What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point.
Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want things to actually get better?
People are scared, that's just a fact, and they need to feel confident that action is being taken in their best interest. Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.
We all know that this is an exceptional event and that there will be missteps. People will forgive mistakes and setbacks and take on more risk if they are confident that there is a plan - but so far there isn't one. We're almost six months into this and the messaging is still chaos. The lack of a national strategy is what is causing this pandemic to worsen. The rot really does start at the top.
The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!
“What we currently have going on right now is a complete collapse in confidence. So many commenters are debating the death rate, case counts, hospitalizations, etc, which is all besides the point.“
That’s what happens when political parties and now the president and his administration are spreading misinformation as long it helps their short term needs. Nobody believes anything anymore. I am already worried about the election. No matter the result, a significant part of the population will most likely not trust the results. I don’t think a country can survive such distrust without significant damage to its institutions.
It's not the case. This is clear because lots of countries are having problems with teaching unions refusing to go back to work, but only one country has Trump.
There's a lot of evidence teachers aren't actually afraid, but rather, are in hock to hyper-aggressive unions. They have been paid to not work. They can keep being paid to not work. Why would they work?
To go back to the US context, there's now a teaching union in LA that's refusing to go back post-COVID until their demands are met. Their demands include .... defunding the police. Obviously.
(The Center Square) – One of the largest teachers unions in the state of California, the United Teachers Los Angeles with 35,000 members, says public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District should not reopen if certain policies are not implemented on the state and national level, including defunding the police and implementing Medicare for All
This isn't a COVID problem. This is a political problem.
I'm very pleased by the decision from the top in California today about keeping schools remote until things get better. The only complaint I have is how long it took to get there. Tons of people at hundreds/thousands of school districts and private schools throughout the state have spent incredible effort debating and planning and so much effort could have been saved if the decision from the top was made earlier.
But he's making the decision for all of California. If you look at the actual data, it appears that most of the cases are coming from southern california. Also, the real data to look at is death rate, and hospitalization rate. I don't know about the death rate, but the hospitalization rate is definitely going up. However, nearly all of the patients are in southern california again. In fact, it's LA that's really the epicenter of death and hospitalization for california.
Here's the hospitalization link I'm using, because there might be better data somewhere else.
It's easy to be consumed by the fear about this disease, and that the number of cases that are rising. But we have to be careful to make informed decisions, and not compromise student learning in the entire state due to rising cases in one part of the state.
One thing, is it looks a bit like the hospitalizations might be starting to slightly level off, but it's hard to tell since it still could be trending upwards. At the very least, it doesn't look like the cases are on any kind of exponential curve.
Why do you believe keeping schools closed is better than reopening? Have you looked into the research? Most of my findings indicate that the benefits of opening safely outweigh the the risks and the adverse effects of school closure (to the children, families and society) outweigh the benefits.
Just one quote out of many:
> Weighing the health risks of reopening K-12 schools in fall 2020 against the educational risks of providing no in-person instruction, school districts should prioritize reopening schools full time, especially for grades K-5 and students with special needs, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Edit: I realize this is a contentious topic. I'm definitely not trying to stir up political wars here. I'm submitting my question and research findings here because I trust this place for civil and intellectual discourse.
I share your pleasure in the decision, but staunchly disagree with you about the method used to reach it.
The correct decision was reached, in time (before the start of the school year) for it to make a difference.
Tons of people and thousands of schools vigorously debating is the democratic process. A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism, and as we've seen repeatedly this year, authoritarian decisions are resisted even when they're the right decision.
For something like masking, you can justify it with the urgency of the situation (even though I'm compelled to add that "the top" got this one wrong during the crucial months of February and March). For starting school in the fall, you can't.
I’m not, California should have got its shit together and instituted comprehensive tracking and tracing commensurate with the needs of public education restarting. By failing to build testing and tracing capacity we have wasted the time bought for us through mass unemployment. California is the 5th largest economy in the world, we could have done this alone and ignored the rest of the us, but we didn’t and that is a failure.
> we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus
This statement implies that there's a way to completely eradicate the virus, eg. if everyone in the world stays locked in their homes for 6 weeks, then the virus will be eradicated. That's not realistic, the level of coordination required to make that happen does not exist.
So eradicating the virus was never on the table, no matter how much we lock down.
I actually chose stomp over eradicate because I wanted to imply that there would still be some left but that it would be a manageable amount. That's interesting that you took it the opposite way; I'm sorry for the confusion.
I agree, eradication was probably impossible in the United States. What I thought we all agreed on at the start of this thing was to lock down so we could "flatten the curve". Remember that? While we were locked down there would be an enormous marshaling of resources so we could equip everyone with PPE/Masks, get testing going, and do contract tracing. But because we didn't lock down the entire nation we snuffed out the hot spots in Washington and New York but let new ones fester and they are now out of control.
Also, in case you haven’t noticed, we are not even remotely “locked down”. If you go downtown where I live (and in countless other cities in the USA) you will find people out horsing around, ignoring stay-at-home, eating at their restaurants, shopping for their khakis, and basically pretending the virus doesn’t exist. Traffic has not changed. People aren’t wearing masks (despite a statewide order). And where is enforcement? Nonexistent. I’m not convinced we can do a national lockdown because no state has even managed to implement a statewide or even citywide lockdown.
We have powerless leadership, proclaiming half-assed and unenforced orders, more worried about saying the right things than doing the right things.
If we were actually serious about beating the virus, downtown would be totally empty and I wouldn’t hear constant traffic and human activity from my backyard.
It’s bizarre to me that given the conclusion that this is the only solution people’s immediate instinct is to just say it’s not possible. Nothing’s possible if you don’t even attempt it.
>Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.
No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus. And the signal/noise ratio right now is absolutely tiny, especially considering how much damage the media has done by unambiguously turning this into an opportunity to bash Trump. Regardless of how you feel about the presidency, if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests (both left and right) began; and while I do believe it is shameful that we were caught with our pants down, scrambling to gather supplies nearly 3 months late, I'll remind you that so was everyone else.
Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. We also shouldn't be applying the same policies to urban and rural areas.
You know what would really answer this question to me? What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR? That's pretty much worst case exposure and seeing as I haven't heard of doctors dying in droves, I'm inclined to start believing that people do have and/or develop immunity and the fatality/complication rate really is extremely low, for whatever reason. But I need data to be sure.
Now either this strategy isn't as good as you claim it to be or NYT, CNBC, Business Insider, and the WSJ and all the analysts and experts they cite are working together to cook up a conspiracy.
> What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR?
Largely irrelevant, because nurses and doctors should be wearing PPE, are trained to work in infectious environments, work in buildings designed to prevent disease vectors, and places that are sanitized regularly. You should see significantly less cases in healthcare than you would elsewhere.
And just in general, the economic impact of letting the virus run rampant would be astronomical. Even outside of deaths, those with severe cases are ending up with likely permanent damage to their hearts, lungs, or kidneys, which will require increased medical costs and likely people who can no longer work.
> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.
Sweden did a voluntary lock down, which was in practice pretty comprehensive. Even then they still had a death rate per capita many times higher than its neighbours, and it was economically hit just as hard.
Perhaps it was worth a try, but it didn't pan out. Their government even formed a commission to figure out why it went so bad.
> it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus.
oramit said:
"The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!"
You've been downvoted quite a bit but I think your post is a good example of the problem at hand.
Yes, we have to make choices about costs and we can't save everyone. Yes, the data is super noisy and its hard to tell what is happening. Yes, the media loves bashing Trump.
But none of that is important because then you go right into downplaying things and saying that "if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests". The tone-deafness of this sentence is astounding to me.
People are scared, telling them that actually we only failed as badly as other countries, is, wow.
Yes. This is largely the problem. Unfortunately, I don't think it would have mattered whether it was a left or right president. The side not in office would have done the opposite. Everything is a political proxy war right now.
I'm not so certain. There is extreme political polarization, yes, but I don't think we can honestly look at the situation at hand and not see the giant Trump shaped elephant in the room. He hasn't ever governed as a "unity" president. That has worked for him when things were generally humming along but it fails catastrophically in times of crisis. Lots of people (myself included) simply don't believe he can put aside partisanship and his own ambition to do what is in the best interest of the country. I feel like my mistrust has been proven correct.
Remember, at the start of this crisis Trump did start holding regular Covid briefings, there were big actions taken, and his approval numbers went up quite a bit. But then he backed away from all that, and started actively undermining things. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
I'm honestly baffled by it because he doesn't even have to really succeed to get good approval numbers, he just has to look like he cares, but he can't manage even that.
Contrast this with Andrew Cuomo of New York, who by any objective measure totally screwed things up. It didn't matter though - he was decisive, held daily briefings, and at least looked like he was putting in effort to fix things. Now his popularity is up a ton.
https://buffalonews.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/public-...
That's really the core of my entire thesis. The public doesn't expect perfection in the face of something like this - I don't. But I do expect the politician to give a damn, or at least put in the effort of looking like they giving a damn.
A crisis like this is exactly the sort of thing you can rally the country around. There was a brief two week period in late March where it actually happened! It was a choice by Trump, which then filtered down into Trump leaning local politicians, to turn it into a proxy war.
Believe me, I'm cynical about politics too, but I think you're engaging in the worse kind of "both-sidesism" with this. Is your contention really that if Hilary was president, Republicans would have all locked down, and Democrats would not? I just don't see it. We only truly know about the timeline we are in right now, shrugging your shoulders and saying things wouldn't be better anyway in another timeline you don't know anything about isn't helpful.
There are two camps causing trouble preventing COVID-19 mitigation: the Radical Right where they are in office (Trump, Arizona, Florida,...), and the Radical Right where the Left or moderate Right are in office (Michigan).
The financial damage is completely self inflicted. There is plenty of food, housing, and other necessities of all kinds except some items specific to treating the pandemic itself (which is important, but not the goal of "reopen it the economy").
Closing restaurants and football stadiums doesn't deprive anyone of the necessities of life and health. We can watch TV for entertainment. People doing essential work haven't stopped.
The only economic-related suffering are people being pushed out of their homes by landlords, or refused food (of which there is plenty) by the controllers of the food supply.
