Kids are far behind in school

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/schools-learning-loss-remote-covid-education/629938/

by whitepaint • 4 years ago

140 364 4 years ago

theatlantic.com

oneoff7867• 4 years ago

But either way, children should not be stuck with the bill for a public-health measure taken on everyone’s behalf.

That’s a generous take.

voisin• 4 years ago

Please expand?

oneoff7867• 4 years ago

The benefit of the lockdowns was very, very small for the kids.

tallanvor• 4 years ago

At least in the US they're able to quantify the issue somewhat. In Norway they just canceled exams for multiple years in a row, and those students passed whether they were prepared or not.

micromacrofoot7• 4 years ago

Interesting that it can be quantified somewhat… but the suggested interventions (extra tutoring, summer school, longer days) are just not going to happen. That education is gone. If they happen anywhere, it’ll only be rich kids.

satysin• 4 years ago

If they happen anywhere, it’ll only be rich kids.

This is a very sad truth.

We are very fortunate and were able to afford private tuition for our son along with more free time to put into home schooling during the lockdowns to ensure he didn't fall behind.

Unfortunately a lot cannot afford private tutors nor have free time they can commit to consistent home schooling so it will further separate those on lower incomes. Something we will not truly see for maybe a decade or more when younger kids (my sons age) enter higher education. This is something I feel strongly about and have written to our local education governmental body about but all I have had back is generic soundbites :(

Part of me is wondering if I should just take this into my own hands and try to organise something with the local schools and social centres directly for weekend and summer programmes.

makomk• 4 years ago

The fundamental problem here is that when we chose to shut down society, most of the capacity that went unused is gone and cannot be brought forward into 2022 to fill in the gaps left behind. So for example, all of the teaching time that was wasted on ineffective distance learning or just didn't happen is gone. Want to organise a bunch of catch up sessions? You'll have to find a bunch of extra teaching time from somewhere (and likely a bunch of extra teachers) on top of normal teaching along with extra time in those kids' days - easy enough to do small scale for a wealthy few, much harder for all of society.

The same has happened everywhere, from factory production to restaurant meals and hotel stays, which limits our ability to pay teachers to do this - in order to pay them more in real terms they have to be able to buy more, but the amount of stuff available to buy isn't even enough to support people's existing quality of life. Any attempt to pay teachers generous overtime to teach extra would have to come out of other peoples' real-terms income in a world where that is already dropping for most, and the bigger the program the more painful and broadly felt that would be.

sodality26• 4 years ago

I disagree. Gifted programs exist and students in it receive more personal and one-on-one support. Personally I didn't pay for my gifted program (or my parents, of course) throughout the entirety of elementary and middle school. Only in high school did I have to pay for the extra exams, which was approximately $400 (I shoveled snow to pay for it).

micromacrofoot7• 4 years ago

Kids from poorer households are much less likely to be in these programs. Of course plenty of individuals defy this, but from a broad sociological context mostly kids from wealthier educated backgrounds end up in "gifted" programs.

In the US household income is one of the most reliable ways to predict academic success. We're already seeing Covid widen some of these existing gaps.

This is also kind of irrelevant to the parent article. All kids lost out during the pandemic. Without additional efforts beyond what was happening pre-pandemic, everyone will slide down a little.

randomtwiddler2• 4 years ago

Parents can educate their own children. The costs for well outlined curriculum in the digital age are minimal.

micromacrofoot7• 4 years ago

This kind of comment usually comes from someone very young, or maybe unfamiliar with the state of many family's lives in the US.

Parents aren't often educated well themselves. They don't know how to teach anything to anyone.

Some of the working poor don't even have time to cook their kids reasonable meals.

Locally we're experiencing a bus driver shortage (more like a pay shortage), and the school district knows that on days without buses... some kids don't show up because there's no one home that can take the time off of work to bring them to school.

Parents with the education, time, and money can educate their own children. Outside of the upper-middle class... it's rare to encounter parents who have all of those.

If we were to rely on parents for education, we'd be setting half the country back by a good 50 years. Literacy rates would absolutely plummet.

kkfx3• 4 years ago

There is a meaning issue here: school in Democracies, in substantial ones, are the tool to spread a certain level of culture needed to be Citizens, those who intellectually can get opportunities to going further, those less smart can still acquire a minimum culture to be Citizens peers between peers. In formal BUT not substantial democracies witch means in wannabe dictatorships school means just indoctrination so they are the same "entity" formally, but with different substantial targets.

Oh, I forget to say that actually we humans live or in dictatorships of in only-formal democracies.......................

usrn3• 4 years ago

The idea that modern US public schools communicate the culture of the sounding community is honestly a little ridiculous sounding.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Apparently, national polling is showing that about 80% of parents are concerned about what is being taught in the schools, so it’s likely that this schooling system has decoupled from the values that the citizens want to uphold.

kkfx3• 4 years ago

I'm speaking in theory, about schools as a concept. Modern schools implementations in western countries and most of the rest of the world are just about mass indoctrination.

mcv6• 4 years ago

My oldest son started in secondary school last year, so his first two years were largely in lockdown. He's quite introverted (and by now extremely so), so he enjoyed not having to meet people, but his school discipline suffered enormously. I already caught him gaming instead of following classes during the lockdown, and he apparently never learned to finish his homework. He's got more failing than passing grades.

Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is.

OscarCunningham2• 4 years ago

Still, he's smart, seems to understand all the material, and he still has a couple of years to work on his problems before his exams, so with enough work from him, school, us, and the extra tutoring we fortunately can afford for him, he'll probably be okay. But there are probably tons of kids far worse off than he is.

It's sad to me that this is the way things work. Being smart and understanding the material are the important endpoints. If he's already achieving those then it's backwards to make him do lots of extra work just to jump through the hoops of exams.

philipov4• 4 years ago

I thought so too, until I got to a point in my education where it actually required work to continue making process, and the discipline to do it wasn't there. Habits are hard to break, and forming healthy study habits early is as valuable a result of education as the acquisition of that day's knowledge. Maybe more important.

