Summer of 2020, the following happened in quick succession: Trump blustered schools should open, the teachers unions immediately took the anti-Trump position, my friends in Europe all started sending their kids back to school without any masks at all, Covid cases were similar there and here in Massachusetts, I pointed this out to my local friend group and one response is that if I wanted similar in Massachusetts that means I don’t care if teachers die, I got a new job in pharma with a huge raise, the local teachers union declared they wouldn’t teach in person unless they “felt safe,” …..and this former public school booster transformed her raise into private school tuition so her kids could go to school in person for all of 2020-2021.
The progressive conversation about this issue was profoundly alienating. I’m still voting blue bc the alternative is even worse, but my political participation went off a cliff.
School is a key institutional support for my family. If I can pay my way out, I won’t rely on the state to supply that support ever again.
If you are a good teacher, and 5 families are willing to pay 60K / year each for you to teach 5 kids in a nice setting without any of the bureaucratic BS of the school system, you would be insane not to take that offer.
This will indeed come to a head. In SF, the *current reality* is that the only kids who go to public schools are poor ones. The few parents I know who didn't move to the suburbs here all have their kids in pods or private schools, and they aren't going back. Moreover, these same forces are taking good teachers out of the public system and into pods where they can quadruple their income while dealing with 90% less BS.
Is 60K a year a lot? Yes. In SF with 4K a month rent and 500K HHI being common, no surprise that the above kind of arrangement is mainstream.
Now, consider this goes downmarket. You could do this model with a 10 kid pod at 30K each. Same 300K. And maybe you as the entrepreneur-educator can bring on a staffer or two at 60K each to help. Or pay on a fractional basis a specialist to teach a math class once a day for an hour on zoom.
There are any number of creative ways to deal with this and simply make the school irrelevant.
Hate to do this, but this is a bit of a "water flows downhill, news at 11" type of scenario. COVID forced the hand of a lot of people who might have accepted prior conditions in schools... which in many cases weren't great, simply out of inertia.
Also, see healthcare. You see One Medical type places (mass-market concierge healthcare) popping up that give you healthcare efficiently and on time, in a cost efficient manner.
It didn't have to be this way. It gets back to the central problem facing Democrats - if you are going to run on government helping people, your first job is to make sure government actually helps people. You can argue unions should operate purely in the interest of their members, and many do. But the party is under no edict to let said interests have free reign over the agenda.
Doing that - just bending to the union regardless of consequences, is the ultimate in short term thinking. You get the endorsement and the enthusiastic vote from membership short term, but at a terrible cost to your long term viability when the outcomes of their negligence becomes apparent.
Some of this is on unions. You can be a smart union or a dumb union. Look at whatever section of the Teamsters that represents UPS drivers. They negotiate hard for high pay and good benefits. But they’ve never tried to fight productivity improvements that the company wants to implement. The result is that UPS workers are well paid but they work hard and hustle. And UPS customers by and large are happy with the overall results. That’s what a smart union does.
UPS workers face a level of competition that public schools do not. If it was as easy to switch from public school to charter or private as it is from UPS to FedEx, I think the conduct would be quite different.
This is a point I argue as well, to the point I am somewhat exhausted doing so. There is a sentiment I see too often that "management and labor are always adversarial", which completely ignores win/win scenarios like you point out. It is in some quarters almost like the feels you get from "sticking it to the man" matter more than whether that stick ends up in your own eye.
It is from what I've read very similar to how german unions work *with* management when they can where interests align.
Management, labor, customers, and suppliers are in a four-way battle. Depending on the particular issue, any pair of them could naturally end up aligned against the other pair, or there could be fights internal to a pair.
Another successful government program in these United States.
Maybe shamoblic Afghanistan withdrawal, paying more per sq. ft for replacement of NY Public Housing roof repairs than a luxury Soho condo would pay for their roof replacement and bungling public schools really are all sides of the same coin.
We are just home schooling instead. My wife used to teach, and also has her MBA. But this way we can make sure the kids are learning, and not wasting time on woke BS
I had forgotten that Trump had been an early advocate of reopening schools, but in retrospect that was probably a huge part of this. He had been so malevolent about so much of pandemic response that of course that was going to turn people off, even if he was right about this one thing.
This is yet another example of how partisanship ate our brains In a logical world, if your friend who works in pharma says that the data show it's safe to send back to school, you would probably think "my friend knows what she's talking about, so the schools probably are safe" rather than "my friend doesn't care about teachers' lives."
I completely agree. I live in Florida where schools were only closed i the spring of 2020 and fully reopened in the fall. My kids have been back in person the entire time with no material issues.
I’ve voted blue my whole life, and as much as I despise the inflammatory rhetoric, if DeSantis runs for governor again next year I’ll more than likely be voting red.
Political participation ought to depend on the absolute difference between expected outcomes. The silly thinks that some Progressives say is pretty far from what gets done. With the right its the opposite. They sometimes say good things, but actual outcomes are likely to be worse than advertised. Advertising extreme "progressive" positions is the Right's bread and butter.
Yes, betrayal sums it up pretty well. Especially given the rhetoric that parents were entitled whiners for pushing for schools to reopen. I've supported strong public social/ safety net services my whole life, and hearing that I was entitled for expecting the *one* public service I've ever utilized (and the one so basic it's been law here since 1647) to be there for me definitely felt like a betrayal.
I don't think I felt as strongly about it as others, my son did fine with at-home learning (public school) the second half of the 19-20 school year and was back in-person for all of last year.
One thing that runs a little but counter to the narrative here is that last year all of the kids (well, the parents, you know) at my son's school had the option to be either at-home or in-person, with the option to switch at the beginning of each new quarter, and almost no one sent their kids. I mean that. My son was one of 5 kids in his entire classroom who did in-person, the rest of the parents kept their kids at home. Now this was middle school, so I recognize that having elementary-school-aged children who cannot stay home by themselves makes a massive difference.
In our district, we were told we needed to choose at home or in person in September, and could decide again in December. The school also said they wouldn’t have enough in person slots for everyone who needed one. We chose home because we figured we could handle it better than families in more precarious employment situations.
It was quickly obvious this was a disaster. Kids in school were flourishing in classes of 12 to 14 students. Kids at home were in distance learning with 30 to 35 in a virtual class, not even able to see all their classmates on one screen, and overwhelmed teachers who could not keep up with feedback and grading. My kids went into a downward spiral, one of them eventually just gave up on school completely. Our district then announced they would not accept anyone in-person in December either. Whatever choice we made in September would now count for the entire school year.
We finally found spots for the kids at a private school that was open in person the entire year. My younger daughter is still in tutoring to catch up with the 5 months of schooling she didn’t have last year.
Democrats are really bad at governing. They're struggling to keep schools open. They're failing to build enough homes in the states they govern. They struggle to enact incredibly popular measures when they have a federal trifecta.
Republicans are worse. But it seems very likely Democrats' incompetence is part of the reason Republican craziness doesn't lead to electoral defeats large enough to get them to clean up their act.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I guess more sane people need to primary Democratic incumbents. The party desperately needs a refresh.
One of the main reasons I do not associate with either party is because neither is the party for good governance. Democrats, ostensible the party of government, seems completely uninterested in making government effective and instead is all about more spending and more programs.
