"Democrats are the party that thinks education is important"
You mean "Democrats are the party that "says" education" is important. But actions speak louder than words. And Democrat resistance to charters, school choice, and of course open schools has clearly shown that teachers unions are way more important that actually educating students
Our school (private, boarding) closed in the spring of 2020. We reopened in the fall as a hybrid school with many international and some domestic students on Zoom but the majority in the classroom. We ratcheted down our expectations, inflated our grades to accommodate student stress - which was an ongoing mental health crisis all last year - and muddled through.
The reality is that stress is mild form of transient brain damage that - if it persists - can become permanent. (I recommend Paul Tough's book: How Children Succeed.) Being in-person last year arrested some decline in learning, but was far from what we would consider successful. Math, in particular, noted extreme loss of practiced skills.
The problem is the pandemic. Going back to school with students stressed beyond normal limits is only marginally better in terms of arresting loss of learning. Better off just making a 13th grade for the next few years.
Everything. These are all high achieving kids aiming for top colleges. Even those who are going to be first generation college students have high expectations for themselves. If kids don't give a shit about their education, then they are less stressed by school performance. We had numerous students (dozens from a student body of a little less than 600) leave school last year, because they were overwhelmed.
Last year was better than no school, but if anyone at our school would suggest that it was close to normal, they would be laughed away.
I guess I'm more wondering - what are they stressed about last year that they aren't normally stressed about? Stressed about getting sick or someone they know getting sick? Stressed about disruptions to travel and admission policy changes?
Sort of <gestures at everything>. That's why I said the problem was the pandemic. The adults were worried and they picked up on that, I think. Being in person this fall has felt more normal; we've re-started sports which help.
I think the future looked very, very uncertain for them, as it looked for all of us. My responsive point is that lost learning occurred even with in-person education last year, and we should adjust how we think about school for this generation of students until we can recoup those losses.
We did some professional development about the concept of "cognitive load." Basically there is only so much any individual can do cognitively. That's their load. The pandemic, the election, the general sense of uncertainty all created immense burdens on cognitive load.
What does all this mean for university education? I and other professors I know have all sorts of anecdotal statements about the ways things did and didn't work for students teaching online last year. Returning to in-person this fall made some things better and introduced other problems. But college-age students can manage school from home, and don't need adult supervision, in a way that younger students really can't.
It really seems to me that in classes with substantially more than 50 students, the online format is likely much *better* than the lecture-hall format. In small seminars with 5 or so students, the online format is nearly as good as the in-person format, as long as people have reasonable equipment. Medium sized classes seem to benefit a lot more from being in-person.
I'm fully expecting the omicron wave to have a couple weeks delay in the parts of Texas that are dozens of miles from the cities, so that it will hit us right as the semester begins. Would it be good or bad for me to do civil disobedience and start the semester online, despite the university banning most covid mitigation measures?
What is your goal in delaying in-person class? Prevent infection for yourself? Your student? Two things I'd think about:
1) How confident are you that you can time when "the wave" arrives where you live? I'm skeptical that your prediction will be accurate, because predictions are really, really hard, especially where there is a lot of uncertainty.
2) Will you be able to avoid infections for yourself and others? Or just shift the place and time where they occur? In other words - aren't you all likely to be exposed to Omi sooner or later? And are many of your students going to gathering with friends outside of your classroom anyways?
The big thing is that I think there's value in not having everyone get infected at once. Even if I just shift the infections out of the first week, so that each student gets infected in a different week instead of all at once, I think that's an improvement.
The past three semesters have all seen a big wave occur in the two weeks around the beginning of the semester. If you look at data from Fall 2021 in Brazos County, TX, it looks like the biggest wave happened four weeks after the beginning of the semester, but it turns out that the county health department was just overwhelmed with data in the first two weeks of the semester and didn't process some of it until October, when cases were coming down (this is supported both by stories from the health department in our local newspaper, and by the fact that hospitalizations peaked in the first two weeks of the semester and were already coming down by the time the highest official case counts were reported).
If the omicron wave happens earlier, and has already clearly crested and is moving down, then perhaps there won't be a beginning-of-semester wave this time. But it seems quite likely that there will be, especially since there's a good chance of the omicron wave peaking right around that time in mid-January (since we are likely a week or two behind the cities like Houston that are starting to see their wave now).
It's true that many students are going to gather with friends, and that is the likeliest way for them to get infected. But cutting the ties across different social groups (like classes) prevents the wave in every social group from being synchronized all at once.
I’d argue most human capital formation in university students happens outside the classroom. I think I would have missed the most important parts of university of I would have attended classes from my parents house.
The fact that righty libertarian tech bros were statistically illiterate to take the failure of a bunch of range restricted fiddley interventions to produce any education miracles as evidence that education didn't matter should be enough to let us disregard them for a while.
As a resident of flyover country (suburban Des Moines to be exact) with two small children in school and another two at home, the fact that this argument is still being circulated boggles my mind. Just another anecdotal point for me that shows we are rapidly splitting into two cultures, because the argument for closing schools is a cultural one not based on "science" but relative values of risk.
As someone who is an educator there is some false ideas here. I know teachers and teacher unions are some of everyone’s favorite punching bags as the go to bad guy for all problems of education.
Teaching virtually on zoom was not easier than in person instruction. It was ridiculously hard to create systems from scratch, i.e. documents etc.
Most schools outside of some cities did reopen last year. They started hybrid which was even harder then went full reopening.
I think the NY/DC base of most pundits is giving them a somewhat myopic view.
The historical revisionism is a bit much. I am glad Matt Y. did bring up the polling on poorer parents. As I recall lots of parents were demanding schools close. One gives far too much power to unions to say it was just their lobbying. The dramatic parent change of mind has of course went down the memory hole.
I can say anecdotally that no teacher I know wants to go back to virtual learning. I have also seen this in NEA publications for its members. Again that doesn’t mean you can’t find anyone who says it, but it certainly isn’t the dominant view. So if that is your current talking point, please just stop.
I think a far better criticism of education unions and school boards is that got so cowed by a George Floyd murder that they gave in to very destructive ideas pushed by Ed schools, activists, and DEI industrial complex on “equity” in grading, discipline, and even giving tests that is currently doing massive damage to students right now. Ask
It would be helpful if someone has an explanation why lower SES parents were/are more supportive of school closures than high SES parents. Keeping kids at home has to be far more onerous for the former than the latter.
I've never seen solid research, but a few ideas that seem plausible -
1) COVID was more dangerous for lower SES people than higher SES people. (This is true, although I'm not sure if it was the reason.)
2) Higher SES kids tend to go to better schools, so the cost of missing a few months might seem higher than at a school that didn't seem to be providing much value to begin with.
3) If you were sitting on your laptop 10 feet away while your kid took classes, you may have had a clearer view of any problems than someone who had to keep working outside the home during remote school hours.
4) Partisan affiliation drove a lot of how people felt about this, and while it doesn't track closely with income on a national level, within a given area, higher SES people tend more conservative. (Of course, some people felt strongly enough to buck their co-partisans on this - myself included - but on average it may have played a role.)
Another very straightforward idea that I think tops the rest is that lower SES people tend to value schooling less and higher SES people tend to value schooling more. I'm sure it's not always the case, but it's what I see within my own extended family and circles of friends and acquaintances.
From the perspective of a parent not always clear on how that sausage got made, the three most vocal groups pushing for school closures appeared to be: the teachers' unions (especially in the large cities), the school board members with education backgrounds (as opposed to the career politicians), and community groups led by teachers.
In my area, I saw no parents of school aged kids pushing for school closures. For a remote option, yes - but even the parents who wanted that for themselves (about 1/3 when parents here were surveyed in summer 2020) never seemed to want to impose that broadly. Presumably they understood why that wasn't viable for everyone.
And I don't think teachers were being lazy - I think it came from a place of sincerely held fear. But then I also think the Jan 6th rioters sincerely believed the election was stolen. That's not a justification. I think many young, healthy teachers let themselves get dragged into echo chambers greatly exaggerating the risk, because it tapped into a preexisting belief that their jobs were uniquely hard and special. When both as citizens and public employees, they had an obligation to do their due diligence before trying to shape policy.
You should be able to edit now - underneath your comment, next to the heart and reply, should be three dots, and if you click there, then an "edit" button should appear.
Edit: under your own comment there is no heart, there is "reply", "delete", and then the three dots.
Following up on your omicron post, are you encouraged by the lack of a surge in deaths in South Africa or, as far as I’ve seen, anywhere that’s had omicron? It really does seem like this wave is less lethal.
I don't want to close schools. What worries me, though, is that a lot of schools are running on fumes and tape. If enough teachers call out sick, they're going to have to close, because there's no subs.
My best hope is that instead of block closures of entire districts, it will be individual schools.
The flip side is that for those of us in conservative areas, the schools are not only going to stay open, but they will refuse to use any mitigation strategies. Last year, my district stayed open, with full time instruction for K-5 and hybrid for 6-12 (secondary went back full time in the spring). They had almost zero days closed, because everyone took it seriously and the district wanted to prove it could be done. This year? They're treating it all as a joke.
It's been an open question how much of student learning over the years is a product of natural development and how much is due to schooling -- or even just due to any form of education.
To what degree do kids get better at reading through the early grades because their brains are developing new abilities and to what degree is it because of explicit instruction and scaffolded practice?
Like, we would not teach very much algebra to little kids because we know that they lack the cognitive development to handle that kind of abstraction. They just are not ready.
It would be great if this pandemic gave us more insight into this class of questions. It would be great if were collecting good enough data to -- eventually -- address this basic question.
Yes, Matt nodded his head in this direction. But he missed the fact that a lot of advancement is (likely?) just due to cognitive development.
And if we take that idea seriously, the lack of schooling might not be the only cause of "learning loss." The broader stress of living through a pandemic, what is otherwise doing to their parents, communities and the the culture could also be impacting learning.
Closing schools are not the only the thing that might be hurting kids. I know this sounds shocking to some, but kids' stress hurts their academic performances. Moving a lot is bad for kids academic performances. Parents getting divorced is bad for the academic performance (at least in the short run). Lack of food? Lack of stability? All these things matter.
How can Matt seriously think (or write) that lack of schooling is the only relevant change (as compared to the be beforetimes)? How can he suggest that the learning loss he sees is entirely due to school buildings being closed?
People get better at things because they are taught it/practice doing it.
If you don't teach a kid how to read, or do algebra they almost certainly won't learn it. And even after you learn it, to master it, you need to practice, practice, practice.
If those kids were at home, reading books, and doing workbooks all the time, then they probably would probably learn just as much or more.
But if they are watching TV, playing video games, then they will learn little or nothing.
Which do you think they were doing?
Mine were reading and doing workbooks. But then again, we had always been planning on home schooling.
Plus we aim for about 300 days of instruction a year.
1) I don't know what they were doing. That's one of my points.
2) I don't think we know whether kids without teachers would "probably learn just as much or more" than if they just were home reading and practicing than if they were taught and supported by teaching with well constructed units, lessons and activities. I've never seen any evidence that that is really plausible. But maybe my judgment on that is wrong and this COVID era will give us the data to show that.