The school system often fails to do that effectively, but their failure does not invalidate the goal.

watwut2• 4 years ago

Understanding why something works and being able to put that in use are often two different things.

mcv6• 4 years ago

I think it really depends on the student and what their primary challenges are. School isn't merely about accumulating knowledge, it's about learning how to learn, how to work, how to plan, etc. And those are the issues my son is struggling with. Stuff he's interested in, he picks up very quickly. But actual projects he needs to finish, he doesn't finish. Or he doesn't even know how to start. Or he finishes them halfway and then doesn't submit them. He frequently fails to read the assignment properly and ends up doing duplicate work as a result. He doesn't study for a test that should have been easy for him. He keeps postponing stuff that's already overdue.

These are the things he needs to learn, and they're probably a lot more important to the rest of his life than French grammar.

ovi2562• 4 years ago

I've heard from private school teachers that they expected exactly this to happen, and enrollment in private schools has boomed as parents that could used the schools that cared about staying open (and opened as soon as they could).

This was well supported and non-controversial pre-pandemic, where we had research results showing that simply having participation in remote schooling lowers high school graduation rate by a significant fraction. But during the pandemic, we still closed schools for most pupils in the developed world.

This was one more problem where the contemporary governance mechanism is "we pretend it won't/isn't/didn't happen because it's politically inconvenient as it contradicts high level leadership decisions (and we can't cause face loss to said leadership)".

gilbetron• 4 years ago

No idea why you were getting downvoted this month, what you said was largely fact. I have a son that went through 6th grade virtually, and 7th grade in-person but masked. We were able to stay on top of him, so he's doing well enough academically (honor roll for 3 terms so far this year, although the work has been easier). Socially and developmentally has been a big issue, and he suffered a lot, in a first world way. He'll be fine, but this has scarred his generation and the results will be felt on society in the coming decades - I don't know how, but it will.

But he tells me of all the kids that are just simply failing, and have barely learning anything this year, let along last when many were sitting home by themselves all day.

We did our kids dirty last year :(

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

It was that last sentence where he threw blame.

mort965• 4 years ago

I don't understand exactly what you're complaining about. Has anyone ignored the cost of closing schools? My impression has always been that everyone has known about the high cost, but, well, millions more dead isn't exactly a small cost either.

I mean you may disagree with the choices which were made, but surely you have to recognize that it's a bit more complicated than what you're suggesting?

mattcwilson12• 4 years ago

Would love to see the data you have showing that private schools that stayed open, or public schools that fought to stay open, contributed significantly to additional deaths, such that “millions more dead” would even be a fair comparison to the impact of schools choosing to go virtual instead.

bigDinosaur• 4 years ago

Yes, people have stated that 'the kids will be fine' quite consistently. Also, all costs other than deaths have been underplayed by people in favour of lockdowns. Memory-holing this is literally insane (where insane = disconnected from reality).

That's not to say that what was done wasn't the best of a suite of bad options. But I saw nothing but fairly extreme downplaying of the consequences of lockdowns from people who wanted long (the only effective) ones.

endgame2• 4 years ago

No, people really did pretend that. Here's one example that I remember: https://twitter.com/AmerAcadPeds/status/1425857041457942542

Obviously paediatrics is not the same as schooling, but I recall this sort of attitude being prevalent.

nathanaldensr• 4 years ago

millions more dead

Prove it. You can't draw wild conclusions like that and get away with it. Hardly any children die from COVID-19, and the ones that do often had extreme comorbidities.

spookthesunset4• 4 years ago

I've been called a selfish asshole who just wants to use school as a daycare when I said our school should be open. LOTS of people pulled the wool over their eyes and pretended that "kids are resilient" and "kids will be fine" when they closed schools for more than a full year.

What we did to the young generation the last two years is awful.

makeitdouble3• 4 years ago

This was one more problem where the contemporary governance mechanism is "we pretend it won't/isn't/didn't happen because it's politically inconvenient as it contradicts high level leadership decisions (and we can't cause face loss to said leadership)".

Can this be more factually false:

https://www.ed.gov/coronavirus/data

first sentence:

COVID-19 and the 2021-2022 School Year
Students learn best when they're safely in school, in-person.

thorin• 4 years ago

Was interesting to see the variance between US states and countries with the various lockdowns and even quite a big variance between schools in the same region. In the UK aside from a couple of terms my kids were generally in school full time. Fortunately both kids were in early stages of primary school. My son has been hitting some good milestones with his maths and english, especially reading although perhaps understandably the teachers are reluctant to compare their abilities based on previous years.

Conversely my friends in Asia and California saw their kids out of school for very extended periods.

criddell• 4 years ago

Any guesses what the long term consequences might be? I have a hard time imagining anything more dire than the immediate consequences of social isolation during the pandemic.

In other words, I think the kids that make it through are going to be okay.

usrn3• 4 years ago

I spent high school in the woods home schooled and only socialized at church. So did all my siblings and a number of people I met at college. We all turned out fine.

winphone1974• 4 years ago

Very few people ever self identify as "not fine" so along with being a single data point yours is pretty biased

ryanbrunner• 4 years ago

I think home schooling and large-class remote schooling are quite a bit different. We home schooled our kids for the 2020 / 2021 school year, while most other kids spent the majority of the year in remote learning. Our kids are doing great academically, while there's definitely some struggles among some of the other kids.

This is another factor increasing inequality, by the way - we were exceptionally privileged to be able to have work schedules able to handle this, and a nanny who could watch our kids while we worked. Most parents wouldn't be able to do that.

howling• 4 years ago

Standard application of selection bias. People that don't "turn up just fine" don't go to college or browse HN.

jl6• 4 years ago

Greater inequality, because wealthy parents can do more to compensate for schooling inadequacies than poor parents can.

goldfeld• 4 years ago

Oh you've no idea how catastrophic cascading effects over generations of parenting will be, but it's all fitting to a plan you know, the pandemic was just a means. The words religious and fascism come to mind, also Greg Egan's and others' sci-fi.

