19 ms·

School absences have ‘exploded’ almost everywhere

108 points by wallflower 3y ago

newzisforsukas 3y ago
https://archive.ph/F1Br0 https://archive.ph/F1Br0
ttpphd 3y ago
[flagged]
- guerrilla 3y ago
  Any particular reason you think that or just are you just a naturally good guesser?
- fullshark 3y ago
  The policy response to the pandemic you mean
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Or the lack thereof when it was happening, causing it to develop into a global pandemic with long term consequences that are swept under the rug because it's bad for the economy.
  - fifteen1506 3y ago
    Agreed, the plebs should have been infected ASAP. We would have leapfrogged the economical development of other countries.
    - fullshark 3y ago
      Or maybe just do what Europe did? America is unique in its decision to shut down schools, in California some districts were literally closed for a year.
      - fifteen1506 3y ago
        Europe closed schools and businesses too.
draw_down 3y ago
Everyone treated it as optional. Even the teachers and school staff said zoom school is fine, it won’t be any worse or any different than in person school. Now we’re all shocked, shocked!
diggan 3y ago
> In a working-class pocket of Michigan, school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance. Wow, pajama day didn't bring back students? So strange. I wonder if they tried less homework, shorter school-days and/or later start of the day? Basically the three reasons I myself was chronically absent from school for as long as I can remember.
- iammjm 3y ago
  I remember getting to school for the 7:45 AM class as some of the worst times of my childhood. Imagine a deep Polish winter, it’s -15 Celsius, you get up at 6:30 in complete darkness, you walk to a bus station to get on an overcrowded bus where you can barely even stand as all the other kids are going too. then starting the day with an hour of math with a sociopathic, incompetent teacher… it took me years to appreciate school and learning again
  - grugagag 3y ago
    I have some similar horrible experiences with school but hey, isn’t it like an authentic prep for the real world?
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      > isn’t it like an authentic prep for the real world? No. And if it were don't you think it would be better to teach the children how to improve the state of the world instead of perpetuating its evils?
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    "fat psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives!"
- 542458 3y ago
  The article highlights that many parents whose children are absent are treating the posted assignments/homework as the primary teaching tool, so cutting that back hurts absent kids (I also understand that homework’s has been massively scaled back already in most places). Shorter days unfortunately interferes with school’s role as state-provided daycare for working parents. Later days is a solid idea, and I believe research shows it improves student performance at the highschool level, although if I understand correctly this is largely a scheduling/budget issue with how busses are staggered today.
topherclay 3y ago
The final sentence of the article answers the headline with, > “We haven’t seen an answer" Alright.
jraby3 3y ago
In Israel a lot of the schools start with 20 minutes of body movement (at least near me). The kids become active. It’s not as big a deal if they are a little late. And my daughter (but not my son) hates missing it.
- grugagag 3y ago
  Thats fantastic!
- andrewnicolalde 3y ago
  That makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s something that would have helped me during high school.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  I wonder if there has been any studies done showing correlation between walking/biking to school and school success. Walking a mile takes about 20 minutes and personally I find that walking to work sets me up for success way better than driving does.
  - aio2 3y ago
    Physical activity has shown to improve mental health, which as a result improves learning.
  - lambdaba 3y ago
    Indeed there have been, I can't recall the exact study, but I found a meta-analysis here: [Physical Activity and Academic Performance in School-Age Children: A Systematic Review ](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6616 https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6616).
  - keybored 3y ago
    When I was a kid those who lived in walking distance walked or biked. Those who didn’t was bused. It was just about geography. Rural area though.
    - 3y ago
mattw2121 3y ago
"because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track." Do this and then you'll have your top performers start being absent as well -- out of boredom. I'd suggest sending kids that are lagging behind, and those that have high absentee rates, into remedial classes. Education should get kids excited about learning. From my experience, nothing gets kids more excited than the feeling that they've accomplished something. Make them sit in a room to rehash the same old crap over and over and you lose the ones you want.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Yeah, the ones that are lagging need more personal attention and fine-tuned lessons; unfortunately part of the issue is the teacher shortage, so they can't really make smaller classes.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    Maybe sort the classes by ability, then?
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      The problem with streaming is that it is always tempting to put the best teachers in the more academically inclined classes because that is where they get the most visible effect. But of course it should be the other way about, the very best teachers should ve assigned to the students who find the whole affair the most difficult. The best students can often just be given an assignment and told to get on with it.
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Sort the classes by learning speed, the faster kids aren't expected to do more or harder class work like today instead they get longer lunches, free periods, more recess and early dismissal. Only slow kids need homework, the fast kids get it done as part of class and peer grade themselves. Frees up teaching resources for the slower kids and respects everyone's time. Puts the incentives in the right places, rewarding the diligent responsible students.
bedhead 3y ago
The ripple effect from our unhinged covid response continues to be felt in countless places, from school absenteeism to downtown office space values to public transportation and on and on. We created new habits that are hard to break and naturally none of the hysterics who tried to unwind society gave any thought to anything besides trying to temporarily feel “safe.” There’s always a tradeoff…
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Another way to look at it is that during lockdown people realized that millions driving through rush hour every day to sit in a cubicle was a drain on the time of employees and a waste of company money in renting the building. I don't care if commercial real estate took a hit outside of impacts to pension/401k. We have the technology now and the pandemic proved it, so we can now evolve in that area. No need to be stuck in that hell loop forever.
  - halfcat 3y ago
    Exactly this. The curtain was pulled back and people realized the lies they were being fed by companies. Turns out the business won’t fold if people are remote, and if you’re out sick that immovable deadline gets…moved.
    - whiterknight 3y ago
      Maybe it won’t collapse but maybe everything is only working 70% as well as it used to. It sure feels that way.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        If purchasing power falls 30% it’s only fair that things are only working 70%. Spoiler alert: purchasing power fell way more than 30%, so we are actually lucky things work still as much as they do.
        3y ago
janwillemb 3y ago
> attendance has become optional I recognize this with my own kids and my students. Two things: 1) since the pandemic the bar for a sick day has been lowered drastically. 2) Educational material can be found online in most of the cases, at least in my university. Students think they can handle it themselves from home. These are not necessarily bad developments. What would be interesting to see is if the drop out rate has increased.
- cies 3y ago
  > Students think they can handle it themselves from home. Some have show to do well from home, especially when schools opened up a little bit at the end of the pandemic: all was online, some students thrived!
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Oh for sure, but the challenge is that every student has different needs; some thrive in at-home self-directed study, others need one on one care, others need a classroom environment, etc. Policy is set through statistics and cost / benefit though; the protestant classroom setting for a good while was the most cost-effective way to get many students up to a specific level. It wasn't perfect, but it worked at the time.
- fullshark 3y ago
  They are probably bad developments, as much as we want to pretend kids are strong minded independent learners, the reality is they are kids and need guidance and a teacher to instill discipline. This is something we've known for millennia that we want to pretend isn't true because it's more convenient to ignore, also because of our obsession with venerating youth culturally.
  - bluedino 3y ago
    We've removed more and more rules from every aspect of society and suffered because of it. It does seem like things are starting to reverse though
  - 3y ago
rel2thr 3y ago
i feel like this is just explained by sick days, flu season was crazy this year post-covid people are more hesitant to send their kids to school slightly sick or when there are sick siblings / parents in the household.
- whazor 3y ago
  This! We don't send our kid to school with fever. Sending your kid to school with a low fever used to be very normal. But post-COVID we are more tempted to check the temperature when the head feels warm. But actually the better way to 'measure' a fever is how much a child is playing and energetic.
Aachen 3y ago
> Everywhere * in the USA
- Aaargh20318 3y ago
  Is school in the US optional? Over here (the Netherlands) school is mandatory for anyone under 18. Skipping school without a valid reason (e.g. illness) comes with a €100/day fine.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    It’s relatively easy to pull your kid from the public school system (we submitted a form for each child, and have to provide a brief report annually on their homeschool progress), and the penalties you mention do not exist unless absence quantity is egregious (and typically, no financial penalties).