Republicans still seem largely in low-taxes/starve the beast mode but the new populism has turned to more spending for favored interests.
It's really depressing how the topic of making government more effective, or getting more value out of our tax dollars, is completely missing from the national debate.
I agree completely. What I find particularly sad is that the D's have gotten worse at governing very rapidly. In the 1990s and 2000s, they overall did quite well. They developed policies aimed at the middle class, were somewhat fiscally responsible, took crime seriously, respected the institutions of government, and so on. They certainly did far better at these things than the R's.
But more recently, it seems they've decided to go for the R approach of catering to the base, and let future generations worry about paying the bill.
I have a somewhat opposing view. There is natural tension between leadership and the base. If leadership delivers results, the base stays in line. If it doesn't, the base acts more independently. Democratic leadership didn't deliver enough results to keep the base in line and is now paying the price. Similar to Republicans.
I think there's an additional factor in that technology has made our democracy (unfortunately) a bit more direct. Sending your member of Congress a letter or (God forbid) calling a staffer has a higher barrier of entry than spouting off on social media, and it can't get the same engagement from your fellow loud constituents on some random Tuesday.
To look at it from a different angle, both parties benefited from being able to meet up at some DC bar and leveling with each other, rather than living in perpetual fear of somebody catching a photo of you daring to chat casually with the Enemy. This goes probably doubly or triply for lower-level staffers.
Only one party has allowed this to become so malignant as to threaten our democracy, but I would rather go to the dentist than deal with the "Squad", as much as I might agree with them on many matters of policy.
For both Bunya and Gunnar, I often wonder if the base has fragmented, especially in big cities, to the point that a set of positive results are very difficult to deliver. The different interests/desires involved in housing come to mind. Reducing crime, which should be unifying, has become flashpoint because of police abuse and their resistance to improve. This is not to excuse Dem politicians, but their jobs appear to have gotten more difficult.
I'm more with Binya's comment below here. We lost the chance, in the 1990's and 2000's, to craft sensible policy that would make solidly blue states and cities livable places for ordinary people. Given that the broader economic trend towards urbanization has been inevitable for some time, that has resulted in the middle and working classes of those places suffering as they're outbid for the basic necessities of life, radicalizing the Democratic base.
That's why we find ourselves in a situation where building more housing to alleviate a housing shortage, which should be a slam-dunk, is instead decried as a hand-out to property developers and owners. The urban left is so divorced from the reality of policy-making that they're damned near as bad at it as the GOP.
Our board of supervisors in SF is a very excellent example of this. You have people like Dean Preston who has the audacity to say "I've been working on affordable housing for 40 years in SF, vote for me", without understanding the irony that, if you've been working on affordable housing for 40 years... and the results are this bad, maybe you're in the wrong occupation.
We need one party that prioritizes issues of fairness, equal opportunity and sufficiently equitable distribution of resources over nice, elegant theories of economic models of incentives and systems - in other words to point out when the theory isn't delivering results in the here and now, and to demand that it does. That's necessary but the instincts that animate a party like that are matters of the heart, not brain.
So we need another party that acts as the brain of our system, to translate the good goals of the heart into functioning, workable political and economic that don't have totally screwed up incentives and can operate without excessive, constant government intervention and kludges. That could be the Republicans. If people like Romney were in charge of the Republican party it would be.
But right now we have one party with a heart and not much brain, and the party that's supposed to play the role of the brain has become a zombie.
You’re right, of course, but in the US we have a long history of mixing up your elegant formula with not so extraneous stuff like race, class, and religion. Add to that our federal system and you’ve got a heap of trouble.
For sure. In politics all the grading is on a curve, and a generous one. It's remarkable anything halfway coherent gets done at all, when you consider the herky-jerky way the opinions of large groups move around and coalesce, or don't, around particular ideas, sometimes because of and sometimes in spite of the best efforts of leaders aka the people in front of the parade. Sometimes I wonder if the dynamics of public opinion is that different from how a colony of ants, school of fish, flock of birds or group of lemmings decides where to go.
Wouldn’t hurt for younger more serious republicans to primary incumbents either. A problem on the right side is that the GOP doesn’t really view itself as a party that governs but an opposition party.
Making an alternative party that has different, serious, and implementable ideas will help the Dems too. Competition never hurst
And until she dumbed everything down to try to compete with Sanders, Warren was one of the only Democrats who really did try to formulate policies by starting with a groundup understanding of the whole system and the incentives her proposals would create - her ideas about reforming the law of corporations especially impressed me in it's sophistication yet operational simplicity. Not just randomly turning knobs and dials like Sanders. Focusing on corporate law like that was almost Archimedean in how it identified fulcrum point in the whole system that often taken as a fact of nature but in fact is very much a legal fiction that we created and can change. Btw, her husband is a very good legal historian of the law of legal structures used to limit personal liability, like corporations, how they came into being....
Her recent statements are baffling to me. (Blaming grocery store executives for rising food prices, picking a fight with Elon Musk, as examples). I was never a supporter of hers, but always respected that she did the work to understand the banking system and proposed targeted proposals to address what she viewed as risky or unethical behavior.
Now her statements are what I'd expect from some random Occupy Wall Street protester mindlessly chanting slogans.
I feel like I've seen a few cycles of her on this - when she did her first run for Senate, and when she did her run for President, she seemed to be all over having reasonable plans based on a combination of theory and empirics. But while she's been sitting in office, she's been much more willing to talk like someone who's on social media all day.
I think that many dream hoarders "care" about the unfortunate. They have lawn signs to prove it! Then the use their fancy rewards credit cards at the supermarket, which indirectly jacks up prices for the people who use cash... (Not to mention blocking new housing developments, etc.)
Exactly, FrigidWind. In her interview on the Ezra Klein show at the beginning of the primary she said her number one priority was anti-corruption. All good reforms can flow from that. Alas.
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.
As a member of a teacher's union in Wisconsin, I've never understood why we were making the argument during covid that *what we do doesn't matter.* This has been a real emperor has no clothes moment even for many liberal members of teacher's unions, and I'm increasingly thankful to work in a district that managed to be open every day of the 20-21 school year in a hybrid model.
I just don't know how teaching can become a more attractive profession without unions though. It's true that a public sector employee union has interests that don't align with the service recipient, but without unions public sector employees are pitted against the collective will of society to get that service as cheaply as possible. I don't see that as compatible with the desire to provide a high quality education to every child.
"As a member of a teacher's union in Wisconsin, I've never understood why we were making the argument during covid that *what we do doesn't matter.* This has been a real emperor has no clothes moment even for many liberal members of teacher's unions, and I'm increasingly thankful to work in a district that managed to be open every day of the 20-21 school year in a hybrid model."
Having been in dialogue with some of the leaders at NFT and NEA back in the summer of 2020, I think the top people were aware of this dynamic and wanted the fall 2020 story to be about "support our heroic teachers as they work through the pandemic" but ultimately decided to bend to the desires of the local union leaders who had a lot less savvy about the long-term consequences.
I think it's true, thinking back to fall of 20, that most of my colleagues would have leaned into the "heroic teachers" narrative and only a couple were having overwhelming anxiety about the virus. There's already a lot of martyr-complex thinking among educators--just scroll for two minutes through teacher Twitter, one of the most noxious places on the internet.