In other news Politicians Are Far, Far Advanced In Their Schemes.

Ed.: it may sound as if I'm calling out a major conspiracy and centralized but that's far from it, I'm just saying bad actors will increasingly have their way and bad intents will group themselves and plan out the short term ahead, step by step of public degradation. But that's been happening since the first fall and destruction of Babylon anyway.

shlant• 4 years ago

what "bad actors" are you referring to? what are their "bad intents"?

taeric14• 4 years ago

Probably not much, is my gut. Catching up on relevant academic items is easier than we typically acknowledge. Is why those kids that were reading at an early age are typically not that ahead in a few years.

Not that this should be dismissed. But I hazard it is not a panic item.

mattmcknight5• 4 years ago

why those kids that were reading at an early age are typically not that ahead in a few years.

That's often because they are dropped in a single pace system, where they are forced to sit with kids learning the alphabet, wasting valuable time, getting bored.

dsadsadsaddsa• 4 years ago

I can only agree, if we are talking about kids who are already going to do well. For those kids who only went to school because it was socially demanded and part of life, then I could not disagree more. I know a headmaster of multiple schools in a deprived area near where I live, who said his kids will never recover because they've forgotten how to go to school (or never learned, depending on the timing).

JohnDeHope• 4 years ago

I'm curious which is worse, social isolation, or mass consumption of video media. I bet Netflix is worse. The social isolation was bad, no question. But during the early school lockdowns I saw first hand what 12+ hours a day of modern TV does to a person's brain in a short period of time. It's nothing like what TV was like in the 80s when I was a kid. The social isolation gets a lot of air time. I'd guess it's not the worst thing the lock downs did to kids. I bet the loss of education and the overdose of TV are in the top two.

Cerium2• 4 years ago

My parents are teachers and talk about mass consumption of internet media as the largest negative effect of the pandemic on children. Many of them are serious addicts, high school students acting like children at just the thought of their video games and YouTube access missing for minutes.

zarzavat• 4 years ago

I realize this is not what you intended, but I have learned more (as an adult) from YouTube than I ever did at school.

A bad teacher in adolescence can ruin an individual’s appreciation of a subject. Today’s kids are blessed with the best teachers in the world, only a few taps away.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with video content. But perhaps the recommendation algorithms need to be tweaked so that these websites have more social responsibility towards younger users.

mattmcknight5• 4 years ago

While Netflix may be bad, what kids watch on YouTube and TikTok is far worse. Netflix content was at least written by an adult, maybe even edited.

corrral4• 4 years ago

Backing you up that kids' entertainment is next-level bad now, especially on Netflix, which seems to have made it their mission to fund & collect as much absolute trash as they can, when it comes to kids' cartoons. And I think people were a bit correct before, that our cartoons decades ago were largely brain-rotting garbage, but it's got nothing on what kids will end up watching if you set them loose on Netflix, now. YouTube rightly gets shit on for what it considers kid-appropriate, but Netflix is terrible, too, in a different way. Wall-to-wall cotton candy for the brain. Weirdly-and-cheaply-CG-animated junk with the laziest imaginable writing. More than one person could ever consume. And the parental controls aren't sufficient to cut all the garbage out, because much of it is intended for young kids.

Since streaming services are all terrible as far as letting you control what kids can watch, we've started just manually curating content for our kids. Took them almost no time to adjust to the new options, while if they were presented alongside Netflix, they almost never chose them. They're just as happy, and the average quality of what they watch is far higher.

dncornholio3• 4 years ago

My guess is a lot of people will blame covid for their failings out of their own. This will be the harshest consequence I think; people playing victim.

[edit] I think it's already happening, but with parents. My kid is not a bad learner, it's because of covid!

DoughnutHole• 4 years ago

The effects will probably be small but measurable on average, with significantly worse effects on poorer kids or kids that were already struggling to begin with.

The closest example to something like this happening is probably major teacher strikes. Kids in Argentina during the teachers strikes of the 1980s lost an average of 88 days of primary education and today make about 3% less per year than you would expect given their age.[0] This effect largely comes from lower income groups being less likely than usual to achieve higher levels of education and being more likely to be unemployed.

[0] https://www.cedlas.econo.unlp.edu.ar/wp/wp-content/uploads/d...

dehrmann3• 4 years ago

Based on TFA's numbers, 88 days seems close enough on the academic scale. Social is probably worse (kids probably played with their friends while teachers were striking), and that's also a big component of earnings. I'd guess 6% less earnings, though it'll really depend on how old they were in 2020. It also exacerbates inequality.

The interesting question is whether there's a 20-year block with lower performance, or there are spikes at certain points. I imagine anyone starting professional work out of college in 2020 is effectively a year behind by now. Someone who started in 2015, not so much. I'm not sure if something similar applies to school.

spookthesunset4• 4 years ago

They'll have lost a bunch of "firsts". First date, first kiss, graduation, prom, dances, you name it. We stole it from them.

mynameishere• 4 years ago

One thing I don't think I've ever seen in my life and never expect to see is a statement along the following lines: "Yeah, those cranks and 'conspiracy theorists' were right again." And this will stay true no matter how many times they are right.

The credit will always go to some academic who discovers the obvious after the damage is done.

cassianoleal• 4 years ago

the obvious after the damage is done

This is survivorship bias.

micromacrofoot7• 4 years ago

You can't easily conclude "right" here, but you can very easily adjust the narrative to fit certain biases.