3) There IS good data that serious increases in instructional time DOES lead to increased learning. But that generally costs quite a bit. Increasing instructional time by 67% would raise labor costs considerably. If your family can eat that, that's quite valuable for your kids. Most families cannot afford that and most communities have not decided that its worth the cost.
If that were the case we’d expect to see similar levels of learning loss among kids whose schools stayed open, like many private school students. Do we?
Unfortunately, private schools don't take the tests. And -- in reality -- private schools did not do a better job of keeping their buildings open. We did not see the enrollment shifts that many people were claiming. So much about schooling in the pandemic was falsely reported.
I was VERY frustrated by those -- including huge numbers of teachers -- that advocated for canceling or diminishing standardized testing. NCLB turned any state standardized testing into something for teachers to fear. This has been a HUGE harm. (dumbed down the tests, too.)
These holes in the testing data really concern me. We are missing incredibly opportunities to actually learn something here. That's a valuable silver lining. We are going to be stuck trying to look at longer term trajectories (not the worst thing) by relying on families and students to correctly report how much in-person and how much remote schooling they attended over these years. We have some district data on that, thank god, but not contemporaneous achievement data.
And school attendance data is famously horrendously bad. That's been reported to be even worse during the pandemic. I don't mean that it shows bad things. I mean that it is just not accurate and trustworthy.
So, we have parents holding kids out of school quite a bit. And the populations that are most associated with lower achievement are the ones holding kids out more. Then we get remote school. And who knows what the out-of-school factors at play are.
There needs to be TON of work done to untangle this stuff. This ia going to take a long time to figure out how to to get good answers out of this.
"by relying on families and students to correctly report how much in-person and how much remote schooling they attended over these years"
Doesn't sound like so hard to do. It will be messy and have a little bit of noise but I bet most parents can correctly remember 1 month or half a year. Also, why can't we just look at school districts? My district was closed much more than some neighboring districts that often benchmark to one another. Seems as good as you're going to get for real-world data that approaches an RCT
1) Famously, people don't accurately report who they voted for or even whether they voted a short time later. You think that people are going to accurately report how many days their kids were in school? How many days they were online? How many days they actually signed in?
2) The attendance data collection by teachers was poor. I've only got anecdotes on that, but I don't see any reason to think that the quality of that data -- the district data we have -- is highly credible.
3) Nothing like RCT at all. First, not random. Second, not controlled. It's not even a natural experiment. It's all observational. There are a TON of correlates to student performance that seem to have influenced school building closure decision-making.
I don't know how much worse the another distract data that this stuff is, but I wish there's been more attention to collecting it well through this. I know, time of upheaval. Plenty of the things to worry about. And from a classroom perspective, attendance data is not the most important thing. But from a research (and policy-implications) perspective, it matters a lot.
People do report fairly accurately who they voted for. It's true that some large single digit percent of people inaccurately report that they voted for the eventual winner, rather than who they actually voted for. But if for some reason you lack data on the actual vote shares in different districts, or different demographics, surveying people will be a useful indicator of which districts and demographics were stronger or weaker for various candidates. You'll still be able to detect strong enough correlations, even though there will be a bit more noise.
We live in an era when elections are decided by small single digit margins, and we are commenting on a author who does not believe that the x-axis generally should go down to zero.
In that context, large single-digit errors are just killer. The noise there just absolutely swamps the signal.
yeah, if there are few enough factors, you can find some of the stronger signals, but we run into huge problem of magnitude and sign error when there are a lots of factors.
That's a very small sample size. The states are not homogenous. And it still begs the question of the accuracy of the data.
Finding strong methods to handle this without violating their assumptions is gonna be hard hard work, and even then the results are going to have very wide confidence intervals -- likely larger than the actual effects if well modeled. And THAT's where the sign errors can come from.
Is the idea that nothing can be learned from comparing states to each other?
Yes, it will be quite tricky like all real world problems of this nature. Good studies will attempt to control for confounders. And good analysis will take state studies and compare them to good school district studies, and compare them with survey data from individual students and any country comparisons that can be made. And they'll attempt to study test scores, reading comprehension, psychological studies, and whatever else they can come up whether it's clever or far too clever.
If the body of evidence points to learning loss having a lasting effect the studies will show the cost of closing to be higher than some thought. If it doesn't that's evidence for the other position.
The way I'm understanding your argument is almost that "nobody can know anything" while at the same time asserting even harder to evaluate claims, like "the stress of the pandemic is actually the cause of poor test scores".
There would be confounding issues; people with the financial and other means to move their kids to private schools also use those means to reduce stress in their households
Are they all experts in cognitive development? Are the all curriculum experts? Are they all pedagogical experts? Do they all know how to recognize and/or treat trauma in kids?
Let people decide the best way to do the wiring and plumbing in their homes. They'll know better than anyone else ever could. Let people decide the best way to fix their cars. They'll know better than anyone else ever could. Let people decide for themselves the safe levels of toxins in their food and water. They'll know better than anyone else ever could. Let people decide how to fix airplanes for themselves. They'll know better than anyone else ever could.
Just face it, you have absolutely no respect for the skill, knowledge and/or expertise of educators (including teachers). Just own it. Start with it. Teachers don't know anything that parents don't. Teachers bring nothing to the table that parents don't already have -- other than maybe time?
No. I said it was a question how much is just a product of natural cognitive development.
I believe in schools and education. I have very specific ideas about which is natural cognitive development and what is is not. But there's been no way to check that. I don't often talk or write about this because I am pulling it out of my ass.
But this COULD BE a chance to examine these questions with real data.
Just to add my own observations from my three school-age children - every kid is different and the restrictions and Covid affected them differently.
My oldest, who just turned 18 and is a senior currently, was always a self-starter and required very little parental intervention to do well with pretty much anything. Our high schools here did a hybrid system in the fall of 2020 and at first she did fine. But the hybrid schedule was very disrupting, so she opted into online-only, which was an option given by the district. Academically she did worse, but OK - no longer straight A's but not failing either. But she developed depression and anxiety which affected everything, including her grades. Therapy, medication and going back to 100% in-person school has helped, but she's not completely over it yet.
My next kid, currently 16, was historically kind of the opposite of my daughter - not much of a self starter, diagnosed with ADD, easily distracted, etc. Online/hybrid school for him was a complete shit-show. One of us parents would need to check on him constantly to make sure he was doing his work. And he hated being online. HATED. If the district had frozen grades in the spring of 2020 when schools were completely closed, he would have failed that semester completely.
We ended up transferring him to a smaller and different school in the district that had 4 days a week in person and also utilized a different teaching model. The change was an immediate 180 for him academically, psychologically and socially.
My youngest, in 6th grade this year, also has attention issues. School closings in the Spring of 2020 were a shit-show similar to my older boy. Fortunately, our district made the wise decision to have 100% in-person school for elementary. So the 2020-2021 year was normal for him except for masks and a couple of times he had to stay home due to quarantine/exposure rules.
Now I'm an educated person who has worked remotely for almost 5 years. And my wife, with a STEM PhD, had recently retired from the USAF and hadn't started full-time work, so she was home as well. And we are in the 2nd quintile for income, probably upper-middle-class for our area. We had a ton of advantages that most other families did not have - two parents at home, stable marriage, secure financially, educated parents who help kids with learning, etc. And yet it was still a massive struggle, especially for my daughter and her depression and anxiety which didn't have an obvious cause, except for the timing with Covid restrictions.
So I think of our advantageous and fortunate position and the struggles we faced, and try to imagine how it must have been for the many parents who did not have our advantages. It's really no wonder that many parents are upset and angry about how things turned out. That anyone is considering repeating school closures at this stage is mind-boggling.
This resonates a lot with our experiences with our two kids (including the mental health issues, which were serious). The one who did the rock bottom worst at home turned around instantly the day she found out she would be starting in-person school and has flourished ever since.
I basically agree, as usual. I suspect that your perspective is influenced by your status as parent (a trait seemingly absent from most Left pundits) and by your living in a major city. Nothing wrong, but most Americans live in less urban environments than you (and perhaps 95% of all national-class pundits)
As usual, Matt's understanding of the difference between a proxy and a construct are -- when it comes to standardized tests, at least -- is grossly deficient.
Standardized tests measure...well, they only measure what they measure. They only even attempt to measure the academic standards and they only even try to measure a subset of them, and much of the time they don't even do that that well.
So, what do the test scores tell us? They tell us that the kids really feel behind trend ON THE THINGS THAT WE CAN TRUST STANDARDIZED TESTS TO MEASURE. That's not all the standards, not all the academic skills and not all the things we expect kids to learn.
It takes a lot more than this data to conclude how much learning loss there might have been. Heck, we don't even have a good picture of how comparable the cohorts were. For example, imagine that a bunch of higher scoring kids (e.g., from higher SES families) transferred to private school -- as so many said was happening. That would lower the average because private school kids don't take these tests. That wouldn't be because any kids did worse that their equivalents in previous cohorts. It would just be a product of a different composition in the cohort. Heck, everyone could be doing BETTER, but differences in the composition of the tested population could throw off the average.
Now, I don't think that's what happened. But I don't know. I have no idea how the cohorts compare. I don't know how the testing windows compare. I don't know how the tests in each state compare (i.e., my understanding is that some were shortened). I don't know how much the kids lost test-taking skills for the cancelled 2020 tests, thus the lower scores are for construct-irrelevant reasons.
I don't know much teachers sacrificed test prep -- the kind I don't like -- during the year, this eliminating artificial inflators of previous years' test scores. I don't know.
And Matt doesn't either.
Does this mean that it's ok to close schools? Of course not! But if Matt can't do better than cite bad analysis of bad data, well, what are paying for here? Shouldn't he be able to come up with better arguments than that?
I was really worried about closing schools in 2020. I wrote my municipal and school governance to urge GREAT care in closing schools because we already knew which families and kids would be most burdened by the harms. I was originally against closing schools and I HATE when schools are closed. I really worry about the kids who are held out of school.
But I have the humility to recognize that we know DAMNED little about so-called "learning loss" and that the kind of data and analysis that Matt is citing offers very little insight into the issue.
Matt has missed so much that is important here, I can not fit it into a single comment. But let me start with this one:
Children are not the only people who work in schools. We need to consider the fact that adults work in schools, too.
* We ought to at least pause and consider the morality of dumping the cost (in health risk) for all the benefits) of children being in school on a very small group of adults.
* We need to -- as practical matter, not a moral matter -- be prepared for what we do when a few teachers get sick. We need to be prepared for when MORE than a few teachers get sick. In NYC, they have a long traditional of closing schools on the Jewish High Holidays (Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah). That not because kids would otherwise miss school. That's because historically there were so many jewish teachers in the schools that they simply couldn't staff them sufficiently to keep them open. Losing teachers means, eventually, you have to close schools. You simply cannot have enough substitutes ready to fill in for everyone.
* If we want to keep schools open, we need to be proactive about keeping teachers healthy. (not just teachers, of course. bus drivers matter. school cafeteria staff matter. janitors matter. the rest of the staff matters.) Matt keeps talking about keeping schools open, but rarely about what needs to be done to keep them open. No acknowledgement that there's a very practical consideration of teacher health. Like, right now with omicron and breakthrough infections, what does he think we need to do? Unless we think that's ok to have teachers who have tested positive to keep teaching, how do we keep the teaching fore force from catching COVID?