Government officals, corporation managers, billionaires and few others are simply unwilling to let go of their obsession with hoarding money, an imaginary social invention (which is of course useful in easier times), for a few months while we fight the commmonest real enemy the world has ever faced.
I have pretty much given up on everybody at this point. I have already pulled my kid from school and will not send them back. I am in a single income family and I am now working from home.
All actions and purchases at this point are to help us to become more independant from the system. Society and government at large has shown itself to be unreliable and undependable. I am also making longer term plans to move out of my current state.
I think one of the things that has been so disheartening to me about the pandemic is that it has shown how we just can't really do anything anymore in the US.
I mean, just look at PPE. I understand being a little flat footed when the pandemic first started, but it's been nearly 6 months now. I would have expected mass mobilization to pump out N95 masks, gloves, gowns, face shields, etc. by the millions. I mean, look how many heavy military vehicles the US managed to build during WWII, and then consider we can't even build masks of sufficient quantity.
And this just follows an ever growing set of problems that the US has just oddly accepted without the political will to do anything, things like our totally f'd healthcare system, mass shootings, climate change, etc.
I disagree, though, with the sibling comment that says "Don't give up! Don't withdraw!" It's not like there aren't other functioning societies in the world that are way less broken than the US. Staying behind in some mythical "fight" is just misplaced patriotism IMO. There are other countries that live the ideals that I used to associate with America (real freedom, upward mobility, democracy, rule of law, etc.) much better than the US does these days.
All of this is a consequence of ideologies that have become popular in the US both in politics and in business. Having government direct a mobilization is not acceptable. A mandate that people wear masks is not acceptable. Having manufacturing capacity to make low-value products in large numbers in the US is bad business when poorer countries can do it for less. Having spare inventory is bad, because just-in-time manufacturing is more efficient. Accepting a reasonable profit at a time of crisis is considered stupid when a business can make windfall profits by pitting states against each other or signing a sweetheart deal in exchange for a no-bid contract. We're looking a lot like Russia under Yeltsin when the place was collapsing and people were stealing everything that wasn't nailed down.
Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who is committed to division, who's willing to undermine the efforts of those who work for him, who, even at this time of crisis thinks that nothing other than personal loyalty to him and that he should never make a mistake.
The United States government is completely and utterly dysfunctional when it comes to serving the needs of its citizens. The government rarely goes out of its way to help its citizens, and the rare times it does something to help, it does so incredibly begrudgingly, intentionally making the process as painful as possible.
The pandemic payouts are a wonderful example of the government going out of its way to make helping its citizens as painful as possible. Millions of people still haven’t received their one-time payment of $1,200. Meanwhile in Canada, it took their government only two weeks to develop the infrastructure to send monthly payments of $2,000 to every Canadian.
The incompetence displayed by the American government isn’t because they can’t do better - it’s because they don’t want to do better. The same government was able to send massive financial assistance to huge corporations with very little delay.
It’s become totally evident that the United States government exists solely to serve its corporations, not its citizens. Anything it does to actively help it’s citizens is, at best, incidental.
It is true that the pandemic has brought to the fore some things that could be improved. I'm not based in the US but I think it has a lot going for it. We may argue about some of the drawbacks associated with the status quo but this is the country that landed people on the moon. It has brought us Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Starbucks, Hollywood, Disney, etc. In spite of the retoric from some quarters it still welcomes people from all over the world. And what is more they almost immediately identify themselves as American and embrace the values and start making working towards the American dream. I think you'd struggle to find a better place in terms of upward mobility. Certainly not in Europe. I think we have to see it in terms of trade offs. The things that some admire in other nations come at a cost. And in some cases can't really happen in the US because the policies don't scale as well. There may be other nations catching up in some areas. But I think America is still a great nation.
If you want an increase in mask supply, you have to either allow the pricing mechanism to do its job, or force people to make masks. Given the (very popular) laws against price gauging, it seems like the only viable option is to force some companies to manufacture more masks. Production capacity is available, but at a higher cost than is currently economical.
All that being said, your second point seems correct to me, and I doubt anything will be done (as a result of the political quagmire).
I would argue that the high salaries in the software industry have siphoned technologists from other industries that make physical products. Some of that is intrinsic, since making stuff has smaller margins than pushing bytes. But a lot of it is hidebound business practices. For example, should a manager always make more money than their reports? In many industries the answer is yes, which is a rejection of supply and demand in favor of a social hierarchy. There is also incredible bloat in supervisory roles, again because of the artificial money and prestige. Some companies would seemingly prefer to slowly die than pay needed employees a market rate, market being a national market spanning industries (some skillsets are fungible like that).
I have no idea about N95 masks, but surgical style masks (which are what most people need) seem to be readily available.
I bought 50 for $30 at Newegg in mid May. I just ordered another 200 from there at $15 per 50. There are similar offerings immediately available on Amazon.
Honestly I think the government is too big and centralized. At this point is isn't much different that Soviet Russia back in the 80s and 90s. I think the reason the government can't do a good job is because it wasn't designed to operate the way it is now. We were supposed to be 50 states all doing what is best for them and not dictated by the federal government. The right decision for New York will probably not be the right decision for Wyoming and so forth.
To your comment about WWII. We had a common enemy and a common effort. This "wartime" economy pretty much envolved the entire economy and I would argue wasn't much different than what communism would be. Meaning that the central government pretty much controlled the means of production.
Good. The current state of the world is incredibly unnatural when you compare it to even 50 years ago. Everything is too connected. We are so much more efficient, but so much more fragile. The best thing you can do to save the world is save yourself and your family. Less fragility, more robustness at the personal / local level.
I am mid twenties, and was homeschooled my entire childhood. My father owned a technology company, and brought me to work with him most days. People talk about homeschooling being damaging due to the lack of exposure to the "real world", but I have had more exposure to reality than most, due to the constant exposure to actual working life.
Don't be afraid of "sheltering" your children by not having them be part of the system. There is so much more out there than the system. Your kids will turn out weird vs other kids raised in the standard environment, but its a good kind of weird.
My family was very involved with the homeschooling movement in our state, so I am more exposed than most to the sub-culture. Feel free to ask me any more specific questions.
A counterexample is Tara Westover[1] who grew up in an extremist version of what you are describing. She ultimately became successful but it was mostly despite her parents isolation from "the system", not because of them.
At this point I am even sure that being more efficient is better. From the context of economic opportunity the only ones that benefit are the rich and well connected. Now, I'm not one to bash "rich people" but think about it. If I was looking for a good deal for some land I could probably find one if I looked hard enough. Today it is pretty difficult to find land that isn't insanly expensive or too far away. Everything has already been bought up. The people that are well off and connected already learned 20 or 30 years ago where the land development were going to happen and they already bought the land.
As far as homeschooling is concerned. I spent 20 years in the military and the only thing that I observed that was a little awkward about the people that were home schooled was how they were around "authority". Meaning that they weren't as submissive to authority like everyone that went to a normal public school.
I don't think homeschooling is usually like you're describing. Most of the people I have met who were homeschooled were not social adjusted or developed and didn't seem 'normal' by most standards. Most of them had parents who were either extremely religious or some other ideological tendency (survivalist, etc).
How do parents help their kids learn once they reach middle school or high school level and the materials get more challenging?
I understand that many good online courses exist but they are not full substitutes of in-person discussions and personalized feedback for essays, for example. It can take quite a bit of time to understand or even review materials. Some families might not have the necessary background as well.
Not sure where you're from, but in many places, "society and government" has not failed people the same way it has in the US. Even within the US there are some places where local and state government have performed much better than places like Florida or NYC.
That is to say, the problem is not, conceptually, "society and government", but instead, the American society and American government we have today. Don't give up! Don't withdraw! Organize and fight to improve the systems that are exacerbating this crisis.
It's my conclusion that the system has failed as well, and it comes from things that are intrinsic to the system itself. Our civilization and systems are set up for failure. When "success" and "wealth" is determined by how much resources you can extract from the land and people, and how much control over access to those resources, it incentivized centralization and control over basic necessities. This would be food, water, shelter, warmth and clothing. Every one of those require money and participation in the economy. There is no fixing it, as every single possibility moves us towards eventual collapse.
The alternative is having the basic needs (food, water, shelter, warmth, clothing) be met by being a participant in the ecology. Where these things can be provided through decentralized means as part of regenerative processes. When these things are provided by regenerative cycles, families can live off of that across many generations provided that they are wise stewards of the land. This is better than Universal Basic Income. You can't eat money, and UBI still relies on the fragile global supply chain to meet basic needs.
Furthermore, because these systems are decentralized, it does not require collective action. It does not require organizing, or fighting against the system. It does not require waiting for leaders to Do Something About It. It is more like letting the weeds grow. Pioneering into depleted soil with tenacity and resilience. It requires a mindset shift, and connecting with the local ecology and local community.
Let's see - US government instituted reasonably prompt lockdowns. They mailed one-time stimulus checks to everyone, gave 600$ unemployment insurance boosts, ramped up hospital capacities, opened up other support measures for businesses and allowed 50 parallel experiments (at state level) to see what works and what doesn't.
Was the response perfect? Certainly not. Did some other countries do better? I'm sure we could find a handful. Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!
And in case you think that the US is indeed one, it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore, or you have consumed too much of biased media which wants to maximize your anxiety and partisanship for their profits, or you are just trolling here to intentionally sow divisions. Assuming you are not in the last category, please go and learn about how things are in Brazil or India or sub-Saharan Africa. You will realize that the US is in a much better shape and things are handled far better than the media narratives.
What we need is a plan and a leader that will pull us out of this gridlock and death spiral that we're in. We need a diagnosis of what exactly is going wrong, a concrete plan of action, and mass participation.
My diagnosis:
- Hyper-partisanship is causing politicians and the electorate to harden into uncompromising tribes. This hyper-partisanship also serves to increase the size and scale of the fringe wings of both parties, leading to events like the infamous white-supremacist Charlottesville rally.
The cause(s):
- 1. News as a business, particularly if that business is publicly traded, is not in the 'truth-telling' business. It is in the 'maximizing profits' business, as all (publicly traded) companies are.
- 1.1. Therefore, truth is ancillary to any for-profit news business. This will manifest itself in different ways depending on the monetization scheme of the business.
