Historically least prepared for college high school class in history...

[fskimospy]

You act like we understood COVID in 2020. Like numbers were reliable in 2020 when the COVID death tolls were hugely underreported, which was crystal clear when you'd go look up how much pneumonia death tolls shot up in the confederate states during the first few months of the pandemic. The schools should have been closed until teachers had sufficient opportunity for vaccination against a novel virus not well understood, which didn't happen April/May 2021.

Actually I’ve repeatedly said I supported the closure of schools in spring of 2020 precisely because the mortality rate for the virus was not understood.

By fall of 2020 we had a basic idea as to the mortality rate and we knew that it was overwhelmingly the elderly and otherwise compromised who were at risk.

In addition to learning loss children were subjected to increased violence in their homes during school closures and other pandemic measures.

Violence against children during the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected children’s risk of violence in their homes, communities and online, and has compromised the ability of child protection systems to promptly detect and respond to cases of violence. ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

For impoverished students schools play a vital role in their welfare that goes far beyond just the learning part.

 

[Zorba]

There is absolutely merit to actually writing things vs typing. Even if you don't go back and read them, it's the function of committing brain power to writing out the words, seeing it, and thinking through how you want to write it. There's just an extra layer of processing and memorization that happens that typing doesn't provide.

My latest *uuuuuuuuuuhggggggggggg* moment. I have a 6th grader doing fractions. They need to do worksheets. Oh but it's not really a worksheet. It's an assignment in an online module that has you type in some things (like what's a quotient vs a divisor) but then when it comes to the *actual* work you need to do it on a piece of paper you scrape up from home, do the work, and then to "show it" you have kids needing to take a freaking chrome book and try this gymnastic act of taking a picture of a piece of paper with the potato cam quality web camera and upload it. Watching my kid struggle trying to figure out where, what, and how to do this was just beyond obnoxious.

Send home the damn assignment on a piece of paper for fucks sake. Let them do it. And bring it back. Enough with this stupid needless technical overhead that introduces nothing of value. The online shit for a 6th grader turns a 5 minute assignment into a 20 minute one. You spend more time fidgeting with the technical interfaces than you do actually learning the stuff you need to learn.

I'd really like to see some good research on the impact of computers in the classroom. I really hate it, but it might just be because I'm old. But last year my daughter in first grade would do timed math and logic games and iPad while the teacher read with kids one on one. Seemed like a decent use case, but homework, worksheets, reading on Chromebooks needs to go away

 

[Zorba]

In NYC if you have diabetes you simply apply for a reasonable accommodation and you would not have been required to report for in-person teaching so how is that relevant?

The average age of an active NYC teacher is 42. For the 40-50 age pre-vax group IFR for COVID is somewhere around 0.035%, and that includes those with heightened vulnerability to severe COVID, meaning the IFR for those without risk factors would be even lower than that. Is the argument really that we need to inflict significant learning loss on a generation of kids for years in order to protect teachers from a disease with a sub 0.035% fatality rate? I suspect there are plenty of other activities teachers undertake with similar risks.

Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly informed from pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies

The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 among non-elderly people in the absence of vaccination or prior infection is important to estimate accurately, since 94% of the global population is younger than 70 years and 86% is younger than 60 years. In systematic searches in SeroTracker and...

www.medrxiv.org

There are about 5M teachers in the US, so what you are saying is you're are fine if 2,000 of them died in the line of duty. Plus another 10,000 or so being sent to the ICU with likely significant long term effects. Not to mention follow on effects of them passing it to others, etc.

What the US should've done was prioritize schools over everything else. Instead we decided that we wanted no restrictions on anything, so we then we had to ask teachers to enter an environment where catching the virus was almost guaranteed. Then half the states banned any type of sensible protections for the teachers.

We as a society decided bars were more important than education, that not wearing masks was more important than education, that not socially distancing was more important than education. So guess what, education suffered.

Other countries that left education open, had much better control of the virus than the US.