* Then there's the perception and confidence thing. How do we convince teacher that we have their backs and take their health seriously. If teachers don't think that we are taking their health seriously, why should they be in favor of keeping schools open his winter? Why should they show up? Why shouldn't they quit? Because the education of other people's kids should be so much more important to them than their own health? Because the functioning of the wider economy and parents' sanity should be more important to them than their own health? Can't we understand why that might be a difficult sale? We need to take teacher confidence in the systems' efforts to protect their health seriously as a necessarily goal to keeping schools open.
Why can't Matt see that? Could it be that he has so little respect for teachers that he thinks they shouldn't be expected to care about their own health and safety?
Yeah, I'm talking about the weeds. I am talking about the practical realities of staffing, retention and the most basic element of workforce management in schools. What do you do when someone is out? What do you do when lots of people are out?
How do you convince your workers that it is safe to come to work in a pandemic?
If you cannot address these issues and come up with real answers, you need to stop hectoring policy makers and communities about closing schools. Wishing upon a start ain't gonna make this work. These are real problems. These are the practical realities. You can't just waive your hands and fiat them away -- unless you just want to be an ideologue who care more about spouting impractical ideas than actually making a difference in the world.
This was despite the fact that we prioritized getting teachers vaccinated. It’s this kind of behavior that drives a lot of frustration people have with much of the teaching profession.
1) You are presupposing that it is the primary job of unions to keep schools open. No, their primary job is to protect their members. Do you think that it is better for members to work in schools or to work from home? Do you think that it is better for teachers to be required to take unapproved drugs or for them to have the option?
And are you willing to admit that you COULD be wrong.
2) Union leaders are elected officials. They can try to lead in a certain direction, but democratic accountability requires that they be responsive to their electorates. The AFT leadership was trying to change minds, but they could not get too far ahead of their membership. The membership did not want mandates.
3) Really? Hesitation of an organization to back requiring unapproved drugs from being a requirement of employment is what drives the frustration a lot of people have with much of the teaching professional? I find that literally impossible to believe. The is a brand new issue, and that "frustration" ain't new at all.
In fact, that "frustration" is driven by teachers' insistence that they be treated like professionals, that their expertise be respected and they work understood. That "frustration" is born of an uniquely American unwillingness to take teaching seriously and a belief that lip service is a substitute for creating structures that support high quality teaching and teacher development.
15 month certification programs. Accelerated/alt certification/routes to the classroom. All because we don't pay teachers enough to pay back the loans for longer programs. Dumping teachers into full time work as novices with no more support than experienced teachers have. Lack of career ladders. Lack of prep time. Heaving teaching loads. Too many preps. Not enough common planning time. Paying teachers based on contracted hours but expecting them to work far far far more, even at the cost of their sustainability. Generally treating teachers as glorified childcare. Expecting teachers to love their students as much as parents do, and to sacrifice for their students as much as we expect the most loving parents do. Expecting a fanatical loyalty to the goals of the profession that never expected of anyone else.
Yeah, when you says you're frustrated with much of the profession, those are just some of the real reasons.
"You are presupposing that it is the primary job of unions to keep schools open. No, their primary job is to protect their members"
I've noticed that every discussion of public sector unions has to have at least one proponent repeating this exact line, word for word. 'The unions aren't obligated to care about the kids' (or society/the rights of innocents more broadly if we're discussing LE unions). In this worldview it's fine if unions are completely amoral, self-interested actors. Basically your response mixes 'why doesn't anyone care about teacher safety or burden' with 'we teachers aren't obligated to care about anyone but ourselves'. You get why this is not a persuasive argument?
My tongue-in-cheek response is- OK fine, and those of us who are taxpayers and parents subsequently aren't obligated to care about the health of teachers (or cops, or firefighters). You can imagine we're part of a 'taxpayers' union' if that helps you visualize it.
My more serious response- yes you are absolutely obligated to care about the children's psychological health & education first & foremost, that's a literal requirement of the job that I'm paying your salary & too-generous benefits for. If you aren't, happy to mass fire the entire union and hire new teachers who will. Putting the children's health & education first is, again, the Prime Directive of the job that I hired you for- and firing is absolutely an option. Does that kind of make sense?
1) Word for word? There are 8 words there and I didn't use use most of them. So, ummmm, no.
2) That does not at all capture what I said, literally or in spirit. I never said or suggested in any way that they are not obligated to care about kids or society. Not on the least. You cannot find that sentiment anywhere in what I wrote, what I have ever written, what I have every said or or what I have every thought.
3) I used four words twice. is, to, primary, job. (I could be counting words wrong. it's late. I'm on my phone.) I specifically addressed their...what is that phrase I used twice? PRIMARY JOB.
4) The reason why unions ARE obligated to care about children is that their members require it. Unions are -- quite literally -- to collective action agent of their members They exist for the members. And if the members care about kids, the unions have to care about kids. If the members care about a living wage for all members, the union has to.
So, yes, unions care about kids. But they ALSO care about members. And it is their PRIMARY JOB to protect their members('s interests).
5) When union members make clear that they care more about students than their own health, the unions will act on that. When union members want a balance, the union will act on that.
6) Yes. We are part of a community union. We vote. We have elected officials. And elected officials have to sort through our interests. It is not for you to decide for yourself what we all care about most.
7) No, no one signs any contract that give others such rights over their bodies and bodily integrity. That was outlawed by the 13th amendment to the constitution. No, we are not allowed to sign those contracts. they are unenforceable. The government regularly takes action against organizations that do not respect that fact.
8) I'm gonna pretend for a second that you are responding to what I actually wrote instead of some bizarre fantasy of yours: No, our employees are NOT required to put they interests of other people's children over their own health. No, that is NOT a literal requirement of the job that we are paying teachers to do. There's a contract. You can read it. You will not find that obligation anywhere in contract. You are just wrong. 100% wrong. Go read the contract. ("Literal" means taking the words seriously without imposing metaphor. It means accepting the straight meanings of the word. Do NOT get into a "literal" fight with a former english teacher who is the son of an attorney. You will lose.)
9) No, you cannot mass fire the teachers because they care more about their own health than others people's children. You cannot. The contract does not allow that. Like, literally, the contract does not allow that. No one care what YOU are happy to do. The job is defined by a contract, not by your whims, disrespect or love of cruelty. This firing you fantasize about is not an option. That's not how contracted employment works. That's not how the law works.
10) How many teachers have your hired? My guess is that you never hired a single one. So, stop playing pretend and start trying to address the real problems we face.
Without getting into the other stuff, re: 9- yes, you can terminate a municipality or county's union contract, as Camden New Jersey famously did with their police union. I agree that it wouldn't legally be called 'firing', but it could be called a 'disbanding' of the district. You don't have permanent lifetime employment man, lol. In Camden, hundreds upon hundreds of cops were summarily fired after their police department was terminated, and then had to re-apply for their old jobs back (as they should have been).
Re: 7 & 8- my goal would be for teachers to be required to work in-person. I'll have to check the Constitution, but tens of millions of blue collar workers have been working in person since March 2020, and I don't believe the 13th Amendment has been brought up yet. The goal is that you would & should be treated like any other job
3) That's nonsensical. We treat many different jobs quite differently from each other.
2) And please name the job in which we fire people of caring more about their own health than the well being of other people's children. If you think teaching should be treated more like other jobs, why put this one special requirement on teachers? You're contradicting yourself.
1) Who ever said that teachers should have permanent lifetime employment? The question is whether you ought to be able to fire them because you want employment to come with total control over their bodies, including subjecting them to deadly danger without limit. They are public employees under contract. So, fire them for cause. Document performance issues and fire them for cause.
Heath works fight disease and the pandemic If they stop doing their work, we lose the fighters in the present war.
Teachers simply do not enable society to fight COVID. Teachers working schools or online have no bearing on the how people infected with COVID respond, on keeping them out of harm or moving them out of harm.
Teachers are not health care workers. They do not help us to fight COVID.
If we were fighting a huge rise in cockroach populations, we would not accept exterminator refusing to go to work. Of course not. They are they only way we fight the cockroach apocalypse. But if the comedy writers decide they have to work remotely during that war, well, they weren't relevant to the fight.
But if you want to stick to this comparison? OK. Let's treat keeping teachers safe the way that we treat keeping healthcare workers safe. I've seen number on how many patients nurses are responsible for and it is a small fraction of the number of kids that teachers are responsible for. The busiest doctors don't see as many patients in a day as a high school teacher sees students. So, let's prioritize getting teachers the PPE and well ventilated and cleaned workspaces like we do hospitals. Let treat teacher safety as seriously as we treat healthcare safety.
Or do you think that the comparison fails when we actually get down the level of practicalities?
As for whose responsibility it is to figure this shit out? Matt had a podcast he called The Weeds. He gets into practicalities. That's his jam. And he's smart enough to contribute, instead of just taking potshots. He can be specific on what needs to be done in other policy areas, why can't he do that here?
And did it ever occur to you that maybe this one doesn't have the answer you want? Why do think that it is failure simply because someone hasn't come up with the the answer to an impossible problem? District couldn't invent or produce vaccines. They couldn't distribute them. They couldn't manufacture PPEs. They can't make vaccines available to children. They cannot require vaccines of children over the objections of communities and political leaders. They cannot magically fix failing infrastructure that communities have for so long been unwilling to pay the cost of maintaining.
This idea that it is someone else's problems to solve? That we are not responsible for supplying our schools and their leaders with the tools and resources to address the problems we want them to solve, and yet we can still say that they have failed and should not have to those jobs?
How about this, Emily? Well cut your households income by 97.2%, but still expect you to stay physically and mentally healthy? How about this, instead, we make your job WAY WAY harder, but give no additional resources? How about this? We flood your home and workplace with sarin gas, but do not give you any kind of PPE? And for each of these, we expect you to continue to work as normal, be just as productive and condemn you for pointing out that any of this is unreasonable?
Yeah, those are exaggerated. They are exaggerated to illustrate a point that too many people are not getting. We never were willing to pay for school infrastructure maintenance, and now that bill is coming due in the form of buildings that are VERY difficult to make safe. We have stomped on teachers and underpaid them for so long that they don't have resources of handle this far far far more demanding and dangerous work. But you call them failures for not magically rising to the occasions and solving in possible problems.
And you don't have enough empathy to think that it is anyone's problem but theirs to figure out how to magically solve these impossible problems. You think that they should be fired for our communities' unwillingness to prepare appropriately.
no, you were advocating for the firing of other educators. Of the school and district leaders who haven't been able to solve the impossible problems you think they should have.
Because they only educators that anyone has any consideration for at all are the ones who prove their worth by loving their individual students. The one who work further from kids are simply decided and assaulted *all*the*time*.
Because education is not treated as a profession. Because educators are expected to love their students like a mother would, and be willing to make motherly sacrifices. Those who do not? Well, they are not contributing anything. And when they cannot solve the impossible problem society dumps on them, they should be fired.
After all, it's just basically women's work, right? And all women are truly useful for is child rearing.
"But if a large number of people...proposed that we should close the hospitals"
Or proposed that police should stop working, or firefighters, or garbage collectors, etc...
The original argument here sort of boils down to "Teachers are not essential workers". I'd like to think they are and education is actually critically important. But teachers' unions seem to be saying the opposite.