- 1.2. In the case of 24-hour news networks, like Fox and CNN, they are advertisement driven and therefore seek to maximize 'eyeballs'. Therefore, a constant stream of engaging content must be produced: for both Fox and CNN, the result is hyper-sensationalism. The creation of outrage, controversy, and even facts that don't exist. Further, because Fox is so partisan, it has effectively forced CNN to become partisan too.
- 1.3. The above is also true, and *especially* true, for ad-driven online news sources. Clickbait is a well-known phenomenon for, again, maximizing outrage and controversy for ad impressions. Visit an average article on CNN, Fox, or Breitbart and count how many ads you see. Now ask yourself: is it *really* in their best interest to be partial and nuanced?
- 2. Twitter and Facebook allow us to create echo chambers of politicians, pundits, news organizations, and peers.
- 2.1. The 'like' and 'share/retweet' mechanisms incentivize divisive, emotional, and simplistic posts/tweets.
- 2.2. And given that a small subset of users actually tweet or comment or post, those that do tend to be more radical, which lead people to believe that the majority opinion for ${POLITICAL_PARTY} is reflected in the comment section. This leads to a true 'Overton shift' for those in ${POLITICAL_PARTY} and opposite polarization for ${OTHER_POLITICAL_PARTY}.
There are another dozen reasons, I'm sure, including: money in politics, constant campaigning, a genuine uptick in racism/anti-semitism, and many more. I think exploring the idea of a crowd-sourced website listing these reasons and proposed solutions would be quite valuable.
> has not failed people the same way it has in the US
Not yet. It ain't over yet though, even though it might seem like it elsewhere. Basic facts are: herd immunity is prohibitively expensive from the fatalities perspective (although it may be our only long term option), a vaccine is not guaranteed to ever exist, and C19 is now endemic, so it will come back. Oh and also, for the society to function people must be able to work.
To poster below who said that no vaccine == no herd immunity. That's actually not true. For a vaccine to be approved it needs to be safe. Herd immunity will just happen eventually, no approval needed as the virus itself doesn't care if it's "safe" or not. Paradoxically, the society will likely prefer to tolerate higher body count due to not having a vaccine at all, rather than smaller body count for a vaccine that is unsafe in a small, but not completely negligible percentage of cases.
A uniquely American view of independence and rights has become a uniquely american problem with helping our neighbor, unfortunately. Nations with more collective oriented values appear to have done much better.
Just sucks to not have a solution for people who spend their lives teaching (and babysitting, managing, mentoring, and more) our youth.
While I do worry to myself if that's making monoliths, I think you're right.
One way or another, this situation tests a country/culture's ability to implement collective behavior/protections where the benefits don't accrue to the person taking the actions.
Social distancing has its obvious social costs, and my feeling (I couldn't definitively call it understanding) with masks is that it's more about protecting people from you, and not the other way around.
I think no matter how you break it down, the USA has proven so far it's poorly suited to do carry that out for each other.
We're currently looking for a new home and this disaster has completely changed what we're looking for. Before it was clean suburbs with great schools close to the city. Now we're looking for more property much farther out and even considering states that didn't lock down so tightly. Good schools are no longer a consideration as we will home school as well.
The social contract theory has failed, and we're preparing now for a future without it.
Albeit, I'm not a single family (we have two parents) but...I'm an advocate for homeschooling. I have been for about a decade now. I've noticed a lot of different parenting styles growing up and education matters tremendously but not just book smarts, but emotional intelligence, dealing with various people, skills, and even high valued skills.
As I've lived my life and looked into multiple system, I feel the American education has failed it's students for well over 30 years. The student that succeed? The ones that knows that school is more than 9am to 2pm (or whatever depending on the age). I feel it's best taught in the home.
As the child ages and more skilled studies are required, yes they'll learn from teachers but parents can get very far with a child, if you encourage them to learn and foster their curiosity.
Finally, I'll conclude with this. I feel very grateful for this covid19 because this will now help more resources to improve the quality/efficiency of homeschooling. I look forward to using these new resources that will rise up.
Economist Bryan Caplan (who wrote the book The Case Against Education) has been homeschooling his kids for 5 years and shares his thoughts on the topic:
I am lucky enough that the local school district and university my kids go to are either outright online, or offering online options. But if that were not the case, I would be where you are, and I would also support teachers striking over the lack of fundamental workplace safety of in person teaching right now. From the rough impressions of my reading of research, indoor transmission in groups is the easiest way to pass an infection.
This is completely intentional and the natural growth of right wing political ideologies that has been building since the 80s.
There has been a concerted effort by some to make the government unreliable. There are vested interests in getting the government out of many things it does, and lots of profit to be made taking over what the government provides. The right has, for awhile, been ideologically opposed the government funded education, for example.
If the government is unreliable, it's because the US has elected people that make it so. Government works fine in many countries around the world. Canada, Europe, Australia... all seem in far better shape. We're just intentionally crippling it for ideological and profit reasons.
US voters who voted Trump into office are also largely to blame. No one to blame but ourselves. Projecting anger onto "the system" is missing the picture. To put it another way, if you want your government to work for the people, stop voting people into office who are very obviously breaking the government because they are zealots or greedy.
The real illness is on a different level - it's the way the main culture in the US sees and understands the world. It makes some spectacularly wrong assumptions there. But those assumptions were never seriously challenged (no enemies nearby, dominance after WW2), so then why change, right?
Now those assumptions are being challenged. And of course a lot of people, rather than change and give up their cherished "identity", would plow ahead blindly, consequences be damned. Everyone who is protesting masks, I am looking at you and your beliefs.
This has happened many times in history. Societies get their beliefs challenged by reality. Some adapt, fix their stuff, and go on. Some don't.
My wife is a teacher and starting school (in person) in a week and a half. There’s no answers to questions like:
- Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away?
- When a teacher gets sick, what substitute teacher is going to want to teach an exposed class (also, they’ll be making sub plans with covid?)?
- When they’re sick are will they be getting additional sick leave?
- Do they get worker’s compensation if they get sick, since they were knowingly sent into a dangerous environment?
> Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away?
It pains me to admit that this didn't even occur to me as part of the topic of teachers being sent back. The human aspects of students-teacher relationships. I feel I've been desensitized to this after exposing myself to a constant stream of news, and now I'm thinking further about what other aspects lie behind other headlines. Thank you for sharing this
I agree - this never really occurred to me either. My girlfriend's mother is a preschool teacher who just had to go back to in-person sessions and she believes some of these kids will have trauma's from being young and terrified. One little girl is afraid to touch anything and constantly asks if objects have been cleaned/safe to touch? it's heartbreaking to her.
It's a human aspect, but to be blunt, it's not a significant consideration as long as you aren't opening schools in an area with high community transfer (e.g. Houston today). IF you additionally filter out high risk-group teaches (known pre-existing health conditions, older than 65, etc.) excess death risk is quite low. (e.g. in the Bay Area, dying in a car crash remains far more likely (~10x) if you meet the criteria earlier noted)
It's amazing to see how differently we treat the low probability, high impact events like active shooters and terrorism, but we completely fail to do the far easier task of dealing with the high probability, unknown impact events.
Well, that’s true, except that it’s not easy. Easy to talk about, sure, but not easy to implement without backlash from the moneyed interests that exist.
Even on the outside, it seems like pushing kids back into the classroom is poorly thought out. I can't imagine the shitshow it must seem like on the inside.
The problem is, remote education has been a complete disaster.
I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work.
In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't care, or are unable to provide internet access.
One solution is to get students back into classrooms. Another is to design a remote learning system that actually works, with enforcement of attendance and where grades actually matter, but that is probably not something our substandard education system is able to achieve.
My girlfriend is a middle school guidance counselor. She was spending most of her week during the end of the school year dealing with referrals from teachers for students who weren't doing any work at home. Not just slacking off some, but entirely refusing to do anything. She'd try contacting the parents but many would never return her calls. The few she did contact weren't very concerned or admitted they lacked a way of making their child do their school work.
Her main concern is that this is going to widen the achievement gap between students with high parental involvement and those with low parental involvement. They've spend a lot of time trying to come up with strategies to deal with the situation but outside of sending government officials to the home for an on-site evaluation (problematic for many reasons), there's little they can do. She's worried that as time goes on, the number of students discovering they can get away with doing no work will increase.
All good questions. If it were me I would join forces with other teachers and parents to bring the questions to the principal and school board (or district). I suspect that in many cases, teachers and parents will need to put significant pressure on the PTB to force them to confront these important questions.
edit - If your wife belongs to a teachers union, this would be a great thing for the teachers union to push for.
You can push for answers from those people, but there's probably no real answers to give. The federal response to the pandemic has been so ineffective, to put it kindly, that it leaves people at all levels with no meaningful responses. Principals, superintendents, and school boards can want to offer the support described in this thread, but have no real way to actually deliver it.
All good questions. Based on some of what I've read, actions are being taken to ensure (for the most part) the contrary...that businesses / schools are protected with little regard for the individual. A more recent example is below.
> Included in the list are temporary protection from the trial bar for schools, colleges, charities and business that follow public health guidelines and for frontline medical workers.
One could argue they (in this case Senate majority) are just crossing the t's and dotting the i's but considering there has been little regard (in many states and definitely on the federal level) for public health (in favor of other concerns) thus far...that is IMHO wishful thinking.
Same here. The narrative admin has been giving parents was that they were working hand in hand with teachers on the return plan.
That was a total lie. It came out this week and parents (thankfully) called our counties admin on their narrative.
So no they have principals calling each teacher and asking them on their comfort level about returning . Unsurprisingly, most aren’t comfortable.
When they called my wife they asked for her comfort level on a 1-10 scale.
She refused to give them a number. Instead just saying this plan means she is 100% confident she will contract it and spread it to the family in the month of august. But that is not what concerns her. What concerns her is that if every other school, teacher and parent is doing the same, on the heels of the current numbers, it means we may not be able to get the medical attention we need due to overloading the medical community.
The Los Angelos teachers added a few other requests [1]. The introduction starts with:
[...] LAUSD educators clearly want to get back into schools with their students, but the underlying question at every step must be: Given broader societal conditions, how do we open physical schools in a way that ensures that the benefit outweigh the risks [...]
