There's plenty of data showing that time spent in school does not strongly correlate with learning, and that kids that start school much later than their peers very quickly catch up to those peers [1,2]. School is mainly subsidized daycare, but it's daycare that's important especially for poor kids.
There’s a lot of data showing the importance of a school-like environment in acquiring language and social skill for young children, who were in no real danger from COVID and poor spreaders on top of that.
I keep seeing people arguing that school isn’t important, but also against things like school choice and I really wonder what’s motivating them.
I'd really love to see a citation for young children being in no real danger and poor spreaders, especially considering they are the hardest group to ensure mask compliance with.
> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare, particularly when prevention strategies are in place. An Australian study of 39 COVID-19 cases among 32 students and seven staff traced contacts across 28 schools and six early childhood centers and found only 33 secondary positive cases (28 students and five staff members) out of 3,439 close child contacts and 385 close staff contacts.58, 59 Several contact tracing studies have found limited student-to-student transmission in schools.47, 54, 60, 61
>An Australian study of 39 COVID-19 cases among 32 students and seven staff
A study about Australian schooling and children probably doesn't hold as much here in the US. My family involves lots of teachers. The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.
Well then here's a meta-analysis from June 2020[1], the time in question vis-vis school closures. A study from 2021 finding that school closures had little effect on community transmission[2]. Here's another from 2020[3]. Here's another from last year showing lower transmission by children[4].
>The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.
What the research suggests is that you're probably seeing kids under 12 getting COVID from adults.
You can poke around google scholar and see for yourself. Public health articles are quite readable.
As I pointed out in another comment, numerous studies in several countries have found that children infrequently spread COVID to one another or TO teachers but spread does move in the other direction.
You could have looked 2 comments up to find this[1]. This was well known at the time and the basis for COVID measures in schools in basically all of the OECD.
> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare...
"Danger" has other dimensions than mortality. Some of polio's worst effects emerge a decade or more after infection for example. The confidence of these assertions about the effects on children are not warranted at all. I'm grateful they don't die at the same rates but that's not an indication it doesn't affect them.
Maybe. We know what language skill acquisition loss does to children, especially the poor. And now with the extreme virility of newer variants it seems impossible to prevent infection over the medium term. So we’ve probably stunted the development of a generation of kids for no benefit to them.
The extremely contagious nature of the newest strains is in many ways a direct consequence of our global failure to contain it early on before it had so many chances to mutate. (eg how we did with MERS and the original SARS)
Asymptomatic spread and a lack of clarity on whether it was even "airborne" plagued our early efforts to contain it.
That being said, the lockdown-related learning loss is also a disaster, and one that will disproportionately impact disadvantaged kids and their communities.
The only argument I'm making here is that closing schools and switching young children to "distance learning" was a bad tradeoff and a disaster. It was driven by fear, anti-science nonsense, and the concerns of large US teachers unions. The CDC in general failed, and is run by liars with contempt for the general public.
I'm not sure what we could have done once the virus entered wild mammal populations and began circulating in places with no public health infrastructure. This happened pretty early on. The Omicron variants came out of mice populations in South Africa.
It sounds like you're making a case for "a necessary or acceptable risk" which I don't really agree with but I think is a valid position. But that's very different from the "no real danger" claimed above, which again I don't think anyone has the knowledge to honestly and confidently assert right now.
Every other OECD nation went back to in person schooling pretty quickly, and mostly without masks. They didn't have catastrophic outcomes. There is to date, no known serious long term risk to children in general, but nearly a century of data about the importance of socializing with other children to childhood development. In the US we got this wrong.
Small children never needed masks and weren't forced to wear them in any other OECD nation. Masks are terrible for language acquisition and social development. Also as I pointed out above the CDC even states that small children ~10 and under were never a major source of spread. Wasting effort putting masks on toddlers was social capital that could have been better spent on useful mitigations.
Socialization is important, but the instructional portion of school is mostly garbage, even at fancy private schools. The difference there is the caliber of peers. Just like ivy league schools don't teach you anything you wouldn't learn at a decent state school, but the peer group is wealthier and more motivated.
For basic social skills development for ages ~4-7 it only matters that they are around other children. Ideally this is with a lot of unstructured time. The "quality" of the other 5 year olds doesn't matter, humans are social animals and childhood play with other children is know to be critical in development. Closing schools for a year in much of the US was an unmitigated disaster for childhood development. No other OECD nation did this.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that by age 7 the average quality of peers has diverged significantly between bad schools and good ones. Do you want your children hanging out with defiant, unmotivated children who view school as a jail and run around shooting spitballs, spewing racial slurs, and even bringing weapons to school?
You're totally missing the thrust of the discussion. Being around other children is necessary for normal language acquisition, learning emotional regulation, self-regulation, speech skills, and on and on. Children below a certain age HAVE to be around other children to develop normally. This is well established and has nothing to do with the proper behavior or socioeconomic status of the other children.
> You're totally missing the thrust of the discussion. Being around other children is necessary for normal language acquisition, learning emotional regulation, self-regulation, speech skills, and on and on.
Are you suggesting that children can't learn these skills from adults, but must learn them from other children for some reason?
> Are you suggesting that children can't learn these skills from adults
It is well established that normal development REQUIRES contact with other children. Any specialist in early childhood development or education will tell you this. I'm in no way an expert here, but I've never once seen an expert claim that adult contact substitutes for peer contact in developing these skills.
> It is well established that normal development REQUIRES contact with other children. Any specialist in early childhood development or education will tell you this.
I admit I smell a little bullshit on this as there are a number of red flags here.
What constitutes "normal" is a subjective judgment relative to a culture. More culture-neutral professions use metrics like "health" in medicine, which are far less loaded, ie. if a particular environment leads to self-destructive behaviours, that's an "unhealthy" environment; but there is notion of a "normal" environment or a "normal" lifestyle. Since you seem fairly adamant that this sort of socializing is crucial, you will have to clarify if you meant "healthy development" rather than "normal development", because the former may be of interest but the latter is of no particular interest.
Furthermore, specialists in early childhood development and education would of course be chock full of good advice, but that advice is based on evidence that was also almost certainly studied within a specific cultural context. I'm not at all convinced that such advice constitutes general principles on how any healthy children must be raised.
If you have citations I'd certainly like to read them.
Splitting hairs on "normal" isn't the argument you think it is. There are normal developmental milestones in childhood[1], it's a term of art. For 5year olds it includes things like "Speaks in sentences of 5 or more words, and with all parts of speech", or "shows less aggression". Again, this isn't controversial stuff, ask any pediatrician, or early childhood education specialist. Hell talk to a speech pathologist.
> a specific cultural context
This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.
If you insist that I have to provide citations to convince you of the consensus here are a few. Vocabulary[2]. An article specifically about the effects of school closures[3]. I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?
None of those studies isolate peer interaction. As such they are a valid indication of the effect of school closures but the event is multivariate and you can draw no conclusions about the peer interaction effects directly. It amounts to "The experts say peer interaction is important so that must be one of the variables at play here" But the actual research some of which I cite in my sibling comment indicates the opposite.