Essential sounds to me like a job that can't be paused or replaced for any serious length of time. Garbage workers are essential because after several weeks of time, stinking piles of dirty garbage will pile up wherever regular people can't replace the garbage workers work.
A waiter at TGIF's is not "essential" because no one needs to go out to eat. We can all get by without dine-in restaurants if need be.
I think education falls into the first category. Every job entails some risk. Teaching normally entails various risks (exposure to children's diseases has always been one of them); more than some jobs, less than some others. Any time the world changes the shape of those risks will change and one professions will becomes better or worse relative to others.
But we never once, for a moment, considered pausing healthcare, or worried "will doctors quit" or worried "will nurses think we support them" if we ask them to keep working during a dangerous covid wave. Same goes for Firefighters, Prison Guards, Fedex Workers, etc...
And to be less theoretical and switch from the past to the present: every teacher and most students have had the chance to be vaccinated. The vast majority of Americans are working on-site, and / or they are out and about in society. Teachers in a handful of school districts seem to be among the last to come officially out. I don't know what purpose it serves, especially as it's becoming increasingly unlikely that Omicron is a significant danger for the vaccinated / prior-infected.
1) The thing I think your analysis misses is whether essential work must be continued in the same form.
Like, we had an increase in telemedicine during the pandemic. Doctors were essential workers, but the nature of some of the work shifted.
I don't think that this is binary, at all. It's a tough thing to classify well.
2) Making teaching a relatively worse profession is bad. It's bad for society. It means that we should expect lower quality teachers (for various reasons and mechanisms). Heck, maybe we're already seeing some of that.
That is, this dynamic you mention actually contributes to the problem.
3) No one ever paused teaching or schooling. This is the great bullshit lie of this issues. Schooling shifted to remote platforms for many many many students. But schooling continued.
It's just factually untrue that schools closed. School BUILDINGS closed. But my wife's law firm didn't close. She's been busier than ever. Matt didn't stop working simply because he didn't go to the office.
4) The primary thing we lost when the school buildings closed was the childcare function of out schools. Let's just acknowledge that. So much of the whining about schools closing is how debilitating it is for families and the economy. We just hate losing our baby-sitters.
5) I have no doubt that remote schools is educationally inferior for a lot of reasons -- which I don't at all need to list here. But I also have no doubt that there was a lot more going on to hurt student learning during he last 20 months.
Saying "we just hate losing our baby sitters" makes this sound trivial. But it isn't. It takes a village to raise a child, and we all moved out of the villages, so we got schools to play several parts of that role. It is massively disruptive for people who expect to have some help raising their kid and have moved away from friends and family and into the suburbs because of the societal promise that there would always be an institution available to help raise your kid.
My girlfriend student-taught at a low-income school in Massachusetts last year. They were fully remote until March, but the YMCA next to the school ran a program where parents could drop their kids off during the day and do Zoom school there. So hundreds of them would sit in the gym on their ChromeBooks with minimal supervision and their masks on their chins all day long, and then they went home to their parents, many of whom seemed to be doing zero social distancing.
Meanwhile, my father, a teacher in a rich school in the DMV that vaccinated it’s teachers extremely early, opposed reopening because of the risk to him, and got all conspiratorial if you tried to show him evidence of the minimal spread in schools. To this day he can’t bring himself to say that the learning loss last year wasn’t worth whatever reduced spread it got us.
As a teacher I can say teaching from home via zoom is an easy gig compared to driving in. And that motivates the desire to zoom teach. A few students like 10% do better because mom is standing over there shoulder. But most do worse. The discipline issues are so easy via zoom the most behavior is just turning the camera off not throwing stuff at there classmates.
My thinking on COVID: As with other viruses, such as rhinovirus and the flu, everyone is likely to get it; the question is *when* they will get it. We want the answer to be "after they are vaccinated and there are good treatments available", and/or "when they are young enough that the virus is very unlikely to cause serious health problems". It seems to me we are now in that desirable time frame. The only people who have not had ample time to be vaccinated are young children, to whom covid is very unlikely to cause serious harm. We should thus not be concerned about positive cases / testing positive for covid. What am I missing?
Have the Swedes actually been reckless? There was a lot of talk about them in spring 2020, because they didn't take a lot of official government-mandated restrictive measures. But have they been any less restrictive on an individual and business level than their neighbors?
I miss the culture over Sweden, which now feels like a million years ago. It was so much more fun and less consequential than the culture war over vaccines.
Agree with this statement and MY's post. I argued vociferously last year here on this substack that schools should be open, that the long term morbidity of school closures is not negligible. And people acted like I had no empathy for those old or immunocompromised. (eye roll). I always, from the beginning and throughout, thought all Covid mitigation strategy should be targeted toward preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed b/c then people die/suffer needlessly. And that is the one part here that you are overlooking with Omicron. We are in much better shape with vaccines and treatment, but Omicron is so infectious and spreads so rapidly that we are at risk of overwhelming hospitals again this winter. Yes, likely everyone will get Covid at some point, but if everyone gets it all at once, we could be in for a lot of needless death. A small percentage of a very large number is still large enough to overwhelm the hospitals.
So we are back to flattening the curve? It is disappointing that all the COVID relief programs do not seem to have boosted hospital capacity. Was there at any point a giant pot of money from Congress to encourage retired nurses to come out of retirement? To provide medical assistants with some additional training that would enable them to practice as nurses, at least temporarily?
It seems to me like the evidence is starting to show that Omicron just can't spread so far and wide to cause that kind of mayhem. In particular, the data from S. Africa seems to show the rapid peak burned itself very quickly, and without a scary concurrent rise in hospitalizations.
It's still early in Omicron, and it's totally possible I'm missing info or misinterpreting some of the data. If so I'm totally willing to backtrack on this and I apologize ahead of time. But that's what I'm seeing so far in the data and from reports I've read (despite Matt Y's post of a couple days ago).
Wouldn’t it be great if Omincrom pushed out the other strains and is so transmissible to everyone and so non-lethal that COVID just burns its self out in a month?
Pushing out the other strains seems bound to happen, because if there is one thing that seems clear it is that Omi has a much larger degree of immune-escape. All the epimelogical and lab-experiment data would have to not apply in North America for that not to happen here. Stranger things have happened, but that feels like the safe bet.
IF, and it's still just an if, but if it's a lot less lethal than Delta, it will turn out to be an improvement on the situation. Which would have really interesting implications for much of the various predictions and warnings and advice we've been hearing over the last year. Vaccinate the world to prevent dangerous mutations, for example, or whatever argument is being made for travel bans would have been exactly wrong, in practice.
The data I'm seeing so far implies a wave with about half the daily total deaths of the USA's current delta wave. I don't know if I should expect bigger lags on S. Africa's death reporting though. For now it's about 50 days per day. Per capita that translates to almost 300 per day here. And then we probably have to double it to adjust for S African's undercounting of covid deaths relative to excess deaths, so 600 per day, which is about half of what we'er experiencing here today.
There are various other assumptions and adjustments you could make to this data argument though. It's tricky. Although S Africa is much younger they don't seem much healthier. And one thing that's noticeable from previous waves is they are a lot sharper up and then down then corresponding USA waves. So I'm hopeful that 50 per day is as high as it ever gets over there.
What you’re missing is that most people had Covid already in s Africa so there was a lot of immunity already. In contrast, immunity from the vaccines don’t look great against Omicron w/o a booster so the US is in a slightly different situation than s Africa. Europe is a better comparison.
"Antibodies from people double-vaccinated with any of the...vaccines were significantly less effective at neutralizing the omicron variant compared to the ancestral virus. Antibodies from previously infected individuals were even less likely to neutralize omicron."
#2) Every "How many people had covd" study I've seen has had big error bars. Just by ball-parking the raw excess death numbers (my source is the Economist) and reported covid deaths in both countries, I'll guess 1.5x as many South Africans have been infected as here. Whereas the vaccination levels here are far almost double.
So that basically evens out to about the same levels of existing immunity. And in Europe cases have been rising all winter, so it's hard to distinguish what part of that is Omi, but deaths (perhaps a better proxy for serious hospitalizations) are rising very slowly.
I know this is commonly said but antibodies are just the first line of defense (against infection in particular) and while Omicron evades those ,other parts of the immune system still provide significant protection against more severe outcomes.
No one who is currently sounding the "this looks scary" alarm (which was definitely right a couple of weeks ago) will admit to being wrong two weeks hence, out of a misguided fear that the public will not take them seriously next time.
Which is hilarious pants-on-head wrongness. More noble lies. Sick of it.
People underestimate what it means when otherwise healthy 30-65 year old with hypertension and diabetes need to be hospitalized. It's just not something that regularly happens.
"Oh, they're not really dying." That's good, but there are multiple areas around the country that having hospitals clog up already, and we're early into this.
Perfectly willing to admit I’m wrong by end of winter. Will be relieved and happy to admit that. It’s possible I’m over-reacting bc I took care of Covid patients last winter when the hospitals were overwhelmed and it’s something I hope never to deal with again. But hospitalizations are up 30% in 1 week here in LA (where vaccination rate is pretty good) and cases up nearly 50% so…
My experience currently is that a LOT of vaccinated people are testing positive with very mild symptoms right now. The last serious cases I had were early November in an unvaccinated family. This is great news if it means that the vast majority are developing immunity and this is the path to the virus becoming mild and endemic. My only point is that this may be the tip of the iceberg, the earliest stage of a surge, and that between Covid and Flu, the old and vulnerable may still overwhelm the hospitals. I hope not, but this doesn't seem like an irrational concern to me. I'm not advocating for another shut-down or for stricter mitigation strategies, was just pointing out that we may still be in for a rough winter. That was all.
Exactly! I guess there's still enough uncertainty that someone could make a speculative argument with Omicron, if it somehow turned out to be so serious and immune-escaping that it's like a whole new virus. But that seems less and less likely every day (if it was ever likely at all).
"Democrats are the party that thinks education is important"
You mean "Democrats are the party that "says" education" is important. But actions speak louder than words. And Democrat resistance to charters, school choice, and of course open schools has clearly shown that teachers unions are way more important that actually educating students
I'd be curious what a D poll would say about charter schools. I would not be surprised if this is an issue which wins a majority of D voters.
I agree - you're not allowed say "education is important" and then take away gifted programs and stop caring about standard tests.
Our school (private, boarding) closed in the spring of 2020. We reopened in the fall as a hybrid school with many international and some domestic students on Zoom but the majority in the classroom. We ratcheted down our expectations, inflated our grades to accommodate student stress - which was an ongoing mental health crisis all last year - and muddled through.
The reality is that stress is mild form of transient brain damage that - if it persists - can become permanent. (I recommend Paul Tough's book: How Children Succeed.) Being in-person last year arrested some decline in learning, but was far from what we would consider successful. Math, in particular, noted extreme loss of practiced skills.
The problem is the pandemic. Going back to school with students stressed beyond normal limits is only marginally better in terms of arresting loss of learning. Better off just making a 13th grade for the next few years.
What are students stressed about?
Everything. These are all high achieving kids aiming for top colleges. Even those who are going to be first generation college students have high expectations for themselves. If kids don't give a shit about their education, then they are less stressed by school performance. We had numerous students (dozens from a student body of a little less than 600) leave school last year, because they were overwhelmed.
