put our kids in private school and haven't looked back. Kids are happier and there really is something to be said when the teachers actually have to listen to the parents, instead of dismissing our concerns and telling us they know best.
- ianlevesque 4y ago
  There's certainly a spectrum of teacher quality out there but I worry you're falling into the same trap as those who target their aggression at customer service representatives. Public schools have a lot of issues that start at the top and teachers are just the most visible endpoints.
  - tsgagnon 4y ago
    Also, quite literally selection bias, as public schools don't get to choose which students to take, other than in extreme cases.
- pirate787 4y ago
  One point of fact that Pew gets wrong (and is part of the teacher union disinformation campaign) -- charter schools are also public schools.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    Yes they’re just often non-union schools, which is why the teachers unions don’t like them.
    - InitialLastName 4y ago
      Alternate narrative: Teachers don't like charter schools because their business model often revolves around idealistic, frequently underqualified [0] young teachers being paid $40k/year to spend 12 hours/day as prison guards "for the good of their community". The unions are just doing their job in opposing horrific working conditions in their industry. [0] Thus with little recourse.
linuxftw 4y ago
People are waking up to the fact that public school is one of the biggest intrusions of the state into your personal life. Zero tolerance polices of all kinds can land your child in criminal trouble. Truancy laws can have police sent to your home. School boards calling the FBI when you voice displeasure with their policies. Expensive, world-class facilities. When I was a kid, no school had a swim team because we didn't have pools. Can't put in a new school without state of the art gym, sports fields, often a pool. Giant auditoriums so your taxes can pay whack-job public speakers. And for what? So kids can learn to read, write, and do math? We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation? Good riddance. Public school is a scourge on man kind.
- TheFreim 4y ago
  > We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation? Public "education" made me despise learning and helped suppress my love of reading to the point that I'm only just starting to rekindle it. I performed well in school, but not well enough to be in advanced courses. It was complete torture, constantly vascilating between things being so easy that I'd stop paying attention to then being difficult because I'd fallen behind. This isn't even including disciplinary nonsense, I've got stories about that.
  - rbreaves 4y ago
    Well I had a similar experience with them jamming bad books on me, but on the whole I would say I was better off with public schooling than the alternatives that would have been available to me without a doubt.
    - TheFreim 4y ago
      > jamming bad books I should clarify, it's not just "bad books" that were the issue. There definitely were bad books, but there were also books which I've reread and enjoyed. The issue is more pertaining to the context of the books. Being required to regurgitate things about a book which you didn't have time to read thoroughly, being forced to focus not on the content but on how you can write a report that will please your particular teachers tastes. This, combined with numerous other issues, created terrible associations.
pyuser583 4y ago
My daughter attends a private school that stayed open through most of the pandemic. Lots of kids from public school transferred in. They aren’t leaving. In addition to actually being open, the local public schools went all in with BLM. That’s not bad by itself. But in practice it means the local school board is spending its time figuring out how to promote racial equity. How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important. Private schools and rich suburban school districts are flooded.
- legitster 4y ago
  I think it's not just BLM, but basically everyone was "too online". If you were a teacher, you fell into progressively more extreme content streams. If you were a parent, you read about teachers falling into more extreme content streams. The actual classroom environment might not have changed one iota, but everyone spending all day reading about bogeymen online for two years seems to have soured the relationship.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  >How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important ...as it should be. If the privileged keep playing their privilege games while neglecting equity, society does not work.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    The privileged are now going to private schools and suburban schools.
  - TheFreim 4y ago
    The greatest societies, even or own if it can still be considered great, were not built on the lowest common denominator, they were built to push up, above and beyond, the best of the best.
    - p0pcult 4y ago
      America was built on slave labor, and used exactly your arguments to justify the slavery.
legitster 4y ago
Schools closures were really a disastrous policy. Experts and parents alike agreed that schools should have remained open. Instead, the US was the standout among Western nations at not getting kids back into the classroom: https://webarchive.unesco.org/web/20220629024039/https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/ https://webarchive.unesco.org/web/20220629024039/https://en.... Teachers' and their unions also became somewhat bad actors here too - undermining good faith attempts to resume classroom teaching and constantly moving goalposts well after the vaccine was available. It also pitted teachers directly against their local policymakers and voters. The irony is that while everyone stayed home for a year and studied up on social justice, the lack of schooling will hit poorer families much worse. We were able to put our kid in a private school. Time will tell the lingering effects on less fortunate families. Really telling is that almost no one is attending PTA meetings anymore (unless to yell at teachers or to yell at the people yelling at teachers). Anyone who actually cared about partnering with/challenging teachers to improve education has since moved on.
- rbreaves 4y ago
  The pandemic was the disastrous part and yes measures were taken in response to it that no one liked doing, but how we lay blame on people trying to protect themselves, and their family.. I think is shortsighted. More people died in most countries from it than what they died in the last World War, and maybe 2. We don't go around constantly blaming the people and decisions that led up to the World Wars, it happened and we accept it and move on from it. Also sending kids into private schools in the US I think is part of the problem - there are many proponents that'd love all public schools to go under and to teach their brand of "science" and "history" to their students while knowing they are not providing an actual education. That is not all private schools, but many do have an agenda and little to no oversight in the US.
  - legitster 4y ago
    > how we lay blame on people trying to protect themselves, and their family.. I think is shortsighted Sure, but does ensuring my child has a good education not part of protecting my family? I faced about a 0.5% chance of being critically harmed by Covid versus an unknown chance that my child would permanently be affected by school closures. That's not so cut and dry a choice as people make it. And we can find all sorts of reasons to knock private education, but they actually stayed open and provided education.
Bhilai 4y ago
Is it such a bad thing? Anecdotally, the student enrollment in the school my kids are zoned for has gotten to the point where they had to bring Portables and put them in the field next to school to continue to support all the incoming kids. I dont know the specifics about why there isn't funding (or viability) to build a permanent structure. We also have not heard plans about building new schools to alleviate the overflow. Just to be clear, I realize schools are a mechanism for many kids to escape abusive parents, get proper meals and the numerous benefits of getting a structured education and companionship of peers. I just feel like we are trending towards blaming the pendemic for literally everything while systemic issues in education have existed long before pandemic ever happened.
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  Most school districts do portables because they expect gentrification and less school age children going forward (demographics are destiny), so no point in bulding permanent structures for a temporary problem.