 

[Zorba]

Really though, that stat includes everyone with high risk factors like diabetes, immune compromise, etc., all of whom would not be required to return to in-person instruction.

So you’re really probably talking about something significantly lower than that, and that doesn’t even take into account that a very large percentage of teachers got COVID while they weren’t teaching in-person anyway.

At what point do organizations dedicated to the education and welfare of children start to take the education and welfare of children into account?

You are also using stats not available in summer of 2020 (and were likely much worse because that was before any effective treatments had been discovered). The number is also based on our (weak) attempts at slowing the spread, such as closing schools, thus mostly protecting the hospital systems. If those weak controls weren't used and the hospital system completely saturated the numbers would've been much worse and not just from COVID directly.

In the summer of 2020 you could barely get masks, no rapid tests, no real treatments, etc.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

At what point do organizations dedicated to the education and welfare of children start to take the education and welfare of children into account?

When I look back at my schooling, I have a hard time taking anyone serious who says it out-values a human life.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

By fall of 2020 we had a basic idea as to the mortality rate and we knew that it was overwhelmingly the elderly and otherwise compromised who were at risk.

In addition to learning loss children were subjected to increased violence in their homes during school closures and other pandemic measures.

If it was so important the teachers should have gotten raises for putting themselves at risk and for holding society together. If I was a teacher in 2020 my response to administrators telling me to come risk my life without a vaccine for a poverty wage I would have probably told them to go fuck their mothers unless they offered me a good bump in pay.

 

[fskimospy]

When I look back at my schooling, I have a hard time taking anyone serious who says it out-values a human life.

So no amount of education equals one?

 

[fskimospy]

If it was so important the teachers should have gotten raises for putting themselves at risk and for holding society together. If I was a teacher in 2020 my response to administrators telling me to come risk my life without a vaccine for a poverty wage I would have probably told them to go fuck their mothers unless they offered me a good bump in pay.

Well then you can just quit?

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

So no amount of education equals one?

Last I checked the US education system didn't take the year off, it just sucked ass like the rest of the planet did. If the pandy is the worst thing that happens to gen alpha I'd say they'll be okay. It'll certainly beat all our predictions.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Well then you can just quit?

God damn you hate labor

 

[fskimospy]

God damn you hate labor

Do you really think I hate labor?

 

[fskimospy]

Last I checked the US education system didn't take the year off, it just sucked ass like the rest of the planet did. If the pandy is the worst thing that happens to gen alpha I'd say they'll be okay. It'll certainly beat all our predictions.

This is just not true - there are really serious, negative things that happened to kids during this time. Lots of them.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

This is just not true - there are really serious, negative things that happened to kids during this time. Lots of them.

I don't doubt it, I just think a lot worse things are going to happen to that generation. It was bad, it's as bad as it could have been for them.

 

[Zorba]

This is just not true - there are really serious, negative things that happened to kids during this time. Lots of them.

You are demonstrating the problem with prevention and why politicians and managers suck at prevention. If you make decisions at great cost and inconvenience to prevent an issue, then it doesn't happen, because you prevented it everyone thinks you over reacted and wasted all those resources. Meanwhile, if they wait until there already is a huge issue, they get to be the "great leaders" that fix it.

It's really not possible to know how much schools closing decreased spread, as places with closed schools were also doing other measures, while places with open schools were mostly doing little.

How many grandparents never got COVID because their kids didn't catch it at school, for example.

The real take away is we should enforce better controls outside of schools, so schools will be safe enough to keep open. Because schools are more important than bars and not wearing a mask.

 

[fskimospy]

You are demonstrating the problem with prevention and why politicians and managers suck at prevention. If you make decisions at great cost and inconvenience to prevent an issue, then it doesn't happen, because you prevented it everyone thinks you over reacted and wasted all those resources. Meanwhile, if they wait until there already is a huge issue, they get to be the "great leaders" that fix it.

It's really not possible to know how much schools closing decreased spread, as places with closed schools were also doing other measures, while places with open schools were mostly doing little.