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    School in Norway is not compulsory. Education is. When we wanted to take the children to the US with us for three months the headmistress tried to make out that we needed her permission but in the end she could only threaten us with the potential problem that there might not be a space in the school for them when they came back. My wife asked for the lesson plans for the period and was grudgingly given them; all three of the children were ahead of their respective classes when we got back. Does fining people make their educational attainments better? I know that such fines are a big thing in the UK but as far as I can tell it is just a burden on the poor and merely adds a small additional cost to family holidays for the well off that is offset by lower prices during term time.
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    Where does the money go?
    - Aaargh20318 3y ago
      Where all money for fines goes, to the government.
jawns 3y ago
Is it possible that expectations around attendance have never been reasonable or even safe? In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness. Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces have dialed back extra sick time that was available during the first couple of years of COVID.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Back when I was in school about a decade ago, kids came to school sick as dogs as taking time off for being sick was seen as malingering. A friend at another school knew a guy who came to school with a stomach bug and puked several times throughout the day as they had a perfect attendance incentive worth grades, so to ensure he got his grades, he walked around puking for the day. I spent plenty of classes hacking and coughing. So I don't think they are reasonable at all. If you are sick, you should stay home should still apply.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Minor sniffles and sneezes should not result in anyone staying home. The pandemic has clearly altered this mentality but it doesn’t seem like a good trajectory. A little cold is barely an inconvenience.
    - from-nibly 3y ago
      No. Keep your kids home if they are sick. An screw every parent who thinks this way. My family got sick 6 times in the last 12 weeks because of this nonsense. If your kid is sick it's your fault if other kids catch what they have. I dont care if it's "just the sniffles" It causes so much inconveniece for my family.
      - freitzkriesler2 3y ago
        This is how it always was before covid and how it will always be if you send kids to germ factories (aka schools). Get the meds, drink water, go to sleep. Part and parcel of living in modern society.
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Mizza 3y ago
Are there similar changes at Montessori schools? Maybe they could try making school less like prison, with less mandatory pointless toil?
- Ajay-p 3y ago
  I attending Montessori and enjoyed it, but this was 10+ years ago. We did not talk about the teacher's personal beliefs and politics, and there was no discussion of student gender or sexuality. It was focused on social and interpersonal development and academics. I understand some people believe discussing these sensitive topics is essential to student development, but I think it has made kids very uncomfortable and strayed too far from academics.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Despite what you've heard, they don't really talk about those things in public school either.
    - donor20 3y ago
      They absolutely do at least in CA starting in kindergarten
      - darby_eight 3y ago
        Discussion of gender seems to be pretty in-line with kindergarten education from what I remember 20 years ago. Hell, we even "voted" in the 1996 presidential election (I voted for the most attractive person, Bill Clinton).
fideloper 3y ago
Our kids were too young for school during the pandemic (thank god, it seems like it really messed up kids lives). Now they're both in early-years of school. Attendance is kinda interesting! We parents EXTREMELY want the kids to go to school as it's the much-needed break to get our own work done - both in basic upkeep of our lives/household, and in our careers. We need the school hours to be long. Longer than they are, in fact. (As a side note, my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess? wtf? Have you met children before?) On the other hand, life is expensive. Being restricted to only travel during the most expensive times to travel (around school holidays) isn't ideal. We can work with our kids to make up lost school time. I also just don't like this third party entity whose value seems to go down every year to control our lives!? Teaching (from the teachers point of view) increasingly is geared towards meeting metrics that are divorced from the needs of the kids. The teachers incentives are being misaligned with ours. Additionally, I think we've (royal we) grown distrustful of public school in general. Not in a "big government" sort of way, just that we need to acknowledge that US public schools are designed for conformity. Being different (e.g. having ADHD, or being "on the spectrum") is not tolerated well - you might find your kid in a special needs bucket that effectively segregates them into programs that might not fit their needs at all. At the same time, private school costs are huge and often the ones closest to you come not only in an extreme monetary cost a culture cost - being overly religious, or not religious enough (YMMV). So, yeah, it's hard to really want or care to "be a model citizen" to the public schools that are increasingly putting up the pressure on parents (that's a whole other topic, why aren't grandparents capable of being helpful any more? where did our support networks go?) while standards that might be outside of the school's control are lowering their ability to give quality education. (Also, pay the f*&king teachers, maybe!?)
- dr-detroit 3y ago
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- loudmax 3y ago
  Absolutely this. For so many reasons, we need a well functioning public school system. Where "well functioning" means serving various needs of both children and parents. All children. The importance of education is something that liberals and conservatives actually agree on. But like so much else, it's become a pawn in the culture wars, so that the most dissonant voices at the fringes drown out the common sense concurrence in the middle.
alpaca128 3y ago
> school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance Because "school but with one funny twist" is still school with the same broken system. It's like the workplace memes about ping-pong tables and free food, you can't fix the problem without fixing it.
- fullshark 3y ago
  Ping pong tables and free food worked pretty well for a while, but the true motivator there was the illusory value of startup equity lottery tickets it appears.
  - annoyingnoob 3y ago
    > the illusory value of startup equity lottery tickets it appears Kind of like the lottery, you cannot win if you do not play. I could have a job with a paycheck, or I could have a job with a paycheck and a lottery ticket.
    - whiterknight 3y ago
      There are other kinds of investments that are less risky than isos.
      - anon291 3y ago
        I don't understand this attitude. Most sw engineers at a startup are well compensated salary wise. Who cares if you also have a lottery ticket.
        fullshark 3y ago
        Well at least 5 years ago it became clear you should value those tickets at ~$0 at most startups when making career decisions, so those tickets come at significant opportunity cost even if the other money is "good."
gravescale 3y ago
I think some parents and kids have realised that much of that slog is ever less about the education and more about using children as tools for buffing the school or district stats in the best case or it's just riot control in the worst case. Miss a day or two of school and now you're "behind" because you don't know some trivia¹ that's on your next standardised test. Mostly irrelevant to the student, but highly worrying to the school. The real things you need to learn, things like curiosity, scientific thinking, critical thinking, practical intuition, complex problem solving, unstructured information retrieval, team work and so on aren't easy to measure, so they're not really measured and then they're not optimised for. Which, when everything is minmaxed to death, means they're optimised against. That's the charitable, non-paranoid interpretation, at least. I did a homestay in Germany decades ago and the kids left school at about 1pm and spent the afternoon in woodland unsupervised, co-operatively building a sprawling multi-storey "treehouse" that was about 25 metres on a side. I wouldn't be surprised if the skills acquired in that part of their childhood mostly came from there rather than bullet points about carbon bonds in benzene or something. 1: Sure trivia provides "pixels" for a hoped-for complete picture eventually, but the broad substrate you place these pixels on seems de-emphasised compared to just hammering decontextalised details that are easy to test until everyone is heartily sick of the whole subject.
- jajko 3y ago
  You are missing forest for the trees - states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success. Thats not what the core of any population is, and hence not much catered for, not in public state funded institution. Now another topic is whats good for any individual kid and society long term, those can be quite different matters. I see those points in same way you do, but consider them more a parental responsibility and a way to give your kids a head start if you actually care. Look at what kind of folks stay teachers and how they are paid - dont expect miracles. Sad state of affairs, but it is what it is
  - anon291 3y ago
    > states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success. It's unfortunate because regardless of what you think, the so-called 'alpha males' with an insatiable drive for success are the ones representing the vast majority of the tax revenue.
_heimdall 3y ago
This and similar issues shouldn't be surprising at all after we effectively declared that in-person schooling isn't really necessary and that kids would be fine staying home learning on an iPad. What were people supposed to take away from our handling of schooling during the pandemic response?
theknocker 3y ago
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g5095 3y ago
stigmatize the working class as boring while promoting alternative lifestyles as more attractive/worthy .. then tax their parents into the ground through run-away inflation.. strip them of any potential for home ownership or a stable life and then wonder why kids don't see any value in traditional education?
EZ-E 3y ago