This is one of my spiciest takes that I only share with my spouse and psuedo-annonymously online - no one whines more about less than teachers. A lot of friends and acquaintances from college are teachers in some of the local suburban school districts. These are high paying jobs with top resources, and yet their social media feeds are nothing but endless complaints about how hard their jobs are during normal times, and about how trying to send them back to work during Covid is equivalent to being sentenced to life in a salt mine in the gulag.
Their complete lack of awareness that other people A) have been working in person this whole time and B) mostly shut up about it is wild.
I myself am very sympathetic to the "heroic teachers" narrative. I'd in principle be extremely happy to vote for an increase in taxes to increase teacher salaries. Really the only factor that would make me hesitate is the teacher unions. I've always been skeptical of them, and their response to covid has reinforced my concerns tenfold.
They are operating in a much more competitive labour market.
Public schools are a dominant employer, so they can set wages and conditions and, without a union, most teachers would have little choice to work there.
Private and independent schools effectively benchmark against the local Union/public school contract.
This is the first compelling argument in favor of public sector unions I've heard. As someone who is generally in favor of private sector unions but more than a bit allergic to those in the public sector, it's given me something to mull over, thanks.
Yes, public schools and private schools are different. But I'm not sure I understand how the presence of a teacher's union somehow helps alleviate the resource disparity? or makes tough-to-teach kids easier to teach? Or, alternatively, how the teacher's union helps the teacher do a better job in those circumstances?
I agree that it's hard to see how teachers' unions are adding value in the US system. That's not the same as claiming private schools prove unions are not necessary.
The idea is that the bad stuff rs make it more difficult to teach the good ones. However, there are interventions like in school suspension and alternative schools that can segregate them effectively
I don’t think it does, if you’ll note my post above, but it does mean that it’s not easy to make useful comparisons because of confounding factors, self-selection prominently included among them.
I think the consensus is pretty strong that the German model tracks too early. While American schools are comprehensives socially, they are still heavily tracked academically. I probably took 90% of my classes with the top 5% of my high school.
In the Netherlands, they have a full choice model. Pretty much anyone can start a (publicly funded) school, as long as you follow regulations/standards. There are very real choices in instructional style between schools, and parents choose what they want for their kids. This system seems way more functional than the US one.
Teacher's unions seem to deploy "what we do doesn't matter" very strategically and in very self-serving ways. Which is what I would expect any union to do.
Then have the union only advocate for changes to wages and benefits. Have them stay out of everything else (including advocating against charters and school choice)
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?
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The pre-Omicron estimates for the US were 90%+ convalescent or vaccine-derived immunity… we shall see.
There’s no evidence that convalescent immunity fared better and a lot that says it’s worse. Hybrid immunity seems to be the best shot, followed by boosted vaccine…
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?
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.
I’m starting to wonder if the relative material deprivation that young not-quite-professionals in cities (the progressive base) often undergo has disposed them to enjoy seeing *others* unable to enjoy urban amenities?
It would explain why so many of my peers are unable to let go of “but we’re saving lives with our boredom!”
I think a lot of teachers were genuinely afraid - probably excessively so.
A frustration I’ve had through this entire pandemic is that I don’t think we’ve done a good job of communicating about risk in a way that ordinary people can understand. I’m open to suggestions but something like “In January 2020 the average 45 year old female teacher had an X% chance of being hospitalized over the next 3 months for any reason. Teaching in a community with Y% COVID positivity rate increases this hospitalization rate by Z%” Of course there are a bunch of variables at play here, but you could imagine someone (a competent CDC?) setting up a website where you could adjust those variables, select specific mitigations and see the result. You could also throw in comparisons like “this increase in risk is equivalent to driving an extra 30 miles per week” or something like that. By contrast what I see is people way under-rating the risk (who me? Get vaxed? Why?) or massively overstating the risk (30% of infected people get long COVID! <uh- no>). In the absence of clear data and communication people run wild with their over-confidence or anxiety.
I really do blame the media on this point. I don't quite know why we're so bad about talking about risk, but when I was given a choice to teach online in an open school for anyone who wanted to stay home last year I was pretty scared because my spouse has many comorbidities.
But like I couldn't find easy to understand risk data. Like maybe it was there somewhere but the only place I really regularly see it is some 538 people post some of this stuff to their Twitters. I'm not enough of a stats head to build models but I can read a chart and understand is as risky as X and make reasonable choices.
At this point I think we should be moving towards a “tornado watch vs tornado warning” model. For those who don’t live in areas with frequent tornados, a tornado watch is issued hours ahead of time. It means that the weather conditions are ripe for spawning tornados. You don’t head to a shelter for a tornado watch, but you are supposed to be vigilant. In days past, that meant keeping the radio or tv on so you will hear a warning if one is issued - today it means making sure your smartphone is charged and connected to a network. A tornado warning means tornados have been spotted and are nearby - head for shelter immediately!
Right now, we’re getting a bunch of new infections from omicron. That’s a tornado watch- we should be vigilant - go get that booster if you haven’t prioritized that, take a little bit more care about monitoring you and your family for symptoms, that sort of thing. If/when we see evidence that this wave is causing a lot of serious illness- THAT’S the tornado warning.
We really need a system that makes virus alerts the same way we have weather alerts.
We also need better terminology than "watch" vs "warning" - maybe in tornado country you get a better sense of that, but I always hear "winter storm watch" or "winter storm warning" and can never remember which one is more imminent than the other.
“ but institutions can become excessively responsive to their noisiest members.”
This is almost always the case, but in this case the consequences were so severe, and the chance of repeating the mistake so likely, that it justifies extirpating the institution root and branch.
Uncomfortable position for someone who generally believed that teachers’ unions generally/usually had the best interests of students at heart two years ago, but they proved me wrong.
Mass closures of schools (and colleges) was one of the greatest disasters of the entire pandemic. Double digit trillions of dollars of welfare over the lifetime of these kids thrown onto a bonfire, for no public health benefits for themselves and minimal effects on community transmission. What a catastrophe. I hope no country betrays young people in such a manner ever again.
Separately:
>For years, study after study has shown that the effect sizes of education interventions tend to be really small. And when they don’t look small, they tend to be very difficult to scale up. That led some people to infer that schooling is largely pointless. But we learned during the pandemic that if you try something out-of-sample like not having school at all, the effects are actually very large.
This particularly ropey argument that school doesn't matter so we can shut them all down was ofc most explictly made by a certain S. Alexander. For a certain period of time earlier this year, the extremely clever and contrarian "rational" take on school closures was that they would have minimal impact on learning outcomes, because extremely clever and contrarian rational bloggers hated having to study foreign languages when they were at school. Kids going months without education is basically just a big Snow Day.
Given the large mutual audience with Slow Boring, I hope readers here take the claims of that outlet on the big policy questions with generous helpings of scepticism in future.
It probably depends on the kids. I basically took my 8th grade of school off. In HS, i only did work if the classes interested me.
Then after 5 years in the army, I went back to school then got my CPA, and MBA. not a big deal. I also was tested with a 133 IQ into the honors program back in grade school. So the potential was there, I just had to do the work (or at least some of it).
Still, I could have gotten where I wanted to go a lot faster, and maybe even gotten farther if I had started earlier.
