Prominent left/liberal folks retconning the COVID school closure thing as some sort of gigantic mistake is one of the nuttiest examples of consent manufacturing I've ever seen.
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People are treating closing schools as a mistake instead of noting how it revealed a bunch of cracks in society that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
That asshole is a smug centrist liberal who shits on the left in 80% of his posts and any time someone puts his shit in my feed I think much less of them
And I an not sure those suffering from long covid and other permanent if not lingering effects on their health are quite the social butterflies they perhaps once were.
And never once questioning teachers’ ability to implement EFFECTIVE online learning principles and practices. Most teachers—secondary and higher ed—are subject matter experts devoid of expertise in online learning. Yes, it’s more than lecturing over the Internet. Way more.
I have always loved this nonsense idea that “IF KIDS AREN’T IN SCHOOL IN PERSON EVERY DAY THEIR BRAINS WILL MELT!!” As if we don’t give them 10 straight weeks every year to fuck off in the summer, and 2-3 more over winter break
??????? That's an entirely disingenuous reading of that. "This policy had real, negative consequences" is not even remotely the same as saying "This policy shouldn't have happened" and implying they are the same is ridiculous
In general a lot of people on the left (and everywhere really) have a tendency to assume policies can be implemented in a vacuum with no effects beyond the ones they want. See also the many takes that basically boil down to "we could solve scarcity by capping prices/eliminating money".
I mean obviously that's factually wrong, but the idea of "there's enough for everyone if we share" is broadly true which is what people are usually trying to say
But in a lot of cases where I see people making those sorts of claims (e.g. US housing and global income/standard of living) there genuinely isn't, unless you either restrict "everyone" to a set of already relatively privileged people or have a much lower value for "enough" than is often implied
oh yeah if super privileged leftists that live in quasimansions are going around saying "everyone can have this" like, lol and lmao of course. Usually when I see people talking about this stuff they're instead meaning like nobody needs to freeze/starve to death
Ah, yeah, I mostly run into it more with people saying stuff along the lines of "with single payer everyone could have all the healthcare they want", "NYC has enough housing for everyone who wants to live there", "everyone globally could live a comfortable middle-class American lifestyle", etc.
They vomplain about remite schooling, but praise hone schooling where they are passing laws tgatbparents don't need to follow or create a teaching plan thus you wonder what their kids are actually learning.
The problem with studies like this is that it's impossible to disentangle the effects *remote learning* had from the effects *being in the middle of a deadly pandemic with no end in sight* had.
How do you even account for that level of stress and uncertainty?
Covid was extremely unlikely to give a large number of children "permanent brain damage". Schools were closed so we wouldn't lose millions and millions of older lives, it was a worthy tradeoff even though one generation benefitted to another's detriment.
I'm afraid not. Studies have shown that roughly 7% of children who catch COVID develop neurological damage that lasts for a year or more, about a third of them severely. While protecting millions of older lives was good, the move *also* saved a lot of kids.
How do you correct for the negative effects on learning of having loved ones in the hospital? Of not being able to see friends? Of your parents being in the other room working so there's no space to just be a kid alone with other kids?
How many kids lost a parent or grandparent? How many kids lost two weeks or more of school because they were sick themselves? I can't believe we're not including these things, this is such a weird discussion.
How do you correct for the negative impact on lesson plans of teachers having to do last-minute revisions for three months of unexpected remote learning, of not having tech set up in advance, of the stress levels of those teachers impacting their ability to teach?
Which seems to be all this dude (who I find very annoying in general, so it pains me to appear to be defending him) is saying here, particularly if you read the next post in the thread
I think if you want to make the point that dipshit thinks he's making you'd need a study that isn't college students, which has had remote coursework for what feels like 20 years, and something other than an intro to econ class, which isn't really education
I mean, there was a good year after the adult population was fully able to be vaccinated where kids still weren’t having in-person classes because teachers refused until the kids were vaccinated because they don’t understand science.
I’m not a parent so I understand my opinion counts for less, but it always seemed like the moment we recognized there was a global pandemic, we should have just acknowledged that kids were going to get a bit off track on their education.
Being alive is more important than being a good cog.
Also, entire classes and sometimes schools used to close due to chicken pox outbreaks. I graduated from h.s. the same year the chicken pox vaccine was approved in the U.S. (1995)
This has been ongoing for a while. There seems to be some mass, willful misremembering of how things were at the time. Given the attention span of the average American, it's getting some traction in places it shouldn't.