> There are normal developmental milestones in childhood[1], it's a term of art. For 5year olds it includes things like "Speaks in sentences of 5 or more words, and with all parts of speech", or "shows less aggression".
Yes, milestones for western cultures.
> This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.
Cultural context has little bearing on brain development or language acquisition? Sorry, that's crazy talk. I was raised in a bilingual household, so by any quantitative metric I had twice the language acquisition of all of my peers when entering school, and my nieces and nephews are actually trilingual. Culture has a huge influence on milestones.
"Brain development" is too vague a term to meaningful respond to. Also, "childhood play" doesn't mean "play only among children" it means "play with children". Adults can easily play with children. I do it all of the time.
> I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?
Yes, I have seen literally no reason to conclude that children must interact with other children to grow up healthy. As for your citations:
A review of normal biological maturation of homo sapiens (uncontroversial), sprinkled with a plethora of cultural expectations around maturity needed for schooling and other western expectations which neither hold for other cultures, nor are they some kind of mark of a pinnacle of human growth. I could easily see some of these milestones change in the next 20 years as we better grasp what's happening during human maturation.
Its own synopsis says this is a qualitative study. That's little better than an anecdote to pique curiosity for further study. It proves nothing substantial, and certainly not that this child wouldn't have learned even faster if interacting only with adults, who naturally have an even better grasp of language than children.
This does not prove your thesis, quite the contrary. Per the abstract, "High school students from low-income neighborhoods suffer a learning loss of 0.4 standard deviations after a one-year school closure, whereas children from high-income neighborhoods initially remain unscathed."
In other words, children that have parents with good jobs (or a parent at home), or other adults that are around to supervise and interact with do just fine, it's only children that are left to their own devices that suffer learning loss. Where is the evidence that peer interaction is critical, which is what you claimed?
There is no evidence that the "great equalization" effect of school has to do with peer interaction at all, it's equally compatible with the hypothesis that poorer kids do better in a more supervised environment where they have to act within certain boundaries enforced by adults, which they otherwise wouldn't have with parents that are abusive, neglectful or have to work too much to put food on the table.
There's also considerable evidence that after school programs reduce crime because they spend less unsupervised time with peers, which reduces delinquent behaviour. In other words, the more time children spend with responsible adults the better off they tend to be, and the more unsupervised time they spend with peers, the more delinquent they tend to be.
So in conclusion, I see no strong, causal connection between peer interaction and healthy development. Positive human interactions matter of course (preferably diverse), but not necessarily peer interactions, which is what you are claiming.
Your still going to find basic spoken language acquisition happens at roughly the same rate across cultures. Sure, expectations around learning milestones are subjective but we’re talking about school closures in the US anyway.
You aren’t pointing to any evidence that peer socialization isn’t really important.
You haven't pointed to any evidence that it is important either, and that's what I asked for. The other poster rightly pointed out some citations demonstrating that the evidence for this conclusion is effectively non-existent.
Absent any evidence I have no reason to accept your assertion that children "require" such interactions, particularly since it makes no sense to me. As I said, positive human interactions are clearly essential as the negative effects of isolation are dramatic, but I see no reason why peer interactions specifically are essential and there's no comparably clear, strong signal as with isolation.
Anecdotal evidence only but I and my two brothers were all homeschooled and learned these skills from our parents. There is a great deal opinion among child development experts that is not necessarily backed up by evidence. I would need to see some peer reviewed studies before I would be willing to believe these assertions.
I suspect that the truth is that children need play and interaction to build social skills but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant. The challenge in the pandemic of course is that the parents did not really have capacity to engage in those activities due to their own jobs and Video Conferencing is a very poor substitute. But suggesting that it has to be other children is probably incorrect. It's just a hypothesis on my part though.
I think you're probably underestimating how much you learned this from each other.
> but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant.
Again, this very much runs contrary to the general consensus about childhood development. If you disagree, then you need to bring some facts and research to the argument.
I have only anecdotal evidence so this is a fair point. However I'll point out that I have not seen the experts provide facts or research either so it appears that they have the same obligation.
In fact a cursory survey of the research I can publicly get access to indicates that parent-child, or teacher-child interactions are considered very essential for moral and social development and there is very little mention that I can find of inter-child interactions as a critical part. Most of the research that I can find highlights the importance of adult-child interactions. If you can point me to some studies that counteract that I'm interested.
They might be poor spreaders, but they are spreaders, which largely udnerminded efforts to reduce (indirect) contact. They are basically a tunnel for spreading from one family to another.
> which largely udnerminded efforts to reduce (indirect) contact
One of the worst things that happened the last two years is this myopic focus on exactly one thing with zero regard to other competing problems. Everything has costs. Keeping kids out of school for a year plus has costs. I am fairly certain history will show that the costs to children vastly outweigh the marginal benefits gained from closing schools to "reduce the spread".
It turns out there are other problems in the world than just a myopic fixation to covid... the inability for "the experts" to balance covid against the rest of human existence is one of the greatest fuckups of our time.
The CDC summary I link to elsewhere in the comments points to numerous studies showing very little spread by grade school age children.
> They are basically a tunnel for spreading from one family to another
This wasn't and generally hasn't been the case for children under 12 as the aforementioned research points out. Spread generally goes from adults to each-other and to children and rarely in the other direction. It was a very poor rationale for closing schools, especially elementary schools. These kids have missed out on critical milestones in social and psychological development that far outweigh any known risk they face from COVID.
My understanding of school choice is that there is little to no difference in the overall money spent. It is just that it is assigned to each student.
If the student population were then to remain in the same schools, nothing changes. It is only when students move to other schools and take the money with them that there is a change.
>My understanding of school choice is that there is little to no difference in the overall money spent. It is just that it is assigned to each student.
ok, I would expect some significant change in investment because of needs of bureaucracy, IT systems etc.
I mean if kids go by default to school they should go to, then there has to be a process for kids that want to change, there has to be a way to register and keep that knowledge of change through the next sequence of that child's schooling etc.
I would expect it to cost something noticeable, and that it might also cost more or less depending on which part of the U.S. one were in.
How is this different from what has to already be supported today with kids moving in and out, even mid-semester?
The processes and tools to support this are already in place, we're only talking about scale.
There certainly would be a significant amount of disruption over the first five or so years as kids move around, schools would need to figure out expansion/contraction of facilities and faculties.
Ok, and so again, if someone thought school was unimportant - why would they support school choice given the significant amount of disruption? The only way I can see someone wanting to take the extra effort that school choice would take, whether it is my supposition of extra effort or yours, is if they thought school was really important.