A tangent thought - I may be out of touch but I am amazed of little the school system changed over time (at least in my country), while in 2024 literally all the knowledge and all there is to learn in school (at least until university) is available on the internet with top quality video or resources. Yet students are expected to show up every day at 8 AM to 5 PM in my country. When I remember my classes in high school - 90+% of the time is just the teacher talking, us copying on notes, the teacher demonstrating something or letting us do assignments present in the school book, it might as well be a video or interactive content. Do we really still need children to learn in this way and structure nowadays? Or is it just to let parents work they 9 to 6? It all feels... very inefficient somehow. (ps : I do not have children in school, as most readers probably guessed)
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Pedagogy relies on more than mere exposure to information. To a substantial degree, information central to an education has been reasonably readily available since the early 20th century, a combination printing, cheap paper, and public libraries. Not entirely as convenient as online Internet access, to be sure, but a low barrier for a motivated student. There are notable examples of self-taught prodigies[1] ... ... but overall, organised, school-based education seems to scale vastly better. Teachers don't merely expose but guide, at least in the best cases. ________________________________ Notes: 1. One was, I believe, William Sidis, who'd taken refuge in a public library after being bullied, read Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and corresponded with Russell over errata and corrections. I'm trying to turn up a reference, possibly The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy by Amy Wallace.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >in 2024 literally all the knowledge and all there is to learn in school (at least until university) is available on the internet with top quality video or resources. It's all mixed up in and endless sea of shit though.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    no wonder there is usually a curriculum
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kwhitefoot 3y ago
Perhaps it's because most schooling seems irrelevant to many of the students? I went to very good schools and actually enjoyed quite a lot of my schooldays but even while I was there I could see that a lot of it was a complete and utter waste of everyone's time. I spent six years attending French classes and three of Latin. I can't read, write, speak, or understand either one. I moved to Norway fifteen years later and spent a couple of hours a week in evening classes for a year and a few years of immersion in the language and now I am fluent with much almost no effort. So why do schools all over the world persist in educational methods that don't work? Why do they never teach people how to handle money, how to negotiate with tradesmen about repairs to a house, how to drive a car.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  It's not the methods. If you and all the rest of your class would have been motivated the methods would have worked fine.
  - locallost 3y ago
    People didn't invent the saying "when the student is ready, the teacher appears" for nothing. But following that it's a fair point that how we do things is not optimal. E.g. pushing kids into classes based on their age and than having everyone for the most part do the same things. People/kids are just different, different interests, different levels. Maybe it was a necessity once, but maybe we can do things differently now.
    - deleted 3y ago
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  - acover 3y ago
    Are you sure? I struggled for years to maintain a decent mark in french class. 2 months of duolingo for spanish and I was able to have conversations. A grammar, written first approach is hard and boring but it does scale to 30 students for 1 teacher though.
- 3y ago
PaulKeeble 3y ago
Its world wide. In the UK the increase was analysed and its all due to increased sickness. Teachers and students are sick twice as much as they were before the pandemic begun and teachers are the second hardest hit group by Long Covid behind medical staff. The official count of UK children with Long Covid is 68,000 but its likely much higher than that since the NHS is mostly diagnosing Long haulers with anxiety (hence why the press has been big on all the increase in mental health diseases). Its just Covid, this is what living with this disease looks like.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Or are we finally just accepting that people do get sick from time to time? A friend at another school knew a guy who came to school with a stomach bug and puked several times throughout the day as they had a perfect attendance incentive worth a percentage of your grade, so to ensure he got his grades, he walked around puking for the day. At the time people praised his dedication.
  - swed420 3y ago
    People are getting sick more often because COVID causes lasting damage to the immune system. https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/ https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/ There is an orchestrated push by capital to not acknowledge this basic fact. https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-awareness https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-a...
- brohoolio 3y ago
  My kids are still playing catchup in terms of illnesses since the pandemic. Our district masked for the first two years. Neither of my kids were sick for those two years. Since then they’ve been playing catchup immunity wise as they’ve been exposed to all the colds and other viruses. Which means they are absent more. I’m hopeful that they are almost caught up in terms of what they have been exposed to and the amount of times they are sick in a year will be declining. Seriously it blows my mind that folks say masks don’t work because if you’ve had school age children you know how often they are sick and for those two years the district was masking we had nothing. It was glorious while it lasted.
gilbetron 3y ago
My wife and I have noticed this, and it is really bizarre because it is across all kinds of demographics. We consider school mandatory for our son, except for medical reasons or significant events (funeral, for instance). Nearly all of his friends, even those that have teacher parents, will often be out of school, "because we wanted to go skiing" or "didn't feel like it today". I don't get it at all, like I didn't get the memo of "meh, school is optional". Our son doesn't really even want to miss school, because he knows we'll make him do his missed work anyway. I guess we are old school (we are older, Gen X parents). The pandemic seems to have, if not broken, changed society in many fashions, and I guess schooling is one of them. Many of his affluent friends still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug. We are far from "tiger parents", and push our son to mostly get As because he easily can do so, and feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work. Weird times.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug > feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work. Can you take an A or “advanced work” to the deli and exchange it for a sandwich? The people you are criticizing realised the pointlessness of it all and that extra work (or knowledge) beyond a baseline doesn’t make a measurable difference worth the extra effort.
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- madamelic 3y ago
  Long term, high school doesn't matter, college really doesn't either. One can accelerate the other which can accelerate life but long-term, if your kid sucks at life, no amount of school diligence will solve that. Inversely, if your kid sucks at school but is a good worker & intelligent, their school credentials won't matter. Past the first job, credential specifics stop mattering really. No one will care whether you got an A or B+ in Calculus in junior year. If the kid is doing alright and isn't getting into too much trouble, I don't see the issue of letting them play hookey with parent permission especially in their final years. My parents had a policy that if we had good grades, we could skip days occassionally in our senior year. We'd take the day off and just pal around on errands if we wanted.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
By compartmentalizing school to a square on a zoom call for 2+ years why are they surprised when the students treat it like a square on a zoom call.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  i wonder if videoconferencing also devalues the workplace
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It certainly can; but it's less the video calls and more the endless meetings that they enable. Dilbert talked about pointless meetings 25 years ago; Zoom has made it more prevalent. At least if you're "off camera" you can just mute yourself and get some real work done.
- itsdrewmiller 3y ago
  It said in the article that this was a problem for schools that reopened quickly too (although didn’t give numbers).
FergusArgyll 3y ago
Maybe they don't want to have bathroom breaks tracked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838413
mminer237 3y ago
Talking with our local school administrators, this does seem to be the biggest challenge they're facing. From their point of view, it's just caused by (typically poorer) parents who don't care about their kids' education and saw how it seemed to be optional during COVID and so just don't make their kids go if they don't feel like it. It's really sad, and it sounds incredibly hard for anyone else to do anything about.
- sethammons 3y ago
  The article points out the rise in truancy is similar across socioeconomic boundaries
  - itsdrewmiller 3y ago
    It was 9% in richer districts and 13% in poorer districts - I’d definitely be interested in further analysis to see an intra-district breakdown.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  This is the first comment I see directing the problem at the parents, where I believe it rightly belongs. Is it not the parent's responsibility to make sure their child gets to school safely and on time every day?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    What do you do when the parents can't or won't? Or take an example of a high school student who adamantly refuses to attend school, do you eventually just let him "get away with it" or do you put him in a correctional facility?
- LakesAndTrees 3y ago
  My experience with my teen has been that, post-pandemic, he and all of his friends simply decided they didn't want to be inside/bored like they were. We're struggling big-time to keep ours in class. We've tried incentives. We've levied punishments. It's like neither they nor their friends care - at all - about any of it (certainly much less afraid of consequences than I ever was). Add the much more common use of drugs to the mix (from 14 on), phones that are not required to be put away in class, and it's very tough to keep them on track. I didn't have half of the distractions/opportunities for entertainment kids these days have, and it was hard for me to muster up the enthusiasm.