How many grandparents never got COVID because their kids didn't catch it at school, for example.

The real take away is we should enforce better controls outside of schools, so schools will be safe enough to keep open. Because schools are more important than bars and not wearing a mask.

Why has no one asked what the cost was to the students?

 

[vi edit]

Honestly, stuff like better investments in ventilation in a school are a *long term* improvement. Every single day that can help mitigate some additional spread. Just this last month my kids schools were at about 50% attendance because of *this* round of Covid. Better systems would have kept on providing impact even now.

But looking at long term impacts is not of importance to American politics. Just what can we do for the next election.

 

[Zorba]

Why has no one asked what the cost was to the students?

I agree that it is a discussion that needs to be had and other countries showed that school could be done, but that was because they prioritized schooling over freedumb. I was super pissed at that time and went off on my in-laws about how their POS politicians making stupid decisions was the reason their granddaughter couldn't go to school. Schools closing should be the last weapon in the quiver, unfortunately in the united states we don't believe in community action problems.

I do really agree that some places, like Cali really kept the schools closed way too long, especially given their relatively low community spread.

Schools could've also been more creativity in how to handle protocols, but we have over 13,000 school districts in the US, so good luck getting any commonality there. Things like keeping all high schoolers in the same class room all day, and rotating teachers in and out. Or just mandating masking and vaccines.

Honestly, stuff like better investments in ventilation in a school are a *long term* improvement. Every single day that can help mitigate some additional spread. Just this last month my kids schools were at about 50% attendance because of *this* round of Covid. Better systems would have kept on providing impact even now.

But looking at long term impacts is not of importance to American politics. Just what can we do for the next election.

Ventilation is already a major driver of energy usage and equipment sizing. Increasing the ventilation to the point of disease prevention would drive massive increases in energy usage throughout the country.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

But looking at long term impacts is not of importance to American politics. Just what can we do for the next election.

It's not of importance to business in America either. Just what can you do for the stock price right now, fueled by having capital gains not taxed as income so anyone who matters in a company can get paid in stock to dodge taxes.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

You are demonstrating the problem with prevention and why politicians and managers suck at prevention. If you make decisions at great cost and inconvenience to prevent an issue, then it doesn't happen, because you prevented it everyone thinks you over reacted and wasted all those resources. Meanwhile, if they wait until there already is a huge issue, they get to be the "great leaders" that fix it.

It's really not possible to know how much schools closing decreased spread, as places with closed schools were also doing other measures, while places with open schools were mostly doing little.

How many grandparents never got COVID because their kids didn't catch it at school, for example.

The real take away is we should enforce better controls outside of schools, so schools will be safe enough to keep open. Because schools are more important than bars and not wearing a mask.

Yeah if we were South Korea who kept the virus largely in check outside of a large outbreak caused by a Christian megachurch (big surprise) while there was no vaccine yet through extensive testing and contact tracing I'd have been more ok with schools opening earlier. But that's the difference between a nation run by responsible adults vs one run by banks and corporations.

 

[Exterous]

Coincidentally we had dinner tonight with a long time friend who is heavily involved with University admissions for education programs in the state. The number one school in the state is barely getting by with bare bones enrollment despite a sky high ranking for the field in numerous publications. Another University whose education program was the second largest program at the school not all that long ago is now the smallest program at the school. She ran a job fair at the last one and had a school district turnout almost double their previous record for district attendance. Unfortunately the number of districts in attendance was 3x the number of students looking for a job.

Doesn't bode well for how prepared for college kids are given the number of teacher openings in the state. Rich schools will continue to find and hire quality teachers especially now that the Step system has all but been obliterated in the state. Average to poor districts or rural districts will fall further and further behind continuing to disadvantage students who likely need the most help

 

[Fenixgoon]

Coincidentally we had dinner tonight with a long time friend who is heavily involved with University admissions for education programs in the state. The number one school in the state is barely getting by with bare bones enrollment despite a sky high ranking for the field in numerous publications. Another University whose education program was the second largest program at the school not all that long ago is now the smallest program at the school. She ran a job fair at the last one and had a school district turnout almost double their previous record for district attendance. Unfortunately the number of districts in attendance was 3x the number of students looking for a job.