Last year was better than no school, but if anyone at our school would suggest that it was close to normal, they would be laughed away.
I guess I'm more wondering - what are they stressed about last year that they aren't normally stressed about? Stressed about getting sick or someone they know getting sick? Stressed about disruptions to travel and admission policy changes?
Sort of <gestures at everything>. That's why I said the problem was the pandemic. The adults were worried and they picked up on that, I think. Being in person this fall has felt more normal; we've re-started sports which help.
I think the future looked very, very uncertain for them, as it looked for all of us. My responsive point is that lost learning occurred even with in-person education last year, and we should adjust how we think about school for this generation of students until we can recoup those losses.
We did some professional development about the concept of "cognitive load." Basically there is only so much any individual can do cognitively. That's their load. The pandemic, the election, the general sense of uncertainty all created immense burdens on cognitive load.
Matty Y back at it with the coldest takes on earth
What does all this mean for university education? I and other professors I know have all sorts of anecdotal statements about the ways things did and didn't work for students teaching online last year. Returning to in-person this fall made some things better and introduced other problems. But college-age students can manage school from home, and don't need adult supervision, in a way that younger students really can't.
It really seems to me that in classes with substantially more than 50 students, the online format is likely much *better* than the lecture-hall format. In small seminars with 5 or so students, the online format is nearly as good as the in-person format, as long as people have reasonable equipment. Medium sized classes seem to benefit a lot more from being in-person.
I'm fully expecting the omicron wave to have a couple weeks delay in the parts of Texas that are dozens of miles from the cities, so that it will hit us right as the semester begins. Would it be good or bad for me to do civil disobedience and start the semester online, despite the university banning most covid mitigation measures?
What is your goal in delaying in-person class? Prevent infection for yourself? Your student? Two things I'd think about:
1) How confident are you that you can time when "the wave" arrives where you live? I'm skeptical that your prediction will be accurate, because predictions are really, really hard, especially where there is a lot of uncertainty.
2) Will you be able to avoid infections for yourself and others? Or just shift the place and time where they occur? In other words - aren't you all likely to be exposed to Omi sooner or later? And are many of your students going to gathering with friends outside of your classroom anyways?
The big thing is that I think there's value in not having everyone get infected at once. Even if I just shift the infections out of the first week, so that each student gets infected in a different week instead of all at once, I think that's an improvement.
The past three semesters have all seen a big wave occur in the two weeks around the beginning of the semester. If you look at data from Fall 2021 in Brazos County, TX, it looks like the biggest wave happened four weeks after the beginning of the semester, but it turns out that the county health department was just overwhelmed with data in the first two weeks of the semester and didn't process some of it until October, when cases were coming down (this is supported both by stories from the health department in our local newspaper, and by the fact that hospitalizations peaked in the first two weeks of the semester and were already coming down by the time the highest official case counts were reported).
If the omicron wave happens earlier, and has already clearly crested and is moving down, then perhaps there won't be a beginning-of-semester wave this time. But it seems quite likely that there will be, especially since there's a good chance of the omicron wave peaking right around that time in mid-January (since we are likely a week or two behind the cities like Houston that are starting to see their wave now).
It's true that many students are going to gather with friends, and that is the likeliest way for them to get infected. But cutting the ties across different social groups (like classes) prevents the wave in every social group from being synchronized all at once.
I’d argue most human capital formation in university students happens outside the classroom. I think I would have missed the most important parts of university of I would have attended classes from my parents house.
The fact that righty libertarian tech bros were statistically illiterate to take the failure of a bunch of range restricted fiddley interventions to produce any education miracles as evidence that education didn't matter should be enough to let us disregard them for a while.
As a resident of flyover country (suburban Des Moines to be exact) with two small children in school and another two at home, the fact that this argument is still being circulated boggles my mind. Just another anecdotal point for me that shows we are rapidly splitting into two cultures, because the argument for closing schools is a cultural one not based on "science" but relative values of risk.
As someone who is an educator there is some false ideas here. I know teachers and teacher unions are some of everyone’s favorite punching bags as the go to bad guy for all problems of education.
Teaching virtually on zoom was not easier than in person instruction. It was ridiculously hard to create systems from scratch, i.e. documents etc.
Most schools outside of some cities did reopen last year. They started hybrid which was even harder then went full reopening.
I think the NY/DC base of most pundits is giving them a somewhat myopic view.
The historical revisionism is a bit much. I am glad Matt Y. did bring up the polling on poorer parents. As I recall lots of parents were demanding schools close. One gives far too much power to unions to say it was just their lobbying. The dramatic parent change of mind has of course went down the memory hole.
I can say anecdotally that no teacher I know wants to go back to virtual learning. I have also seen this in NEA publications for its members. Again that doesn’t mean you can’t find anyone who says it, but it certainly isn’t the dominant view. So if that is your current talking point, please just stop.
I think a far better criticism of education unions and school boards is that got so cowed by a George Floyd murder that they gave in to very destructive ideas pushed by Ed schools, activists, and DEI industrial complex on “equity” in grading, discipline, and even giving tests that is currently doing massive damage to students right now. Ask
Rank and file teachers about that.
It would be helpful if someone has an explanation why lower SES parents were/are more supportive of school closures than high SES parents. Keeping kids at home has to be far more onerous for the former than the latter.
I've never seen solid research, but a few ideas that seem plausible -
1) COVID was more dangerous for lower SES people than higher SES people. (This is true, although I'm not sure if it was the reason.)
2) Higher SES kids tend to go to better schools, so the cost of missing a few months might seem higher than at a school that didn't seem to be providing much value to begin with.
3) If you were sitting on your laptop 10 feet away while your kid took classes, you may have had a clearer view of any problems than someone who had to keep working outside the home during remote school hours.
4) Partisan affiliation drove a lot of how people felt about this, and while it doesn't track closely with income on a national level, within a given area, higher SES people tend more conservative. (Of course, some people felt strongly enough to buck their co-partisans on this - myself included - but on average it may have played a role.)
Another very straightforward idea that I think tops the rest is that lower SES people tend to value schooling less and higher SES people tend to value schooling more. I'm sure it's not always the case, but it's what I see within my own extended family and circles of friends and acquaintances.
From the perspective of a parent not always clear on how that sausage got made, the three most vocal groups pushing for school closures appeared to be: the teachers' unions (especially in the large cities), the school board members with education backgrounds (as opposed to the career politicians), and community groups led by teachers.
In my area, I saw no parents of school aged kids pushing for school closures. For a remote option, yes - but even the parents who wanted that for themselves (about 1/3 when parents here were surveyed in summer 2020) never seemed to want to impose that broadly. Presumably they understood why that wasn't viable for everyone.
And I don't think teachers were being lazy - I think it came from a place of sincerely held fear. But then I also think the Jan 6th rioters sincerely believed the election was stolen. That's not a justification. I think many young, healthy teachers let themselves get dragged into echo chambers greatly exaggerating the risk, because it tapped into a preexisting belief that their jobs were uniquely hard and special. When both as citizens and public employees, they had an obligation to do their due diligence before trying to shape policy.
Wish I could edit. Phone makes it hard to proofread.
You should be able to edit now - underneath your comment, next to the heart and reply, should be three dots, and if you click there, then an "edit" button should appear.
Edit: under your own comment there is no heart, there is "reply", "delete", and then the three dots.
Thank you.
Following up on your omicron post, are you encouraged by the lack of a surge in deaths in South Africa or, as far as I’ve seen, anywhere that’s had omicron? It really does seem like this wave is less lethal.
I don't want to close schools. What worries me, though, is that a lot of schools are running on fumes and tape. If enough teachers call out sick, they're going to have to close, because there's no subs.
My best hope is that instead of block closures of entire districts, it will be individual schools.
The flip side is that for those of us in conservative areas, the schools are not only going to stay open, but they will refuse to use any mitigation strategies. Last year, my district stayed open, with full time instruction for K-5 and hybrid for 6-12 (secondary went back full time in the spring). They had almost zero days closed, because everyone took it seriously and the district wanted to prove it could be done. This year? They're treating it all as a joke.
Third thing that Matt missed.
It's been an open question how much of student learning over the years is a product of natural development and how much is due to schooling -- or even just due to any form of education.
To what degree do kids get better at reading through the early grades because their brains are developing new abilities and to what degree is it because of explicit instruction and scaffolded practice?
Like, we would not teach very much algebra to little kids because we know that they lack the cognitive development to handle that kind of abstraction. They just are not ready.
It would be great if this pandemic gave us more insight into this class of questions. It would be great if were collecting good enough data to -- eventually -- address this basic question.
Yes, Matt nodded his head in this direction. But he missed the fact that a lot of advancement is (likely?) just due to cognitive development.
And if we take that idea seriously, the lack of schooling might not be the only cause of "learning loss." The broader stress of living through a pandemic, what is otherwise doing to their parents, communities and the the culture could also be impacting learning.
Closing schools are not the only the thing that might be hurting kids. I know this sounds shocking to some, but kids' stress hurts their academic performances. Moving a lot is bad for kids academic performances. Parents getting divorced is bad for the academic performance (at least in the short run). Lack of food? Lack of stability? All these things matter.
How can Matt seriously think (or write) that lack of schooling is the only relevant change (as compared to the be beforetimes)? How can he suggest that the learning loss he sees is entirely due to school buildings being closed?
People get better at things because they are taught it/practice doing it.
If you don't teach a kid how to read, or do algebra they almost certainly won't learn it. And even after you learn it, to master it, you need to practice, practice, practice.
If those kids were at home, reading books, and doing workbooks all the time, then they probably would probably learn just as much or more.
But if they are watching TV, playing video games, then they will learn little or nothing.
Which do you think they were doing?
Mine were reading and doing workbooks. But then again, we had always been planning on home schooling.
Plus we aim for about 300 days of instruction a year.
1) I don't know what they were doing. That's one of my points.
2) I don't think we know whether kids without teachers would "probably learn just as much or more" than if they just were home reading and practicing than if they were taught and supported by teaching with well constructed units, lessons and activities. I've never seen any evidence that that is really plausible. But maybe my judgment on that is wrong and this COVID era will give us the data to show that.
3) There IS good data that serious increases in instructional time DOES lead to increased learning. But that generally costs quite a bit. Increasing instructional time by 67% would raise labor costs considerably. If your family can eat that, that's quite valuable for your kids. Most families cannot afford that and most communities have not decided that its worth the cost.
If that were the case we’d expect to see similar levels of learning loss among kids whose schools stayed open, like many private school students. Do we?
Yeah, that's the question.
Unfortunately, private schools don't take the tests. And -- in reality -- private schools did not do a better job of keeping their buildings open. We did not see the enrollment shifts that many people were claiming. So much about schooling in the pandemic was falsely reported.
I was VERY frustrated by those -- including huge numbers of teachers -- that advocated for canceling or diminishing standardized testing. NCLB turned any state standardized testing into something for teachers to fear. This has been a HUGE harm. (dumbed down the tests, too.)
These holes in the testing data really concern me. We are missing incredibly opportunities to actually learn something here. That's a valuable silver lining. We are going to be stuck trying to look at longer term trajectories (not the worst thing) by relying on families and students to correctly report how much in-person and how much remote schooling they attended over these years. We have some district data on that, thank god, but not contemporaneous achievement data.