mikewarot 3y ago
Kids have been soaked in the news that we're all doomed because of climate change, and they won't ever be able to afford the American dream, no matter what. Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it. They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary. Why would they care about school?
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Economics and climate change? I'd be slacking off because it is clear that AI is going to be the brain job top dog by the time I get to career stage.
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    Ahh, climate change. The go-to explanation for absolutely any negative phenomena observed in the world.
  - darby_eight 3y ago
    I see a lot more kids mocking AI on TikTok than fearing it, but I might be looking in the wrong place.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      Fear it? I would be embracing it. Send my allocated AI entity to work and send me the checks. In a sense it is like having a body double go to school for you.
      - anon291 3y ago
        Oh goodness... This must be satire.
        Workaccount2 3y ago
mydriasis 3y ago
Talked to my niece about this, she's highschool age. She says that during covid, her school set up all of the infrastructure for remote learning, and they _still offer it_ -- that is, if she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to go to class much at all, save for the school's attendance policy... which means that while she has a 4.0, she's also near truancy. For a lot of folks, school was never good. If I had the choice back then, would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to?
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  > would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to? Would you every worry about doing ok academically but falling behind socially?
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Have you talked to children that attend public school today? School is not helping them socially whatsoever.
    - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
      Do I think there has been an increase percentage wise in the amount (and in the awareness) of teenagers who don't like various aspects or high school (or children who don't like elementary/middle school)? 100% But I went to public school not too long ago. High school, about 4,000 people. Really diverse culturally. I think you can make the argument that you had "the majority" (50.1%, 2k+ teenagers) who "did well/liked it" overall. Did they dislike it for one reason or another? Sure. But I don't think 49.9% were bullied (social media or not). I would say it's a smaller minority/more "fringe". Not to say that if it's 20% of children it isn't a very large problem. But... if 80% of people 'can and do' make it out + benefit from it + find a way to enjoy it... how come it works for them and not others?
- bombcar 3y ago
  They count doing the remote stuff as truancy? Given that I would do as much of my course work as fast as I could so I could slack off the rest of the time, if I'd've had distance learning as an option in high school I'd've been all over it (and perhaps learned not to double contract).
forgotmyinfo 3y ago
You mean vulnerable kids and developing teenagers don't want to be bullied and shot? Gosh, you could just knock me over with a feather.
schneems 3y ago
I hold views in both sides here. I teach computers at an elementary school on Thursdays, and my kids go to that school. As an educator I see an impact of absences even in this fun class that kids want to go to and there isn’t a grade. We generally have a 1-2 or 1-2-3 approach to teaching something. That is: teach it one week, then review it, then teach or review it again the next. When someone is out for two weeks they just don’t learn that concept and then later on need specialized attention to be caught up. Or in the case of larger class sizes or multiple kids out the whole class either has to be slowed down or those kids get left behind. That to me is the bigger problem: absences change the velocity of the class and make it harder for not just the kids that are absent. On the other hand: I wish school life was more flexible so I could take my kids to more life experiences. Grand parents live an 18 hour drive or an 18 hour flight away. We ski. We travel. And we value school. I wish there was an easier “if you are out for this week, then here’s a link to the remote curriculum”, but as a teacher, it is the difference between supporting a fully remote office and a hybrid one. It’s more work and teachers are already overworked and under paid compared to the value they have on society. During covid we had all remote school and while the outcomes of my kids suffered the flexibility was nice. I wish we, as a society and nation figured out how to find a way to make that work instead of going “back to normal” and learning/changing nothing. For instance: I imagined a nationally backed “remote school” any student could optionally attend on a week they are sick or out. With both live remote lectures and pre-recorded content. Maybe parent guides for some homeschooling. Or if students are lagging behind in that model, maybe sunmer school becomes more normal (or some other creative solution). It’s a bit like that Rick and Morty episode where he is in the VR game. “ What's this, you beat cancer and then went back to work at the carpet store? Boo.” We lived through Covid and then collectively decided to go back to the carpet store.
muaytimbo 3y ago
Kids don't want to be at school, teachers don't want to be at school, local residents don't want to fund schools. In NYC public school reading/math comprehension is at 50%. They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts. Unfortunately once a large special interest group is subsidized by the taxpayer and a voter base is established for local politicians and the jobs program never goes away even though all evidence indicates the benefit to the taxpayer is marginal.
- vundercind 3y ago
  > They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts. This on its own communicates nothing interesting. It’d be surprising if this weren’t the case, given private schools possess the superpower of not having to serve everyone.
  - anon291 3y ago
    Public schools shouldn't either. At the end of the day the entire purpose of a school is against equality. History has demonstrated that while everyone can achieve a basic level of competence, there are real differences in hard working behavior and intelligence that helps you succeed in academia. It's insane that public schools have to be some great equalizer and then they're simultaneously sold as preparing kids for the ultra competitive cutthroat world of academia and commerce. Either they need to not be the great equalizer and prepare kids for the real world. This would mean not serving some kids with the same services (although again, a basic education would be guaranteed). Or we could admit that while we succeeded in building a basic education system, we have failed at building a public academic system for the early years and just let the private academia take over.
anon291 3y ago
For two years we said kids didn't need to be in school and many well off parents realized that what made their kids smart was their own involvement, not the schools.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
In unrelated news: https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-record-high-of-2-6-million-12959783 https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-rec... The failure to prioritise rationality over economics is going to be seen as one of the biggest public health and economic failures in recent centuries.
- gbacon 3y ago
  An unleashed public health establishment leaping outside their area of expertise to successfully push for lockdowns was the largest unforced error in generations, one whose effects we’re still feeling years later. Scientists who study the allocation of scarce resources toward desired ends are economists, not epidemiologists. A basic truth of economics is that people respond to incentives. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Public choice economics shows us that government employees likewise respond to career interest. Incentivizing people not to work and incentivizing another group of people to pump up their rookie numbers of people not working may create a slight inflationary pressure on the overall figure.
donatj 3y ago
My high school had a maximum of three absences per quarter or you would automatically fail your classes and have to appeal. As a perennially sick kid, this meant I just went to school super sick, all the time. I’m not sure that’s better for anyone. Getting my tonsils removed as an adult was a literal life changer. I used to get strep 6 to 10 times a year. I have not had it since.
Bostonian 3y ago
Put the # of days missed each year on the high school transcript and allow employers to filter job applicants on this basis. Make federal student aid for college conditional on having few high school absences. That would reward attendance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lsaferite 3y ago
  That would codify the bullshit "perfect attendance' awards schools insist on handing out. Those kinds of incentives discourage people from isolating when they are sick. One of the many drivers of schools being breeding grounds for illness.
  - Bostonian 3y ago
    Employers would decide how to use the absence information. Maybe 10 or fewer absences in a year would be considered ok, but 50 or more a red flag.
workingdog 3y ago
I'd rather my kids go with me to Japan than spend a week learning that a new gender just dropped.
- monkey_monkey 3y ago
  Looking at your comment history, your son might be better off at school than with you. 'London historically is a nice city. It's too bad that rampant criminal enterprise has been imported into it.' Jeeez.
  - workingdog 3y ago
    [flagged]
jordanpg 3y ago
As I'm reading this, I'm also streaming the regional First Robotics regional championship in Georgia: https://www.twitch.tv/gafirst2 https://www.twitch.tv/gafirst2 I note without comment that those kids aren't in school right now.
treesknees 3y ago
I’ve been a classroom volunteer teacher for a computer science / programming course at a local high school. I can attest that this is accurate - I’d estimate 20-25% of the class is absent on any given day that I’m there. And of the students that are present, there’s a good number of them who are checked out mentally and really don’t participate. It’s surprising to me. Back when I was in school, I was extremely anxious missing any days. Elective classes are one thing, but I just don’t understand how students are missing multiple days of history or math or science and able to keep up.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240329120646if_/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240329120646if_/https://www.ny...