I imagine there's a lot of other people that never would have recovered from the path I took.
“Pre-pandemic, … ‘[S]uck it up, the kid almost certainly won’t die’ is not a thing you would say to the parents of a young child.”
This is certainly true, but what pediatricians constantly did tell parents with sick kids was, “It’s viral, so just go home, give the kid rest and fluids, and come back or go to the hospital if it gets worse.”
Which kind of amounts to the same thing, just said much more nicely.
I agree with Matt's take here, though I wish the post had given more than just a throwaway line to non-white parents being more supportive of school closures ("I will acknowledge that surveys indicate low-SES parents were more supportive of school closures than high-SES ones.") A common tactic of the "keep schools closed" crowd was to cite public support for virtual schooling, and the more savvy among them would trot out this specific point about non-white parent support for that position. It also fed into the "bougie parents want babysitting" argument. I'm fairly tuned into this debate for both personal and professional reasons, but never came across any good research on specifically why non-white parents were more supportive of school closures/virtual learning, despite the clear research showing disproportionately negative academic impact on those student groups. (I also think this is why it's not a coincidence that the one large district to announce virtual learning for January 2022 is PG County, a majority Black district.)
I get the anger at teacher unions, but given a significant portion of the Dem coalition (non-white families with school age kids, not just teacher unions) was also supportive of school closures, then I think it's worth more than a throwaway line here, even if the overall conclusion (keep schools open) is correct on the merits.
I would guess it may be related to low-SES parents being less likely to trust institutions like schools and take their word for it that it is safe. But that’s just a guess.
That's interesting and I'm not trying to refute it, because I have no idea why either.
But I mention that because it doesn't quite square with what I remember from the 2020 period where NYC public schools moved to voluntarily choice of in-person / zoom schools. If I remember correctly it was Hispanic parents who were most likely to send their kids in, followed closely by Whites. Both Asian and Black parents were sending kids in at much lower rates.
To be explicit - I say it doesn't square because it doesn't map cleanly to my mental ordering of NYC public school parents' education / income levels by ethnicity. But I don't live in NYC so maybe I'm wrong.
In any case, there are probably multiple driving factors.
Omicron isn’t that lethal. The unwillingness of public health authorities to say this explicitly has further discredited them as risk averse ninnies.
The data are quite clear. South Africa has a 20% vaccination rate, suffered a huge outbreak, is so poor that only a tiny minority of non-serious cases are detected, and is averaging 40 covid deaths a day. Omicron has been spreading in Europe for much longer than the US. Deaths have not exploded anywhere. The UK is averaging 40 something deaths a day, which would project to 220 deaths in the US or 20% of our present death rate. I don’t know whether the death rate from omicron is 3% or 20% the rate of delta, but it’s low enough that only the most vulnerable should worry much.
At some point, many US public health authorities shifted from a posture in which they recognized that disruptive societal interventions were huge expenditures of political capital... to thinking that one disruptive societal intervention meant that the population was *more* accepting of other disruptive societal interventions. They're not performing any sort of effective cost/benefit analysis anymore.
As you suggest, god help us if we very seriously need the population to take their word for anything again any time soon. I think the vast majority have rightfully checked out of the conversation.
Discussion of "how lethal" is pretty much beside the point. It's plenty lethal enough to get vaccinated/boosted, wear a mask indoors, and to start producing and rolling out a Omicron optimized vaccine. Hearing how frightened we should or should not "feel" divorced from what to DO is very tiresome.
I’m not scared of omicron. I am scared of what a wave of omicron will do to our already overburdened hospital systems. An extra 20% patients in hospital is not manageable right now in the Northeast, Michigan, etc., where hospitals are already maxed out.
"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
Hey Milan, some hopefully constructive criticism for today's plots:
* The colors are too similar, so it's hard to distinguish the different subjects.
* Having the post-covid points disconnected from the pre-covid data makes it even harder.
* It seems like one subject is missing from the post-covid data (history?). Since all the subjects tracked pretty closely together pre-covid, the missing one could just be removed to make the plot less busy, without losing anything important to the message of the plot.
* To make things easier to distinguish, use different marker shapes and/or line styles for each subject. Open markers are often a better choice when data points overlap.
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.
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.
My daughter attends a charter school in DC and I will say that I've been relatively happy with their COVID response and I'm cautiously optimistic about their policies moving forward, especially compared to the Prince George's County Schools next door that Matt referenced.
They started in-person instruction back up in spring of 2021 - part time, but still - earlier than most other schools in the area. Now that we're back to full-time instruction, including before/after care classes, they have instituted easily achievable common sense precautions, like having the kids eat outside unless it's raining (note - this should continue to be a policy after COVID. Kids getting more time outside is good!), mandated staff vaccines (impressively at 100% now), and started a random student testing regimen to find asymptomatic kids. When kid vaccines became available they organized a vaccine clinic at school to get kids jabbed, which has led to 60% of the student body already being vaccinated.
Like many schools, right before Christmas we had a huge uptick in kids testing positive. The school has been sensible in only quarantining kids who had close contacts, and if kids are fully vaxxed, are allowed to come back without quarantine. They've been transparent with notifications when kids test positive (obviously not naming the students), and have no plans as of now to delay school re-opening after winter break despite the boom in positive cases.
This isn't to brag, but rather to show that schools CAN institute coherent COVID policies. It just takes leadership. Maybe it's only possible with the independent leadership in charter/private schools compared to the institutional inflexibility of public districts, but it exists.
I just want to note that the school my kid attends is a DC public school and sounds identical in its response, so in DC, at least, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of charter vs. public. My kid previously attended a charter school and our experience has been that DC charter schools hew pretty closely to DCPS policies, mostly for the better.
This issue is where the left lost me.
Summer of 2020, the following happened in quick succession: Trump blustered schools should open, the teachers unions immediately took the anti-Trump position, my friends in Europe all started sending their kids back to school without any masks at all, Covid cases were similar there and here in Massachusetts, I pointed this out to my local friend group and one response is that if I wanted similar in Massachusetts that means I don’t care if teachers die, I got a new job in pharma with a huge raise, the local teachers union declared they wouldn’t teach in person unless they “felt safe,” …..and this former public school booster transformed her raise into private school tuition so her kids could go to school in person for all of 2020-2021.
The progressive conversation about this issue was profoundly alienating. I’m still voting blue bc the alternative is even worse, but my political participation went off a cliff.
School is a key institutional support for my family. If I can pay my way out, I won’t rely on the state to supply that support ever again.
If you are a good teacher, and 5 families are willing to pay 60K / year each for you to teach 5 kids in a nice setting without any of the bureaucratic BS of the school system, you would be insane not to take that offer.
This will indeed come to a head. In SF, the *current reality* is that the only kids who go to public schools are poor ones. The few parents I know who didn't move to the suburbs here all have their kids in pods or private schools, and they aren't going back. Moreover, these same forces are taking good teachers out of the public system and into pods where they can quadruple their income while dealing with 90% less BS.
Is 60K a year a lot? Yes. In SF with 4K a month rent and 500K HHI being common, no surprise that the above kind of arrangement is mainstream.