There's at least one study that tried to link loss of education with a greater long-term loss of life than the short-term losses avoided with closures... but there are a lot of holes and assumptions so it's far from reliable.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/31/962090342/did-closing-schools...

thejackgoode• 4 years ago

Wild speculation: interestingly, school's often underrated original function "to keep children off the streets" rephrased as "protecting against harmful influence of the world until your frontal lobe develops" means they might be reinvented to be digital limiting structures instead of physical limiting structures.

scotty793• 4 years ago

I think school is more about protecting parents working capacity from their children than protecing children from the world.

Children compulsively and under duress are exposed to so many horrible people and behaviors at school that the rest of the world seems mostly like sheltered, peaceful place by comparison.

nverno4• 4 years ago

In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.

Is this referring to differences b/w students in the same schools, but of different ethnicity? I don't really understand the racial implications this article is making.

taeric14• 4 years ago

My guess would be yes. The implication seems that pushing the school burden home is hardest on the homes that are already heavily burdened, and that that is more true of minority families?

nverno4• 4 years ago

It just seems lazy, using race as a proxy variable without positing a hypothesis for what it means. It doesn't tell us, as readers, anything about why some kids didn't perform as well as others.

dncornholio3• 4 years ago

... and they will absolutely be fine. Learning is not being done only on schools. Also schools aren't as efficient every day of the week. Some years or semesters are a lot more important than others.

In any case, I have no doubt kids will catch up.

micromacrofoot7• 4 years ago

They will not catch up. It will be a feature of this generation. You can't just remove a year of education and expect things to normalize without intervention. You see similar effects throughout history in education, workforces, etc due to life-disrupting events like war.

"Fine" is relative. Individuals will continue on as always... and many won't notice any change... but this will likely be an ongoing measurable difference when society is more cumulatively studied.

christkv• 4 years ago

I don't know how it's in other countries but in Spain school is glorified children care to ensure kids below 12 are kept occupied until at least 5 and even 6 with additional after school activities.

The reason we moved to a private school. Kids under 12 should not be 9 hours at school everyday.

lapcat15• 4 years ago

What does being "behind" even mean? The dirty truth of the US educational "system" is that there is no system. Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth (i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded). When I was a kid, my family moved from one city to another within the same state, and suddenly I was way behind in my new school, especially in math, simply because my new school moved at a significantly faster pace and had higher expectations of students. But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated.

It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. We rely a lot on "social promotion", where mere age and time spent in seats is taken as the standard for educational level.

endisneigh5• 4 years ago

So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated.
It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared.

Huh? So you think the problem of being behind is overstated, but observed many students not being properly prepared yourself when you taught?

lapcat15• 4 years ago

Huh?

There's a typo: it should have said "a lot of students". Not sure whether that was the confusion here.

balefrost2• 4 years ago

If you read the article, it specifically points to remote learning as the thing that put students behind. I think the commenter believes that the negative effect of remote learning is overstated relative to other factors.

giantg26• 4 years ago

"i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded"

Not exactly. Most states and the federal government adjust funding to send it to the schools that need it most.

https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/research/school-fundi...

Steltek2• 4 years ago

"Most states" qualifier supports the claim that funding varies widely from state to state and town to town. State and Federal funding grants alone are not going to sustain a school district.

Also, your link is basically a charter school industry propo campaign. Hardly unbiased when talking about public schools.

seoaeu• 4 years ago

Here’s a different source contradicting that: https://www.pubintlaw.org/cases-and-projects/our-expert-repo...

015UUZn8aEvW3• 4 years ago

Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth

The data show that causation mostly flows in the opposite direction. The main determinant of whether a school is "good" is the average academic ability of the students who attend the school. And that, statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income.

Policy interventions based on the idea that school quality determines student performance have consistently failed to show significant results. These interventions include local and regional busing. Putting lower-achieving students in close physical proximity to higher-achieving students doesn't make much of a long-term difference.

lapcat15• 4 years ago

These interventions include local and regional busing.

Busing raises a host of problems that are independent of school quality.

I can only offer my anecdotal experience here, but I was able to thrive in my new school, after I caught up. My inherent ability didn't change simply by moving, but more was given to me and more expected of me after I moved. But I wasn't bused in, I lived in the same neighborhoods as my friends and peers.

lern_too_spel2• 4 years ago

The article you're commenting on mentions several interventions with significant benefit:

"High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction."

"One option is voluntary summer school, which, according to prior research, has yielded about five weeks of instructional gain per student. Another option is an extra period each day of instruction in core subjects. A double dose of math over the course of an entire school year has been shown to produce gains equivalent to about 10 weeks of in-person instruction, although the evidence on reading is weaker."

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/5-lessons-e... lists a few more studies that consistently show the opposite of what you claimed. School quality matters, and more schooling matters.

mattmcknight5• 4 years ago

While you are correct that good schools are caused by good students, it's not strictly accurate to say that "statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income". Being a good student is largely a function of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is largely a function of parental intelligence and conscientiousness. Income doesn't cause intelligence or conscientiousness, although it may be partially caused by them.

jdmichal5• 4 years ago

I'm going to repost a comment of mine from two years ago. This is not an unknown thing to school boards.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012403

The wife of one of my good friends was on the county school board for 12 years. According to her, it was an unspoken secret was that parental involvement was the biggest predictor of / contributor to student success. The reason it was taboo was because you absolutely cannot expect anything from the parents. It was political suicide.

I would put dollars on the table that such is already happening for every parent that is willing and able to do it, because they were already doing it before too.

jcranberry• 4 years ago

What data?

markvdb• 4 years ago

What does being "behind" even mean?

In my case as a guitar teacher, I see two patterns:

- Students with less support at home or natural feeling for guitar are about a year behind where they would normally be after four years of studying.

- My most motivated, talented and best supported students are on schedule or slightly ahead.

jeffbee2• 4 years ago

Thanks for mentioning music. It baffles me that anyone would be blind to the idea that children could be "behind" when so much of childhood development involves muscle strength and dexterity that must be practiced. This goes for many musical instruments as well as the voice, all athletics, penmanship, verbal articulation, and so much more.

tejohnso• 4 years ago

What does being "behind" even mean?