108 points by wallflower 3y ago

newzisforsukas 3y ago

https://archive.ph/F1Br0 https://archive.ph/F1Br0

ttpphd 3y ago

[flagged]

guerrilla 3y ago
Any particular reason you think that or just are you just a naturally good guesser?
fullshark 3y ago
The policy response to the pandemic you mean
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Or the lack thereof when it was happening, causing it to develop into a global pandemic with long term consequences that are swept under the rug because it's bad for the economy.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  Agreed, the plebs should have been infected ASAP. We would have leapfrogged the economical development of other countries.
  - fullshark 3y ago
    Or maybe just do what Europe did? America is unique in its decision to shut down schools, in California some districts were literally closed for a year.
    - fifteen1506 3y ago
      Europe closed schools and businesses too.

draw_down 3y ago

Everyone treated it as optional. Even the teachers and school staff said zoom school is fine, it won’t be any worse or any different than in person school. Now we’re all shocked, shocked!

diggan 3y ago

> In a working-class pocket of Michigan, school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance. Wow, pajama day didn't bring back students? So strange. I wonder if they tried less homework, shorter school-days and/or later start of the day? Basically the three reasons I myself was chronically absent from school for as long as I can remember.

iammjm 3y ago
I remember getting to school for the 7:45 AM class as some of the worst times of my childhood. Imagine a deep Polish winter, it’s -15 Celsius, you get up at 6:30 in complete darkness, you walk to a bus station to get on an overcrowded bus where you can barely even stand as all the other kids are going too. then starting the day with an hour of math with a sociopathic, incompetent teacher… it took me years to appreciate school and learning again
- grugagag 3y ago
  I have some similar horrible experiences with school but hey, isn’t it like an authentic prep for the real world?
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > isn’t it like an authentic prep for the real world? No. And if it were don't you think it would be better to teach the children how to improve the state of the world instead of perpetuating its evils?
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  "fat psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives!"
542458 3y ago
The article highlights that many parents whose children are absent are treating the posted assignments/homework as the primary teaching tool, so cutting that back hurts absent kids (I also understand that homework’s has been massively scaled back already in most places). Shorter days unfortunately interferes with school’s role as state-provided daycare for working parents. Later days is a solid idea, and I believe research shows it improves student performance at the highschool level, although if I understand correctly this is largely a scheduling/budget issue with how busses are staggered today.

topherclay 3y ago

The final sentence of the article answers the headline with, > “We haven’t seen an answer" Alright.

jraby3 3y ago

In Israel a lot of the schools start with 20 minutes of body movement (at least near me). The kids become active. It’s not as big a deal if they are a little late. And my daughter (but not my son) hates missing it.

grugagag 3y ago
Thats fantastic!
andrewnicolalde 3y ago
That makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s something that would have helped me during high school.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
I wonder if there has been any studies done showing correlation between walking/biking to school and school success. Walking a mile takes about 20 minutes and personally I find that walking to work sets me up for success way better than driving does.
- aio2 3y ago
  Physical activity has shown to improve mental health, which as a result improves learning.
- lambdaba 3y ago
  Indeed there have been, I can't recall the exact study, but I found a meta-analysis here: [Physical Activity and Academic Performance in School-Age Children: A Systematic Review ](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6616 https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6616).
- keybored 3y ago
  When I was a kid those who lived in walking distance walked or biked. Those who didn’t was bused. It was just about geography. Rural area though.
  - 3y ago

mattw2121 3y ago

"because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track." Do this and then you'll have your top performers start being absent as well -- out of boredom. I'd suggest sending kids that are lagging behind, and those that have high absentee rates, into remedial classes. Education should get kids excited about learning. From my experience, nothing gets kids more excited than the feeling that they've accomplished something. Make them sit in a room to rehash the same old crap over and over and you lose the ones you want.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Yeah, the ones that are lagging need more personal attention and fine-tuned lessons; unfortunately part of the issue is the teacher shortage, so they can't really make smaller classes.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Maybe sort the classes by ability, then?
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    The problem with streaming is that it is always tempting to put the best teachers in the more academically inclined classes because that is where they get the most visible effect. But of course it should be the other way about, the very best teachers should ve assigned to the students who find the whole affair the most difficult. The best students can often just be given an assignment and told to get on with it.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Sort the classes by learning speed, the faster kids aren't expected to do more or harder class work like today instead they get longer lunches, free periods, more recess and early dismissal. Only slow kids need homework, the fast kids get it done as part of class and peer grade themselves. Frees up teaching resources for the slower kids and respects everyone's time. Puts the incentives in the right places, rewarding the diligent responsible students.

bedhead 3y ago

The ripple effect from our unhinged covid response continues to be felt in countless places, from school absenteeism to downtown office space values to public transportation and on and on. We created new habits that are hard to break and naturally none of the hysterics who tried to unwind society gave any thought to anything besides trying to temporarily feel “safe.” There’s always a tradeoff…

7thaccount 3y ago
Another way to look at it is that during lockdown people realized that millions driving through rush hour every day to sit in a cubicle was a drain on the time of employees and a waste of company money in renting the building. I don't care if commercial real estate took a hit outside of impacts to pension/401k. We have the technology now and the pandemic proved it, so we can now evolve in that area. No need to be stuck in that hell loop forever.
- halfcat 3y ago
  Exactly this. The curtain was pulled back and people realized the lies they were being fed by companies. Turns out the business won’t fold if people are remote, and if you’re out sick that immovable deadline gets…moved.
  - whiterknight 3y ago
    Maybe it won’t collapse but maybe everything is only working 70% as well as it used to. It sure feels that way.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      If purchasing power falls 30% it’s only fair that things are only working 70%. Spoiler alert: purchasing power fell way more than 30%, so we are actually lucky things work still as much as they do.
      - 3y ago

janwillemb 3y ago

> attendance has become optional I recognize this with my own kids and my students. Two things: 1) since the pandemic the bar for a sick day has been lowered drastically. 2) Educational material can be found online in most of the cases, at least in my university. Students think they can handle it themselves from home. These are not necessarily bad developments. What would be interesting to see is if the drop out rate has increased.

cies 3y ago
> Students think they can handle it themselves from home. Some have show to do well from home, especially when schools opened up a little bit at the end of the pandemic: all was online, some students thrived!
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Oh for sure, but the challenge is that every student has different needs; some thrive in at-home self-directed study, others need one on one care, others need a classroom environment, etc. Policy is set through statistics and cost / benefit though; the protestant classroom setting for a good while was the most cost-effective way to get many students up to a specific level. It wasn't perfect, but it worked at the time.
fullshark 3y ago
They are probably bad developments, as much as we want to pretend kids are strong minded independent learners, the reality is they are kids and need guidance and a teacher to instill discipline. This is something we've known for millennia that we want to pretend isn't true because it's more convenient to ignore, also because of our obsession with venerating youth culturally.
- bluedino 3y ago
  We've removed more and more rules from every aspect of society and suffered because of it. It does seem like things are starting to reverse though
- 3y ago

rel2thr 3y ago

i feel like this is just explained by sick days, flu season was crazy this year post-covid people are more hesitant to send their kids to school slightly sick or when there are sick siblings / parents in the household.

whazor 3y ago
This! We don't send our kid to school with fever. Sending your kid to school with a low fever used to be very normal. But post-COVID we are more tempted to check the temperature when the head feels warm. But actually the better way to 'measure' a fever is how much a child is playing and energetic.

Aachen 3y ago

> Everywhere * in the USA

Aaargh20318 3y ago
Is school in the US optional? Over here (the Netherlands) school is mandatory for anyone under 18. Skipping school without a valid reason (e.g. illness) comes with a €100/day fine.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  It’s relatively easy to pull your kid from the public school system (we submitted a form for each child, and have to provide a brief report annually on their homeschool progress), and the penalties you mention do not exist unless absence quantity is egregious (and typically, no financial penalties).
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  School in Norway is not compulsory. Education is. When we wanted to take the children to the US with us for three months the headmistress tried to make out that we needed her permission but in the end she could only threaten us with the potential problem that there might not be a space in the school for them when they came back. My wife asked for the lesson plans for the period and was grudgingly given them; all three of the children were ahead of their respective classes when we got back. Does fining people make their educational attainments better? I know that such fines are a big thing in the UK but as far as I can tell it is just a burden on the poor and merely adds a small additional cost to family holidays for the well off that is offset by lower prices during term time.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Where does the money go?
  - Aaargh20318 3y ago
    Where all money for fines goes, to the government.

jawns 3y ago

Is it possible that expectations around attendance have never been reasonable or even safe? In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness. Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces have dialed back extra sick time that was available during the first couple of years of COVID.