Now, consider this goes downmarket. You could do this model with a 10 kid pod at 30K each. Same 300K. And maybe you as the entrepreneur-educator can bring on a staffer or two at 60K each to help. Or pay on a fractional basis a specialist to teach a math class once a day for an hour on zoom.
There are any number of creative ways to deal with this and simply make the school irrelevant.
The thought of a public school system viewed the same way as we view mass transit (how poor people get around) is just *terrifying*.
Hate to do this, but this is a bit of a "water flows downhill, news at 11" type of scenario. COVID forced the hand of a lot of people who might have accepted prior conditions in schools... which in many cases weren't great, simply out of inertia.
Also, see healthcare. You see One Medical type places (mass-market concierge healthcare) popping up that give you healthcare efficiently and on time, in a cost efficient manner.
It didn't have to be this way. It gets back to the central problem facing Democrats - if you are going to run on government helping people, your first job is to make sure government actually helps people. You can argue unions should operate purely in the interest of their members, and many do. But the party is under no edict to let said interests have free reign over the agenda.
Doing that - just bending to the union regardless of consequences, is the ultimate in short term thinking. You get the endorsement and the enthusiastic vote from membership short term, but at a terrible cost to your long term viability when the outcomes of their negligence becomes apparent.
Some of this is on unions. You can be a smart union or a dumb union. Look at whatever section of the Teamsters that represents UPS drivers. They negotiate hard for high pay and good benefits. But they’ve never tried to fight productivity improvements that the company wants to implement. The result is that UPS workers are well paid but they work hard and hustle. And UPS customers by and large are happy with the overall results. That’s what a smart union does.
UPS workers face a level of competition that public schools do not. If it was as easy to switch from public school to charter or private as it is from UPS to FedEx, I think the conduct would be quite different.
Exactly. Which is why we need full school choice. And why unions hate school choice
That didn't effect the UAW until GM and Chrysler were circling the drain and Ford survived by the skin of its teeth.
This is a point I argue as well, to the point I am somewhat exhausted doing so. There is a sentiment I see too often that "management and labor are always adversarial", which completely ignores win/win scenarios like you point out. It is in some quarters almost like the feels you get from "sticking it to the man" matter more than whether that stick ends up in your own eye.
It is from what I've read very similar to how german unions work *with* management when they can where interests align.
Management, labor, customers, and suppliers are in a four-way battle. Depending on the particular issue, any pair of them could naturally end up aligned against the other pair, or there could be fights internal to a pair.
No disagreement. If the GOP ends up saving public education from itself without killing it in the process, I’m going to laugh my ass off.
Another successful government program in these United States.
Maybe shamoblic Afghanistan withdrawal, paying more per sq. ft for replacement of NY Public Housing roof repairs than a luxury Soho condo would pay for their roof replacement and bungling public schools really are all sides of the same coin.
As long as public s hook kids are subjected to coercive masking, it will be the bus of education. Only servants and cowards mask.
What a silly thing to say.
Lol.
Whatever you say, bro.
Why limit this to masks? Only servants and cowards wear pants.
You're not truly free unless your squishy bits are out for the world.
I'll believe the anti-mask crowd is sincere when they come out equally against uncomfortable bras and underwear
And Only Fans do not!
You're not truly free unless your squishy bits are out for the world.
We are just home schooling instead. My wife used to teach, and also has her MBA. But this way we can make sure the kids are learning, and not wasting time on woke BS
Are you or your wife also employed, full or part time?
I had forgotten that Trump had been an early advocate of reopening schools, but in retrospect that was probably a huge part of this. He had been so malevolent about so much of pandemic response that of course that was going to turn people off, even if he was right about this one thing.
he was right about more than that. his operation warp speed push is a big reason we got the vaccines so quick
This is yet another example of how partisanship ate our brains In a logical world, if your friend who works in pharma says that the data show it's safe to send back to school, you would probably think "my friend knows what she's talking about, so the schools probably are safe" rather than "my friend doesn't care about teachers' lives."
I completely agree. I live in Florida where schools were only closed i the spring of 2020 and fully reopened in the fall. My kids have been back in person the entire time with no material issues.
I’ve voted blue my whole life, and as much as I despise the inflammatory rhetoric, if DeSantis runs for governor again next year I’ll more than likely be voting red.
Political participation ought to depend on the absolute difference between expected outcomes. The silly thinks that some Progressives say is pretty far from what gets done. With the right its the opposite. They sometimes say good things, but actual outcomes are likely to be worse than advertised. Advertising extreme "progressive" positions is the Right's bread and butter.
We put our son in private school to ensure in person learning and kept him there this year to avoid coercive masking.
Hammer dropped
Yes, betrayal sums it up pretty well. Especially given the rhetoric that parents were entitled whiners for pushing for schools to reopen. I've supported strong public social/ safety net services my whole life, and hearing that I was entitled for expecting the *one* public service I've ever utilized (and the one so basic it's been law here since 1647) to be there for me definitely felt like a betrayal.
I don't think I felt as strongly about it as others, my son did fine with at-home learning (public school) the second half of the 19-20 school year and was back in-person for all of last year.
One thing that runs a little but counter to the narrative here is that last year all of the kids (well, the parents, you know) at my son's school had the option to be either at-home or in-person, with the option to switch at the beginning of each new quarter, and almost no one sent their kids. I mean that. My son was one of 5 kids in his entire classroom who did in-person, the rest of the parents kept their kids at home. Now this was middle school, so I recognize that having elementary-school-aged children who cannot stay home by themselves makes a massive difference.
In our district, we were told we needed to choose at home or in person in September, and could decide again in December. The school also said they wouldn’t have enough in person slots for everyone who needed one. We chose home because we figured we could handle it better than families in more precarious employment situations.
It was quickly obvious this was a disaster. Kids in school were flourishing in classes of 12 to 14 students. Kids at home were in distance learning with 30 to 35 in a virtual class, not even able to see all their classmates on one screen, and overwhelmed teachers who could not keep up with feedback and grading. My kids went into a downward spiral, one of them eventually just gave up on school completely. Our district then announced they would not accept anyone in-person in December either. Whatever choice we made in September would now count for the entire school year.
We finally found spots for the kids at a private school that was open in person the entire year. My younger daughter is still in tutoring to catch up with the 5 months of schooling she didn’t have last year.
Democrats are really bad at governing. They're struggling to keep schools open. They're failing to build enough homes in the states they govern. They struggle to enact incredibly popular measures when they have a federal trifecta.
Republicans are worse. But it seems very likely Democrats' incompetence is part of the reason Republican craziness doesn't lead to electoral defeats large enough to get them to clean up their act.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I guess more sane people need to primary Democratic incumbents. The party desperately needs a refresh.
One of the main reasons I do not associate with either party is because neither is the party for good governance. Democrats, ostensible the party of government, seems completely uninterested in making government effective and instead is all about more spending and more programs.
Republicans still seem largely in low-taxes/starve the beast mode but the new populism has turned to more spending for favored interests.
It's really depressing how the topic of making government more effective, or getting more value out of our tax dollars, is completely missing from the national debate.
I agree completely. What I find particularly sad is that the D's have gotten worse at governing very rapidly. In the 1990s and 2000s, they overall did quite well. They developed policies aimed at the middle class, were somewhat fiscally responsible, took crime seriously, respected the institutions of government, and so on. They certainly did far better at these things than the R's.