Or matter?

Is extending parental dependency the problem? If someone starts college at 20 instead of 18 they are likely at home longer. But a lot of people aren't leaving home for college anyway, or they return home after college whether they graduate or not.

If a bunch of kids start high school at 16 instead of 14 is it going to cause serious problems? It seems to me the only issues would be those that we create by our own expectations.

jdmichal5• 4 years ago

There would be huge capacity problems associated with combining entire years of students. Many teachers, classrooms, and entire schools are already on the edge of overcapacity.

dncornholio3• 4 years ago

Absolutely. If everyone is behind, are you?

leksak2• 4 years ago

You don't imagine being two years older than the majority of your classmates at that time is going to have immediate effects on their social life at that time or that employers in the future will note that they graduated later in life and thus pass them over for a different candidate?

ekianjo• 4 years ago

But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated.

Alternative explanation: you are acting like there is no problem based on anecdotal evidence that is irrelevant to the current situation - At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all.

lapcat15• 4 years ago

At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all.

I'm not saying there are no negative effects. What I would say is this: even before the pandemic, many students were not sufficiently "challenged". They were already moving more slowly than they could have moved. It's possible for them to catch up. They could have caught up with other kids before the pandemic too, if put in the right situation.

Time spent sitting in seats is not education, by itself. How that time is used is just as important, and we often squander that time, even when there's not a public health crisis.

User23• 4 years ago

Home schooling is quantifiably far superior to public schooling, pretty much independent of socioeconomic status[1].

  As one would expect, the education level of parents did affect the results. For example, home-school students of parents without college degrees scored, on average, at the 83rd percentile for the core subjects. When one parent had a college degree, those students scored at the 86th percentile, and when both parents had a college degree, those students scored at the 90th percentile. There was virtually no difference, however, between the scores of students whose parents were certified teachers and those who were not.

It amuses me that apparently certified teachers are no better at teaching than any other concerned parent. In fact, a concerned parent will wildly outperform a school teacher. This ought to be unsurprising to anyone who is aware of the mind-boggling two standard deviation improvement tutoring provides. A home-school is essentially a tutoring arrangement.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/30/home-school...

lapcat15• 4 years ago

In fact, a concerned parent will wildly outperform a school teacher.

A parent teaches maybe 2 students per day. A school teacher teaches maybe 200 students per day. It's an unfair comparison.

giantg26• 4 years ago

I'd image those same parents would score similarly to the public school teachers if they had to comply with all the policies the schools set. Many teachers have quit because the schools don't let them teach effectively.

magicink81• 4 years ago

The schooling system is designed to fail the expectations of those who think its purpose is to educate people, and succeed in full-filling other purposes. If you're curious about what those other purposes might be, I recommend reading the books of John Taylor Gatto [1].

Also, the School Sucks Project [2] is a great source of knowledge about the history of schooling, as well as education solutions and alternatives to schooling. They have just launched a re-broadcast of the essential 50 episodes (of their over a decade of 800 episodes) that covers the full spectrum of the relevant topics.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE%3Fref=... [2] https://schoolsucksproject.com

scotty793• 4 years ago

I'd like to see how well the knowledge is retained in kids after let's say 3 years.

I believe most of the knowledge the kids were taught that long ago is not present in their memory anymore as if it was never taught.

I remember happily forgetting all information I learned and it took me just summer vacation to do that.

Cerium2• 4 years ago

Most of the facts get forgotten, though I can conjure up quite a few on any class I think of having taken. The important part of education is not the facts, it is the skills. School taught me to think scientifically and critically, to write and to speak, as well as made me confident interacting in the society I live. Those skills have served me well.

scotty793• 4 years ago

School taught me to think scientifically and critically, to write and to speak, as well as made me confident interacting in the society I live.

I had completely opposite expeirience from primary and to some degree secondary school. Especially on the last item. But also speaking and writing and thinking. It didn't develop me in those areas. If anything it stunted me for life. I had to painstakingly recover from it after it was finally over and I'm sure I'll never recover 100%.

buildsjets2• 4 years ago

Especially in high school, an astounding amount of time, money, space, and personnel are dedicated to sports, and this does not just impact the athletes. In many schools the entire day is structured around the football team's practice schedule. Make school sports a truly after-hours extracurricular activity and remove their impact from non-participants, and I'd estimate you could see around 20% improvement time spent on classroom instruction on core subjects.

brightball10• 4 years ago

The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event.

You have players on the team and coaches, yes. But you also have cheerleaders, marching band, trainer assistants (usually students who want to go into medicine or physical therapy). There are homecoming pagents and dances plus the social event every weekend for the school that goes along with it.

There’s no sport in high school that comes close to pulling everybody together the same way as football. There’s more to it than just classroom education vs sports in this case. It’s helping to foster a sense of community and school pride.

Often there will be charity drives that coincide using the games as a place to make announcements.

buildsjets2• 4 years ago

If football is so disruptive to the primary purpose of school, which is education, then it should be completely eliminated from schools. No taxpayer money should be used for this entertainment nonsense.

rufius3• 4 years ago

It’s helping to foster a sense of community and school pride.

You forgot part:

It’s helping to foster a sense of community, school pride, *and brain damage*.

taeric14• 4 years ago

This is silly. There is nothing stopping any other sport from being as central more than the amount of money and effort that currently goes to football. Often in an arms race against neighboring schools.

To try and prop it up as a natural thing that is good just feels like a major problem.

lapcat15• 4 years ago

There’s no sport in high school that comes close to pulling everybody together the same way as football.