MattGaiser 3y ago
Back when I was in school about a decade ago, kids came to school sick as dogs as taking time off for being sick was seen as malingering. A friend at another school knew a guy who came to school with a stomach bug and puked several times throughout the day as they had a perfect attendance incentive worth grades, so to ensure he got his grades, he walked around puking for the day. I spent plenty of classes hacking and coughing. So I don't think they are reasonable at all. If you are sick, you should stay home should still apply.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Minor sniffles and sneezes should not result in anyone staying home. The pandemic has clearly altered this mentality but it doesn’t seem like a good trajectory. A little cold is barely an inconvenience.
  - from-nibly 3y ago
    No. Keep your kids home if they are sick. An screw every parent who thinks this way. My family got sick 6 times in the last 12 weeks because of this nonsense. If your kid is sick it's your fault if other kids catch what they have. I dont care if it's "just the sniffles" It causes so much inconveniece for my family.
    - freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      This is how it always was before covid and how it will always be if you send kids to germ factories (aka schools). Get the meds, drink water, go to sleep. Part and parcel of living in modern society.

deleted 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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Mizza 3y ago

Are there similar changes at Montessori schools? Maybe they could try making school less like prison, with less mandatory pointless toil?

Ajay-p 3y ago
I attending Montessori and enjoyed it, but this was 10+ years ago. We did not talk about the teacher's personal beliefs and politics, and there was no discussion of student gender or sexuality. It was focused on social and interpersonal development and academics. I understand some people believe discussing these sensitive topics is essential to student development, but I think it has made kids very uncomfortable and strayed too far from academics.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Despite what you've heard, they don't really talk about those things in public school either.
  - donor20 3y ago
    They absolutely do at least in CA starting in kindergarten
    - darby_eight 3y ago
      Discussion of gender seems to be pretty in-line with kindergarten education from what I remember 20 years ago. Hell, we even "voted" in the 1996 presidential election (I voted for the most attractive person, Bill Clinton).

fideloper 3y ago

Our kids were too young for school during the pandemic (thank god, it seems like it really messed up kids lives). Now they're both in early-years of school. Attendance is kinda interesting! We parents EXTREMELY want the kids to go to school as it's the much-needed break to get our own work done - both in basic upkeep of our lives/household, and in our careers. We need the school hours to be long. Longer than they are, in fact. (As a side note, my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess? wtf? Have you met children before?) On the other hand, life is expensive. Being restricted to only travel during the most expensive times to travel (around school holidays) isn't ideal. We can work with our kids to make up lost school time. I also just don't like this third party entity whose value seems to go down every year to control our lives!? Teaching (from the teachers point of view) increasingly is geared towards meeting metrics that are divorced from the needs of the kids. The teachers incentives are being misaligned with ours. Additionally, I think we've (royal we) grown distrustful of public school in general. Not in a "big government" sort of way, just that we need to acknowledge that US public schools are designed for conformity. Being different (e.g. having ADHD, or being "on the spectrum") is not tolerated well - you might find your kid in a special needs bucket that effectively segregates them into programs that might not fit their needs at all. At the same time, private school costs are huge and often the ones closest to you come not only in an extreme monetary cost a culture cost - being overly religious, or not religious enough (YMMV). So, yeah, it's hard to really want or care to "be a model citizen" to the public schools that are increasingly putting up the pressure on parents (that's a whole other topic, why aren't grandparents capable of being helpful any more? where did our support networks go?) while standards that might be outside of the school's control are lowering their ability to give quality education. (Also, pay the f*&king teachers, maybe!?)

dr-detroit 3y ago
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loudmax 3y ago
Absolutely this. For so many reasons, we need a well functioning public school system. Where "well functioning" means serving various needs of both children and parents. All children. The importance of education is something that liberals and conservatives actually agree on. But like so much else, it's become a pawn in the culture wars, so that the most dissonant voices at the fringes drown out the common sense concurrence in the middle.

alpaca128 3y ago

> school administrators have tried almost everything, including pajama day, to boost student attendance Because "school but with one funny twist" is still school with the same broken system. It's like the workplace memes about ping-pong tables and free food, you can't fix the problem without fixing it.

fullshark 3y ago
Ping pong tables and free food worked pretty well for a while, but the true motivator there was the illusory value of startup equity lottery tickets it appears.
- annoyingnoob 3y ago
  > the illusory value of startup equity lottery tickets it appears Kind of like the lottery, you cannot win if you do not play. I could have a job with a paycheck, or I could have a job with a paycheck and a lottery ticket.
  - whiterknight 3y ago
    There are other kinds of investments that are less risky than isos.
    - anon291 3y ago
      I don't understand this attitude. Most sw engineers at a startup are well compensated salary wise. Who cares if you also have a lottery ticket.
      - fullshark 3y ago
        Well at least 5 years ago it became clear you should value those tickets at ~$0 at most startups when making career decisions, so those tickets come at significant opportunity cost even if the other money is "good."

gravescale 3y ago

I think some parents and kids have realised that much of that slog is ever less about the education and more about using children as tools for buffing the school or district stats in the best case or it's just riot control in the worst case. Miss a day or two of school and now you're "behind" because you don't know some trivia¹ that's on your next standardised test. Mostly irrelevant to the student, but highly worrying to the school. The real things you need to learn, things like curiosity, scientific thinking, critical thinking, practical intuition, complex problem solving, unstructured information retrieval, team work and so on aren't easy to measure, so they're not really measured and then they're not optimised for. Which, when everything is minmaxed to death, means they're optimised against. That's the charitable, non-paranoid interpretation, at least. I did a homestay in Germany decades ago and the kids left school at about 1pm and spent the afternoon in woodland unsupervised, co-operatively building a sprawling multi-storey "treehouse" that was about 25 metres on a side. I wouldn't be surprised if the skills acquired in that part of their childhood mostly came from there rather than bullet points about carbon bonds in benzene or something. 1: Sure trivia provides "pixels" for a hoped-for complete picture eventually, but the broad substrate you place these pixels on seems de-emphasised compared to just hammering decontextalised details that are easy to test until everyone is heartily sick of the whole subject.

jajko 3y ago
You are missing forest for the trees - states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success. Thats not what the core of any population is, and hence not much catered for, not in public state funded institution. Now another topic is whats good for any individual kid and society long term, those can be quite different matters. I see those points in same way you do, but consider them more a parental responsibility and a way to give your kids a head start if you actually care. Look at what kind of folks stay teachers and how they are paid - dont expect miracles. Sad state of affairs, but it is what it is
- anon291 3y ago
  > states dont want to raise a generation of alpha males with big ego and unsatiable drive to success. It's unfortunate because regardless of what you think, the so-called 'alpha males' with an insatiable drive for success are the ones representing the vast majority of the tax revenue.

_heimdall 3y ago

This and similar issues shouldn't be surprising at all after we effectively declared that in-person schooling isn't really necessary and that kids would be fine staying home learning on an iPad. What were people supposed to take away from our handling of schooling during the pandemic response?

theknocker 3y ago

[dead]

g5095 3y ago

stigmatize the working class as boring while promoting alternative lifestyles as more attractive/worthy .. then tax their parents into the ground through run-away inflation.. strip them of any potential for home ownership or a stable life and then wonder why kids don't see any value in traditional education?