56 points by lxm 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

[dead]

sokoloff 4y ago

https://archive.is/1qwzU https://archive.is/1qwzU

treis 4y ago

Unfortunately the article doesn't answer the important question of "where did they go?".

softwaredoug 4y ago
Anecdotally - in my area, private school attendance has surged. I know other families who have taken to home schooling. My son is in a private middle school. There's a good chance they wouldn't be in private middle school if the pandemic didn't happen. He was very frustrated being at home with Mom and Dad. After a year, he was getting very angry and depressed. I didn't expect to be paying for private school, but given his situation, here we are...
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Yes... but one million students, what percentage surge would that be in private schools if they all ended up there? I think it would have to be much larger, especially considering many private schools don't have that much additional capacity. (Edit: Also considering marginalized groups are the most likely to drop out... they are the least likely to afford private schools.) I strongly suspect many students have just completely fallen off the radar. Who knows what will happen to them.
  - softwaredoug 4y ago
    Also anecdotally, I don't think truancy enforcement has been particularly strict during the pandemic. I know our school has given a lot of grace to students going on vacation, etc compared to pre-pandemic.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    The private school my kids attend grew like 20%. I think there are enough private schools to handle much of this. And homeschooling is not “fallen off the radar” either. But I don’t doubt some have fallen off the radar.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - certifiedloud 4y ago
    Even then, households that choose to homeschool or private school their children still contribute to public schools. So the article's claim of needing to close schools due to fewer pupils and lack of funding is left unanswered. There may be migration involved.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Federal & state funding is often tied to student attendance.
    - toast0 4y ago
      Every state manages school fundig differently, and within states, it can vary, too. But in California, most districts are funded by the state, and the funding formula is based on attendence (and details about the student population). Some districts opt to get their funding directly from local property taxes which don't vary by attendance, but most districts get more funding by accepting the state funding and choose that instead. If public school attendence goes down in such a system, the school districts (and therefore the schools) get less funding, but tax collection probably doesn't change. Instead there will be a surplus in the general fund. California has a lot of formulaic budget requirements, so if attendence dropped enough, it might derail the rest of the budget, but I'm not familiar with how close to the requirements the school budget tracks.
justin66 4y ago
Paragraph #3.
- treis 4y ago
  A vague and meaningless paragraph that I wasted 30 seconds of my life reading again
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 4y ago
This website claims there are ~160k fewer 10 to 14 year olds than 15 to 19 year olds in the US. I presume that means 40k to 50k kids age out every year and who will not be replaced by kids in the class under them for high school. https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/ The 5 to 9 population is more than 1M less than the 10 to 14 population, and the 0 to 4 is ~300k less than the 5 to 9. Unless a lot more kids immigrate to the US, school enrollment will fall by 250k per year in a few years just due to fewer kids.
flerchin 4y ago
Anecdotally, home-school. My friends have not sent their kids back. Mom dropped out of work to full-time home-school, and they like it better. They have not asked for my opinion, but I worry for their kids.
- asynchronous 4y ago
  And I worry had they stayed in public school.
irrational 4y ago
Uh… it says right there in the article that some went to private schools, some are now home schooled, and some were never born (declining birth rates means overall number of potential students dropping). Anecdotally, I heard from some public school teachers that when they moved to online school during the pandemic, some students, who previously were failing, blossomed and excelled, but went back to failing when in-person school was brought back. It turns out that in-person school doesn’t work well for everyone.