It’s a lot like the conflation of “lockdown” with “people deciding to stay home. Even if those schools had been open, a bunch of kids would’ve stayed home because individual parents didn’t know if schools were safe for kids
There were also plenty of schools that didn't lock down but were forced to close anyway for weeks at a time because too many of their teachers were sick.
it comes down to balancing lives saved vs life prospects worsened and nobody wants to go on record making that calculation, so they pretend it’s not what’s being done
also did they control for how many of your parents died because death has a lot of knock on learning loss effects that never seem to be factored into these things
There is this weird retroactive implication that we could have decided to do zero COVID mitigation - no school closures, no masks, no distancing, etc. - and the death count would have remained the same. Like there would have been no downsides! It’s crazy!
yeah also we tried that in winter 21-22 and the schools had to close anyway because all the staff and students got sick and the national guard substitutes got sick and turns out that the virus is a real force of nature and nature does not operate according to what polls well
No that’s not what happened at all. The private schools opened - and never closed in Sweden. Sweden did have more deaths than the US, but also didn’t have a lost year of education. Don’t claim that there weren’t trade offs.
How many of them died? Do you know what the fatality rate of Covid is for 5 year olds? It’s ironic that you think I sound uninformed… you sentenced them to a lifetime of being poorer, less educated and dying sooner rather than listen to reason.
I know this isn't the main point but feel compelled to point out that the closures polled very well. It was elite media types who were sick of their kids barging into their home offices who started demanding the schools reopen.
this! i know no non-elite people who were mad about closures. i loved WFH and loved having extra time with my spouse and kids. was it hard? of course. but life is hard and parenting is hard and at least we were together and safe. i know how lucky we were.
The idea that problems with learning now are due to closures years ago, which in some places were brief, and not due to cumulative cognitive damage from repeated infections is absolutely absurd
For sure. Though I do think device dependence got even worse during/after! (speaking in part from my own experience… I feel like we let our kids have screen time in desperation when alternative activities weren’t as readily available, and it was much harder to claw that back than I expected 🥲)
I don't know why anyone would ignore it saved lives, unless they're poor thinkers or are taking a paycheck from bad people. Cuz that was the fuckin point.
To state the blindingly obvious, this post is not making the "terrible mistake" claim you attribute to it. "X had costs" =/= "X was a terrible mistake" and the poster understands this, as he makes clear in the very next post in the thread.
Why the screenshot instead of a quoteskeet that would allow folks to more easily see the next skeet in his thread, which makes clear your mischaracterizing what he said?
Oh wait, nevermind. I answered my own question, I guess.
*Especially* in the context of the next post, which is why OP did a screenshot instead of RT. They didn't want you to see it and mess up his little dunk.
But the alternative was worse. Staying open and killing more people. Surely the effects of thousands more dead would outweigh the negatives. It goes with out saying so why even say it?
I agree it was worth it to go remote. There are two main reasons to say it though. 1. The OP suggested there was a period around late 2021-early 2022 when costs began to outweigh benefits, because these costs were weightier than expected. 2. It has implications for ongoing remote education models.
If you want to concede that it’s true but argue just that the person who said the true thing did it for corrupt reasons I’m happy to grant that they said it because they want to end all human life on earth and torture puppies. Whatever motive you want. That doesn’t matter to me.
Let me be more specific, prior to establishing whether we agree on the truth of the statement, I am not concerned with speculating along with you as to the motives of the person making it. That’s an invitation to ignore what is happening in the world because of whether or not people are moral.
It may be that this person loves COVID-19 and tries to get it every day and wants more people to get it. This would not change whether remote learning has negative impacts on education compared to in-person learning. I am interested in whether it is true that remote learning had these impacts.
The most curious thing about his argument is he's like "but schools were closed when everything else was open" when like... maybe those other places shouldn't have been? lol
“Learning is important, closing schools is bad!” guy and “AI is an amazing revolution, we should just be teaching students prompt engineering” guy are usually the same guy, too.
I just want these fucking freaks to answer why they think mass orphaning would be better or why “their guys” didn’t do any kind of national air filtration distribution.
I love the imagined situation where people thought “this will be GOOD for education” rather than “here’s the best we can come up with to avoid making charnel houses”
There were weeks where we were waiting for our school to shift to online classes. A lot of instructors, especially grad instructors, said fuck it and just moved online without waiting for permission. Our students were fine with it, we'd figure it out and everything already sucked.
I remember it really broke containment right as our spring break hit. I said to my partner “I don’t think we can bring them back.” He then went to a meeting with the Dean and texted “I don’t think this meeting is happening. People are yelling in her office and a whiteboard just says WEBEX”
yeah the replies to this that are like "well there WERE negative effects" yeah man, we know! you made up a guy who thinks lockdowns are straight Ws instead of a way to reduce mortality as much as possible at the cost of things being exactly like they were yesterday
exactly, saying “well actually” over and over has the cumulative effect of questioning the lockdowns. it doesn’t need to be said! it’s a straw man. we all agree that there were drawbacks. we also had no choice.