EZ-E 3y ago

A tangent thought - I may be out of touch but I am amazed of little the school system changed over time (at least in my country), while in 2024 literally all the knowledge and all there is to learn in school (at least until university) is available on the internet with top quality video or resources. Yet students are expected to show up every day at 8 AM to 5 PM in my country. When I remember my classes in high school - 90+% of the time is just the teacher talking, us copying on notes, the teacher demonstrating something or letting us do assignments present in the school book, it might as well be a video or interactive content. Do we really still need children to learn in this way and structure nowadays? Or is it just to let parents work they 9 to 6? It all feels... very inefficient somehow. (ps : I do not have children in school, as most readers probably guessed)

dredmorbius 3y ago
Pedagogy relies on more than mere exposure to information. To a substantial degree, information central to an education has been reasonably readily available since the early 20th century, a combination printing, cheap paper, and public libraries. Not entirely as convenient as online Internet access, to be sure, but a low barrier for a motivated student. There are notable examples of self-taught prodigies[1] ... ... but overall, organised, school-based education seems to scale vastly better. Teachers don't merely expose but guide, at least in the best cases. ________________________________ Notes: 1. One was, I believe, William Sidis, who'd taken refuge in a public library after being bullied, read Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and corresponded with Russell over errata and corrections. I'm trying to turn up a reference, possibly The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy by Amy Wallace.
thfuran 3y ago
>in 2024 literally all the knowledge and all there is to learn in school (at least until university) is available on the internet with top quality video or resources. It's all mixed up in and endless sea of shit though.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  no wonder there is usually a curriculum

deleted 3y ago

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kwhitefoot 3y ago

Perhaps it's because most schooling seems irrelevant to many of the students? I went to very good schools and actually enjoyed quite a lot of my schooldays but even while I was there I could see that a lot of it was a complete and utter waste of everyone's time. I spent six years attending French classes and three of Latin. I can't read, write, speak, or understand either one. I moved to Norway fifteen years later and spent a couple of hours a week in evening classes for a year and a few years of immersion in the language and now I am fluent with much almost no effort. So why do schools all over the world persist in educational methods that don't work? Why do they never teach people how to handle money, how to negotiate with tradesmen about repairs to a house, how to drive a car.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
It's not the methods. If you and all the rest of your class would have been motivated the methods would have worked fine.
- locallost 3y ago
  People didn't invent the saying "when the student is ready, the teacher appears" for nothing. But following that it's a fair point that how we do things is not optimal. E.g. pushing kids into classes based on their age and than having everyone for the most part do the same things. People/kids are just different, different interests, different levels. Maybe it was a necessity once, but maybe we can do things differently now.
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- acover 3y ago
  Are you sure? I struggled for years to maintain a decent mark in french class. 2 months of duolingo for spanish and I was able to have conversations. A grammar, written first approach is hard and boring but it does scale to 30 students for 1 teacher though.
3y ago

PaulKeeble 3y ago

Its world wide. In the UK the increase was analysed and its all due to increased sickness. Teachers and students are sick twice as much as they were before the pandemic begun and teachers are the second hardest hit group by Long Covid behind medical staff. The official count of UK children with Long Covid is 68,000 but its likely much higher than that since the NHS is mostly diagnosing Long haulers with anxiety (hence why the press has been big on all the increase in mental health diseases). Its just Covid, this is what living with this disease looks like.

MattGaiser 3y ago
Or are we finally just accepting that people do get sick from time to time? A friend at another school knew a guy who came to school with a stomach bug and puked several times throughout the day as they had a perfect attendance incentive worth a percentage of your grade, so to ensure he got his grades, he walked around puking for the day. At the time people praised his dedication.
- swed420 3y ago
  People are getting sick more often because COVID causes lasting damage to the immune system. https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/ https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/ There is an orchestrated push by capital to not acknowledge this basic fact. https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-awareness https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-a...
brohoolio 3y ago
My kids are still playing catchup in terms of illnesses since the pandemic. Our district masked for the first two years. Neither of my kids were sick for those two years. Since then they’ve been playing catchup immunity wise as they’ve been exposed to all the colds and other viruses. Which means they are absent more. I’m hopeful that they are almost caught up in terms of what they have been exposed to and the amount of times they are sick in a year will be declining. Seriously it blows my mind that folks say masks don’t work because if you’ve had school age children you know how often they are sick and for those two years the district was masking we had nothing. It was glorious while it lasted.

gilbetron 3y ago

My wife and I have noticed this, and it is really bizarre because it is across all kinds of demographics. We consider school mandatory for our son, except for medical reasons or significant events (funeral, for instance). Nearly all of his friends, even those that have teacher parents, will often be out of school, "because we wanted to go skiing" or "didn't feel like it today". I don't get it at all, like I didn't get the memo of "meh, school is optional". Our son doesn't really even want to miss school, because he knows we'll make him do his missed work anyway. I guess we are old school (we are older, Gen X parents). The pandemic seems to have, if not broken, changed society in many fashions, and I guess schooling is one of them. Many of his affluent friends still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug. We are far from "tiger parents", and push our son to mostly get As because he easily can do so, and feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work. Weird times.

Nextgrid 3y ago
> still won't turn in homework and regularly get Bs and Cs and their parents just shrug > feel guilty that we don't push him harder to do advanced work. Can you take an A or “advanced work” to the deli and exchange it for a sandwich? The people you are criticizing realised the pointlessness of it all and that extra work (or knowledge) beyond a baseline doesn’t make a measurable difference worth the extra effort.
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madamelic 3y ago
Long term, high school doesn't matter, college really doesn't either. One can accelerate the other which can accelerate life but long-term, if your kid sucks at life, no amount of school diligence will solve that. Inversely, if your kid sucks at school but is a good worker & intelligent, their school credentials won't matter. Past the first job, credential specifics stop mattering really. No one will care whether you got an A or B+ in Calculus in junior year. If the kid is doing alright and isn't getting into too much trouble, I don't see the issue of letting them play hookey with parent permission especially in their final years. My parents had a policy that if we had good grades, we could skip days occassionally in our senior year. We'd take the day off and just pal around on errands if we wanted.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

By compartmentalizing school to a square on a zoom call for 2+ years why are they surprised when the students treat it like a square on a zoom call.

geraldhh 3y ago
i wonder if videoconferencing also devalues the workplace
- bombcar 3y ago
  It certainly can; but it's less the video calls and more the endless meetings that they enable. Dilbert talked about pointless meetings 25 years ago; Zoom has made it more prevalent. At least if you're "off camera" you can just mute yourself and get some real work done.
itsdrewmiller 3y ago
It said in the article that this was a problem for schools that reopened quickly too (although didn’t give numbers).

FergusArgyll 3y ago

Maybe they don't want to have bathroom breaks tracked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838413

mminer237 3y ago

Talking with our local school administrators, this does seem to be the biggest challenge they're facing. From their point of view, it's just caused by (typically poorer) parents who don't care about their kids' education and saw how it seemed to be optional during COVID and so just don't make their kids go if they don't feel like it. It's really sad, and it sounds incredibly hard for anyone else to do anything about.

sethammons 3y ago
The article points out the rise in truancy is similar across socioeconomic boundaries
- itsdrewmiller 3y ago
  It was 9% in richer districts and 13% in poorer districts - I’d definitely be interested in further analysis to see an intra-district breakdown.
wildrhythms 3y ago
This is the first comment I see directing the problem at the parents, where I believe it rightly belongs. Is it not the parent's responsibility to make sure their child gets to school safely and on time every day?
- bombcar 3y ago
  What do you do when the parents can't or won't? Or take an example of a high school student who adamantly refuses to attend school, do you eventually just let him "get away with it" or do you put him in a correctional facility?
LakesAndTrees 3y ago
My experience with my teen has been that, post-pandemic, he and all of his friends simply decided they didn't want to be inside/bored like they were. We're struggling big-time to keep ours in class. We've tried incentives. We've levied punishments. It's like neither they nor their friends care - at all - about any of it (certainly much less afraid of consequences than I ever was). Add the much more common use of drugs to the mix (from 14 on), phones that are not required to be put away in class, and it's very tough to keep them on track. I didn't have half of the distractions/opportunities for entertainment kids these days have, and it was hard for me to muster up the enthusiasm.

mikewarot 3y ago

Kids have been soaked in the news that we're all doomed because of climate change, and they won't ever be able to afford the American dream, no matter what. Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it. They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary. Why would they care about school?