The original poster I replied to thought that for some reason people who thought that school was unimportant should not be against people being allowed to choose what school to go to. That being against it was somehow contradictory. To quote:
>I keep seeing people arguing that school isn’t important, but also against things like school choice and I really wonder what’s motivating them.
so what did I say, I said
>If you think school isn't important why would you want to spend the extra money on school choice that such a program would entail?
for which I got three downvotes, because reasons I guess.
someone said it wouldn't be expensive, I said ok it seems to me like logically it would but I could be wrong, here are my points why I think it would be expensive. The guy above the post of mine you're replying to said it wouldn't be expensive for any of those reasons but there would be a lot of disruptions the first few years, and I said ok, so then a person who thought schools were unimportant wouldn't want you to shift schools for that reason, because who wants to deal with a bunch of disruptions in an unimportant system? (and in my world systems that have lots of disruptions tend to be expensive)
That isn't the argument I was making. I was pointing out that people supporting the school closures make a host of weird and at times contradictory arguments. People will at the same time argue that in person learning isn't important, school choice is evil, children have to go to public schools, but whether or not it's over zoom or even with their teacher doesn't matter. This is to my my an incoherent set of positions, unless you view it as an argument from a labor organization trying to maximize member(public school teacher) benefits.
> someone said it wouldn't be expensive, I said ok it seems to me like logically it would but I could be wrong
This is information you can easily find. Charter schools for example spend 61% of what public schools do per pupil per year on average in the US.
If you don't think the default school is important, why would you care if a kid switched?
--
If the response was that it's too expensive to allow them to switch that'd be logical, but I don't think that's the common response. Tbf I am not really aware of people matching the initial premise either.
The argument I’m making is that there is a cynical thread in the politics around COVID in schools in the US driven by teachers’ unions. This leads people to make these self contradictory arguments.
I didn't say you think that, you said you thought they were self-contradictory viewpoints, I can see how someone might want to not allow school choice, but also think school is unimportant.
School choice isn't more expensive than compulsory district based schooling though. Nationwide charter schools and similar average $6,585 per pupil spending compared to $10,771 per pupil at conventional district public schools.
School is mainly subsidized daycare, but it's daycare that's important especially for poor kids.
This is an important point in the United States. Many kids have absolutely NO order in their lives outside of school (due to absent parents, economic hardships, etc, etc). Many schools don't fully understand this, and do a pretty poor job of serving the kids, but I've seen public schools that fully understand what their kids need, and do their best to meet those needs. We can argue forever as to whether public schools should be responsible for the sort of things they are forced (by reality) to implement, but without the schools, these kids would be totally lost.
I didn’t see anything in this that addresses the concerns around the delays in attaining literacy for young children.
It’s also important to note that the original article does touch on some of these points, but it explains that the situation is different, and different points are also made, eg:
> Schools in a quarter of countries still have no plans for catch-up, says unicef
> A quarter of poor countries are not keeping track of how many pupils have returned to school. Going after dropouts while there is still a chance to tempt them back is urgent. “It could be hopeless in six months”
It may be vaguely educational daycare, but it's the tool that our society has developed that permits one or both parents to have jobs or careers. As you say, taking that away hurts the poorest the hardest (and rich and powerful, not at all. Ask Gavin Newsom how much disruption his kids experienced). As a side note, it's becoming increasingly well-known that one of the side-effects of Covid control polices is a large reduction in the position of women in the workplace.
Also - while what you say may be true, and there may be some merit to a lifestyle that does not depend on such "daycare", such a lifestyle was also not possible under lockdowns.
I'm not convinced having both parents in most families working is actually a good thing. It seems to depress birth rates in most countries to the degree that you eventually get a pretty serious crisis.
I think one parent working part time for the first 7 or 8 years or so is a pretty good option if you can make the economics work, admittedly the economics of it may not be easy
Zero time certainly correlates. There was next to no enforcement of remote attendance or remote assignments being done by the students themselves. Testing was also severely curtailed.
This is a general trend in (at least North American) education systems. An approach I liken to thermometer removal as a means of combating fever. If outcomes aren't measured, then are failed approaches at education reform really failed? How do you know? It's ingenious in a self-defeating kind of way.
My favorite is changing the tests every few years. You're still testing, so people can't call you on that, but the test results aren't like for like, so you can't compare them and see how things are going on a longer scale.
That and the focus on point in time test results to evaluate a school rather than analyzing results taken from multiple periods. X% of Y grade students at grade level in year Z doesn't tell you much about the quality of the school in year Z, unless you know where those students were at in year Z - 1.
The problem is that students and parents are not held accountable for failure in America. It's either the teachers, admins, or politicians who appoint the admins. So it's clear how that reaction to testing is incentivized. It was not always this way. Stuff changed about 40 years ago during the Cold War. The objectives changed, but the attitude that failure was always the fault of the educational system rather than larger cultural forces on students never went away.
Public schooling was started to keep kids out of the workforce but that doesn't affect your premise
"There's plenty of data showing that time spent in school does not strongly correlate with learning,"
I have issues with your first source who I believe has seriously misrepresented the data, made accusations of bias without providing evidence, was carefully selective about sources, and has a self admitted bias. Let's get into some parts of his paper.
---------------- [The Author makes his points]
Section 2:
In the Benezet experiment, a school district taught no math at all before 6th grade (around age 10-11). Then in sixth grade, they started teaching math, and by the end of the year the students were just as good at math as traditionally-educated children with five years of preceding math education.
the author thinks this is related to the age of the student which I personally think is a heavily weighted variable in learning. However this only means that there is a limit to the amount of time lost (the kids caught up) and age is a factor
He then goes on to New Orleans in which they lost one to two years of school, went back, and outperformed their peers, but the author also notes that they switched to charter schools which (not shown in your reference) have a noticeable impact. So again, there's another variable besides time spent. [a]
Additional points - immigrants and homework (homework having no value i.e. homework is like being school and less homework doesn't hurt)). These do appear to be valid towards his theory
He then mentions home schooling - He shows that by the time kids get to college they have equaled their peers. The author says that home schooling isn't like school because some (I hope some meaningful amount) parent's aren't actually teaching their kids, only answering questions (his words something about unschool). If home schooling was like school then this would work against him because it's time in a school like environment and those kids matched their peers. He provides no evidence that a significant amount of parents are operating in a way that is unlike school. I assume the only way that would be valid was if the kids made the learning decisions themselves.
-----------------[Author talks about studies that worked against him]
I stopped reading after the intro to section 4 which I will now quote-
"The strongest counterevidence to my position comes from a body of literature on the effect of other long-term school closures, mostly from disasters but occasionally from teacher strikes.
I’m inherently skeptical of these, because I’m suspicious that education researchers love finding that education has huge effects, that any disruption to education is a disaster, and that kids should be in school much more. This is in addition to the usual bias for positive results. Still, the studies exist and we should look at them."
To be fair , as stated, he does start to look into them. However he had no issues with using studies from researches that worked for his theory but if they work against it then he's skeptical.
So let's get into his section 3 though where he tries to poke holes in the studies that work against him.
His response to counter studies 1 - The more snow days, the less learning - His counter is that in the study the only snow days that mattered were in late February and since they tested in March the kids were missing test prep.
My thoughts - Prior he never questioned or looked at when school loss happened as a variable and how it effects learning. Prepping for a test is still studying the material I don't think it's fair to now start digging into the time of the year when that happened to counter studies that work against him
He does offer a decent counter after this by citing a study in MA that didn't show less learning from snow days
His response to counter studies 2 - Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (US) - He says this in response " don’t entirely understand their methodology, so I can’t critique them very well, but I have to admit I’m skeptical of them anyway" Again he states he is skeptical for no other reason because he doesn't understand the methodology and it goes against him
His response to counter studies 2 Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (Argentina) - he says "I can’t find any specific problems with this study. It just seems extreme to me" he then basically accuses the study of being misleading because he doesn't understand it.