softwaredoug 4y ago

It's not just public school, but in general many forms of social capital[1] have taken a huge hit and will take a while to recover. Other kinds of social interaction and organization have taken a hit. Whether its local tech meetups, your school's PTA, concerts, farmers markets, etc, society has taken a hit. We see the impact in heightened crime, panhandling, and other signs of social distress. Even these small, seemingly trivial, kinds of organized social interactions created community and a chance for people to actually care about the state of organized society. Pre pandemic, I feel we were in a positive cycle of renewed cities, increased social capital. Now it feels like we're in a negative cycle of people avoiding each other, leading to negative feedback loops and lack of social support. 1 - https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-social-capital https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-soci...

andrewmutz 4y ago
The violent crime rate has not gone up. Murder in particular has gone up, but not broader measures of violent crime: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/31/violent-crime-is-a-key-midterm-voting-issue-but-what-does-the-data-say/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/31/violent-cri...
- rayiner 4y ago
  Murder rates are an important indicator because virtually no murders go unreported, while reporting of other violent crimes can vary. For example, as your source notes, NYC doesn’t even report violent crimes to the FBI: > In the latest FBI study, around four-in-ten police departments – including large ones such as the New York Police Department – did not submit data, so the FBI estimated data for those areas The homicide rate rose 30% during 2020, taking us back to roughly mid-late 1990s levels: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-know-about-the-increase-in-u-s-murders-in-2020/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-kno....
  - treis 4y ago
    Their cite includes the national crime victimization survey which surveys a 100-200 thousand people and asks if they've been a victim of a crime. Theoretically that's independent of anything else and should accurately reflect the true crime rate. But these days I'm not sure how you can get an accurate sample. That said, I think this somewhat misses the point. Large numbers of cities saw violent disturbances over the last couple years. Anecdotally, I've noticed an increase in street racing and those sorts of general jackassery. Technically I'm not the victim of a violent crime but there definitely seems to be more of an edge to life these days. Understandable that people feel less safe and violent crime technically not going up isn't much solace.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

https://archive.is/1qwzU https://archive.is/1qwzU

mistrial9 4y ago

public schools in this coastal California urban area include a litany of daily, relentless vices; are some of the only school districts in US history to be seized by State government (more than once now) for gross fiscal mismanagement, and have had shooting resulting in death often enough that it is not reported in the news generally. There are more than forty human languages spoken at home in the greater county schools, and many, many homes are dysfunctional including abuse and neglect.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

"Declining birthrates, a rise in home schooling and growing competition from private and charter schools are contributing to the decline in traditional public school enrollment, according to school officials." I think the problem with public schools is really the teachers. They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex. After the chaos of the pandemic, we put our kids in private school and haven't looked back. Kids are happier and there really is something to be said when the teachers actually have to listen to the parents, instead of dismissing our concerns and telling us they know best.

ianlevesque 4y ago
There's certainly a spectrum of teacher quality out there but I worry you're falling into the same trap as those who target their aggression at customer service representatives. Public schools have a lot of issues that start at the top and teachers are just the most visible endpoints.
- tsgagnon 4y ago
  Also, quite literally selection bias, as public schools don't get to choose which students to take, other than in extreme cases.
pirate787 4y ago
One point of fact that Pew gets wrong (and is part of the teacher union disinformation campaign) -- charter schools are also public schools.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  Yes they’re just often non-union schools, which is why the teachers unions don’t like them.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    Alternate narrative: Teachers don't like charter schools because their business model often revolves around idealistic, frequently underqualified [0] young teachers being paid $40k/year to spend 12 hours/day as prison guards "for the good of their community". The unions are just doing their job in opposing horrific working conditions in their industry. [0] Thus with little recourse.

linuxftw 4y ago

People are waking up to the fact that public school is one of the biggest intrusions of the state into your personal life. Zero tolerance polices of all kinds can land your child in criminal trouble. Truancy laws can have police sent to your home. School boards calling the FBI when you voice displeasure with their policies. Expensive, world-class facilities. When I was a kid, no school had a swim team because we didn't have pools. Can't put in a new school without state of the art gym, sports fields, often a pool. Giant auditoriums so your taxes can pay whack-job public speakers. And for what? So kids can learn to read, write, and do math? We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation? Good riddance. Public school is a scourge on man kind.