And school attendance data is famously horrendously bad. That's been reported to be even worse during the pandemic. I don't mean that it shows bad things. I mean that it is just not accurate and trustworthy.
So, we have parents holding kids out of school quite a bit. And the populations that are most associated with lower achievement are the ones holding kids out more. Then we get remote school. And who knows what the out-of-school factors at play are.
There needs to be TON of work done to untangle this stuff. This ia going to take a long time to figure out how to to get good answers out of this.
"by relying on families and students to correctly report how much in-person and how much remote schooling they attended over these years"
Doesn't sound like so hard to do. It will be messy and have a little bit of noise but I bet most parents can correctly remember 1 month or half a year. Also, why can't we just look at school districts? My district was closed much more than some neighboring districts that often benchmark to one another. Seems as good as you're going to get for real-world data that approaches an RCT
1) Famously, people don't accurately report who they voted for or even whether they voted a short time later. You think that people are going to accurately report how many days their kids were in school? How many days they were online? How many days they actually signed in?
2) The attendance data collection by teachers was poor. I've only got anecdotes on that, but I don't see any reason to think that the quality of that data -- the district data we have -- is highly credible.
3) Nothing like RCT at all. First, not random. Second, not controlled. It's not even a natural experiment. It's all observational. There are a TON of correlates to student performance that seem to have influenced school building closure decision-making.
I don't know how much worse the another distract data that this stuff is, but I wish there's been more attention to collecting it well through this. I know, time of upheaval. Plenty of the things to worry about. And from a classroom perspective, attendance data is not the most important thing. But from a research (and policy-implications) perspective, it matters a lot.
People do report fairly accurately who they voted for. It's true that some large single digit percent of people inaccurately report that they voted for the eventual winner, rather than who they actually voted for. But if for some reason you lack data on the actual vote shares in different districts, or different demographics, surveying people will be a useful indicator of which districts and demographics were stronger or weaker for various candidates. You'll still be able to detect strong enough correlations, even though there will be a bit more noise.
We live in an era when elections are decided by small single digit margins, and we are commenting on a author who does not believe that the x-axis generally should go down to zero.
In that context, large single-digit errors are just killer. The noise there just absolutely swamps the signal.
yeah, if there are few enough factors, you can find some of the stronger signals, but we run into huge problem of magnitude and sign error when there are a lots of factors.
Not to mention we will probable be able to do long term state to state comparison
to show what?
That's a very small sample size. The states are not homogenous. And it still begs the question of the accuracy of the data.
Finding strong methods to handle this without violating their assumptions is gonna be hard hard work, and even then the results are going to have very wide confidence intervals -- likely larger than the actual effects if well modeled. And THAT's where the sign errors can come from.
Is the idea that nothing can be learned from comparing states to each other?
Yes, it will be quite tricky like all real world problems of this nature. Good studies will attempt to control for confounders. And good analysis will take state studies and compare them to good school district studies, and compare them with survey data from individual students and any country comparisons that can be made. And they'll attempt to study test scores, reading comprehension, psychological studies, and whatever else they can come up whether it's clever or far too clever.
If the body of evidence points to learning loss having a lasting effect the studies will show the cost of closing to be higher than some thought. If it doesn't that's evidence for the other position.
The way I'm understanding your argument is almost that "nobody can know anything" while at the same time asserting even harder to evaluate claims, like "the stress of the pandemic is actually the cause of poor test scores".
There would be confounding issues; people with the financial and other means to move their kids to private schools also use those means to reduce stress in their households
I mean, yes? Let people decide what’s the best way for their child to learn and grow - they’ll know better than anyone else ever could.
Really? Why?
Are they all experts in cognitive development? Are the all curriculum experts? Are they all pedagogical experts? Do they all know how to recognize and/or treat trauma in kids?
Let people decide the best way to do the wiring and plumbing in their homes. They'll know better than anyone else ever could. Let people decide the best way to fix their cars. They'll know better than anyone else ever could. Let people decide for themselves the safe levels of toxins in their food and water. They'll know better than anyone else ever could. Let people decide how to fix airplanes for themselves. They'll know better than anyone else ever could.
Just face it, you have absolutely no respect for the skill, knowledge and/or expertise of educators (including teachers). Just own it. Start with it. Teachers don't know anything that parents don't. Teachers bring nothing to the table that parents don't already have -- other than maybe time?
No. I said it was a question how much is just a product of natural cognitive development.
I believe in schools and education. I have very specific ideas about which is natural cognitive development and what is is not. But there's been no way to check that. I don't often talk or write about this because I am pulling it out of my ass.
But this COULD BE a chance to examine these questions with real data.
Thank you for writing this.
Just to add my own observations from my three school-age children - every kid is different and the restrictions and Covid affected them differently.
My oldest, who just turned 18 and is a senior currently, was always a self-starter and required very little parental intervention to do well with pretty much anything. Our high schools here did a hybrid system in the fall of 2020 and at first she did fine. But the hybrid schedule was very disrupting, so she opted into online-only, which was an option given by the district. Academically she did worse, but OK - no longer straight A's but not failing either. But she developed depression and anxiety which affected everything, including her grades. Therapy, medication and going back to 100% in-person school has helped, but she's not completely over it yet.
My next kid, currently 16, was historically kind of the opposite of my daughter - not much of a self starter, diagnosed with ADD, easily distracted, etc. Online/hybrid school for him was a complete shit-show. One of us parents would need to check on him constantly to make sure he was doing his work. And he hated being online. HATED. If the district had frozen grades in the spring of 2020 when schools were completely closed, he would have failed that semester completely.
We ended up transferring him to a smaller and different school in the district that had 4 days a week in person and also utilized a different teaching model. The change was an immediate 180 for him academically, psychologically and socially.
My youngest, in 6th grade this year, also has attention issues. School closings in the Spring of 2020 were a shit-show similar to my older boy. Fortunately, our district made the wise decision to have 100% in-person school for elementary. So the 2020-2021 year was normal for him except for masks and a couple of times he had to stay home due to quarantine/exposure rules.
Now I'm an educated person who has worked remotely for almost 5 years. And my wife, with a STEM PhD, had recently retired from the USAF and hadn't started full-time work, so she was home as well. And we are in the 2nd quintile for income, probably upper-middle-class for our area. We had a ton of advantages that most other families did not have - two parents at home, stable marriage, secure financially, educated parents who help kids with learning, etc. And yet it was still a massive struggle, especially for my daughter and her depression and anxiety which didn't have an obvious cause, except for the timing with Covid restrictions.
So I think of our advantageous and fortunate position and the struggles we faced, and try to imagine how it must have been for the many parents who did not have our advantages. It's really no wonder that many parents are upset and angry about how things turned out. That anyone is considering repeating school closures at this stage is mind-boggling.
This resonates a lot with our experiences with our two kids (including the mental health issues, which were serious). The one who did the rock bottom worst at home turned around instantly the day she found out she would be starting in-person school and has flourished ever since.
I basically agree, as usual. I suspect that your perspective is influenced by your status as parent (a trait seemingly absent from most Left pundits) and by your living in a major city. Nothing wrong, but most Americans live in less urban environments than you (and perhaps 95% of all national-class pundits)
Next thing that Matt missed.
As usual, Matt's understanding of the difference between a proxy and a construct are -- when it comes to standardized tests, at least -- is grossly deficient.
Standardized tests measure...well, they only measure what they measure. They only even attempt to measure the academic standards and they only even try to measure a subset of them, and much of the time they don't even do that that well.
So, what do the test scores tell us? They tell us that the kids really feel behind trend ON THE THINGS THAT WE CAN TRUST STANDARDIZED TESTS TO MEASURE. That's not all the standards, not all the academic skills and not all the things we expect kids to learn.
It takes a lot more than this data to conclude how much learning loss there might have been. Heck, we don't even have a good picture of how comparable the cohorts were. For example, imagine that a bunch of higher scoring kids (e.g., from higher SES families) transferred to private school -- as so many said was happening. That would lower the average because private school kids don't take these tests. That wouldn't be because any kids did worse that their equivalents in previous cohorts. It would just be a product of a different composition in the cohort. Heck, everyone could be doing BETTER, but differences in the composition of the tested population could throw off the average.
Now, I don't think that's what happened. But I don't know. I have no idea how the cohorts compare. I don't know how the testing windows compare. I don't know how the tests in each state compare (i.e., my understanding is that some were shortened). I don't know how much the kids lost test-taking skills for the cancelled 2020 tests, thus the lower scores are for construct-irrelevant reasons.
I don't know much teachers sacrificed test prep -- the kind I don't like -- during the year, this eliminating artificial inflators of previous years' test scores. I don't know.
And Matt doesn't either.
Does this mean that it's ok to close schools? Of course not! But if Matt can't do better than cite bad analysis of bad data, well, what are paying for here? Shouldn't he be able to come up with better arguments than that?
I was really worried about closing schools in 2020. I wrote my municipal and school governance to urge GREAT care in closing schools because we already knew which families and kids would be most burdened by the harms. I was originally against closing schools and I HATE when schools are closed. I really worry about the kids who are held out of school.
But I have the humility to recognize that we know DAMNED little about so-called "learning loss" and that the kind of data and analysis that Matt is citing offers very little insight into the issue.
Matt has missed so much that is important here, I can not fit it into a single comment. But let me start with this one:
Children are not the only people who work in schools. We need to consider the fact that adults work in schools, too.
* We ought to at least pause and consider the morality of dumping the cost (in health risk) for all the benefits) of children being in school on a very small group of adults.
* We need to -- as practical matter, not a moral matter -- be prepared for what we do when a few teachers get sick. We need to be prepared for when MORE than a few teachers get sick. In NYC, they have a long traditional of closing schools on the Jewish High Holidays (Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah). That not because kids would otherwise miss school. That's because historically there were so many jewish teachers in the schools that they simply couldn't staff them sufficiently to keep them open. Losing teachers means, eventually, you have to close schools. You simply cannot have enough substitutes ready to fill in for everyone.
* If we want to keep schools open, we need to be proactive about keeping teachers healthy. (not just teachers, of course. bus drivers matter. school cafeteria staff matter. janitors matter. the rest of the staff matters.) Matt keeps talking about keeping schools open, but rarely about what needs to be done to keep them open. No acknowledgement that there's a very practical consideration of teacher health. Like, right now with omicron and breakthrough infections, what does he think we need to do? Unless we think that's ok to have teachers who have tested positive to keep teaching, how do we keep the teaching fore force from catching COVID?
* Then there's the perception and confidence thing. How do we convince teacher that we have their backs and take their health seriously. If teachers don't think that we are taking their health seriously, why should they be in favor of keeping schools open his winter? Why should they show up? Why shouldn't they quit? Because the education of other people's kids should be so much more important to them than their own health? Because the functioning of the wider economy and parents' sanity should be more important to them than their own health? Can't we understand why that might be a difficult sale? We need to take teacher confidence in the systems' efforts to protect their health seriously as a necessarily goal to keeping schools open.
Why can't Matt see that? Could it be that he has so little respect for teachers that he thinks they shouldn't be expected to care about their own health and safety?