Wow, that's not my high school experience. Sports divided the student body into the popular athletic kids and the unpopular academic kids. If you celebrate the football team and not the math team, the results are predictable, and they won't be to promote math.

corrral4• 4 years ago

Football's the reason I dropped band when I no longer needed an arts elective. I'd have stayed in all four years, otherwise.

Being required to waste an entire evening at a football game to play for a few minutes here and there was insulting.

I'm pretty sure it's also the reason the curriculum was built almost entirely around the microscopic musical niche of marching band, rather than instruments & skills that were more likely to be useful in life beyond college.

ryandrake2• 4 years ago

The thing about football is that so many people are involved with it, it becomes a school wide event.

For many small town High Schools in the US, it's not just a school-wide event, it's a town-wide event. I remember in my small town, during High School football season, the entire town mobilized around the event. Sales at local stores, drinks and catering to the field/bleachers, specials at bars post-game for the grown-ups, and so on. The football game was quite literally the most exciting and important thing going on within a 25 mile radius of the school.

As for it becoming a school-wide event, your post is only part of it: Yes, football manages to pull together a lot of the students, not just the athletes, which is positive. But it also can very negatively disrupt the academic routine. Teachers would plan lighter days and/or skip topics because "It'S FoOtBaLl DaY" and they knew everyone was mentally checked out because football game. Athletes would get special exceptions from academic expectations, get special treatment in the classroom, get treated with kid gloves discipline-wise. High School athletics was so important to the entire town that it kind of established the entire local area's social totem pole.

Steltek2• 4 years ago

Well, to anecdotally back you up, in Massachusetts with the #1 public schools in the country, I hear and see nothing about football. I think I hear more about the HS plays and concerts than HS football.

The last football funding discussion at the town level was whether to fund better helmets to protect against CTE or make the players' parents pay for it, so the town isn't seen supporting/encouraging brain damage to children.

sndean• 4 years ago

And to add another anecdote, the overall #1 high school in the US in Virginia (by some rankings at least) doesn't have a football team. Sports like cross country get more attention.

prescriptivist• 4 years ago

I assume the #1 public schools in Massachusetts are Cambridge/Beacon Hill? There are many more reasons why they would be best in class than de-emphasizing football.

rkk33• 4 years ago

Well, to anecdotally back you up, in Massachusetts with the #1 public schools in the country

Maybe they have the "best overall public school systems" but looking at individual public high schools Massachusetts doesn't even make the list till #26 and then not again until #153 in the national rankings

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/search

throwaway0a5e2• 4 years ago

Massachusetts with the #1 public schools in the country,

That's just lying with statistics. Adjust for parental income and see what you get. The state has few poor and rural areas to "drag the average down" so of course they look good. VA would look good too if they had the luxury of counting just NOVA and the coast in their stats.

Talinx• 4 years ago

I'm from Germany, here sport is integrated into the timetable like every other subject. Sport is not that important here so I might underestimate the amount/impact of sports in US high schools.

I'd say that more sport is generally a good thing. What matters most to me about high school learning is that IQ does not decline. Grades are just a bad IQ test and most things you learn in high school don't matter. Sport is healthier than sitting in a dim classroom all day.

I am the kind of person that likes to learn by myself so all learning in school is time spent ineffeciently (from a pure learning perspective; reading a book instead is better). But I think that for most people many things that are taught in high school are useless while more important things (understanding how social media affects you, how to declare taxes, how credit cards work) are not covered (at least here in Germany, I suspect its no different in the US).

annyeonghada4• 4 years ago

Grades are just a bad IQ test and most things you learn in high school don't matter.

Well, speak for yourself. It may be a very unpopular opinion here on HN but I learned a lot at school, be it elementary, middle, high or university. But I went to school in Italy, and it was a good school.

But I think that for most people many things that are taught in high school are useless while more important things (understanding how social media affects you, how to declare taxes, how credit cards work) are not covered (at least here in Germany, I suspect its no different in the US).

This are thing that you can easily google. Why would I want to waste time teaching such trivial things while there are subjects much more interesting and intellectually engaging. Talk about inefficiency.

If someone does not want to study academic subjects it is not obliged to finish school, they can simply abandon once they reach the appropriate age (in Italy, 16 y/o): I know someone who did it and went the trade route and was very happy, but please, please, let us, academically inclined people have our own habitat.

w0m• 4 years ago

I'm curious how many schools this is actually true for. I played football 'back in the day'; but despite winning our district/traveling mid-state for playoffs; I never felt like the team got any special treatment. We showed up an hour before school for weights and stayed a few hours after every day + Saturdays; ~nothing mid-day at all outside of the Misc rally the entire school attended.

a_f• 4 years ago

Presumably the space and facilities to train, both outside and inside, the time of dedicated teachers/coaches and travel costs (speculating) might all be considered special treatment.

I think physical activity in school is important; but you could definitely argue that these are special treatment.

lordnacho3• 4 years ago

Being 19 weeks behind doesn't sound that bad to me. It sounds like one of those things you can measure but you can't notice otherwise. Sure, still a thing to think about. But haven't you all had a friend who got sick and missed a lot of school? Can you tell from meeting adults that they were ill for half a year during their childhood? Maybe the numbers will capture it, but it doesn't seem like enough to worry about.

What I can say is I'm not surprised if people get lower scores after missing school, because a lot of exams benefit from freshness. You sit there and memorize things that are only useful for the exam, you do the exam, and then you flush the double angle formulas from your cache.

What really matters is that you have some tools, both intellectual and psychological, to keep learning new things for the rest of your life.

namelessoracle2• 4 years ago

19 weeks is enough to make a kid college ready or not. And it's enough to push a kid that would be eligible to high achieving school to a lesser one.

lordnacho3• 4 years ago

Yes because they won't be prepared for exams. But not because they aren't educated.

alamortsubite• 4 years ago

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school...

linuxftw• 4 years ago

High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction

Yes, more anxiety inducing pointless education is what kids need. I like how they're trying to sell the idea of measuring students in 'weeks of instruction' as if they're mechanical objects.