------------------------[My final thoughts]
I'm going to stop. Basically for your first reference the author didn't look into this with an open mind, admits his own biases (because I guess he's a hero for doing that), and then looks negatively upon studies because researches want to find positive results for schools but only if those researches results go against him, otherwise he accepts them
In my opinion this person had an agenda and made the data(studies) work for him. Admitting his own bias is fine but that's only a small part. It appears he hasn't overcome it.
If you dig more into Scott's beliefs, it turns out that he basically thinks that intelligence is purely genetic (so, I figure he must conclude, there's no need to bother with teaching the "ungifted," since it won't matter anyway).
It's ironic that he repeatedly calls out "eliminating Gauss" as a useless factoid that doesn't matter to anyone, but he also worries a lot about AI safety and broadly fusses a lot about ML. Getting a solid grasp of linear algebra is absolutely necessary for understanding ML, so you'd think that "eliminating Gauss" would sit at the top of his hierarchy.
> If you dig more into Scott's beliefs, it turns out that he basically thinks that intelligence is purely genetic
That's plainly false. There is no such thing as "purely genetic". If you control for environmental factors that influence the expression of genes correlated with intelligence though, such as nutrition in childhood and exposure to certain chemicals, then the factors that determine intelligence are mostly genetic. This is just obvious. It's practically tautological to say, "all else being equal between two people, their only differences must be genetic".
Where there's some uncertainty is what environmental factors actually influence intelligence and to what extent they matter. Some people think school improves intelligence, but this isn't borne out by robust evidence; meaning, the genetic influence is much, much larger and school's effect is hard to measure.
Here's a thought experiment: if you redirected all the funding for public education to eliminating childhood poverty and food insecurity, would the resulting adults be more or less intelligent? The answer is not at all obvious. Certainly it makes for more "educated" adults by some metrics, but more intelligent adults can presumably educate themselves much better, which seriously undercuts the alleged value of schooling.
> Certainly it makes for more "educated" adults by some metrics, but more intelligent adults can presumably educate themselves much better, which seriously undercuts the alleged value of schooling.
Err, I meant to say that "certainly schooling makes for more educated adults..."
> He then goes on to New Orleans in which they lost one to two years of school, went back, and outperformed their peers, but the author also notes that they switched to charter schools which (not shown in your reference) have a noticeable impact. So again, there's another variable besides time spent. [a]
From your link, charter schools don't really outperform public schools so I'm not sure that this has meaningful impact on his argument.
> He provides no evidence that a significant amount of parents are operating in a way that is unlike school.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you can think otherwise. In your experience, do students have the same relationship with their teachers and school administrators as they do with their parents? Definitely not in my experience, and I expect in yours as well, so clearly the default assumption must be that there is more diversity in homeschooling than in public or charter schooling.
Another line of argument is that there is clear evidence that smaller class sizes are correlated with better outcomes, possibly because lesson plans are more catered to individual strengths and weaknesses, and there is no smaller class size than one-on-one or one-on-two in a parent-child scenario. Here again, the default assumption is that there is more diversity in home schooling approaches.
> I stopped reading after the intro to section 4 which I will now quote- [...] To be fair , as stated, he does start to look into them. However he had no issues with using studies from researches that worked for his theory but if they work against it then he's skeptical.
He literally explained the reason in the part you quoted: pro-education researchers have incentives to find schooling is essential, but researchers who don't have this incentive therefore don't have have this bias (and researchers who do have this incentive but don't find positive results are very trustworthy). It's the same reason we ask researchers to cite their conficts of interest on every paper, because we all recognize that this does bias results. I don't see a problem here, as long as the skepticism isn't extreme/disproportionate.
> His response to counter studies 2 - Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (US) - He says this in response " don’t entirely understand their methodology, so I can’t critique them very well, but I have to admit I’m skeptical of them anyway" Again he states he is skeptical for no other reason because he doesn't understand the methodology and it goes against him
Per above, the default should be skepticism given the vested interest. Secondly, Scott does this sort of publication analysis a lot, particularly in his practice as a psychologist, so if he doesn't understand a methodology then that's suspicious on its own.
> His response to counter studies 2 Teacher's striking leads to loss learning (Argentina) - he says "I can’t find any specific problems with this study. It just seems extreme to me" he then basically accuses the study of being misleading because he doesn't understand it.
Extreme outliers should immediately raise suspicion. If a signal is that strong then we should see it everywhere, but we don't, ergo we should be suspicious that this was either a statistical fluke or some kind of shenanigans.
This sort of argument is what has led to the retraction of lots of ivermectin papers over the past year and a half. The reasoning is sound. It's not an outright refutation, more a recognition that a single paper is insufficient to accept a conclusion absent corroboration, and we should investigate such strong signals that fail corroboration for fraud.
Let me address the researcher bias issue. "pro-education researchers have incentives to find schooling is essential" why? Researches may work for a private company or a college. Are all the researchers elementary school teachers? Either way, a possible motive isn't sufficient evidence of bias. Of the studies that countered him he only says he's confused by one but doesn't go in detail. Instead making it seem like the study is fluff by providing an inner monolog showing how confused he was.
Similar example. I'm reviewing a complex hand tool and say about its use-
"you turn it right to tighten but left to tighten, i dunno maybe I don't get it, let's move on"
To some people reading the implication is that the hand tool doesn't work,is wrong, or confusing to use.
If he has mistrust why not attempt to prove one or more of the studies were fake, used inaccurate data, or came to the wrong conclusions based on the data?
Because by simply mentioning the mistrust and bias, AT BEFORE he even discusses the counter arguments, WHILE ONLY providing potential motive as evidence, he manipulates the reader by leaving a bad taste.
Why even mention your mistrust at all? How is that useful in this scholarly article when you don't offer proof? In my opinion manipulation
The more I think about this article the more it just feels like someone so determined to prove his theory instead of using the proper scientific method and being open minded.
> Let me address the researcher bias issue. "pro-education researchers have incentives to find schooling is essential" why?
Because their research is all about the importance of education. It's like asking whether a pharmaceutical company would strive to publish negative results of their drugs; generally, not if they can avoid it! This is why recent pushes for open data and pre-registration are so important.
> If he has mistrust why not attempt to prove one or more of the studies were fake, used inaccurate data, or came to the wrong conclusions based on the data?
Because that's not the goal of the post. The goal here was to develop a general, informed opinion on a topic by performing a broad review of the state of evidence. Misinterpreting or dismissing one study here or there will not change the conclusion much: if there are strong signals in the data then other studies will surely show it, and if there are no strong signals, then you won't know to trust this one study over the others which found no such signal.
> Because by simply mentioning the mistrust and bias, AT BEFORE he even discusses the counter arguments, WHILE ONLY providing potential motive as evidence
He doesn't provide only motive as evidence, the other studies that dispute the "huge effects" that education researchers seem to find are evidence that these huge effects are not real, hence the suspicion. The whole post to the point where he starts discussing this literature consists of a boatload of evidence that should make you skeptical of those studies.