But more recently, it seems they've decided to go for the R approach of catering to the base, and let future generations worry about paying the bill.
I have a somewhat opposing view. There is natural tension between leadership and the base. If leadership delivers results, the base stays in line. If it doesn't, the base acts more independently. Democratic leadership didn't deliver enough results to keep the base in line and is now paying the price. Similar to Republicans.
I think there's an additional factor in that technology has made our democracy (unfortunately) a bit more direct. Sending your member of Congress a letter or (God forbid) calling a staffer has a higher barrier of entry than spouting off on social media, and it can't get the same engagement from your fellow loud constituents on some random Tuesday.
To look at it from a different angle, both parties benefited from being able to meet up at some DC bar and leveling with each other, rather than living in perpetual fear of somebody catching a photo of you daring to chat casually with the Enemy. This goes probably doubly or triply for lower-level staffers.
Only one party has allowed this to become so malignant as to threaten our democracy, but I would rather go to the dentist than deal with the "Squad", as much as I might agree with them on many matters of policy.
For both Bunya and Gunnar, I often wonder if the base has fragmented, especially in big cities, to the point that a set of positive results are very difficult to deliver. The different interests/desires involved in housing come to mind. Reducing crime, which should be unifying, has become flashpoint because of police abuse and their resistance to improve. This is not to excuse Dem politicians, but their jobs appear to have gotten more difficult.
I do not disagree, and would add to this that social media has probably made it even harder to override base preferences in favor of the median voter.
This is really insightful.
I'm more with Binya's comment below here. We lost the chance, in the 1990's and 2000's, to craft sensible policy that would make solidly blue states and cities livable places for ordinary people. Given that the broader economic trend towards urbanization has been inevitable for some time, that has resulted in the middle and working classes of those places suffering as they're outbid for the basic necessities of life, radicalizing the Democratic base.
That's why we find ourselves in a situation where building more housing to alleviate a housing shortage, which should be a slam-dunk, is instead decried as a hand-out to property developers and owners. The urban left is so divorced from the reality of policy-making that they're damned near as bad at it as the GOP.
Our board of supervisors in SF is a very excellent example of this. You have people like Dean Preston who has the audacity to say "I've been working on affordable housing for 40 years in SF, vote for me", without understanding the irony that, if you've been working on affordable housing for 40 years... and the results are this bad, maybe you're in the wrong occupation.
We need one party that prioritizes issues of fairness, equal opportunity and sufficiently equitable distribution of resources over nice, elegant theories of economic models of incentives and systems - in other words to point out when the theory isn't delivering results in the here and now, and to demand that it does. That's necessary but the instincts that animate a party like that are matters of the heart, not brain.
So we need another party that acts as the brain of our system, to translate the good goals of the heart into functioning, workable political and economic that don't have totally screwed up incentives and can operate without excessive, constant government intervention and kludges. That could be the Republicans. If people like Romney were in charge of the Republican party it would be.
But right now we have one party with a heart and not much brain, and the party that's supposed to play the role of the brain has become a zombie.
You’re right, of course, but in the US we have a long history of mixing up your elegant formula with not so extraneous stuff like race, class, and religion. Add to that our federal system and you’ve got a heap of trouble.
For sure. In politics all the grading is on a curve, and a generous one. It's remarkable anything halfway coherent gets done at all, when you consider the herky-jerky way the opinions of large groups move around and coalesce, or don't, around particular ideas, sometimes because of and sometimes in spite of the best efforts of leaders aka the people in front of the parade. Sometimes I wonder if the dynamics of public opinion is that different from how a colony of ants, school of fish, flock of birds or group of lemmings decides where to go.
Is it the party proper that has no brain or is it the sudden takeover by idiot activists of messaging since summer of 2020?
Yes and the Liberal Democrats were wrecked under his leadership.
Are people who show up for primaries saner than the member?
Wouldn’t hurt for younger more serious republicans to primary incumbents either. A problem on the right side is that the GOP doesn’t really view itself as a party that governs but an opposition party.
Making an alternative party that has different, serious, and implementable ideas will help the Dems too. Competition never hurst
You were Warren 2020?
And until she dumbed everything down to try to compete with Sanders, Warren was one of the only Democrats who really did try to formulate policies by starting with a groundup understanding of the whole system and the incentives her proposals would create - her ideas about reforming the law of corporations especially impressed me in it's sophistication yet operational simplicity. Not just randomly turning knobs and dials like Sanders. Focusing on corporate law like that was almost Archimedean in how it identified fulcrum point in the whole system that often taken as a fact of nature but in fact is very much a legal fiction that we created and can change. Btw, her husband is a very good legal historian of the law of legal structures used to limit personal liability, like corporations, how they came into being....
Her recent statements are baffling to me. (Blaming grocery store executives for rising food prices, picking a fight with Elon Musk, as examples). I was never a supporter of hers, but always respected that she did the work to understand the banking system and proposed targeted proposals to address what she viewed as risky or unethical behavior.
Now her statements are what I'd expect from some random Occupy Wall Street protester mindlessly chanting slogans.
I feel like I've seen a few cycles of her on this - when she did her first run for Senate, and when she did her run for President, she seemed to be all over having reasonable plans based on a combination of theory and empirics. But while she's been sitting in office, she's been much more willing to talk like someone who's on social media all day.
She always seemed to me like she was in the pocket of the “Dream Hoarders”, who I take as a bigger threat than the people she targeted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-elizabeth-warren-really-wants-to-unrig-the-system-she-should-focus-on-the-dream-hoarders/2020/01/21/6666b7f2-3c97-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html
I think that many dream hoarders "care" about the unfortunate. They have lawn signs to prove it! Then the use their fancy rewards credit cards at the supermarket, which indirectly jacks up prices for the people who use cash... (Not to mention blocking new housing developments, etc.)
Warren's salary was paid by dream hoarders at Harvard and she was largely supported by dream hoarders in her presidental campaign (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-super-tuesday.html). I don't know what she truly believes, but she sure didn't bite the white, college-educated hands that fed her.
Exactly, FrigidWind. In her interview on the Ezra Klein show at the beginning of the primary she said her number one priority was anti-corruption. All good reforms can flow from that. Alas.
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.
As a member of a teacher's union in Wisconsin, I've never understood why we were making the argument during covid that *what we do doesn't matter.* This has been a real emperor has no clothes moment even for many liberal members of teacher's unions, and I'm increasingly thankful to work in a district that managed to be open every day of the 20-21 school year in a hybrid model.
I just don't know how teaching can become a more attractive profession without unions though. It's true that a public sector employee union has interests that don't align with the service recipient, but without unions public sector employees are pitted against the collective will of society to get that service as cheaply as possible. I don't see that as compatible with the desire to provide a high quality education to every child.
"As a member of a teacher's union in Wisconsin, I've never understood why we were making the argument during covid that *what we do doesn't matter.* This has been a real emperor has no clothes moment even for many liberal members of teacher's unions, and I'm increasingly thankful to work in a district that managed to be open every day of the 20-21 school year in a hybrid model."
Having been in dialogue with some of the leaders at NFT and NEA back in the summer of 2020, I think the top people were aware of this dynamic and wanted the fall 2020 story to be about "support our heroic teachers as they work through the pandemic" but ultimately decided to bend to the desires of the local union leaders who had a lot less savvy about the long-term consequences.