Doesn't bode well for how prepared for college kids are given the number of teacher openings in the state. Rich schools will continue to be find and hire quality teachers especially now that the Step system has all but been obliterated in the state. Average to poor districts or rural districts will fall further and further behind continuing to disadvantage students who likely need the most help

Sounds like the American way 😢

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Coincidentally we had dinner tonight with a long time friend who is heavily involved with University admissions for education programs in the state. The number one school in the state is barely getting by with bare bones enrollment despite a sky high ranking for the field in numerous publications. Another University whose education program was the second largest program at the school not all that long ago is now the smallest program at the school. She ran a job fair at the last one and had a school district turnout almost double their previous record for district attendance. Unfortunately the number of districts in attendance was 3x the number of students looking for a job.

Doesn't bode well for how prepared for college kids are given the number of teacher openings in the state. Rich schools will continue to find and hire quality teachers especially now that the Step system has all but been obliterated in the state. Average to poor districts or rural districts will fall further and further behind continuing to disadvantage students who likely need the most help

Would you want to teach in this nation where you're paid poverty wage, expected to work off the clock, have to teach to standardized tests, expected to spend your own money on class materials, have to babysit problem children acting out because they live in a nation that threw their families under the bus just like it threw you under, where you have a loud minority of parents accusing you of being a groomer or a woke propagandist, where you have to do active shooter drills because this nation has bred generations of hopeless kids with nothing to lose, etc? Yeah no shit no one wants to go into education.

 

[Exterous]

Would you want to teach in this nation where you're paid poverty wage, expected to work off the clock, have to teach to standardized tests, expected to spend your own money on class materials, have to babysit problem children acting out because they live in a nation that threw their families under the bus just like it threw you under, where you have a loud minority of parents accusing you of being a groomer or a woke propagandist, where you have to do active shooter drills because this nation has bred generations of hopeless kids with nothing to lose, etc? Yeah no shit no one wants to go into education.

There are certainly a number of challenges especially when you look at the salaries compared to working environment. My wife's career is in teaching so we've seen the impact first hand and through peer and friend relationships. There are not only challenges with in the size of the incoming workforce but the existing workforce is getting really burned out. Hell my wife thought she was going to be in this for the long haul but we're having very real conversations about how much longer she needs to endure this before leaving the field.

 

[fskimospy]

There are certainly a number of challenges especially when you look at the salaries compared to working environment. My wife's career is in teaching so we've seen the impact first hand and through peer and friend relationships. There are not only challenges with in the size of the incoming workforce but the existing workforce is getting really burned out. Hell my wife thought she was going to be in this for the long haul but we're having very real conversations about how much longer she needs to endure this before leaving the field.

There definitely are a lot of challenges in the field these days, although salaries vary wildly across the country. In some places they are quite good, in others they are an embarrassment.

While I can only speak for NYC in our case our attrition rate is basically the same as it was before the pandemic at around 6% annually.

 

[Exterous]

While I can only speak for NYC in our case our attrition rate is basically the same as it was before the pandemic at around 6% annually.

This report would indicate the attrition rate for NYC teachers increased from 8% in 2019-2020 to 12% in 2022-2023.

The retention rate had inched up to 92 percent by 2019-2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city.Few teachers employed by the DOE in 2019-2020 left in by the fall of 2020, perhaps due to the increased flexibility forremote instruction during the hybrid schooling year and the possibility of an Early Retirement Incentive from the State.Over the last two years, though, retention rates in NYC Public Schools have declined to about 88 percent in 2022-2023.

https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/roll-call-recent-trends-in-teacher-retention-and-hiring-in-new-york-city-public-schools-september-2023.pdf