> Why even mention your mistrust at all? How is that useful in this scholarly article when you don't offer proof?
I'm not sure what sort of "scholarly article" you think this is, or what that term means to you. Hopefully my elaboration above cleared this up. This hand-wringing over one study is just an indication that the evidence is simply not that strong.
I think Scott looked into this with an open mind, as he usually does, but the evidence is simply not that convincing. For low income kids public education is a huge win, probably mostly due to the structure and safe environment it provides, but the evidence for its educational value is just poor.
This is alot but let me address one argument about home schooling I made.
The author uses home schooling as part of his arguments but doesn't show that either mostly different or mostly the same as being in school for the factors that matter.
I assume what kids are missing isn't being in a specific building, it's probably instructor lead education in certain subjects. However he doesn't discuss what defines school
He does mention "unschooling" which is student controlled and I'll accept that as being different enough from school for his argument.
The problem each parent operates differently and even if there are groups he doesn't show proof that unschooling or the similar is the majority of home schooling
More briefly he makes an assumption that home schooling is different from school in the way that matters when you miss it
I can't imagine that the loss could be any more than two years of school attendance, which puts them at the same level as their global peers who went through the same thing. The only reason we think of this as a huge loss is because we don't have free public education, but instead make education far more expensive and difficult to get the older you get. The dilemma isn't about how we can educate children, it's how can we educate children while simultaneously booting them out of a fairly piss-poor for most educational system immediately after high school or any significant pause during high school, to give them the option of a system that costs $15-20K a year in order to be qualified for unpaid internships.
If we lose a generation, it will be because we wanted to, not because we didn't have the ability to educate them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to grow up. There are certain skills, like learning to speak, that can only be done at a certain age. Once that age is past it is not possible to ever pick them up and be fluent at them.
Covid for under 12s was a disaster. We might as well have fed those children lead for the mental retardation we've caused them for the rest of their lives. Over a virus that killed precisely none of them.
> This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to grow up. There are certain skills, like learning to speak, that can only be done at a certain age. Once that age is past it is not possible to ever pick them up and be fluent at them.
We can at least be thankful none of those skills are learned at school.
Except being forced to wear masks does interfere, and I'm not just talking about the kids. The kids need to be able to see the faces of the adults around them.
It's a bit more than that. One under-appreciated component of universal, compulsory education is that there is an ingrained cultural acceptance that kids go to school and at least attempt to learn.
Overall attendance is continuing to decline in the single-digit range, and there are double-digit declines in attendance amongst selected disadvantaged groups.
Yes, education is mostly a product of culture. Just look at the Jewish people.
Universal compulsory education is a collective affirmation of the value of education in a society, and the extent to which schooling is “taken seriously” is a reflection of how deeply the society embraces this value.
To add on to your mention of cultural aspects. It was the cultural shared experience amongst the citizenry that Adam Smith argued was why public education was so important.
What is a year in the end? You got dozens of them, you can spare one if you really have to, to preserve life, say.
The damage comes from the tiering of education, where anyone not "ready" at the next stage doesn't get access to it at all. That structure is a policy decision we've made, not a necessary fact of education or life.
What other structure is there? All knowledge and skill is based off of more basic knowledge and skills. If someone doesn't have a grasp of simple addition, calculus isn't going to make much sense. That's true at the lowest levels and the highest levels.
Now if you're arguing that the way we test if someone is ready for the next level of a given field is done poorly, that's different and there could be a strong case for it depending on the field and school.
That's not how it works though. You can't skip socialisation and languages for 2-3 years and expect to just pick these thing as if you were 5 years old again.
And even if you could your second point is moot, it is a social construct but it will stay like that, so it end up being a fact of life for everyone.
> which puts them at the same level as their global peers who went through the same thing.
I don't think the problem has anything to do with country vs country loss or competition. It's about children simply losing out on essential education and development, which makes life a bigger struggle going forward. It's especially important for young children, where language and fundamental math acquisition are incredibly important and harder to establish as they age.
It's easy to teach someone calculus if they've had exposure to math since they were 5. It's hard to teach someone algebra if they weren't sitting down with an actual teacher and learning basic arithmetic until 3rd grade. Early math is a hands-on thing and parents often aren't good at teaching it (many being math-phobes themselves).
And that's not even getting into a lack of face-to-face interaction with peers among young kids.
I have to wonder if social anxiety and similar issues will be more common among kids who went through strict covid lockdowns.
Most private schools did 100% remote learning for a very short period of time, where I live most were only doing remote learning for 2 or 3 months, and then students were back to full in person classes. The public school system in contrast did 100% remote learning for 6 months and then implemented a system of A or B attendance for an additional 6 months where every other week was remote learning. As usual those able to pay for education have a huge leg up against their peers. The leg up will be substantial over the course of their lifetime.
> which puts them at the same level as their global peers who went through the same thing.
What are you talking about? The headline says learning loss is a _global_ disaster. Who are the "global peers" of a population that consists of all the world's children?
You know which group didn’t suffer learning loss? Homeschooled children, which indicates to me the failure is ultimately with the parents. Parents (even if they use schools) are the only party responsible for their kids. Even if you use public schools or public food or public medicine. It’s the parents responsibility to raise their children and teach them.
Society seriously failed the children with Covid. But not all of society. I’m way more aware of the parents who take their responsibility seriously. My wife and I moved, reconfigured our whole house, changed jobs, etc to ensure our kids got what they needed. On the one hand it was a good wake up call to a lot of parents (myself included), when I saw them mask my kids under 5 I Showed the school the studies (showing dramatic reduction in learning, IQ and ability).
The state still required it, I went to the state, they said “that’s the requirements to protect children and staff”. When I questioned why children need protection, they deflected and said “protect families from covid”
At that point I unenrolled all my kids and we have been homeschooling since. All of them are well ahead of where they would have been (using old milestones, not the updated ones).
Regardless of Covid, If you can homeschool I’d highly recommend it. As a parent my family has found it way more rewarding and my children learn way more. Frankly, I’m surprised people think the idea of putting “kids the same age” together will ever result in a more “normal” or better experience for kids. Kids need to learn how to behave in society, by themselves (10-20 kids to a teacher) it’s a zoo.
A lot to unpack here but I've seen homeschooling work wonderfully and completely fail -- within the same household.
Homeschooling is not for every family, perhaps not for most families. Parents may not have the luxury of time. Teaching is a profession that requires a level of expertise in subject matter and the art of education itself that parents may not have. Kids have differing levels of intrensic motivation for learning school subjects. Some children do much better with other authority figures than their parents for some activities. Not to mention children with learning challenges that most parents are ill equipped to respond to adequetely. Not to mention the value of interacting with different people and viewpoints. And on and on.
I'm glad your familiy has found success. I've seen it work and work amazingly for some. But I've also seen it fail badly.
Schools, especially public schools, have their problems, no doubt, but if I had to place bets on which society would end up in a better place in two generations, one where everyone is homeschooled vs one where everyone goes to public school, it's no contest. Teaching done by professionals is going to win hands down.