Workaccount2 3y ago
Economics and climate change? I'd be slacking off because it is clear that AI is going to be the brain job top dog by the time I get to career stage.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  Ahh, climate change. The go-to explanation for absolutely any negative phenomena observed in the world.
- darby_eight 3y ago
  I see a lot more kids mocking AI on TikTok than fearing it, but I might be looking in the wrong place.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Fear it? I would be embracing it. Send my allocated AI entity to work and send me the checks. In a sense it is like having a body double go to school for you.
    - anon291 3y ago
      Oh goodness... This must be satire.
      - Workaccount2 3y ago

mydriasis 3y ago

Talked to my niece about this, she's highschool age. She says that during covid, her school set up all of the infrastructure for remote learning, and they _still offer it_ -- that is, if she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to go to class much at all, save for the school's attendance policy... which means that while she has a 4.0, she's also near truancy. For a lot of folks, school was never good. If I had the choice back then, would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to?

MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> would I have gone if I wasn't _required_ to? Would you every worry about doing ok academically but falling behind socially?
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Have you talked to children that attend public school today? School is not helping them socially whatsoever.
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    Do I think there has been an increase percentage wise in the amount (and in the awareness) of teenagers who don't like various aspects or high school (or children who don't like elementary/middle school)? 100% But I went to public school not too long ago. High school, about 4,000 people. Really diverse culturally. I think you can make the argument that you had "the majority" (50.1%, 2k+ teenagers) who "did well/liked it" overall. Did they dislike it for one reason or another? Sure. But I don't think 49.9% were bullied (social media or not). I would say it's a smaller minority/more "fringe". Not to say that if it's 20% of children it isn't a very large problem. But... if 80% of people 'can and do' make it out + benefit from it + find a way to enjoy it... how come it works for them and not others?
bombcar 3y ago
They count doing the remote stuff as truancy? Given that I would do as much of my course work as fast as I could so I could slack off the rest of the time, if I'd've had distance learning as an option in high school I'd've been all over it (and perhaps learned not to double contract).

forgotmyinfo 3y ago

You mean vulnerable kids and developing teenagers don't want to be bullied and shot? Gosh, you could just knock me over with a feather.

schneems 3y ago

I hold views in both sides here. I teach computers at an elementary school on Thursdays, and my kids go to that school. As an educator I see an impact of absences even in this fun class that kids want to go to and there isn’t a grade. We generally have a 1-2 or 1-2-3 approach to teaching something. That is: teach it one week, then review it, then teach or review it again the next. When someone is out for two weeks they just don’t learn that concept and then later on need specialized attention to be caught up. Or in the case of larger class sizes or multiple kids out the whole class either has to be slowed down or those kids get left behind. That to me is the bigger problem: absences change the velocity of the class and make it harder for not just the kids that are absent. On the other hand: I wish school life was more flexible so I could take my kids to more life experiences. Grand parents live an 18 hour drive or an 18 hour flight away. We ski. We travel. And we value school. I wish there was an easier “if you are out for this week, then here’s a link to the remote curriculum”, but as a teacher, it is the difference between supporting a fully remote office and a hybrid one. It’s more work and teachers are already overworked and under paid compared to the value they have on society. During covid we had all remote school and while the outcomes of my kids suffered the flexibility was nice. I wish we, as a society and nation figured out how to find a way to make that work instead of going “back to normal” and learning/changing nothing. For instance: I imagined a nationally backed “remote school” any student could optionally attend on a week they are sick or out. With both live remote lectures and pre-recorded content. Maybe parent guides for some homeschooling. Or if students are lagging behind in that model, maybe sunmer school becomes more normal (or some other creative solution). It’s a bit like that Rick and Morty episode where he is in the VR game. “ What's this, you beat cancer and then went back to work at the carpet store? Boo.” We lived through Covid and then collectively decided to go back to the carpet store.

muaytimbo 3y ago

Kids don't want to be at school, teachers don't want to be at school, local residents don't want to fund schools. In NYC public school reading/math comprehension is at 50%. They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts. Unfortunately once a large special interest group is subsidized by the taxpayer and a voter base is established for local politicians and the jobs program never goes away even though all evidence indicates the benefit to the taxpayer is marginal.

vundercind 3y ago
> They fail as measured by their own grading scale every year. In aggregate, public schools are always lagging behind their private counterparts. This on its own communicates nothing interesting. It’d be surprising if this weren’t the case, given private schools possess the superpower of not having to serve everyone.
- anon291 3y ago
  Public schools shouldn't either. At the end of the day the entire purpose of a school is against equality. History has demonstrated that while everyone can achieve a basic level of competence, there are real differences in hard working behavior and intelligence that helps you succeed in academia. It's insane that public schools have to be some great equalizer and then they're simultaneously sold as preparing kids for the ultra competitive cutthroat world of academia and commerce. Either they need to not be the great equalizer and prepare kids for the real world. This would mean not serving some kids with the same services (although again, a basic education would be guaranteed). Or we could admit that while we succeeded in building a basic education system, we have failed at building a public academic system for the early years and just let the private academia take over.

anon291 3y ago

For two years we said kids didn't need to be in school and many well off parents realized that what made their kids smart was their own involvement, not the schools.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

In unrelated news: https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-record-high-of-2-6-million-12959783 https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-long-term-sick-hits-rec... The failure to prioritise rationality over economics is going to be seen as one of the biggest public health and economic failures in recent centuries.

gbacon 3y ago
An unleashed public health establishment leaping outside their area of expertise to successfully push for lockdowns was the largest unforced error in generations, one whose effects we’re still feeling years later. Scientists who study the allocation of scarce resources toward desired ends are economists, not epidemiologists. A basic truth of economics is that people respond to incentives. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Public choice economics shows us that government employees likewise respond to career interest. Incentivizing people not to work and incentivizing another group of people to pump up their rookie numbers of people not working may create a slight inflationary pressure on the overall figure.

donatj 3y ago

My high school had a maximum of three absences per quarter or you would automatically fail your classes and have to appeal. As a perennially sick kid, this meant I just went to school super sick, all the time. I’m not sure that’s better for anyone. Getting my tonsils removed as an adult was a literal life changer. I used to get strep 6 to 10 times a year. I have not had it since.

Bostonian 3y ago

Put the # of days missed each year on the high school transcript and allow employers to filter job applicants on this basis. Make federal student aid for college conditional on having few high school absences. That would reward attendance.

deleted 3y ago
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lsaferite 3y ago
That would codify the bullshit "perfect attendance' awards schools insist on handing out. Those kinds of incentives discourage people from isolating when they are sick. One of the many drivers of schools being breeding grounds for illness.
- Bostonian 3y ago
  Employers would decide how to use the absence information. Maybe 10 or fewer absences in a year would be considered ok, but 50 or more a red flag.

workingdog 3y ago

I'd rather my kids go with me to Japan than spend a week learning that a new gender just dropped.

monkey_monkey 3y ago
Looking at your comment history, your son might be better off at school than with you. 'London historically is a nice city. It's too bad that rampant criminal enterprise has been imported into it.' Jeeez.
- workingdog 3y ago
  [flagged]

jordanpg 3y ago

As I'm reading this, I'm also streaming the regional First Robotics regional championship in Georgia: https://www.twitch.tv/gafirst2 https://www.twitch.tv/gafirst2 I note without comment that those kids aren't in school right now.

treesknees 3y ago

I’ve been a classroom volunteer teacher for a computer science / programming course at a local high school. I can attest that this is accurate - I’d estimate 20-25% of the class is absent on any given day that I’m there. And of the students that are present, there’s a good number of them who are checked out mentally and really don’t participate. It’s surprising to me. Back when I was in school, I was extremely anxious missing any days. Elective classes are one thing, but I just don’t understand how students are missing multiple days of history or math or science and able to keep up.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240329120646if_/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240329120646if_/https://www.ny...