And then proceeds to the following recommendations, among many others:
- Defund Police
- Shelter the homeless
- Paid sick leave for all
- Medicare for all
- "Charter Moratorium"
- "Financial Support for Undocumented Students and Families"
I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters. Parents choose to send their kids there - if the existing public school was so good, why would they send them somewhere else? It's simply about choice, and sending your own kids to the best possible option. No one would ever deny their own children the best possible education available. It's so clearly about administrators and professionals over the needs of children, it's simply immoral and bordering on evil.
> I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters
The left doesn't hate charters, it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable. That's a subset of charters plus all vouchers.
Actual public charters, by which public schools are granted some variance of generally applicable rules to trial new methods are not a problem to the left; the hijacking of that process to create super-voucher schools when the voucher model failed to gain sufficient political support is what the left hates.
> Parents choose to send their kids there
Often, after the local regular public school has been replaced by a privately-operated charter in the same facility, and often the parents who most choose to send their children their are the ones whose most-local school was replaced, because it's the most convenient public school and going to a more distant one has added cost.
Charter schools compete for the same low funding pool, while only accepting well performing non-SPED students, leaving public schools with less money and a harder (& more expensive) student body.
This artificially increases Charter School's performance, and artificially lowers Public School's performance.
But this isn't an accident, Charter Schools are designed to de-fund public education for political reasons, and while discriminating against SPED kids is illegal, the % of SPED kids at charters is disproportionately low[0].
> Charter schools are significantly less likely to reply to students to the IEP message than to the baseline message, while traditional public schools are not. There is also some evidence that schools are less likely to respond to families with Hispanic-sounding names.
At best, charter schools are there to defund public education. At worst, they are outright embezzling of school funding. They are being pushed by Betsy Devos, whose record speaks against her. Her handling of the charter school system in Detroit led to it having the nationwide poorest reading and mathematics scores. In a lawsuit, charter school defenders argued that literacy is not a right.
For me, it's because private, religiously focused schools can receive federal aid to indoctrinate children into said religion, dictate what is taught to increase indoctrination rates, and skate oversight. They are welcome to do this on their own dime, but as soon as taxpayer funding is involved all religious specific focus and values must be dropped. The school must no longer refuse employment or punish students based on protected classes, benefits and other school affiliated programs must not have any religious based rules or policies, and the school must be transparent to audit and review to confirm students meet standards for their education including basic science and and history like the big bang and fact based origins of dinosaurs.
In this instance, it's a separation of church and state. You should not get a public dime if they do things like fire an LGBT teacher who had otherwise glowing reviews and successful students or refuse to teach basic science and history.
But the arguments against charter schools as a suck for public dollars as well as the way voucher programs can be abused (with support by the present Secretary of education, someone who has investments and connections to charter programs) is another huge issue.
It's not that the left opposes education, it's that they want actual education in schools. It's not that we shouldn't spend the money to improve education, it's that we need to invest in programs and schools that meet federal guidelines and respect federal law and constitutional rights.
And for me it's because the first amendment should guarantee freedom of and FROM religion. If the best school in town is the religious charter school my property taxes are supporting, we have conflicts.
I went to a high school in Cali that was converted to a charter school. As far as I could tell, the main change was that they kicked out all the kids with poor grades or other problems. That is the polar opposite of "choice", it was about increasing inequality and it was completely disgusting.
In many states, almost anyone can establish a charter school and there is very little oversight. Money is diverted from already small budgets to these charter schools.
Additionally, the US system punishes underperforming schools by deallocating funds. In what world does that make sense? Any rational society would send in an educational SWAT team to lift the school up, not handicap it further.
I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters.
You'll probably understand better when you quit thinking that you can automatically identify the players involved. Perhaps simply ask why some folks oppose charter schools.
Others have responded with good answers, such as increased inequality and siphoning funds from public schools. If you take those to be left/right issues, well, there's your problem: does "the right" support increasing inequality and the draining money from public schools? That's kind of a rhetorical question (the assumed answer on my end is, "of course they don't"), but then again, maybe it's not.
These seem to be the "real" reasons: 1) re-segregation 2) skimming[B] 3) de-unionization 4) benchmarking[A] 5) statism preference.
The other declared reasons seemed unconvincing to me.
[A] Benchmarking - competing schools provide parents with a direct comparison point, so it's much harder for a struggling public school to disclaim responsibility for some of their own problems.
[B] Skimming - picking out the best-performing and the least-demanding students.
That's how they like to pitch in sales, anyway. There are two problems which it hopes you won't know to ask about:
1. Most of the big claims about charter school performance is due to small sample size or short measurement time. There's a notorious cycle in the field where someone announces that they have a brilliant way to make kids succeed and publishes results which get a lot of attention, but regression to the mean sets in once they try to scale it up or have more than a few years worth of data. Once you get enough data they perform very similarly to the public schools serving the same community — worse as often as better.
2. Schools which show consistently better performance are the ones who can select students who were higher performing when they enrolled. If you can consistently attract richer, educated parents to your school — say with a pitch telling everyone how it's the best possible education for their children — you will post great numbers but those kids would have done well almost anywhere. This can be overt in the states which allow test-in or in the structure of the school (i.e. hit students with enough outside homework and you're going to lose a lot of kids who don't have family resources to support that extra time) or hidden in other areas: for example, a school in a state which doesn't require schools to offer free/reduced lunch will exclude poor kids without explicitly doing so, as will not offering bus service in a suburban area, having limited support for anyone with special needs, etc.
When evaluating schools, you have to do a value-added analysis comparing like cohorts of students. Public schools serve both a greater number of students and a much higher degree of diversity and very few are truly “bad” as — what you're usually seeing is that poor kids have more obstacles to success, and the United States runs a lot of special needs support through schools, and averages hide that information. I live in Washington DC which has tons of charters and there are a couple which have some great things for certain kids but not everyone (e.g. a language immersion) and a whole bunch which look pretty similar to the data from the local public schools when you match for equivalent parental SES.
Anti-charter sentiment is a union (teacher union) protecting itself. The left is along for the ride, because it's the same "tribe", but this is 100% driven by an organization protecting itself against competition.
> I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters
Charter schools are a threat to the public school system, so the public school system will naturally oppose charter schools.
If you are a public school without charter schools, a parent only has two choices: (1) public school, or (2) pay $20k+/yr/child to do private school. For the vast, vast majority of parents, public school is the only option.
Once you add charter schools to the mix, there is a new option that is viable for a much larger population. When parents choose charter schools, they lose public funding. Hence, this is a threat to public schools, and public school systems will strongly oppose it.
I think the reason you're having trouble understanding this is that you assume the public school union has the interests of children as it's top priority. With that assumption, opposition to charter schools doesn't make sense. But if you assume rational self interest, then you can easily explain the opposition.
I laughed when I first heard about this. Maybe they took the approach of asking for so many un-reasonable things to make sure the school does not open.
My mother is an elementary school teacher, and I don't want her to go back to school this year. The federal government is worse than useless, and the state government is feckless and unwilling to make the tough calls to protect people's lives.
She's been a teacher for ~15 years and still makes less than $30k a year teaching. She loves helping the kids, but her life isn't worth it.
She's in Colorado. The teachers' union agreed to a pay cut & freeze during the Bush financial crisis; pay had had only started to rise again a few years ago.
This is somewhat of a digression, but the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. The people taking these jobs typically must have some other way of supporting their family; either their spouse has a higher-paying professional job or they are the beneficiary of some other form of generational wealth.
But we tend to lose the teachers who must make ends meet their own selves on a teacher's pay. There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
While there certainty are places that pay starting teachers more, unless you work for the upper crust of K-12 the pay is quite bad compared to basically any other other job that requires a four-year degree plus certification and/or (usually and) a license.
The sad part is that it isn't like there isn't a budget to pay teachers more. We spend more per kid than we ever have, but now any budget increases get absorbed by growth in the administration. Administration in education and healthcare is a cancer.
No relation, saw one of their engineering jobs on HN and your comment made me think of a solution for your mother's situation (it's teaching over Zoom).
My mom works as an administrator in a public school. She is one year away from being eligible for medicaid, which is when she planned on retiring. She said as of right now, she plans to go back, because getting private insurance with her pre-existing conditions for the next year isn't feasible. I'm seriously considering seeing if my siblings and I can fund it for her for a year so she can just retire now and not have to worry about her as much.
A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.
The ACA (aka Obamacare) made it so insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions. Check the exchange in her state for options.
The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope.
The presidential talk about it is just that - talk.
>The federal government has no jurisdiction over education.
It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".
Move to Canada, our teachers are paid 86K (CAD) or around 63K USD.
"Teachers in the province earn an average salary of around $86,000, according to data provided by Ontario's Ministry of Education. Only in Alberta are average teacher salaries higher, around $89,000"
It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?
No, the federal government we have is the result of our outdated, quirky and flawed electoral system, where the votes of certain states are much more valuable than others.
My wife is a teacher. She's quitting in two weeks so that she can give her mandatory 30-day notice in time for the beginning of the semester.
The planning being done for the next school year where we live is complete bullshit. The politicians and administrators running the planning have no idea about the realities.
They are driving these hybrid models with kids doing remote and in-person learning in alternative days/weeks with the in-person class sizes being about one third of the normal class size. To do that they would need at least twice the amount of teachers (one to teach in-person, and one to teach remotely to kids staying at home), possibly even more. Are they planning on hiring more teachers? No.
It's going to be a complete shitshow even without teachers quitting en masse.
There's this completely unrealistic sense among the people in charge that teachers will just magically make it work with no additional training, no proper support, no additional resources, nothing.
And I'm not even addressing the difficulties families, especially those that have multiple kids and/or can't work from home, will have with these proposed schedules.
> There's this completely unrealistic sense among the people in charge that teachers will just magically make it work with no additional training, no proper support, no additional resources, nothing.
I honestly doubt they think it will magically work, I think there are no good options that will give all the kids good educational outcomes, keep kids and teachers safe, and allow the economy to function without the use of schools as childcare, and that they are trying to pick the option that will have the least number of people calling for their heads.
Even if they rotate kids in and out to keep crowds down, they still need separate facilities or FEMA level decontamination daily with same day testing for employees like those working the cafeteria and would interact with all sets of students...