More hours of education doesn't make kids smarter. It might make them more knowledgeable in certain subject areas (many of which are completely useless to both children and adults), but it definitely gives them anxiety. The education establishment is trying to encroach on ever more of our kids and young adult's lives, and to what end?

Let's get back to being human. Let's go outside for 7 hours a day, we can probably limit education instruction to just 3-4 hours 3 or 4 days per week, and we'll have more functional adults.

carapace4• 4 years ago

It's the ratio of (sane, emotionally mature) adults to children that's important. A decent ratio is no greater than 6:1. Most of our schools are more like 30:1. In other words the "dosage" of tutoring (to use the article's bizarre metaphor) is ~5x too low.

- - - -

The second major problem, after chronic and extreme under-staffing, is that our didactic methods are designed (inadvertently but surely) to be slow and ineffective. If you teach children well they learn happily and rapidly. What we do instead is teach poorly and so "eduction" is slow, boring, uncool, and ephemeral (i.e. people forget what they "learned".)

mattmcknight5• 4 years ago

Simply end social promotion. You shouldn't move up to the next level of a class until you've mastered the current level. (Levels can be much smaller than a year.) Being at a different pace isn't a problem if you can just make up the time. The side effect bonus is letting other students test out of levels they don't need, they can finish early while others end later.

spiderice• 4 years ago

This solution appeals to me, though I'm wondering what the implications are. Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years? Early college? Continue to go to public school anyway even though they've mastered everything?

I'm not suggesting the solution wouldn't work. Just interesting to think about the new problems that would arise from it. Especially given that public school doubles as "babysitting" for a lot of working parents.

lapcat15• 4 years ago

Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doogie_Howser,_M.D.

beej713• 4 years ago

Like what does a 12 year old who finished the curriculum do for the next 6 years?

Don't have a curriculum that "finishes". Put more material out there, even college-level. Maybe a student gets their PhD by 18, but they're unlikely to get it but 12. And if they do, congratulations.

I think the concepts of grade levels and even different school types (elementary, high, college), useful as they are socially, are getting in the way. We should be trying to make it a granular, smooth progression all the way up.

mattmcknight5• 4 years ago

I remember a girl in my area who had a masters before she got her high school diploma. https://www.gmu.edu/news/2017-05/class-2017-masons-youngest-...

izzydata2• 4 years ago

They would have to end this concept of no child left behind. Also such a meritocracy system would likely be perceived as racist as the students with more time and financial support become more likely to succeed.

sodality26• 4 years ago

Race is just a proxied variable in this equation. The root issue is fundamental inequality in family support, which is shown to be influenced by race, age of parents, wealth, location, etc.

annyeonghada4• 4 years ago

I agree with what you say in an ideal world where every teacher is of good quality but given that many teacher are incompetent or actively despise their students[1], how can I trust them that they're evaluating students in a unbiased, just, meritocratic fashion. I've always had top grades but seeing teachers' behavior has never let me trust them. I have respect for the job, I've even passed the exam to become a teacher (!) but it takes a toll on your mental health knowing that the majority of your coworker is unrespectable.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482113

twox2• 4 years ago

School is arguably mostly worthless in the first place.

tfandango4• 4 years ago

My wife teaches 2nd grade in a public school. She has kids this year who had not been in school since kindergarten. It is difficult to cover such an achievement gap when other kids in the class are on level. It's worse yet when our state has outsourced federal pandemic education fund distribution to 3rd parties which allowed people to purchase Xboxes and TVs. And even worse yet as her district is focusing on putting AppleTVs in every room while buying curriculum that has no books. Last week we had a family emergency and had to leave town for 1 day, she spent all day Sunday working on a plan and preparing work for her class and the "substitute" played youtube videos and let them draw all day, did not even move the plan she put on the desk. I hope other districts are taking this seriously because there are lots of good teachers flooding away from this one and it directly relates to the actions taken by the district admin and it's not good for our kids even after the pandemic has subsided, mostly.

beej713• 4 years ago

Over a decade ago my aunt taught 4th grade. She told me that a lot of kids were getting there who couldn't read and it was impossible to teach them 4th grade material.

This seems like that on greater scale.

More granular mastery-based progression seems like it would be a good start.

andreilys• 4 years ago

Serious question, what are you learning between kindergarten and 2nd grade that's so important?

I remember my time there being effectively day-care, I learned more outside of class than inside it. The only real benefit was socializing with kids my age but otherwise everything I learned in those 2 years could've been taught in a week.

sodality26• 4 years ago

It's not just those grades; I see the same in high school. To a lesser extent, but a lot of the classes that are non-advanced are, here's a 5 question quiz and 15 minutes of content every week, turn it in whenever.

tfandango4• 4 years ago

Many people kept their kids "remote", which started a few years ago in response to the pandemic. Many of these kids did not attend any remote classes or do any of their assigned work over that time. Meanwhile this school reopened in-person almost immediately and many families sent their kids back. So you are talking about kids who don't know 1+1=2 or how to read a single word, when the rest of the class is reading intro chapter books and doing double digit math. Socially they are 2 years behind, which is another issue. Perhaps you are a quick learner, but that's really not the case for everyone.

In her school there is 1 math and 1 reading specialist, who are meant to focus on kids like this. Now they need about 5 more of each but the district has routed funding elsewhere like the Olympic quality weightlifting gym for the high school football team (which is used maybe 1hr per day). Better stop, feeling like I'm about to start ranting again...

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

This is when most kids learn to read. Some kids have basic reading skills before kindergarten, and some learn after 2nd grade. But for most, this is the time when they go from being able to recognize a handful/bunch of words to being able to figure out new words, understand exceptions, and learn about grammar.