I think it's true, thinking back to fall of 20, that most of my colleagues would have leaned into the "heroic teachers" narrative and only a couple were having overwhelming anxiety about the virus. There's already a lot of martyr-complex thinking among educators--just scroll for two minutes through teacher Twitter, one of the most noxious places on the internet.
This is one of my spiciest takes that I only share with my spouse and psuedo-annonymously online - no one whines more about less than teachers. A lot of friends and acquaintances from college are teachers in some of the local suburban school districts. These are high paying jobs with top resources, and yet their social media feeds are nothing but endless complaints about how hard their jobs are during normal times, and about how trying to send them back to work during Covid is equivalent to being sentenced to life in a salt mine in the gulag.
Their complete lack of awareness that other people A) have been working in person this whole time and B) mostly shut up about it is wild.
OTOH I’m not a teacher at least partly cause I don’t think I could take it. Seems like a super hard job!
I myself am very sympathetic to the "heroic teachers" narrative. I'd in principle be extremely happy to vote for an increase in taxes to increase teacher salaries. Really the only factor that would make me hesitate is the teacher unions. I've always been skeptical of them, and their response to covid has reinforced my concerns tenfold.
Norm Macdonald has a great bit on this: https://youtu.be/dAg9M-O9wGo
Why?!
Their job is to tell those people to stuff it, and they have the power to do it.
A public internal brawl would have been vastly less damaging to *their own interests* than what actually occurred!
The iron law of institutions: it's better to be the head of a powerless union than rank-and-file of a powerful one.
“ we were making the argument during covid that *what we do doesn't matter.*”
Speaking as John Q Public… trust me, we noticed. That’s not good for your unionization in the long run.
Independent and Private schools largely operate without teacher unions and seem to do just fine.
They are operating in a much more competitive labour market.
Public schools are a dominant employer, so they can set wages and conditions and, without a union, most teachers would have little choice to work there.
Private and independent schools effectively benchmark against the local Union/public school contract.
This is the first compelling argument in favor of public sector unions I've heard. As someone who is generally in favor of private sector unions but more than a bit allergic to those in the public sector, it's given me something to mull over, thanks.
With more resources and way fewer tough to teach kids. It's not a fair comparison.
Yes, public schools and private schools are different. But I'm not sure I understand how the presence of a teacher's union somehow helps alleviate the resource disparity? or makes tough-to-teach kids easier to teach? Or, alternatively, how the teacher's union helps the teacher do a better job in those circumstances?
I agree that it's hard to see how teachers' unions are adding value in the US system. That's not the same as claiming private schools prove unions are not necessary.
Serious question: Why does the presence of misbehaving or poorly-performing students lead to a union being a necessity?
The idea is that the bad stuff rs make it more difficult to teach the good ones. However, there are interventions like in school suspension and alternative schools that can segregate them effectively
I don’t think it does, if you’ll note my post above, but it does mean that it’s not easy to make useful comparisons because of confounding factors, self-selection prominently included among them.
Or you can have all three "schools" under the same roof with tracking
I think the consensus is pretty strong that the German model tracks too early. While American schools are comprehensives socially, they are still heavily tracked academically. I probably took 90% of my classes with the top 5% of my high school.
In the Netherlands, they have a full choice model. Pretty much anyone can start a (publicly funded) school, as long as you follow regulations/standards. There are very real choices in instructional style between schools, and parents choose what they want for their kids. This system seems way more functional than the US one.
Teacher's unions seem to deploy "what we do doesn't matter" very strategically and in very self-serving ways. Which is what I would expect any union to do.
Then have the union only advocate for changes to wages and benefits. Have them stay out of everything else (including advocating against charters and school choice)
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?
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The pre-Omicron estimates for the US were 90%+ convalescent or vaccine-derived immunity… we shall see.
There’s no evidence that convalescent immunity fared better and a lot that says it’s worse. Hybrid immunity seems to be the best shot, followed by boosted vaccine…
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?
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.
I’m starting to wonder if the relative material deprivation that young not-quite-professionals in cities (the progressive base) often undergo has disposed them to enjoy seeing *others* unable to enjoy urban amenities?
It would explain why so many of my peers are unable to let go of “but we’re saving lives with our boredom!”
I think a lot of teachers were genuinely afraid - probably excessively so.
A frustration I’ve had through this entire pandemic is that I don’t think we’ve done a good job of communicating about risk in a way that ordinary people can understand. I’m open to suggestions but something like “In January 2020 the average 45 year old female teacher had an X% chance of being hospitalized over the next 3 months for any reason. Teaching in a community with Y% COVID positivity rate increases this hospitalization rate by Z%” Of course there are a bunch of variables at play here, but you could imagine someone (a competent CDC?) setting up a website where you could adjust those variables, select specific mitigations and see the result. You could also throw in comparisons like “this increase in risk is equivalent to driving an extra 30 miles per week” or something like that. By contrast what I see is people way under-rating the risk (who me? Get vaxed? Why?) or massively overstating the risk (30% of infected people get long COVID! <uh- no>). In the absence of clear data and communication people run wild with their over-confidence or anxiety.
I really do blame the media on this point. I don't quite know why we're so bad about talking about risk, but when I was given a choice to teach online in an open school for anyone who wanted to stay home last year I was pretty scared because my spouse has many comorbidities.
But like I couldn't find easy to understand risk data. Like maybe it was there somewhere but the only place I really regularly see it is some 538 people post some of this stuff to their Twitters. I'm not enough of a stats head to build models but I can read a chart and understand is as risky as X and make reasonable choices.
At this point I think we should be moving towards a “tornado watch vs tornado warning” model. For those who don’t live in areas with frequent tornados, a tornado watch is issued hours ahead of time. It means that the weather conditions are ripe for spawning tornados. You don’t head to a shelter for a tornado watch, but you are supposed to be vigilant. In days past, that meant keeping the radio or tv on so you will hear a warning if one is issued - today it means making sure your smartphone is charged and connected to a network. A tornado warning means tornados have been spotted and are nearby - head for shelter immediately!
Right now, we’re getting a bunch of new infections from omicron. That’s a tornado watch- we should be vigilant - go get that booster if you haven’t prioritized that, take a little bit more care about monitoring you and your family for symptoms, that sort of thing. If/when we see evidence that this wave is causing a lot of serious illness- THAT’S the tornado warning.
We really need a system that makes virus alerts the same way we have weather alerts.
We also need better terminology than "watch" vs "warning" - maybe in tornado country you get a better sense of that, but I always hear "winter storm watch" or "winter storm warning" and can never remember which one is more imminent than the other.
I have been searching for this EXACT tool since about June 2020.
“ but institutions can become excessively responsive to their noisiest members.”
This is almost always the case, but in this case the consequences were so severe, and the chance of repeating the mistake so likely, that it justifies extirpating the institution root and branch.
Uncomfortable position for someone who generally believed that teachers’ unions generally/usually had the best interests of students at heart two years ago, but they proved me wrong.
Mass closures of schools (and colleges) was one of the greatest disasters of the entire pandemic. Double digit trillions of dollars of welfare over the lifetime of these kids thrown onto a bonfire, for no public health benefits for themselves and minimal effects on community transmission. What a catastrophe. I hope no country betrays young people in such a manner ever again.