We need to double resources for schools and teachers anyway but even if we had the time and funding it would be less than ideal to combat the pandemic too.
I feel like there is too much emphasis on these and not enough on the ones that earnestly want to go back to work. There should be a balance here, as we really do need a lot of students to have access to schools in the fall.
Remote learning doesn't work for everyone and leaves a lot of people behind. The overall consequences of another lost semester may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.
Here's a question to consider: behind on the way to what, exactly?
If we keep on getting pandemics (something that's been expected for a long time) the whole baseline of how society operates will be forcibly disrupted. (a baseline people can be 'left behind' on the way to: I hear talk of students missing vital academic AND SOCIAL connections, which sounds like pre-pandemic talk)
If we have even moderate economic collapse, which is inevitable with the pandemic we do have (and the other, related upheavals going on) then the destination simply will not exist. We will be flung into a Star Trek future where the existing mechanisms of human survival no longer apply. It's possible the consequences of dropping 'behind' will mean the difference between becoming wealthy through business and social connections, and literally starvation and homelessness (rather than just doing poorly and getting by). However, in those conditions, all of society collapses and the wealthy have no place to be anymore. Wealth depends upon the existence of a society that can support it.
In my opinion there is no possible benefit to pretending it's possible to go 'back to normal' in any sense, and it's on us to envision what comes next. 'Normal' is never coming back. It's already gone forever, so it's time to decide whether we want human beings to survive or not.
We've always 'kept on getting pandemics'. Pandemics and rampant disease and death is the normal historical state of the world. We have become accustomed to it being not the case due to the prevalence of vaccines and better medicines, but COVID is nowhere near the worst pandemic ever, nor is it even the last in living memory. Recall that the worst pandemic in terms of per-capita death is still within living memory. Pandemics are normal. There is nothing that has accelerated their emergence. This is a fantastic lie.
> 'Normal' is never coming back.
That's ridiculous. If anything, this pandemic has restored 'normal' to the world. The normal state of the world is pandemics, natural disaster, human death, etc. Only by active human society have we been able to avoid that. Modern society is so good and efficient that too many people have forgotten what's normal.
>may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.
Let's be perfectly clear, this isn't something abstract. The consequences are dead kids and dead teachers. Get that through your head. You of course imagine it won't be your kids that die but there's absolutely no reason to think that.
> Let's be perfectly clear, this isn't something abstract. The consequences are dead kids
Yes, the serious risk of increases in childhood “morbidity and mortality” if schools remain closed are exactly what the American Academy of Pediatrics cited as a key consideration when strongly urging that planning center on a return to in-person schooling with the start of the coming school year.
Not to mention dead family members these teachers and kids will bring the disease back to. Maybe it won't get through people's thick skulls until we start making school yearbooks have obituary sections.
I'd say that's a false dichotomy. Lots of kids won't have access to a safe environment during the day without school. There will be no visibility for those suffering abuse. Physical abuse will be worse with a kid at home with an abusive parent all day, under stress. There will be less access to food for many children. The virus holds the potential of devastating effects on school children and their families if kids go back. We don't have any good way of quantifying the trade-offs. With everything else, we've been running large-scale social experiments to see what works to keep rates at a level the hospitals can manage. I don't see why we shouldn't do the same with schools: let them re-open on a restricted basis, attempt to cater to those most in need, and see what happens.
The consequences of losing a semester for students are highly debatable considering the primary and in many cases only function of schools outside of feeding students is babysitting.
> Remote learning doesn't work for everyone and leaves a lot of people behind. The overall consequences of another lost semester may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.
I'm curious - how few would have to die so that the "overall consequences of another lost semester" is not worse?
The ones who want to go back are either working with special needs kids or have no family of their own. There's a difference between "I'd love to be in a classroom teaching again" and "I want to be in a room full of 20+ potentially infectious children." The government has a responsibility to its constituents that goes beyond "a return to normalcy."
We're hitting 75K positive tests a day in this country and that number is increasing daily. That's WITH social distancing by kids. What do you think is going to happen when a school has 800 kids running around? That's 800 daily potential avenues for disease transmission.
Seriously, who cares if some people "fall behind?" They can catch up at their own pace. I'm pretty sure that most parents would rather their kids graduate at 19 or 20 than be buried at 8 or 9.
I would prefer every student to be held back 1 semester from graduating high school than 1 more dead (if that were a possibility, but you get the point).
I don't even understand how its possible to prefer sending kids back over one semester. Of course I think the bigger issue is its just parents that want kids out of the house for a multitude of reasons including getting back to their own work.
I presume kids die in accidents at school at the moment. if 1 kid dies a year falling down steps at school should all schools be forced to be only 1 level? there needs to be a sensible look at the cost and benefits and zero deaths should not be a a hard requirement.
It is easy to go about and proclaim, "life is priceless", "I would prefer to have every student held back than one dead", and so on.
What of students that have debt and now will have to wait more to get their "education"? Do you realize this is all going to cause more pain and suffering and possible deaths?
Do you realize given more budget it is possible to save more people if you spend it wisely?
I'm also against schools reopening in the fall (though I haven't done much research and don't hold this opinion strongly).
But it seems like holding people back semesters eventually adds up to something that's as bad as a death. These kids are never going to get that semester back. And if you think they enjoy the at home alternatives half as much, or learn half as much or value that time in their lives half as much it seems like on some level the equivalent of 1000s of person lifetimes of value have been lost. I wouldn't hold back everyone one semester in high school in exchange for even on the order of 100s of deaths.
This is exactly why all the people that said "choosing to protect life is also choosing to protect the economy" were right. It sucks, but people with savings can choose to quit over having to risk their lives. So if there is an appreciable risk (and associated hazard, which, for many of our older educators there is) then that is what is going to happen and you still get the disruptions to the economy.
Medical staff get to wear PPE. As for grocery workers:
My wife's a teacher. She was back in school for a day last week, with a much smaller class of children. The first thing one of her children tried to do on seeing her was give her a hug. I doubt this happens to many grocery workers.
In September she'll spend about six hours a day in a poorly ventilated and inadequately sized classroom with 30 children. Neither she nor the children are allowed to wear masks or gloves. From the single days she has been in each week, she's watched children unable to maintain social distancing in the classroom or the playground. They cough, sneeze and wipe their noses on their hands and then touch everything. That's what kids are like.
Nurses largely have the PPE needed to deal with covid and have been trained to do so. Store workers have far less exposure than a teacher trying to wrangle 30 kids for 8 hours a day.
Grocery store workers don't spend 8 hours a day in a crowded room with kids who won't keep their PPE on, won't adequately wash their hands, want to give their teachers hugs / high fives, etc. Cashiers get to stand several feet away from those checking out, can put up plexiglass barriers, can slow down the checkout process a bit to sanitize between customers.
Hospitals are designed to prevent infectious disease spread. They plan for mass sanitation, employees wearing PPE, minimizing disease vectors. My wife's hospital has changed their policy to no outside visitors even on non-COVID floors. You can't do that in a school.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to downplay the sacrifice essential employees are making right now; they absolutely deserve hazard pay among so much else for putting themselves at risk for the benefit of everyone else. I asked my wife at the beginning of this if she wanted to quit, and we'd find a way to make it work, and she said "I'm a nurse, I signed up for this." That's just her mindset; she's been trained to work in a contagious environment and her hospital has many ways to help keep her safe. Asking teachers to take on that responsibility in addition to what we already ask of them, while being inside a petri dish of disease spreading is 100% irresponsible to everyone involved.
Well I would say even a grocery worker is safer because
* They are generally working in a much larger space like a big store, so not confined into a small classroom
* The small space teachers are in are filled with kids that are obviously the most unhygienic. Try as they will, it's way more risky than being filled with adults(ok lots of adults that are less responsible than a 5 year old, I know) who are wearing masks and attempting to keep distancing
I don't know if they're at more or less risk and I don't know the stats on how many of them have chosen not to work, but if I had to guess I'd say that nurses feel a sense of duty as part of their chosen line of work and that grocery workers are easier to replace for those that chose not to work.
Readit News
Heres the thing: even if you believe people are being irrationally afraid, telling people they are stupid and should just suck it up isn't going to get people to cooperate. Do you want to be smugly right, or do you want things to actually get better? People are scared, that's just a fact, and they need to feel confident that action is being taken in their best interest. Telling people that only 1% of them will die so it's all okay is telling people you don't care about them - they notice, they're not dumb.
We all know that this is an exceptional event and that there will be missteps. People will forgive mistakes and setbacks and take on more risk if they are confident that there is a plan - but so far there isn't one. We're almost six months into this and the messaging is still chaos. The lack of a national strategy is what is causing this pandemic to worsen. The rot really does start at the top.
The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!
That’s what happens when political parties and now the president and his administration are spreading misinformation as long it helps their short term needs. Nobody believes anything anymore. I am already worried about the election. No matter the result, a significant part of the population will most likely not trust the results. I don’t think a country can survive such distrust without significant damage to its institutions.
There's a lot of evidence teachers aren't actually afraid, but rather, are in hock to hyper-aggressive unions. They have been paid to not work. They can keep being paid to not work. Why would they work?
To go back to the US context, there's now a teaching union in LA that's refusing to go back post-COVID until their demands are met. Their demands include .... defunding the police. Obviously.
http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/state/la-teachers-u...
(The Center Square) – One of the largest teachers unions in the state of California, the United Teachers Los Angeles with 35,000 members, says public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District should not reopen if certain policies are not implemented on the state and national level, including defunding the police and implementing Medicare for All
This isn't a COVID problem. This is a political problem.
Here's the hospitalization link I'm using, because there might be better data somewhere else.
https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID-19HospitalsDashboard/...
It's easy to be consumed by the fear about this disease, and that the number of cases that are rising. But we have to be careful to make informed decisions, and not compromise student learning in the entire state due to rising cases in one part of the state.
One thing, is it looks a bit like the hospitalizations might be starting to slightly level off, but it's hard to tell since it still could be trending upwards. At the very least, it doesn't look like the cases are on any kind of exponential curve.