Homeschooled kids aren't taught by just their parent(s). They also learn from the subject matter experts who teach specific skills - I personally was enrolled in piano, martial arts, and swimming lessons, but there's plenty of classes that teach important skills that shore up the weaknesses in the parent's teaching toolkits.
Aside from that, homeschooled kids learn from the world around them. They learn from their own experiences, and they develop their own discipline. They learn how to self-motivate, and how to explore the world around them. It was an eye-opening experience when I went to high school for a few years. I learned so little and wasted so much time, though I tried my hardest by asking questions, contributing to the class, and respecting my teachers. There's just so little that can be done when a single teacher is forced to administer 40+ children.
Meanwhile, before high school I'd sit down and read a textbook for 4 hours (without being told to, just because I was interested). I'd go on long walks and sketch plants that I saw. Some days I'd do quite a lot, and other days I'd be done by noon. Even now I find myself approaching problems in a fundamentally different manner than my peers and I can't help but believe that it's because I grew unimpeded by the early academic process.
That's great. I knew a woman who successfully went to a top university at 16 after being homeschooled who graduated summa cum laude and got a full ride scholarship to a very good law school. She was intrensically motivated and geared toward learning. She's done very well for herself.
Her little brother tried to do as little as possible, failed out of community college, and was put in place at his father's company where he proceeded to run the best people off. His father conveniently decided to retire and sell the business to a competetor before that went on too long and the last I heard his son was still living at home trying to get his twitch streams to take off. He's not a dumb person. He probably would have done better with more structure.
Reminds me of all the middle class knowlege workers who at peak covid smugly proclaimed that everyone should just "work from home", I'm doing it and I am very important so why isnt everyone else.
Turns out the supermarket shelves arent at home and someone needs to deliver the toilet paper so you can panic buy your 200th roll that week.
First, I don’t think anyone should be a single parent. Find a new mate asap, if you can’t there’s something deeper there. If not for you, for your children.
That said, I get it. That’s a situation where you need support and help. I also don’t view it as a “failure”, there are optimal and suboptimal situations. If you didn’t have children in a marriage and / or you divorced your spouse; that’s suboptimal and created by the parents (ie a failure). In situations where the spouse dies, society supporting them is necessary. It also isn’t a failure in the sense of any control. Ultimately though, it’s still the parents job. You can’t just ignore the responsibility, you may also not do as well as possible, even if it’s out of your control. It’s unfortunate, but life.
> This is a natural extension of the american/conservative "all consequences are the fault of the person experiencing them" ideology.
You have a very weird view of conservatives that is really nothing like reality; at least based on what I’ve seen.
First point, your comment implies that your view is it’s your neighbors are responsible for your child? So what, the pedophile next door should take care of your kid? Or should you move and take that responsibility? If is your responsibility to move or take action of some kind obviously.
No conservative I’ve ever met have been anti-community or pro-suffering. They have their churches, their private schools, etc. they have more community than most. But they claim it’s your responsibility, because it is. It’s a fact, you can’t ignore. You don’t want your neighbor dictating how you raise your kids. You want help sometimes, that’s good. You can collaborate with people, but shouldn’t expect someone else to take care of something for you. In way of another example, if I got a dog, I wouldn’t expect my neighbor to feed it. That said, there’s a community shelter if the dog needs it.
I came from a poor household, but my parents never shirked responsibility. There were many times they failed to live up to their expectations. But that doesn’t change the fact they tried and understood no one was going to do it but them. My brother and I started working early and we had to pull some weight or we wouldn’t have clothes. It’s the way it was, I suffered far less than those who had irresponsible parents.
the flipside of this is the attitude that suffering and deprivation is virtuous if it is mutual, that you have a 'responsibility' to buy in to a failing and now outright neglectful educational model out of poorly conceived notion that this is leveling the playing field. it isn't, it never has and it never will. the parents who compound the maximum advantages for their kids will win out and the ones who can't or wont will be stuck with another decade of 'no child left behind' given a new, vaguely utopian name.
> Frankly, I’m surprised people think the idea of putting “kids the same age” together will ever result in a more “normal” or better experience for kids.
FWIW, I was home-taught up till 16. In my experience, there are a lot of pluses and negatives to consider, for the long-term health, wealth, and happiness of homeschooled kids (especially for continuing homeschooling for that logo). In my opinion, you need at least some reference to the current acceptable social and academic standards (for a variety of reasons, I had neither).
Neither. I moved to a remote job in a different time zone that worked odd hours. My wife was able to move her hours to weekends and opposite hours.
My kids are in a lot of different activities in the community and we have friends and family we see regularly. Getting to know the new ugh it’s as well is always good.
I can definitely see people doing this poorly. And my wife and I definitely missed stuff. But you learn. The public school I grew up in (wife attended the same one) was one of the worst in the state. Fights, stabbings, had to go through metal detectors, kids would yell all day in the classroom. We had one teacher arrested who was a pedophile and the kids all knew it for years but no one cared until after we left. That kind of school. Trust me, schools can be far worse than home. It really depends on each situation. That said, parents who care and are responsible are really the most important imo for any situation.
> Homeschooled children, which indicates to me the failure is ultimately with the parents.
> I’m way more aware of the parents who take their responsibility seriously
It’s hilarious how you think upheaving your entire life to homeschool your children is so easy and parents have failed if they don’t do so. It’s incredibly expensive and not scalable in any shape or form. This is why actual schools exist.
- buy important supplies like textbooks/sports/music/etc
- fund learning and recreational trips
Reading between the lines of your umpteen confusing comments in this thread, are you claiming that your partner gave up their paid job to tutor your kids for “free”? Is that the “opportunity cost”?
I was homeschooled. It definitely isn't for everyone. I mean it was basically a full-time job for my mom.
We had a group that we sometimes did events with, so I have more than a couple friends who were too. A few homeschooled acquaintances are kind of weirdos. But most of the folks from my homeschool friend group are totally normal. And a couple have really sparkling personalities -- I think they actually ended up with abnormally good social skills by hanging around with adults during their childhood, and not engaging in the weird social pressure cooker of highschool.
I suspect the reputation comes from the outliers -- most people don't know I was homeschooled until I tell them. If you could figure it out on your own, it would have to be the case that I was a real weirdo.
> Homeschooled children have always had a reputation for being quite a bit “off” socially
This is often by design. People homeschool a lot of the time because they don't want their children to pick up many parts of mainstream culture, or be subjected to the things that shape it.
There's a common joke in the homeschooling world: "I was worried my child wasn't getting the socialization of public schools, so I beat him up and stole his lunch money".
<<Now all of these children will be on that level, only with overworked parents who never wanted to homeschool in the first place.
I think this is the relevant quote. Homeschooling parents already self-selected as it were. It is a little bit like Linux. You get in knowing it will require some level of effort. People who choose Windows have no time to devote to that kind of learning. I would not feel comfortable mandating Linux for everyone. Some people are just not ready for responsibility.
I was not homeschooled, but my grammar school experience was borderline horrible and did not improve until private HS ( mostly because my peers were all, well, smarter than me ).