There's also a decent amount of conceptual math taught in these grades. I wouldn't say that the concepts are 'hard', but they do take repeated exposure for many kids to grasp them and perform them accurately. You could teach the skills in a week, but only very bright kids would immediately pick up on all of it and not need further practice to be on par with kids who attended K-2. For example, it takes repeated exposure and practice for kids to know that a number ending with 4 and a number ending with 6 will always sum to a number ending in 0. Or to know their multiplication tables.

Does it take three years to learn this stuff? No. But it can't be crammed into a week or even a month.

sodality26• 4 years ago

What are your(/her) thoughts on gifted programs? I can say personally that gifted programs saved me from this fate of slogging through high school during these pandemic years. For some reason some gifted programs get dragged but having actual difficult assignments instead of just crap I can google, honestly 100% saved me from mediocrity.

tfandango4• 4 years ago

She likes them. Her school has a really high quality GT ("gifted and talented") teacher. It is an honor to get into the program and allows kids the opportunity to do longer-term project type learning like you are talking about. This also gives her more time to focus on the kids that are struggling while not holding back the kids that are already exceeding expectations. In our experience though, it really depends on the teacher, I suppose that goes for all classes in all schools. You were lucky to have a good one it sounds like!

dehrmann3• 4 years ago

And even worse yet as her district is focusing on putting AppleTVs in every room while buying curriculum that has no books.

I agree that Apple TVs in classrooms is a waste of money, but I don't remember text books being particularly useful, either. We covered between 25% and 50% of the contents of the book, and maybe had assigned reading for half of what was covered.

Textbooks are also a bit of a racket, too. The contents and pedagogy generally move very slowly, but legislators and parents like to micromanage contents, and textbook makers are happy to oblige. The number of, say, algebra, books across the US is probably embarrassing, as is the fact that there isn't a movement for public domain textbooks.

Novels are different. With 5 books per year at $4 per book with books lasting a few years, I'm less concerned.

tfandango4• 4 years ago

I too remember hauling around really heavy books and only reading parts of them. My wife seems to use much of her reading curriculum which comes with workbooks they use up throughout the year. This next year they are switching to an electronic curriculum apparently, but she only has 7 iPads for 20 kids. I think she would be happier if she had 20 devices. They could have probably purchased more if they chose Chromebooks over iPads.

vonnik• 4 years ago

@dang The title of the piece is "Kids are far, far behind in school".

Aardwolf• 4 years ago

The title now is "Kids are far in school" which makes no sense. The auto title rewriting system does weird stuff sometimes!

AlwaysRock• 4 years ago

Pre pandemic the US educational system was behind compared to most other developed countries. Now it's just sad. People don't seem to care. And those that do put their kids in private schools that provide better education.

I remember feeling smart for the first time in my life when I went to a public high school. My peers were not dumb but the average level of knowledge was pretty shallow and not so wide. This was a smallish high school in a small state (2000ish kids in new england) in the early 2000s. I know its worse now.

cassac• 4 years ago

Well when you focus on activism and not academics, why would anyone be surprised that the academics suffer?

Easy fix though, lower standards! Lots of districts are already figuring that out. If you take away the primary means to hold the educational system accountable then you have teachers who are unaccountable. All of the sudden all of them are good at their jobs and the teacher mafia… I mean union… can continue to demand more money for the children and won’t even have to deliver anything measurable. It’s genius!

annyeonghada4• 4 years ago

Speaking as someone living in Italy sometimes it's worse than activism: it's pure laziness.

I (27 y/o) recently discovered that my sister's (16 y/0) History teacher hasn't done more than a week of lessons in the entire year: he comes in class, turn on the IWB (Interactive Whiteboard, the last unnecessary technology creeping in school), put on a video and let them watch while she do whatever she fancies.

During the entire year, out of a 400 page History textbook, they have done 39 pages. Now it is clear why there was so much opposition to the idea of online lessons: parents could finally see that their kids were not lying when they said that the teachers were incompetent.

The worst thing is that the teachers' mafia here refuse any kind of evaluation while teachers while touting the necessity of evaluation for the students: they are basically unfirable and devoid of any form of accountability.

I could stay entire evenings recalling events that should never happen in a normal school set[1], and that would be easily prevented with some quality control: they do not even need to be good teachers, just decent persons.

[1]One of my "teachers" used the fact the a dear friend of my classmate was killed in a car crash to mock her, the only satisfaction was having the entire class scream that she was a "dumb bitch": this in a very high-income, sophisticated, old money school.

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

Why is the title missing "behind"? I get that the second "far" is perhaps sensationalistic, but without "behind" the meaning is lost and perhaps inverted.

itronitron2• 4 years ago

The author lost me with their mention of 'achievement loss' ... how can you lose something that you haven't 'achieved'?

Consider that the primary goal of marketing is to create the perception of a need/want on the part of the target segment.

I would be more interested in seeing a survey on what students have actually learned and done over the past two years (both inside and outside the standard curriculum) instead of this pervasive whining by the educational industry.

redlights• 4 years ago

Doesn't this just prove the fact that the US education system was never good in the first place (especially for the lower and middle class)? There's absolutely nothing scientific or moral about forcing a kid from age 6 to sit in a classroom for 8 hours straight twiddling their thumbs longingly looking outside the window. Forcing them from a young age to do regimented work that is clearly meant to be done at a later developmental stage will just cause them to hate it and zone out, which is what caused the problem the author is describing. If you're not truly engaging with kids, how will you get the results you want?

None of those suggestions will solve the fact that the education system itself is incredibly flawed and near collapse.

arrakis2021• 4 years ago

These kids will grow up remembering that a very specific group of people of a certain ideology kept them out of school, masked, and plugged into a zoom monitor for as long as possible.

dehrmann3• 4 years ago

Good thing colleges are going test optional.

3qz• 4 years ago

Most universities in Canada were completely online for almost 2 years. Was it the same for grade schools in the states? I have no idea what level of restrictions this article is about

Kids are far behind in school

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