Just one quote out of many:
> Weighing the health risks of reopening K-12 schools in fall 2020 against the educational risks of providing no in-person instruction, school districts should prioritize reopening schools full time, especially for grades K-5 and students with special needs, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2020/07/schools-shoul...
https://www.mathematica.org/commentary/reopening-schools-whi...
https://jamanetwork.com/channels/health-forum/fullarticle/27...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/07/18/the-risks-of-ke...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
https://globalhealth.washington.edu/sites/default/files/COVI...
Edit: I realize this is a contentious topic. I'm definitely not trying to stir up political wars here. I'm submitting my question and research findings here because I trust this place for civil and intellectual discourse.
The correct decision was reached, in time (before the start of the school year) for it to make a difference.
Tons of people and thousands of schools vigorously debating is the democratic process. A decision handed down from "the top" is authoritarianism, and as we've seen repeatedly this year, authoritarian decisions are resisted even when they're the right decision.
For something like masking, you can justify it with the urgency of the situation (even though I'm compelled to add that "the top" got this one wrong during the crucial months of February and March). For starting school in the fall, you can't.
This statement implies that there's a way to completely eradicate the virus, eg. if everyone in the world stays locked in their homes for 6 weeks, then the virus will be eradicated. That's not realistic, the level of coordination required to make that happen does not exist.
So eradicating the virus was never on the table, no matter how much we lock down.
I agree, eradication was probably impossible in the United States. What I thought we all agreed on at the start of this thing was to lock down so we could "flatten the curve". Remember that? While we were locked down there would be an enormous marshaling of resources so we could equip everyone with PPE/Masks, get testing going, and do contract tracing. But because we didn't lock down the entire nation we snuffed out the hot spots in Washington and New York but let new ones fester and they are now out of control.
So you can argue that it was infeasible, and I would have to agree with you. But you can't argue it was impossible.
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Do you think an enforced national lockdown is feasible in the US?
Given the size of the country, the culture of independence, the relatively loose union of 50 states and other factors, my answer is no.
We have powerless leadership, proclaiming half-assed and unenforced orders, more worried about saying the right things than doing the right things.
If we were actually serious about beating the virus, downtown would be totally empty and I wouldn’t hear constant traffic and human activity from my backyard.
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No no no no no. It's high time we stop treating everything as black and white in this country. It's not just callously disregarding the dead - it's about determining whether the literal and figurative loss of life caused by a lockdown is worth the loss of life caused by the virus. And the signal/noise ratio right now is absolutely tiny, especially considering how much damage the media has done by unambiguously turning this into an opportunity to bash Trump. Regardless of how you feel about the presidency, if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests (both left and right) began; and while I do believe it is shameful that we were caught with our pants down, scrambling to gather supplies nearly 3 months late, I'll remind you that so was everyone else.
Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine. We also shouldn't be applying the same policies to urban and rural areas.
You know what would really answer this question to me? What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR? That's pretty much worst case exposure and seeing as I haven't heard of doctors dying in droves, I'm inclined to start believing that people do have and/or develop immunity and the fatality/complication rate really is extremely low, for whatever reason. But I need data to be sure.
Interesting, Sweden suffered more deaths than their neighbors and does not appear to be any better off economically.
Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...
Sweden had no lockdown but its economy is expected to suffer just as badly as its European neighbors - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t...
Sweden's economy likely won't benefit from its decision to avoid a lockdown, according to analysts - https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-economy-likely-wont-b...
Sweden's controversial anti-lockdown strategy resulted in high death toll and no real economic gain, data shows - https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-coronavirus-strategy-...
Sweden Has Avoided a Coronavirus Lockdown. Its Economy Is Hurting Anyway. - https://www.wsj.com/articles/sweden-has-avoided-a-coronaviru...
Now either this strategy isn't as good as you claim it to be or NYT, CNBC, Business Insider, and the WSJ and all the analysts and experts they cite are working together to cook up a conspiracy.
Not true, we're squarely between several 2nd and 3rd world countries: https://www.statista.com/chart/21176/covid-19-infection-dens...
> until the recent protests (both left and right) began
Not true, current research does not link any outbreaks to protests (BLM protests at least), mostly due to the fact that protesters were wearing masks and were outside: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/01/research-d...
> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.
Not true, Sweden is sitting about 150 deaths / million higher than the US right now: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data?country=USA~SWE#...
> What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR?
Largely irrelevant, because nurses and doctors should be wearing PPE, are trained to work in infectious environments, work in buildings designed to prevent disease vectors, and places that are sanitized regularly. You should see significantly less cases in healthcare than you would elsewhere.
And just in general, the economic impact of letting the virus run rampant would be astronomical. Even outside of deaths, those with severe cases are ending up with likely permanent damage to their hearts, lungs, or kidneys, which will require increased medical costs and likely people who can no longer work.
Sweden did a voluntary lock down, which was in practice pretty comprehensive. Even then they still had a death rate per capita many times higher than its neighbours, and it was economically hit just as hard.
Perhaps it was worth a try, but it didn't pan out. Their government even formed a commission to figure out why it went so bad.
oramit said:
"The United States is currently choosing the worst possible combination of options. We locked down - causing enormous financial damage, but we didn't follow through with the lockdown nationally to actually stomp the virus. So we get to have the deaths and have the financial damage as well. Yay us!"
Yes, we have to make choices about costs and we can't save everyone. Yes, the data is super noisy and its hard to tell what is happening. Yes, the media loves bashing Trump.
But none of that is important because then you go right into downplaying things and saying that "if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations until the recent protests". The tone-deafness of this sentence is astounding to me. People are scared, telling them that actually we only failed as badly as other countries, is, wow.
Remember, at the start of this crisis Trump did start holding regular Covid briefings, there were big actions taken, and his approval numbers went up quite a bit. But then he backed away from all that, and started actively undermining things. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/ I'm honestly baffled by it because he doesn't even have to really succeed to get good approval numbers, he just has to look like he cares, but he can't manage even that.
Contrast this with Andrew Cuomo of New York, who by any objective measure totally screwed things up. It didn't matter though - he was decisive, held daily briefings, and at least looked like he was putting in effort to fix things. Now his popularity is up a ton. https://buffalonews.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/public-...
That's really the core of my entire thesis. The public doesn't expect perfection in the face of something like this - I don't. But I do expect the politician to give a damn, or at least put in the effort of looking like they giving a damn. A crisis like this is exactly the sort of thing you can rally the country around. There was a brief two week period in late March where it actually happened! It was a choice by Trump, which then filtered down into Trump leaning local politicians, to turn it into a proxy war.
Believe me, I'm cynical about politics too, but I think you're engaging in the worse kind of "both-sidesism" with this. Is your contention really that if Hilary was president, Republicans would have all locked down, and Democrats would not? I just don't see it. We only truly know about the timeline we are in right now, shrugging your shoulders and saying things wouldn't be better anyway in another timeline you don't know anything about isn't helpful.
Closing restaurants and football stadiums doesn't deprive anyone of the necessities of life and health. We can watch TV for entertainment. People doing essential work haven't stopped.
The only economic-related suffering are people being pushed out of their homes by landlords, or refused food (of which there is plenty) by the controllers of the food supply.
Government officals, corporation managers, billionaires and few others are simply unwilling to let go of their obsession with hoarding money, an imaginary social invention (which is of course useful in easier times), for a few months while we fight the commmonest real enemy the world has ever faced.
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All actions and purchases at this point are to help us to become more independant from the system. Society and government at large has shown itself to be unreliable and undependable. I am also making longer term plans to move out of my current state.
So good luck everyone with the education system.
I mean, just look at PPE. I understand being a little flat footed when the pandemic first started, but it's been nearly 6 months now. I would have expected mass mobilization to pump out N95 masks, gloves, gowns, face shields, etc. by the millions. I mean, look how many heavy military vehicles the US managed to build during WWII, and then consider we can't even build masks of sufficient quantity.
And this just follows an ever growing set of problems that the US has just oddly accepted without the political will to do anything, things like our totally f'd healthcare system, mass shootings, climate change, etc.
I disagree, though, with the sibling comment that says "Don't give up! Don't withdraw!" It's not like there aren't other functioning societies in the world that are way less broken than the US. Staying behind in some mythical "fight" is just misplaced patriotism IMO. There are other countries that live the ideals that I used to associate with America (real freedom, upward mobility, democracy, rule of law, etc.) much better than the US does these days.
Now, all of this could be turned around quickly with good leadership that could rally the country behind a cause, but we chose someone who is committed to division, who's willing to undermine the efforts of those who work for him, who, even at this time of crisis thinks that nothing other than personal loyalty to him and that he should never make a mistake.
The pandemic payouts are a wonderful example of the government going out of its way to make helping its citizens as painful as possible. Millions of people still haven’t received their one-time payment of $1,200. Meanwhile in Canada, it took their government only two weeks to develop the infrastructure to send monthly payments of $2,000 to every Canadian.
The incompetence displayed by the American government isn’t because they can’t do better - it’s because they don’t want to do better. The same government was able to send massive financial assistance to huge corporations with very little delay.
It’s become totally evident that the United States government exists solely to serve its corporations, not its citizens. Anything it does to actively help it’s citizens is, at best, incidental.
All that being said, your second point seems correct to me, and I doubt anything will be done (as a result of the political quagmire).
I bought 50 for $30 at Newegg in mid May. I just ordered another 200 from there at $15 per 50. There are similar offerings immediately available on Amazon.
Same for face shields.
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To your comment about WWII. We had a common enemy and a common effort. This "wartime" economy pretty much envolved the entire economy and I would argue wasn't much different than what communism would be. Meaning that the central government pretty much controlled the means of production.
I am mid twenties, and was homeschooled my entire childhood. My father owned a technology company, and brought me to work with him most days. People talk about homeschooling being damaging due to the lack of exposure to the "real world", but I have had more exposure to reality than most, due to the constant exposure to actual working life.
Don't be afraid of "sheltering" your children by not having them be part of the system. There is so much more out there than the system. Your kids will turn out weird vs other kids raised in the standard environment, but its a good kind of weird.
My family was very involved with the homeschooling movement in our state, so I am more exposed than most to the sub-culture. Feel free to ask me any more specific questions.
This isn't guaranteed.
A counterexample is Tara Westover[1] who grew up in an extremist version of what you are describing. She ultimately became successful but it was mostly despite her parents isolation from "the system", not because of them.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/02/20/587244230/memoirist-retraces-...