I think you have a point, but it goes back to the question about parents' responsibility and their failures as parents. I am not trying to make anyone feel bad, but we need to be able to qualify results somehow.
Oh I agree. That said, I know the families who kept their kids in school have crazy other issues in our area. Many had delayed speech by a year and what not.
Really not great options, we just did the best we could with what we had. It turned out well and I suggested it to others (if you can, being key). If you can also implies that you want to do it.
simply no, when the government makes it so you need 2 and a half parents working full time to be able to afford a paycheck to paycheck living IT's CLEARLY NOT OUR FAULT!
I wonder how this will affect attitudes towards schooling as an institution in general in the future? These children will grow up and take their places as policymakers, parents and so on - will they value school more, or less?
Perhaps we'll see some large scale restructuring of the school system altogether, which at this point doesn't seem like the worst outcome necessarily, every teacher I've met in my adult life has expressed pretty vocal grievances about almost every administrative aspect of their jobs.
I wonder what attitude the Philippine children will have towards their elders once they move into the "infirm and needing care" phase of life, considering society run by these elders didn't gave two shits about their well-being and learning for two years, well in excess of even what other countries were doing (much less common sense).
I'm surprised a HN community member with your level of contributions would make this sort of comment. From the HN guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
If you have a methodological issue with the analysis, that would be super interesting to share with the community! But these ad hominem fallacies detract from the thoughtful discussions that make HN a special place.
> "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
McKinsey has been indicted several times in obvious ethical issues (opoids crisis anyone) and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Do you have anything to say in their defense, rather? When a bad actor has been identified, you should assume bias instead of good faith by default.
> methodological issue with the analysis
You don't need to discuss at length the analytical methodology when you can see that the result is obviously false. Japan is certainly NOT the best place in the world for education.
I have no idea why the commenter found that particular statistic to be suspect but McKinsey is morally bankrupt. Their Wikipedia entry’s “controversies” section offers a few solid examples.
McKinsey is a global management consulting company. Some don't trust places like that as they "tend to hire mbas or others out of college and have them tell your CEO what to do (to justify what the CEO wants already)".
I have no experience with McKinsey personally other than them not directing me to the other entrance to their building for another business.
What the pandemic has shown as well: Where I live most teachers are still computer illiterates, who are barely able to make a voice/video conference with the kids. They have no idea how to teach online. I don't know how we got here, having teachers without basic computer skills, but here we are.
Another thing the pandemic has shown here is, that schools are mostly incapable of setting up infrastructure for learning online. Not only schools, but also states and the whole country. It all hinged on depending on Microsoft, whose tools were criticized for not being compliant with data protection rules. As a nation, we were so utterly incapable, that we were unable to provide appropriate online learning environments. We failed. Big time.
If students are not at the nominal learning level for their age, we need to meet them where they are. End chronological advancement and work towards mastery, topic by topic.
That’s because old people aren’t very effective at war compared to fighting age people.
He’s talking about during famines, during emergencies, etc.
I think if we’d asked most of the parents who skip meals to feed their kids if we should harm their kids’ future to protect elderly and disabled people, they’d have said no.
That’s nature: the weak and elderly die — and destroying the whole herd to protect them is stupid.
Humans aren't herd animals and live much outside of nature (we try as much as possible). Who would you say is more powerful - a twenty year old man who can perform much physical labor, or an 80 year old with a few million in the bank? In America, looking at their leaders; I'd go so far as to say it's gerontocracy.
> Humans aren't herd animals and live much outside of nature (we try as much as possible).
Humans are animals who live in groups and in nature: denying that is what caused ultimately negative COVID policies (among other social ills).
> In America, looking at their leaders; I'd go so far as to say it's gerontocracy.
This is also true of elephants, but their leaders are wiser than American ones and look after the well-being of young in their groups. (Complete with the leader often being an elder rather than the physically toughest bull.)
You also confused social credit with power, which is easy to do if you view society as absolute.
>That’s because old people aren’t very effective at war compared to fighting age people.
I often wonder about that. Apart from physical strength and stamina, does any army have old people (apart from a few officers etc) in?
At my older age, properly trained, i reckon I'd give a young person a fairly good run for their money - let alone a full squad.
The alarmism on here is absurd. The "herd" isn't being destroyed. School standards have been sinking for decades, grade inflation is crazy, but no, this is the moment the herd is being destroyed. Now all of a sudden people care about education.
The reality is it's a political narrative. The herd will be fine. The herd has gone through way worse things than this.
Ironically many of those older people didn't want to be helped. It was sad to hear the stories of people locked up in nursing homes who were not allowed to see family members for months and months, only to die anyway when Covid inevitably hit.
I struggle to see the point of saving for retirement in 3c+ warmer hellscape. All the more ironic to have those retirement funds put to work accelerating warming.
We all made profound sacrifices so that we all may enjoy the best chance of survival. No one thinks it's a good thing that children's lives were disrupted. No one is pro-pandemic.
If this is an unacceptable result to you - and sure, it should be - then we need to be working to prevent the next pandemic rather than wringing our hands about the current one.
> We all made profound sacrifices so that we all may enjoy the best chance of survival.
Would it be unreasonable for me to point out that not everybody sees it that way?
Did pharmaceutical companies genuinely make sacrifices or did they make bank?
Ditto for large corporations who took advantage of local competitors often being shut down, authoritarian politicians who used Covid as an endless excuse for failing policies and power grabs, and endless grifters who managed to cash in on all of the dollars flowing in ways that are too numerous to list.
No that isn't unreasonable. But when I said "we" I meant human beings, not pharmaceutical companies.
I do agree that pharmaceutical companies and other corporations took advantage of the situation in a way that is inappropriate. I don't mean to suggest that the response to the pandemic shouldn't be criticized, but that it should be criticized with the goal of moving forward and doing better. And if you're suggesting that we should hold these companies accountable, by taking away their patents on vaccines for example, I'm all for it.
What I more often see seems to imply we shouldn't have responded at all and should have "toughed it out" and just let people die.
> What I more often see seems to imply we shouldn't have responded at all and should have "toughed it out" and just let people die.
It's about making a smart cost-benefit analysis. We do this all of the time when it comes to death: for instance, we all willingly hop into cars even knowing there's a non-zero chance we could die in an accident.
I can't really blame anybody for the response on day 1 when we were operating in a fog of war with limited trustworthy information, but I think once we learned about the age-stratified risks associated with Covid, we should have focused on protecting the vulnerable and working to restore normal society as much as possible.
IMO, here's the big picture concern about the Covid response. The events of the last few years are possibly heading the world towards a global financial meltdown and absolute chaos (including wars) that could possibly lead to far more human suffering than anything Covid could have possibly thrown at us. The total response to Covid shouldn't be evaluated by just the last few years, but by the next decade or so where we reap the consequences.
No one thinks that anyone thinks it's a good thing that children's lives were disrupted. No one thinks anyone is pro-pandemic. The question is, and always was, about priorities and what's acceptable to inflict upon young people "just to be on the safe side".
The worst part about school closures is how pseudoscientific the rationale was, and the most infuriating part is that it came with a generous dollop of patronizing "trust the science" exhortations. Closing schools was a terrible mistake, and until we countenance that, it's going to be a problem.