Yeah, I'm talking about the weeds. I am talking about the practical realities of staffing, retention and the most basic element of workforce management in schools. What do you do when someone is out? What do you do when lots of people are out?
How do you convince your workers that it is safe to come to work in a pandemic?
If you cannot address these issues and come up with real answers, you need to stop hectoring policy makers and communities about closing schools. Wishing upon a start ain't gonna make this work. These are real problems. These are the practical realities. You can't just waive your hands and fiat them away -- unless you just want to be an ideologue who care more about spouting impractical ideas than actually making a difference in the world.
Okay, but square that with the fact that Randi Weingarten was fighting vaccine mandates for teachers until AUGUST: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teachers-unions-have-opposed-vaccine-mandates-but-that-may-change/2021/08
This was despite the fact that we prioritized getting teachers vaccinated. It’s this kind of behavior that drives a lot of frustration people have with much of the teaching profession.
OK. Let's do that.
1) You are presupposing that it is the primary job of unions to keep schools open. No, their primary job is to protect their members. Do you think that it is better for members to work in schools or to work from home? Do you think that it is better for teachers to be required to take unapproved drugs or for them to have the option?
And are you willing to admit that you COULD be wrong.
2) Union leaders are elected officials. They can try to lead in a certain direction, but democratic accountability requires that they be responsive to their electorates. The AFT leadership was trying to change minds, but they could not get too far ahead of their membership. The membership did not want mandates.
3) Really? Hesitation of an organization to back requiring unapproved drugs from being a requirement of employment is what drives the frustration a lot of people have with much of the teaching professional? I find that literally impossible to believe. The is a brand new issue, and that "frustration" ain't new at all.
In fact, that "frustration" is driven by teachers' insistence that they be treated like professionals, that their expertise be respected and they work understood. That "frustration" is born of an uniquely American unwillingness to take teaching seriously and a belief that lip service is a substitute for creating structures that support high quality teaching and teacher development.
15 month certification programs. Accelerated/alt certification/routes to the classroom. All because we don't pay teachers enough to pay back the loans for longer programs. Dumping teachers into full time work as novices with no more support than experienced teachers have. Lack of career ladders. Lack of prep time. Heaving teaching loads. Too many preps. Not enough common planning time. Paying teachers based on contracted hours but expecting them to work far far far more, even at the cost of their sustainability. Generally treating teachers as glorified childcare. Expecting teachers to love their students as much as parents do, and to sacrifice for their students as much as we expect the most loving parents do. Expecting a fanatical loyalty to the goals of the profession that never expected of anyone else.
Yeah, when you says you're frustrated with much of the profession, those are just some of the real reasons.
"You are presupposing that it is the primary job of unions to keep schools open. No, their primary job is to protect their members"
I've noticed that every discussion of public sector unions has to have at least one proponent repeating this exact line, word for word. 'The unions aren't obligated to care about the kids' (or society/the rights of innocents more broadly if we're discussing LE unions). In this worldview it's fine if unions are completely amoral, self-interested actors. Basically your response mixes 'why doesn't anyone care about teacher safety or burden' with 'we teachers aren't obligated to care about anyone but ourselves'. You get why this is not a persuasive argument?
My tongue-in-cheek response is- OK fine, and those of us who are taxpayers and parents subsequently aren't obligated to care about the health of teachers (or cops, or firefighters). You can imagine we're part of a 'taxpayers' union' if that helps you visualize it.
My more serious response- yes you are absolutely obligated to care about the children's psychological health & education first & foremost, that's a literal requirement of the job that I'm paying your salary & too-generous benefits for. If you aren't, happy to mass fire the entire union and hire new teachers who will. Putting the children's health & education first is, again, the Prime Directive of the job that I hired you for- and firing is absolutely an option. Does that kind of make sense?
1) Word for word? There are 8 words there and I didn't use use most of them. So, ummmm, no.
2) That does not at all capture what I said, literally or in spirit. I never said or suggested in any way that they are not obligated to care about kids or society. Not on the least. You cannot find that sentiment anywhere in what I wrote, what I have ever written, what I have every said or or what I have every thought.
3) I used four words twice. is, to, primary, job. (I could be counting words wrong. it's late. I'm on my phone.) I specifically addressed their...what is that phrase I used twice? PRIMARY JOB.
4) The reason why unions ARE obligated to care about children is that their members require it. Unions are -- quite literally -- to collective action agent of their members They exist for the members. And if the members care about kids, the unions have to care about kids. If the members care about a living wage for all members, the union has to.
So, yes, unions care about kids. But they ALSO care about members. And it is their PRIMARY JOB to protect their members('s interests).
5) When union members make clear that they care more about students than their own health, the unions will act on that. When union members want a balance, the union will act on that.
6) Yes. We are part of a community union. We vote. We have elected officials. And elected officials have to sort through our interests. It is not for you to decide for yourself what we all care about most.
7) No, no one signs any contract that give others such rights over their bodies and bodily integrity. That was outlawed by the 13th amendment to the constitution. No, we are not allowed to sign those contracts. they are unenforceable. The government regularly takes action against organizations that do not respect that fact.
8) I'm gonna pretend for a second that you are responding to what I actually wrote instead of some bizarre fantasy of yours: No, our employees are NOT required to put they interests of other people's children over their own health. No, that is NOT a literal requirement of the job that we are paying teachers to do. There's a contract. You can read it. You will not find that obligation anywhere in contract. You are just wrong. 100% wrong. Go read the contract. ("Literal" means taking the words seriously without imposing metaphor. It means accepting the straight meanings of the word. Do NOT get into a "literal" fight with a former english teacher who is the son of an attorney. You will lose.)
9) No, you cannot mass fire the teachers because they care more about their own health than others people's children. You cannot. The contract does not allow that. Like, literally, the contract does not allow that. No one care what YOU are happy to do. The job is defined by a contract, not by your whims, disrespect or love of cruelty. This firing you fantasize about is not an option. That's not how contracted employment works. That's not how the law works.
10) How many teachers have your hired? My guess is that you never hired a single one. So, stop playing pretend and start trying to address the real problems we face.
Without getting into the other stuff, re: 9- yes, you can terminate a municipality or county's union contract, as Camden New Jersey famously did with their police union. I agree that it wouldn't legally be called 'firing', but it could be called a 'disbanding' of the district. You don't have permanent lifetime employment man, lol. In Camden, hundreds upon hundreds of cops were summarily fired after their police department was terminated, and then had to re-apply for their old jobs back (as they should have been).
Re: 7 & 8- my goal would be for teachers to be required to work in-person. I'll have to check the Constitution, but tens of millions of blue collar workers have been working in person since March 2020, and I don't believe the 13th Amendment has been brought up yet. The goal is that you would & should be treated like any other job
3) That's nonsensical. We treat many different jobs quite differently from each other.
2) And please name the job in which we fire people of caring more about their own health than the well being of other people's children. If you think teaching should be treated more like other jobs, why put this one special requirement on teachers? You're contradicting yourself.
1) Who ever said that teachers should have permanent lifetime employment? The question is whether you ought to be able to fire them because you want employment to come with total control over their bodies, including subjecting them to deadly danger without limit. They are public employees under contract. So, fire them for cause. Document performance issues and fire them for cause.
Heath works fight disease and the pandemic If they stop doing their work, we lose the fighters in the present war.
Teachers simply do not enable society to fight COVID. Teachers working schools or online have no bearing on the how people infected with COVID respond, on keeping them out of harm or moving them out of harm.
Teachers are not health care workers. They do not help us to fight COVID.
If we were fighting a huge rise in cockroach populations, we would not accept exterminator refusing to go to work. Of course not. They are they only way we fight the cockroach apocalypse. But if the comedy writers decide they have to work remotely during that war, well, they weren't relevant to the fight.
But if you want to stick to this comparison? OK. Let's treat keeping teachers safe the way that we treat keeping healthcare workers safe. I've seen number on how many patients nurses are responsible for and it is a small fraction of the number of kids that teachers are responsible for. The busiest doctors don't see as many patients in a day as a high school teacher sees students. So, let's prioritize getting teachers the PPE and well ventilated and cleaned workspaces like we do hospitals. Let treat teacher safety as seriously as we treat healthcare safety.
Or do you think that the comparison fails when we actually get down the level of practicalities?
As for whose responsibility it is to figure this shit out? Matt had a podcast he called The Weeds. He gets into practicalities. That's his jam. And he's smart enough to contribute, instead of just taking potshots. He can be specific on what needs to be done in other policy areas, why can't he do that here?
And did it ever occur to you that maybe this one doesn't have the answer you want? Why do think that it is failure simply because someone hasn't come up with the the answer to an impossible problem? District couldn't invent or produce vaccines. They couldn't distribute them. They couldn't manufacture PPEs. They can't make vaccines available to children. They cannot require vaccines of children over the objections of communities and political leaders. They cannot magically fix failing infrastructure that communities have for so long been unwilling to pay the cost of maintaining.
This idea that it is someone else's problems to solve? That we are not responsible for supplying our schools and their leaders with the tools and resources to address the problems we want them to solve, and yet we can still say that they have failed and should not have to those jobs?
How about this, Emily? Well cut your households income by 97.2%, but still expect you to stay physically and mentally healthy? How about this, instead, we make your job WAY WAY harder, but give no additional resources? How about this? We flood your home and workplace with sarin gas, but do not give you any kind of PPE? And for each of these, we expect you to continue to work as normal, be just as productive and condemn you for pointing out that any of this is unreasonable?
Yeah, those are exaggerated. They are exaggerated to illustrate a point that too many people are not getting. We never were willing to pay for school infrastructure maintenance, and now that bill is coming due in the form of buildings that are VERY difficult to make safe. We have stomped on teachers and underpaid them for so long that they don't have resources of handle this far far far more demanding and dangerous work. But you call them failures for not magically rising to the occasions and solving in possible problems.
And you don't have enough empathy to think that it is anyone's problem but theirs to figure out how to magically solve these impossible problems. You think that they should be fired for our communities' unwillingness to prepare appropriately.
Great. Just great.
no, you were advocating for the firing of other educators. Of the school and district leaders who haven't been able to solve the impossible problems you think they should have.
Because they only educators that anyone has any consideration for at all are the ones who prove their worth by loving their individual students. The one who work further from kids are simply decided and assaulted *all*the*time*.
Because education is not treated as a profession. Because educators are expected to love their students like a mother would, and be willing to make motherly sacrifices. Those who do not? Well, they are not contributing anything. And when they cannot solve the impossible problem society dumps on them, they should be fired.
After all, it's just basically women's work, right? And all women are truly useful for is child rearing.
That's where this kind of thinking comes from.
"But if a large number of people...proposed that we should close the hospitals"
Or proposed that police should stop working, or firefighters, or garbage collectors, etc...
The original argument here sort of boils down to "Teachers are not essential workers". I'd like to think they are and education is actually critically important. But teachers' unions seem to be saying the opposite.
No, the argument is that teachers are not public safety workers.
Give me a definition of "essential workers" and we can discuss whether teachers fit that category. We know that it never meant "important."
Essential sounds to me like a job that can't be paused or replaced for any serious length of time. Garbage workers are essential because after several weeks of time, stinking piles of dirty garbage will pile up wherever regular people can't replace the garbage workers work.