As far as homeschooling is concerned. I spent 20 years in the military and the only thing that I observed that was a little awkward about the people that were home schooled was how they were around "authority". Meaning that they weren't as submissive to authority like everyone that went to a normal public school.
I understand that many good online courses exist but they are not full substitutes of in-person discussions and personalized feedback for essays, for example. It can take quite a bit of time to understand or even review materials. Some families might not have the necessary background as well.
That is to say, the problem is not, conceptually, "society and government", but instead, the American society and American government we have today. Don't give up! Don't withdraw! Organize and fight to improve the systems that are exacerbating this crisis.
The alternative is having the basic needs (food, water, shelter, warmth, clothing) be met by being a participant in the ecology. Where these things can be provided through decentralized means as part of regenerative processes. When these things are provided by regenerative cycles, families can live off of that across many generations provided that they are wise stewards of the land. This is better than Universal Basic Income. You can't eat money, and UBI still relies on the fragile global supply chain to meet basic needs.
Furthermore, because these systems are decentralized, it does not require collective action. It does not require organizing, or fighting against the system. It does not require waiting for leaders to Do Something About It. It is more like letting the weeds grow. Pioneering into depleted soil with tenacity and resilience. It requires a mindset shift, and connecting with the local ecology and local community.
Was the response perfect? Certainly not. Did some other countries do better? I'm sure we could find a handful. Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!
And in case you think that the US is indeed one, it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore, or you have consumed too much of biased media which wants to maximize your anxiety and partisanship for their profits, or you are just trolling here to intentionally sow divisions. Assuming you are not in the last category, please go and learn about how things are in Brazil or India or sub-Saharan Africa. You will realize that the US is in a much better shape and things are handled far better than the media narratives.
My diagnosis:
- Hyper-partisanship is causing politicians and the electorate to harden into uncompromising tribes. This hyper-partisanship also serves to increase the size and scale of the fringe wings of both parties, leading to events like the infamous white-supremacist Charlottesville rally.
The cause(s):
- 1. News as a business, particularly if that business is publicly traded, is not in the 'truth-telling' business. It is in the 'maximizing profits' business, as all (publicly traded) companies are.
- 2. Twitter and Facebook allow us to create echo chambers of politicians, pundits, news organizations, and peers. There are another dozen reasons, I'm sure, including: money in politics, constant campaigning, a genuine uptick in racism/anti-semitism, and many more. I think exploring the idea of a crowd-sourced website listing these reasons and proposed solutions would be quite valuable.Not yet. It ain't over yet though, even though it might seem like it elsewhere. Basic facts are: herd immunity is prohibitively expensive from the fatalities perspective (although it may be our only long term option), a vaccine is not guaranteed to ever exist, and C19 is now endemic, so it will come back. Oh and also, for the society to function people must be able to work.
To poster below who said that no vaccine == no herd immunity. That's actually not true. For a vaccine to be approved it needs to be safe. Herd immunity will just happen eventually, no approval needed as the virus itself doesn't care if it's "safe" or not. Paradoxically, the society will likely prefer to tolerate higher body count due to not having a vaccine at all, rather than smaller body count for a vaccine that is unsafe in a small, but not completely negligible percentage of cases.
Take a look at the covid19 infection rates in the country a little north of you.. as others have posted, not all governments / society has failed.
You need to ask why you have so many people who are proud not to wear a mask simply because it limits their "Freedoms"??
Maybe if they wore a mask, and excersized social distancing things wouldnt be this bad?
Just sucks to not have a solution for people who spend their lives teaching (and babysitting, managing, mentoring, and more) our youth.
Social distancing has its obvious social costs, and my feeling (I couldn't definitively call it understanding) with masks is that it's more about protecting people from you, and not the other way around.
I think no matter how you break it down, the USA has proven so far it's poorly suited to do carry that out for each other.
The social contract theory has failed, and we're preparing now for a future without it.
Albeit, I'm not a single family (we have two parents) but...I'm an advocate for homeschooling. I have been for about a decade now. I've noticed a lot of different parenting styles growing up and education matters tremendously but not just book smarts, but emotional intelligence, dealing with various people, skills, and even high valued skills.
As I've lived my life and looked into multiple system, I feel the American education has failed it's students for well over 30 years. The student that succeed? The ones that knows that school is more than 9am to 2pm (or whatever depending on the age). I feel it's best taught in the home.
As the child ages and more skilled studies are required, yes they'll learn from teachers but parents can get very far with a child, if you encourage them to learn and foster their curiosity.
Finally, I'll conclude with this. I feel very grateful for this covid19 because this will now help more resources to improve the quality/efficiency of homeschooling. I look forward to using these new resources that will rise up.
https://www.econlib.org/emergency-homeschooling-a-how-to-gui...
There's a video interview where he talks about social aspects as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN_qg27UubM
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-cant-america-handle-t...
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-new-york-city-is-on-t...
There has been a concerted effort by some to make the government unreliable. There are vested interests in getting the government out of many things it does, and lots of profit to be made taking over what the government provides. The right has, for awhile, been ideologically opposed the government funded education, for example.
If the government is unreliable, it's because the US has elected people that make it so. Government works fine in many countries around the world. Canada, Europe, Australia... all seem in far better shape. We're just intentionally crippling it for ideological and profit reasons.
US voters who voted Trump into office are also largely to blame. No one to blame but ourselves. Projecting anger onto "the system" is missing the picture. To put it another way, if you want your government to work for the people, stop voting people into office who are very obviously breaking the government because they are zealots or greedy.
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Now those assumptions are being challenged. And of course a lot of people, rather than change and give up their cherished "identity", would plow ahead blindly, consequences be damned. Everyone who is protesting masks, I am looking at you and your beliefs.
This has happened many times in history. Societies get their beliefs challenged by reality. Some adapt, fix their stuff, and go on. Some don't.
There is still time to change. But not much.
- Do they have the budget for counseling when students and teachers pass away? - When a teacher gets sick, what substitute teacher is going to want to teach an exposed class (also, they’ll be making sub plans with covid?)? - When they’re sick are will they be getting additional sick leave? - Do they get worker’s compensation if they get sick, since they were knowingly sent into a dangerous environment?
It pains me to admit that this didn't even occur to me as part of the topic of teachers being sent back. The human aspects of students-teacher relationships. I feel I've been desensitized to this after exposing myself to a constant stream of news, and now I'm thinking further about what other aspects lie behind other headlines. Thank you for sharing this
(Children actually have had negative excess death rates this year: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-mortality-over-time-o... --- reduction in travel, etc. has more than offset covid)
I know a few teachers. Apparently their students found out that the state was unwilling to hold anyone back a year during the pandemic, they shared this information with each other, and now a substantial amount of them are not doing any work.
In some classes, more than half the students are permanently absent! Either their parents don't know, or don't care, or are unable to provide internet access.
One solution is to get students back into classrooms. Another is to design a remote learning system that actually works, with enforcement of attendance and where grades actually matter, but that is probably not something our substandard education system is able to achieve.
Her main concern is that this is going to widen the achievement gap between students with high parental involvement and those with low parental involvement. They've spend a lot of time trying to come up with strategies to deal with the situation but outside of sending government officials to the home for an on-site evaluation (problematic for many reasons), there's little they can do. She's worried that as time goes on, the number of students discovering they can get away with doing no work will increase.
edit - If your wife belongs to a teachers union, this would be a great thing for the teachers union to push for.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-republicans-to-propose-l...
> Included in the list are temporary protection from the trial bar for schools, colleges, charities and business that follow public health guidelines and for frontline medical workers.
One could argue they (in this case Senate majority) are just crossing the t's and dotting the i's but considering there has been little regard (in many states and definitely on the federal level) for public health (in favor of other concerns) thus far...that is IMHO wishful thinking.
That was a total lie. It came out this week and parents (thankfully) called our counties admin on their narrative.
So no they have principals calling each teacher and asking them on their comfort level about returning . Unsurprisingly, most aren’t comfortable.
When they called my wife they asked for her comfort level on a 1-10 scale.
She refused to give them a number. Instead just saying this plan means she is 100% confident she will contract it and spread it to the family in the month of august. But that is not what concerns her. What concerns her is that if every other school, teacher and parent is doing the same, on the heels of the current numbers, it means we may not be able to get the medical attention we need due to overloading the medical community.
[...] LAUSD educators clearly want to get back into schools with their students, but the underlying question at every step must be: Given broader societal conditions, how do we open physical schools in a way that ensures that the benefit outweigh the risks [...]
And then proceeds to the following recommendations, among many others:
- Defund Police
- Shelter the homeless
- Paid sick leave for all
- Medicare for all
- "Charter Moratorium"
- "Financial Support for Undocumented Students and Families"
- Wealth tax
- Millionaire tax
- ...
[1] PDF https://www.utla.net/sites/default/files/samestormdiffboats_...
The left doesn't hate charters, it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable. That's a subset of charters plus all vouchers.
Actual public charters, by which public schools are granted some variance of generally applicable rules to trial new methods are not a problem to the left; the hijacking of that process to create super-voucher schools when the voucher model failed to gain sufficient political support is what the left hates.
> Parents choose to send their kids there
Often, after the local regular public school has been replaced by a privately-operated charter in the same facility, and often the parents who most choose to send their children their are the ones whose most-local school was replaced, because it's the most convenient public school and going to a more distant one has added cost.
This artificially increases Charter School's performance, and artificially lowers Public School's performance.
But this isn't an accident, Charter Schools are designed to de-fund public education for political reasons, and while discriminating against SPED kids is illegal, the % of SPED kids at charters is disproportionately low[0].
> Charter schools are significantly less likely to reply to students to the IEP message than to the baseline message, while traditional public schools are not. There is also some evidence that schools are less likely to respond to families with Hispanic-sounding names.
[0] http://www.columbia.edu/~psb2101/BergmanMcFarlin_school_choi...
In this instance, it's a separation of church and state. You should not get a public dime if they do things like fire an LGBT teacher who had otherwise glowing reviews and successful students or refuse to teach basic science and history.
But the arguments against charter schools as a suck for public dollars as well as the way voucher programs can be abused (with support by the present Secretary of education, someone who has investments and connections to charter programs) is another huge issue.