Not any time recently. Nearly all US policy for the last 50 years or so has been to increase benefits and lower liabilities for older people, while doing the opposite for younger people. Just look at the share of wealth and wealth per capita for boomers vs millenials and gen z.
Didn't seem to be a problem for The Economist in 2020 and 2021 - I checked a couple of older articles and and they said there wasn't right or wrong - it simply depended on what data were keyed in to the technocrats' policy models.
Any advice on where the affected parents and children can get $5-10K for tutoring so that their kids can catch up? Is the WEF running any give-aways these days?
That’s the best part of it all - watching the media, bureaucrats, and others wash their hands of this mess they all demanded without debate or inquiry.
Catch up to what? Everyone always says "catch up" or "they are behind" and I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about (I don't think they do either). You are either getting an education or you are not.
A more specific example: I moved my children from a (remote-only) public school to a (face-to-face) private school during the pandemic. Now they are back in the (face-to-face) public school, but their peers are far behind them scholastically and need to... catch up.
And the worst part is those folks are the ones who were least able to do what you did. Not many people can afford to put their kids through private school.
All our government policies for the last two years did was fuck over the poor and enrich the wealthy.
…Oh yeah, and create an entire sedimentary layer of discarded masks in our soil. I hope people realize those things are made entirely of unregulated dirt cheap plastic. Consider how much micro plastic you’d be inhaling if you had to wear it 8+ hours a day.
But you aren’t allowed to say this out loud because a ton of people will call you all kinds of horrible things. Independent thought has not been allowed at all. Just shut up and listen to “the experts”.
It's not a binary "either you go into exact details with your entire answer or you're not thinking it through" - it seems intuitive that _many_ people have thought this through and spend their entire careers doing so. This is one reason we have standardized testing in the first place.
It seems rather out of nowhere that someone would suggest we aren't measuring and/or don't know what we're measuring. Sure, the measurements probably aren't perfect, but if someone is suggesting we simply have no data on the subject isn't something that seems like a genuine argument.
Being dismissive is a good indication someone did not think something through. Kinda by definition right?
And standardized tests measure, again I ask you, _what_? Isn't it funny how deep we are in this thread and no one has put a name to it? So child A does better on a test than child B. What does that mean? And I do mean, what _precisely_ does that mean.
I'll give you my opinion in the interests of fairness, there is no way to know what that means. Maybe one child is better at taking tests. Maybe one child resents the test taking process and isn't interested in participating. There are plenty of examples of meaningless tests that people believe in. Lie detectors do nothing, some people still take them seriously. IQ tests measure the biases of the person designing the test, some people still take them seriously. Haven't you ever filled out a job application and had to answer a 20 minute personality quiz? Do you think that works or makes sense?
Is it really crazy to suggest that a top-down structure, where the federal government comes up with some arbitrary standards, then makes up a test to measure compliance with that standard, all in the face of intense political interference - did a bad job?
And more importantly - are the standards meaningful at all? This gets to the heart of the original question. Is there a singular path one is supposed to take? Is it really meaningful to measure your progress along that path?
I'm arguing no one is being dismissive. You seem to be stating that someone has been dismissive as a matter of fact, rather than opinion, no?
I agree it's hard to say what that means, but that is an entirely different argument and has nothing to do with whether or not these averages exist. They do, as a matter of fact, they just might not be measuring things perfectly, as I'm sure we would agree it's hard to know what a perfect measurement even is.
I would consider it dismissive to pretend like these measurements that we do focus on today don't exist, though.
Do I need to offer up a list of standardized testing methods we utilize today or can we at least agree that we are attempting to measure education levels?
If you're saying "Is it that complicated to understand?" isn't communicating divisiveness, I don't think you're being honest with me. I do understand that _you_ are not being dismissive however.
What I am saying is that "education level" is meaningless, and any attempt to measure it will ultimately be meaningless.
> Catch up refers to being at or around a historical moving average. Is it that complicated to understand?
This is the statement, and while it's needlessly condescending I don't find it dismissive at all, it rebuts the point rather concretely. We have measurements that are specifically targeted at measuring education level. This is what "catching up" refers to. Those measurements might be bad, but I disagree strongly that they are meaningless as we have strong indicators that show the measurements do predict real-world success. GPA, for example is positively correlated with adulthood income by quite a lot.
Maybe these are self-fulfilling measurements? Hard to prove one way or another, but they certainly measure things that society has proven they care about.
Come on dude. Condescension and dismissal are nearly synonyms. I don't know why you're dying on this hill, your argument stands equally well without it.
Society deciding something is important is not what I mean by "meaningful" here. GPA predicting success is, as you note, a self fulfilling prophesy - so if we just assigned them at random, and then colleges and employers continued to take them seriously, that would just a meaningful exercise? And then if in successive generations we assigned your GPA to be the average of your parent's GPA - still great?
Then what do you mean by meaningful here? I can't think of anything people would consider more meaningful than ability to produce/provide in relation to educations purpose in todays society. No one presumes we're talking about underwater basket-weaving when we talk about the education system, because it's rather focused on enabling the youth to learn the skills necessary to compete in todays economy.
> GPA predicting success is, as you note, a self fulfilling prophesy
This is not an argument I made - it's a possibility, but I do not consider that to be an understood fact and I believe anyone, myself included, would have a very difficult time evidencing this claim in either direction (which is what I noted).
> so if we just assigned them at random, and then colleges and employers continued to take them seriously
This is quite the qualifier - no one would take GPAs seriously if we assigned them at random for the same reasons employers don't hire from their stacks of applicants at random.
> And then if in successive generations we assigned your GPA to be the average of your parent's GPA - still great?
GPA isn't a measurement against past generations, it's a measurement against your peers - this isn't a valid use of the metrics GPA try to provide. We have testing that attempts to answer "is the current generation more educated than the past?" but that metric is not GPA. Things like literacy rate would be useful for estimating if our education system is getting better.
Meaningful here means, you have set out to measure something well defined, that is measurable, and you have succeeded in creating something with a sufficient SNR to inform sound decisions. Not that it is meaningful in a moral sense.
Yes, this is a contrived hypothetical. I'm not stating this is how GPA works, I'm asking whether that would be acceptable. I'm asking you to suspend disbelief so we can have a discussion. I can see that isn't something you are willing to do, so I bid you a good day.
To the standard for the level of learning that students of their age have typically achieved, or the average of how much learning students of their age had achieved pre-pandemic.
Do you expect to "catch up" to where you would be without the pandemic? I'm not getting my parents back, my city isn't bringing public transit back, there is no world where the pandemic didn't happen. These are its effects, the kids are going to have them too.
I don't expect them to catch up in a time sense- to learn faster than normal. I do expect that it may take them until they are a bit older to reach the standard. Unfortunately, in many places there is no standard, and students are simply socially promoted, irrespective of any progress.
Typically they are referring to their best life, but most will never make it, because things like this, or racism, discrimination, trauma, bills, all get in the way and make them fall behind. Pretty soon they add up and you can never catch up to your best life. You either settle for what you have; peacefully or bitterly.