TheFreim 4y ago
> We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation? Public "education" made me despise learning and helped suppress my love of reading to the point that I'm only just starting to rekindle it. I performed well in school, but not well enough to be in advanced courses. It was complete torture, constantly vascilating between things being so easy that I'd stop paying attention to then being difficult because I'd fallen behind. This isn't even including disciplinary nonsense, I've got stories about that.
- rbreaves 4y ago
  Well I had a similar experience with them jamming bad books on me, but on the whole I would say I was better off with public schooling than the alternatives that would have been available to me without a doubt.
  - TheFreim 4y ago
    > jamming bad books I should clarify, it's not just "bad books" that were the issue. There definitely were bad books, but there were also books which I've reread and enjoyed. The issue is more pertaining to the context of the books. Being required to regurgitate things about a book which you didn't have time to read thoroughly, being forced to focus not on the content but on how you can write a report that will please your particular teachers tastes. This, combined with numerous other issues, created terrible associations.

pyuser583 4y ago

My daughter attends a private school that stayed open through most of the pandemic. Lots of kids from public school transferred in. They aren’t leaving. In addition to actually being open, the local public schools went all in with BLM. That’s not bad by itself. But in practice it means the local school board is spending its time figuring out how to promote racial equity. How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important. Private schools and rich suburban school districts are flooded.

legitster 4y ago
I think it's not just BLM, but basically everyone was "too online". If you were a teacher, you fell into progressively more extreme content streams. If you were a parent, you read about teachers falling into more extreme content streams. The actual classroom environment might not have changed one iota, but everyone spending all day reading about bogeymen online for two years seems to have soured the relationship.
p0pcult 4y ago
>How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important ...as it should be. If the privileged keep playing their privilege games while neglecting equity, society does not work.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  The privileged are now going to private schools and suburban schools.
- TheFreim 4y ago
  The greatest societies, even or own if it can still be considered great, were not built on the lowest common denominator, they were built to push up, above and beyond, the best of the best.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    America was built on slave labor, and used exactly your arguments to justify the slavery.

legitster 4y ago

Schools closures were really a disastrous policy. Experts and parents alike agreed that schools should have remained open. Instead, the US was the standout among Western nations at not getting kids back into the classroom: https://webarchive.unesco.org/web/20220629024039/https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/ https://webarchive.unesco.org/web/20220629024039/https://en.... Teachers' and their unions also became somewhat bad actors here too - undermining good faith attempts to resume classroom teaching and constantly moving goalposts well after the vaccine was available. It also pitted teachers directly against their local policymakers and voters. The irony is that while everyone stayed home for a year and studied up on social justice, the lack of schooling will hit poorer families much worse. We were able to put our kid in a private school. Time will tell the lingering effects on less fortunate families. Really telling is that almost no one is attending PTA meetings anymore (unless to yell at teachers or to yell at the people yelling at teachers). Anyone who actually cared about partnering with/challenging teachers to improve education has since moved on.

rbreaves 4y ago
The pandemic was the disastrous part and yes measures were taken in response to it that no one liked doing, but how we lay blame on people trying to protect themselves, and their family.. I think is shortsighted. More people died in most countries from it than what they died in the last World War, and maybe 2. We don't go around constantly blaming the people and decisions that led up to the World Wars, it happened and we accept it and move on from it. Also sending kids into private schools in the US I think is part of the problem - there are many proponents that'd love all public schools to go under and to teach their brand of "science" and "history" to their students while knowing they are not providing an actual education. That is not all private schools, but many do have an agenda and little to no oversight in the US.
- legitster 4y ago
  > how we lay blame on people trying to protect themselves, and their family.. I think is shortsighted Sure, but does ensuring my child has a good education not part of protecting my family? I faced about a 0.5% chance of being critically harmed by Covid versus an unknown chance that my child would permanently be affected by school closures. That's not so cut and dry a choice as people make it. And we can find all sorts of reasons to knock private education, but they actually stayed open and provided education.

Bhilai 4y ago

Is it such a bad thing? Anecdotally, the student enrollment in the school my kids are zoned for has gotten to the point where they had to bring Portables and put them in the field next to school to continue to support all the incoming kids. I dont know the specifics about why there isn't funding (or viability) to build a permanent structure. We also have not heard plans about building new schools to alleviate the overflow. Just to be clear, I realize schools are a mechanism for many kids to escape abusive parents, get proper meals and the numerous benefits of getting a structured education and companionship of peers. I just feel like we are trending towards blaming the pendemic for literally everything while systemic issues in education have existed long before pandemic ever happened.

kthejoker2 4y ago
Most school districts do portables because they expect gentrification and less school age children going forward (demographics are destiny), so no point in bulding permanent structures for a temporary problem.