A waiter at TGIF's is not "essential" because no one needs to go out to eat. We can all get by without dine-in restaurants if need be.
I think education falls into the first category. Every job entails some risk. Teaching normally entails various risks (exposure to children's diseases has always been one of them); more than some jobs, less than some others. Any time the world changes the shape of those risks will change and one professions will becomes better or worse relative to others.
But we never once, for a moment, considered pausing healthcare, or worried "will doctors quit" or worried "will nurses think we support them" if we ask them to keep working during a dangerous covid wave. Same goes for Firefighters, Prison Guards, Fedex Workers, etc...
And to be less theoretical and switch from the past to the present: every teacher and most students have had the chance to be vaccinated. The vast majority of Americans are working on-site, and / or they are out and about in society. Teachers in a handful of school districts seem to be among the last to come officially out. I don't know what purpose it serves, especially as it's becoming increasingly unlikely that Omicron is a significant danger for the vaccinated / prior-infected.
1) The thing I think your analysis misses is whether essential work must be continued in the same form.
Like, we had an increase in telemedicine during the pandemic. Doctors were essential workers, but the nature of some of the work shifted.
I don't think that this is binary, at all. It's a tough thing to classify well.
2) Making teaching a relatively worse profession is bad. It's bad for society. It means that we should expect lower quality teachers (for various reasons and mechanisms). Heck, maybe we're already seeing some of that.
That is, this dynamic you mention actually contributes to the problem.
3) No one ever paused teaching or schooling. This is the great bullshit lie of this issues. Schooling shifted to remote platforms for many many many students. But schooling continued.
It's just factually untrue that schools closed. School BUILDINGS closed. But my wife's law firm didn't close. She's been busier than ever. Matt didn't stop working simply because he didn't go to the office.
4) The primary thing we lost when the school buildings closed was the childcare function of out schools. Let's just acknowledge that. So much of the whining about schools closing is how debilitating it is for families and the economy. We just hate losing our baby-sitters.
5) I have no doubt that remote schools is educationally inferior for a lot of reasons -- which I don't at all need to list here. But I also have no doubt that there was a lot more going on to hurt student learning during he last 20 months.
Saying "we just hate losing our baby sitters" makes this sound trivial. But it isn't. It takes a village to raise a child, and we all moved out of the villages, so we got schools to play several parts of that role. It is massively disruptive for people who expect to have some help raising their kid and have moved away from friends and family and into the suburbs because of the societal promise that there would always be an institution available to help raise your kid.
Right - I agree for sure.
Every word of this is correct.
My girlfriend student-taught at a low-income school in Massachusetts last year. They were fully remote until March, but the YMCA next to the school ran a program where parents could drop their kids off during the day and do Zoom school there. So hundreds of them would sit in the gym on their ChromeBooks with minimal supervision and their masks on their chins all day long, and then they went home to their parents, many of whom seemed to be doing zero social distancing.
Meanwhile, my father, a teacher in a rich school in the DMV that vaccinated it’s teachers extremely early, opposed reopening because of the risk to him, and got all conspiratorial if you tried to show him evidence of the minimal spread in schools. To this day he can’t bring himself to say that the learning loss last year wasn’t worth whatever reduced spread it got us.
Truly mind boggling.
As a teacher I can say teaching from home via zoom is an easy gig compared to driving in. And that motivates the desire to zoom teach. A few students like 10% do better because mom is standing over there shoulder. But most do worse. The discipline issues are so easy via zoom the most behavior is just turning the camera off not throwing stuff at there classmates.
My thinking on COVID: As with other viruses, such as rhinovirus and the flu, everyone is likely to get it; the question is *when* they will get it. We want the answer to be "after they are vaccinated and there are good treatments available", and/or "when they are young enough that the virus is very unlikely to cause serious health problems". It seems to me we are now in that desirable time frame. The only people who have not had ample time to be vaccinated are young children, to whom covid is very unlikely to cause serious harm. We should thus not be concerned about positive cases / testing positive for covid. What am I missing?
100% cosigned--it is time to behave like reckless Swedes. And, to do my own part, I mostly have been.
Have the Swedes actually been reckless? There was a lot of talk about them in spring 2020, because they didn't take a lot of official government-mandated restrictive measures. But have they been any less restrictive on an individual and business level than their neighbors?
I miss the culture over Sweden, which now feels like a million years ago. It was so much more fun and less consequential than the culture war over vaccines.
Agree with this statement and MY's post. I argued vociferously last year here on this substack that schools should be open, that the long term morbidity of school closures is not negligible. And people acted like I had no empathy for those old or immunocompromised. (eye roll). I always, from the beginning and throughout, thought all Covid mitigation strategy should be targeted toward preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed b/c then people die/suffer needlessly. And that is the one part here that you are overlooking with Omicron. We are in much better shape with vaccines and treatment, but Omicron is so infectious and spreads so rapidly that we are at risk of overwhelming hospitals again this winter. Yes, likely everyone will get Covid at some point, but if everyone gets it all at once, we could be in for a lot of needless death. A small percentage of a very large number is still large enough to overwhelm the hospitals.
So we are back to flattening the curve? It is disappointing that all the COVID relief programs do not seem to have boosted hospital capacity. Was there at any point a giant pot of money from Congress to encourage retired nurses to come out of retirement? To provide medical assistants with some additional training that would enable them to practice as nurses, at least temporarily?
It seems to me like the evidence is starting to show that Omicron just can't spread so far and wide to cause that kind of mayhem. In particular, the data from S. Africa seems to show the rapid peak burned itself very quickly, and without a scary concurrent rise in hospitalizations.
It's still early in Omicron, and it's totally possible I'm missing info or misinterpreting some of the data. If so I'm totally willing to backtrack on this and I apologize ahead of time. But that's what I'm seeing so far in the data and from reports I've read (despite Matt Y's post of a couple days ago).
Wouldn’t it be great if Omincrom pushed out the other strains and is so transmissible to everyone and so non-lethal that COVID just burns its self out in a month?
Pushing out the other strains seems bound to happen, because if there is one thing that seems clear it is that Omi has a much larger degree of immune-escape. All the epimelogical and lab-experiment data would have to not apply in North America for that not to happen here. Stranger things have happened, but that feels like the safe bet.
IF, and it's still just an if, but if it's a lot less lethal than Delta, it will turn out to be an improvement on the situation. Which would have really interesting implications for much of the various predictions and warnings and advice we've been hearing over the last year. Vaccinate the world to prevent dangerous mutations, for example, or whatever argument is being made for travel bans would have been exactly wrong, in practice.
The data I'm seeing so far implies a wave with about half the daily total deaths of the USA's current delta wave. I don't know if I should expect bigger lags on S. Africa's death reporting though. For now it's about 50 days per day. Per capita that translates to almost 300 per day here. And then we probably have to double it to adjust for S African's undercounting of covid deaths relative to excess deaths, so 600 per day, which is about half of what we'er experiencing here today.
There are various other assumptions and adjustments you could make to this data argument though. It's tricky. Although S Africa is much younger they don't seem much healthier. And one thing that's noticeable from previous waves is they are a lot sharper up and then down then corresponding USA waves. So I'm hopeful that 50 per day is as high as it ever gets over there.
What you’re missing is that most people had Covid already in s Africa so there was a lot of immunity already. In contrast, immunity from the vaccines don’t look great against Omicron w/o a booster so the US is in a slightly different situation than s Africa. Europe is a better comparison.
The LA Hospitalization data (you posted below) is something I haven't seen and I agree it sounds worrying.
But I'm really very skeptical of this w.r.t. S Africa for 2 reasons:
1) Omicron seems to evade both immunity from prior infection and vaccines. But most sources I've seen suggest that vaccines are the better of the 2:
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-study-adds-more-evidence-omicron-immune-evasion
"Antibodies from people double-vaccinated with any of the...vaccines were significantly less effective at neutralizing the omicron variant compared to the ancestral virus. Antibodies from previously infected individuals were even less likely to neutralize omicron."
#2) Every "How many people had covd" study I've seen has had big error bars. Just by ball-parking the raw excess death numbers (my source is the Economist) and reported covid deaths in both countries, I'll guess 1.5x as many South Africans have been infected as here. Whereas the vaccination levels here are far almost double.
So that basically evens out to about the same levels of existing immunity. And in Europe cases have been rising all winter, so it's hard to distinguish what part of that is Omi, but deaths (perhaps a better proxy for serious hospitalizations) are rising very slowly.
I know this is commonly said but antibodies are just the first line of defense (against infection in particular) and while Omicron evades those ,other parts of the immune system still provide significant protection against more severe outcomes.
No one who is currently sounding the "this looks scary" alarm (which was definitely right a couple of weeks ago) will admit to being wrong two weeks hence, out of a misguided fear that the public will not take them seriously next time.
Which is hilarious pants-on-head wrongness. More noble lies. Sick of it.
People underestimate what it means when otherwise healthy 30-65 year old with hypertension and diabetes need to be hospitalized. It's just not something that regularly happens.
"Oh, they're not really dying." That's good, but there are multiple areas around the country that having hospitals clog up already, and we're early into this.
Is this true?
Consider David Wallace-Wells at New York Magazine:
Dec 2: "Waiting for Omicron" (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/waiting-for-omicron.html"
Dec. 13: "Can Anything Stop the Omicron Wave?" (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/can-anything-stop-the-omicron-wave.html)
Dec. 15: "Omicron Is About to Overwhelm Us" (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/omicron-is-about-to-overwhelm-us.html)
Dec. 16 (!): "And Now for the Good News About Omicron" (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/and-now-for-the-good-news-about-omicron.html)
Dec. 17: "How Mild Is Omicron, Really?" (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/and-now-for-the-good-news-about-omicron.html)
Dec. 18: "Guateng's Omicron Wave Is Already Peaking. Why?" (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/the-south-africa-omicron-wave-is-already-peaking-why.html)
Correct link for "How Mild Is Omicron, Really?": https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/how-mild-is-omicron-really.html
Perfectly willing to admit I’m wrong by end of winter. Will be relieved and happy to admit that. It’s possible I’m over-reacting bc I took care of Covid patients last winter when the hospitals were overwhelmed and it’s something I hope never to deal with again. But hospitalizations are up 30% in 1 week here in LA (where vaccination rate is pretty good) and cases up nearly 50% so…
Doctors are reporting a lot more “treat and release” cases from omicron than from previous waves. It really does seem to be hitting different!
My experience currently is that a LOT of vaccinated people are testing positive with very mild symptoms right now. The last serious cases I had were early November in an unvaccinated family. This is great news if it means that the vast majority are developing immunity and this is the path to the virus becoming mild and endemic. My only point is that this may be the tip of the iceberg, the earliest stage of a surge, and that between Covid and Flu, the old and vulnerable may still overwhelm the hospitals. I hope not, but this doesn't seem like an irrational concern to me. I'm not advocating for another shut-down or for stricter mitigation strategies, was just pointing out that we may still be in for a rough winter. That was all.
That is great news.
Exactly! I guess there's still enough uncertainty that someone could make a speculative argument with Omicron, if it somehow turned out to be so serious and immune-escaping that it's like a whole new virus. But that seems less and less likely every day (if it was ever likely at all).