It's not that the left opposes education, it's that they want actual education in schools. It's not that we shouldn't spend the money to improve education, it's that we need to invest in programs and schools that meet federal guidelines and respect federal law and constitutional rights.
And for me it's because the first amendment should guarantee freedom of and FROM religion. If the best school in town is the religious charter school my property taxes are supporting, we have conflicts.
Additionally, the US system punishes underperforming schools by deallocating funds. In what world does that make sense? Any rational society would send in an educational SWAT team to lift the school up, not handicap it further.
You'll probably understand better when you quit thinking that you can automatically identify the players involved. Perhaps simply ask why some folks oppose charter schools.
Others have responded with good answers, such as increased inequality and siphoning funds from public schools. If you take those to be left/right issues, well, there's your problem: does "the right" support increasing inequality and the draining money from public schools? That's kind of a rhetorical question (the assumed answer on my end is, "of course they don't"), but then again, maybe it's not.
The other declared reasons seemed unconvincing to me.
[A] Benchmarking - competing schools provide parents with a direct comparison point, so it's much harder for a struggling public school to disclaim responsibility for some of their own problems.
[B] Skimming - picking out the best-performing and the least-demanding students.
1. Most of the big claims about charter school performance is due to small sample size or short measurement time. There's a notorious cycle in the field where someone announces that they have a brilliant way to make kids succeed and publishes results which get a lot of attention, but regression to the mean sets in once they try to scale it up or have more than a few years worth of data. Once you get enough data they perform very similarly to the public schools serving the same community — worse as often as better.
2. Schools which show consistently better performance are the ones who can select students who were higher performing when they enrolled. If you can consistently attract richer, educated parents to your school — say with a pitch telling everyone how it's the best possible education for their children — you will post great numbers but those kids would have done well almost anywhere. This can be overt in the states which allow test-in or in the structure of the school (i.e. hit students with enough outside homework and you're going to lose a lot of kids who don't have family resources to support that extra time) or hidden in other areas: for example, a school in a state which doesn't require schools to offer free/reduced lunch will exclude poor kids without explicitly doing so, as will not offering bus service in a suburban area, having limited support for anyone with special needs, etc.
When evaluating schools, you have to do a value-added analysis comparing like cohorts of students. Public schools serve both a greater number of students and a much higher degree of diversity and very few are truly “bad” as — what you're usually seeing is that poor kids have more obstacles to success, and the United States runs a lot of special needs support through schools, and averages hide that information. I live in Washington DC which has tons of charters and there are a couple which have some great things for certain kids but not everyone (e.g. a language immersion) and a whole bunch which look pretty similar to the data from the local public schools when you match for equivalent parental SES.
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Charter schools are a threat to the public school system, so the public school system will naturally oppose charter schools.
If you are a public school without charter schools, a parent only has two choices: (1) public school, or (2) pay $20k+/yr/child to do private school. For the vast, vast majority of parents, public school is the only option.
Once you add charter schools to the mix, there is a new option that is viable for a much larger population. When parents choose charter schools, they lose public funding. Hence, this is a threat to public schools, and public school systems will strongly oppose it.
I think the reason you're having trouble understanding this is that you assume the public school union has the interests of children as it's top priority. With that assumption, opposition to charter schools doesn't make sense. But if you assume rational self interest, then you can easily explain the opposition.
She's been a teacher for ~15 years and still makes less than $30k a year teaching. She loves helping the kids, but her life isn't worth it.
This is somewhat of a digression, but the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. The people taking these jobs typically must have some other way of supporting their family; either their spouse has a higher-paying professional job or they are the beneficiary of some other form of generational wealth.
But we tend to lose the teachers who must make ends meet their own selves on a teacher's pay. There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
Pretty much everywhere rural starts under $40k (or under $30k in some cases) and stays under $40k for 5-10 years of experience.
No relation, saw one of their engineering jobs on HN and your comment made me think of a solution for your mother's situation (it's teaching over Zoom).
A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.
The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope.
The presidential talk about it is just that - talk.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/08/when-it-comes-educ...
It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".
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"Teachers in the province earn an average salary of around $86,000, according to data provided by Ontario's Ministry of Education. Only in Alberta are average teacher salaries higher, around $89,000"
It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?
The planning being done for the next school year where we live is complete bullshit. The politicians and administrators running the planning have no idea about the realities.
They are driving these hybrid models with kids doing remote and in-person learning in alternative days/weeks with the in-person class sizes being about one third of the normal class size. To do that they would need at least twice the amount of teachers (one to teach in-person, and one to teach remotely to kids staying at home), possibly even more. Are they planning on hiring more teachers? No.
It's going to be a complete shitshow even without teachers quitting en masse.
There's this completely unrealistic sense among the people in charge that teachers will just magically make it work with no additional training, no proper support, no additional resources, nothing.
And I'm not even addressing the difficulties families, especially those that have multiple kids and/or can't work from home, will have with these proposed schedules.
I honestly doubt they think it will magically work, I think there are no good options that will give all the kids good educational outcomes, keep kids and teachers safe, and allow the economy to function without the use of schools as childcare, and that they are trying to pick the option that will have the least number of people calling for their heads.
We need to double resources for schools and teachers anyway but even if we had the time and funding it would be less than ideal to combat the pandemic too.
Remote learning doesn't work for everyone and leaves a lot of people behind. The overall consequences of another lost semester may be far worse than the consequences of reopening.
If we keep on getting pandemics (something that's been expected for a long time) the whole baseline of how society operates will be forcibly disrupted. (a baseline people can be 'left behind' on the way to: I hear talk of students missing vital academic AND SOCIAL connections, which sounds like pre-pandemic talk)
If we have even moderate economic collapse, which is inevitable with the pandemic we do have (and the other, related upheavals going on) then the destination simply will not exist. We will be flung into a Star Trek future where the existing mechanisms of human survival no longer apply. It's possible the consequences of dropping 'behind' will mean the difference between becoming wealthy through business and social connections, and literally starvation and homelessness (rather than just doing poorly and getting by). However, in those conditions, all of society collapses and the wealthy have no place to be anymore. Wealth depends upon the existence of a society that can support it.
In my opinion there is no possible benefit to pretending it's possible to go 'back to normal' in any sense, and it's on us to envision what comes next. 'Normal' is never coming back. It's already gone forever, so it's time to decide whether we want human beings to survive or not.
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> 'Normal' is never coming back.
That's ridiculous. If anything, this pandemic has restored 'normal' to the world. The normal state of the world is pandemics, natural disaster, human death, etc. Only by active human society have we been able to avoid that. Modern society is so good and efficient that too many people have forgotten what's normal.
Let's be perfectly clear, this isn't something abstract. The consequences are dead kids and dead teachers. Get that through your head. You of course imagine it won't be your kids that die but there's absolutely no reason to think that.
Yes, the serious risk of increases in childhood “morbidity and mortality” if schools remain closed are exactly what the American Academy of Pediatrics cited as a key consideration when strongly urging that planning center on a return to in-person schooling with the start of the coming school year.
CDC says that 1.7% of COVID cases belong to children. [2]
Among children, CDC says 1.8% of cases required hospitalization. [2]
A dumb kid is better than a dead kid, I agree. But are 74M dumber kids worth less than 25000 ICU visits in the entire country?[1]: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/number-of-children
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6914e4.htm
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I'm curious - how few would have to die so that the "overall consequences of another lost semester" is not worse?
We're hitting 75K positive tests a day in this country and that number is increasing daily. That's WITH social distancing by kids. What do you think is going to happen when a school has 800 kids running around? That's 800 daily potential avenues for disease transmission.
Seriously, who cares if some people "fall behind?" They can catch up at their own pace. I'm pretty sure that most parents would rather their kids graduate at 19 or 20 than be buried at 8 or 9.
I don't even understand how its possible to prefer sending kids back over one semester. Of course I think the bigger issue is its just parents that want kids out of the house for a multitude of reasons including getting back to their own work.
What of students that have debt and now will have to wait more to get their "education"? Do you realize this is all going to cause more pain and suffering and possible deaths?
Do you realize given more budget it is possible to save more people if you spend it wisely?
How about 10 semesters to save 10 children? 100 semesters to save 100 children?
But it seems like holding people back semesters eventually adds up to something that's as bad as a death. These kids are never going to get that semester back. And if you think they enjoy the at home alternatives half as much, or learn half as much or value that time in their lives half as much it seems like on some level the equivalent of 1000s of person lifetimes of value have been lost. I wouldn't hold back everyone one semester in high school in exchange for even on the order of 100s of deaths.
Doling the pain out in a few month increments is how it is made to seem more reasonable.
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My wife's a teacher. She was back in school for a day last week, with a much smaller class of children. The first thing one of her children tried to do on seeing her was give her a hug. I doubt this happens to many grocery workers.
In September she'll spend about six hours a day in a poorly ventilated and inadequately sized classroom with 30 children. Neither she nor the children are allowed to wear masks or gloves. From the single days she has been in each week, she's watched children unable to maintain social distancing in the classroom or the playground. They cough, sneeze and wipe their noses on their hands and then touch everything. That's what kids are like.
Nurses largely have the PPE needed to deal with covid and have been trained to do so. Store workers have far less exposure than a teacher trying to wrangle 30 kids for 8 hours a day.
Hospitals are designed to prevent infectious disease spread. They plan for mass sanitation, employees wearing PPE, minimizing disease vectors. My wife's hospital has changed their policy to no outside visitors even on non-COVID floors. You can't do that in a school.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to downplay the sacrifice essential employees are making right now; they absolutely deserve hazard pay among so much else for putting themselves at risk for the benefit of everyone else. I asked my wife at the beginning of this if she wanted to quit, and we'd find a way to make it work, and she said "I'm a nurse, I signed up for this." That's just her mindset; she's been trained to work in a contagious environment and her hospital has many ways to help keep her safe. Asking teachers to take on that responsibility in addition to what we already ask of them, while being inside a petri dish of disease spreading is 100% irresponsible to everyone involved.
* They are generally working in a much larger space like a big store, so not confined into a small classroom * The small space teachers are in are filled with kids that are obviously the most unhygienic. Try as they will, it's way more risky than being filled with adults(ok lots of adults that are less responsible than a 5 year old, I know) who are wearing masks and attempting to keep distancing
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