Separately:
>For years, study after study has shown that the effect sizes of education interventions tend to be really small. And when they don’t look small, they tend to be very difficult to scale up. That led some people to infer that schooling is largely pointless. But we learned during the pandemic that if you try something out-of-sample like not having school at all, the effects are actually very large.
This particularly ropey argument that school doesn't matter so we can shut them all down was ofc most explictly made by a certain S. Alexander. For a certain period of time earlier this year, the extremely clever and contrarian "rational" take on school closures was that they would have minimal impact on learning outcomes, because extremely clever and contrarian rational bloggers hated having to study foreign languages when they were at school. Kids going months without education is basically just a big Snow Day.
Given the large mutual audience with Slow Boring, I hope readers here take the claims of that outlet on the big policy questions with generous helpings of scepticism in future.
It probably depends on the kids. I basically took my 8th grade of school off. In HS, i only did work if the classes interested me.
Then after 5 years in the army, I went back to school then got my CPA, and MBA. not a big deal. I also was tested with a 133 IQ into the honors program back in grade school. So the potential was there, I just had to do the work (or at least some of it).
Still, I could have gotten where I wanted to go a lot faster, and maybe even gotten farther if I had started earlier.
I imagine there's a lot of other people that never would have recovered from the path I took.
“Pre-pandemic, … ‘[S]uck it up, the kid almost certainly won’t die’ is not a thing you would say to the parents of a young child.”
This is certainly true, but what pediatricians constantly did tell parents with sick kids was, “It’s viral, so just go home, give the kid rest and fluids, and come back or go to the hospital if it gets worse.”
Which kind of amounts to the same thing, just said much more nicely.
I agree with Matt's take here, though I wish the post had given more than just a throwaway line to non-white parents being more supportive of school closures ("I will acknowledge that surveys indicate low-SES parents were more supportive of school closures than high-SES ones.") A common tactic of the "keep schools closed" crowd was to cite public support for virtual schooling, and the more savvy among them would trot out this specific point about non-white parent support for that position. It also fed into the "bougie parents want babysitting" argument. I'm fairly tuned into this debate for both personal and professional reasons, but never came across any good research on specifically why non-white parents were more supportive of school closures/virtual learning, despite the clear research showing disproportionately negative academic impact on those student groups. (I also think this is why it's not a coincidence that the one large district to announce virtual learning for January 2022 is PG County, a majority Black district.)
I get the anger at teacher unions, but given a significant portion of the Dem coalition (non-white families with school age kids, not just teacher unions) was also supportive of school closures, then I think it's worth more than a throwaway line here, even if the overall conclusion (keep schools open) is correct on the merits.
I would guess it may be related to low-SES parents being less likely to trust institutions like schools and take their word for it that it is safe. But that’s just a guess.
That's interesting and I'm not trying to refute it, because I have no idea why either.
But I mention that because it doesn't quite square with what I remember from the 2020 period where NYC public schools moved to voluntarily choice of in-person / zoom schools. If I remember correctly it was Hispanic parents who were most likely to send their kids in, followed closely by Whites. Both Asian and Black parents were sending kids in at much lower rates.
To be explicit - I say it doesn't square because it doesn't map cleanly to my mental ordering of NYC public school parents' education / income levels by ethnicity. But I don't live in NYC so maybe I'm wrong.
In any case, there are probably multiple driving factors.
Omicron isn’t that lethal. The unwillingness of public health authorities to say this explicitly has further discredited them as risk averse ninnies.
The data are quite clear. South Africa has a 20% vaccination rate, suffered a huge outbreak, is so poor that only a tiny minority of non-serious cases are detected, and is averaging 40 covid deaths a day. Omicron has been spreading in Europe for much longer than the US. Deaths have not exploded anywhere. The UK is averaging 40 something deaths a day, which would project to 220 deaths in the US or 20% of our present death rate. I don’t know whether the death rate from omicron is 3% or 20% the rate of delta, but it’s low enough that only the most vulnerable should worry much.
At some point, many US public health authorities shifted from a posture in which they recognized that disruptive societal interventions were huge expenditures of political capital... to thinking that one disruptive societal intervention meant that the population was *more* accepting of other disruptive societal interventions. They're not performing any sort of effective cost/benefit analysis anymore.
As you suggest, god help us if we very seriously need the population to take their word for anything again any time soon. I think the vast majority have rightfully checked out of the conversation.
Discussion of "how lethal" is pretty much beside the point. It's plenty lethal enough to get vaccinated/boosted, wear a mask indoors, and to start producing and rolling out a Omicron optimized vaccine. Hearing how frightened we should or should not "feel" divorced from what to DO is very tiresome.
I’m not scared of omicron. I am scared of what a wave of omicron will do to our already overburdened hospital systems. An extra 20% patients in hospital is not manageable right now in the Northeast, Michigan, etc., where hospitals are already maxed out.
"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 agree - you're not allowed say "education is important" and then take away gifted programs and stop caring about standard tests.
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.
Hey Milan, some hopefully constructive criticism for today's plots:
* The colors are too similar, so it's hard to distinguish the different subjects.
* Having the post-covid points disconnected from the pre-covid data makes it even harder.
* It seems like one subject is missing from the post-covid data (history?). Since all the subjects tracked pretty closely together pre-covid, the missing one could just be removed to make the plot less busy, without losing anything important to the message of the plot.
* To make things easier to distinguish, use different marker shapes and/or line styles for each subject. Open markers are often a better choice when data points overlap.
* You can check color choices for legibility here: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/, and there's a proposed accessibility-friendly color palette at https://github.com/mpetroff/accessible-color-cycles.
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.
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.
My daughter attends a charter school in DC and I will say that I've been relatively happy with their COVID response and I'm cautiously optimistic about their policies moving forward, especially compared to the Prince George's County Schools next door that Matt referenced.
They started in-person instruction back up in spring of 2021 - part time, but still - earlier than most other schools in the area. Now that we're back to full-time instruction, including before/after care classes, they have instituted easily achievable common sense precautions, like having the kids eat outside unless it's raining (note - this should continue to be a policy after COVID. Kids getting more time outside is good!), mandated staff vaccines (impressively at 100% now), and started a random student testing regimen to find asymptomatic kids. When kid vaccines became available they organized a vaccine clinic at school to get kids jabbed, which has led to 60% of the student body already being vaccinated.
Like many schools, right before Christmas we had a huge uptick in kids testing positive. The school has been sensible in only quarantining kids who had close contacts, and if kids are fully vaxxed, are allowed to come back without quarantine. They've been transparent with notifications when kids test positive (obviously not naming the students), and have no plans as of now to delay school re-opening after winter break despite the boom in positive cases.
This isn't to brag, but rather to show that schools CAN institute coherent COVID policies. It just takes leadership. Maybe it's only possible with the independent leadership in charter/private schools compared to the institutional inflexibility of public districts, but it exists.
I just want to note that the school my kid attends is a DC public school and sounds identical in its response, so in DC, at least, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of charter vs. public. My kid previously attended a charter school and our experience has been that DC charter schools hew pretty closely to DCPS policies, mostly for the better.