Also, there were no "lockdowns" in the US. Countries like China and Singapore had legitimate lockdowns. Americans had spring break, got haircuts, and went to Buffalo Wild Wings with nary a person risking any sort of legal penalties for being outside their homes.
Is that what they’re saying? Is it a retcon? The view that I’ve seen is that a) online learning was genuinely very bad, and has resulted in a lot of problems in education with very little systemic interest in addressing, ANDDDDDD b) it obviously had to had and was the only option
I think it was bad but was the best of a set of bad options, people don't appreciate how if 1% of teachers died or retired early how fucked education would be and how much worse off things are.
People never want to accept a tough decision with consequences as being the right thing to do.
Yep. And people forget that in 2020 we had no vaccine, no treatment, were chronically short of tests (and it took tome for home tests to become available) and that even if kids didn't get as sick as adults, kids could pass covid to adults.
I was cleaning out my office and found a bunch of facemasks that volunteers had made for those of us that were still going into the office and they had to be hand made because there were none to be bought otherwise, just a totally different world people have memory holed.
I think there are deeply dishonest people who want to make covid out to be some hysterical nanny state overreach and other shit, but I do think there are some well meaning but wrong parents who just got burned the fuck out by the whole thing so I try to take people on their own merits here.
I mean sure but ICUs were overflowing with people dying in hallways during Delta so I didn’t really take the concerns of Concerned Parents for Exposing Teachers and their Families to Disease all that seriously
The failure to be able to conceive that, yes, school closures had negative impacts but, on balance, that strategy was right at that time is alarming. Public health involves trade-offs
It feels like you’re just looking for a fight here. The quote poster in question never said it was a bad *idea* just that it was bad, ie “damaging to educational development (relative to normal schooling).” It was the only humane option and the right choice, but it was still educationally damaging!
Learn to read bud, that’s not what’s being said there at all. I know you desperately want to make a mountain out of a mole hill but I’d suggest just getting a hobby instead of engaging in this kind of behavior.
He didn't say it was a mistake; he said it had downsides. Do you think all necessary things have zero downside? You'll have trouble doing what's necessary.
This is why the 1918 flu plays so small a role in literature from that time and why the same will be true of COVID—just endless, enervating, sophistic arguments.
It wasn’t great for my education to stay home for two weeks when I had chicken pox in the 2nd grade…but it was still the responsible thing to do. People need to get a grip.
there’s a paper out there finding differences in the brain on MRI after ‘lockdown time’ and just uncritically attributing them to ‘lockdowns’ without considering the obvious confound of the literal neuroinvasive virus that infected everyone
What? If you’re asking whether it’s specific to COVID then no: the original SARS was worse and influenza viruses can do the same thing, but we’ve kept either of those from infecting literally everyone at once since the Spanish Flu.
My question was just whether it's possible to attribute learning loss to "invisible" covid. I lean skeptical, but could be persuaded that yes, a lot of kids were asymptomatic but also got a long covid of some sort.
Diane, it's now well established that the total death count of healthy children from Covid is ... zero
It's a disease of the elderly and those who already have chronic illness. Healthy children rarely got it, rarely transmitted it, and never died from it.
Even if it had been LATER discredited, we had to work w the info we had at the time. During COVID, we lived with my parents who were in their early 70s. No way I was risking my kid catchin COVID at school, giving it to my parents, & possibly killing them! Closing the schools was the right decision
Diane, what's your take on the count of kids killed by mRNA injections? In your scientific understanding, how does that number compare to the number killed by the disease?
Are you suggesting that perhaps instead of rushing a vaccine we should have taken reasonable steps, like masking & school closures while we were able to gather information regarding the virus & vaccine efficacy?
Maybe just saying let the virus spread wasn’t best idea?
Review-Case Reporting System. One-third (33%) were 15- to 17-year-olds, and 26% were 1- to 4-year-olds. Fifty-six percent were reported as male, 54% white, 24% Black, and 18% Hispanic ethnicity. Physicians declared cause of death in at least 82% of deaths.
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More than two-thirds (68%) had a medical condition (excluding COVID-19) at time of death. The most common conditions were nervous system disorders (19%), congenital disorders (14%), obesity (12%), respiratory
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disorders (12%), and neurodevelopmental disorders (10%). Of children with an underlying condition, 35% had 3 or more conditions. Less than half (42%) had contact with a health care provider within a month of their death; and three-fourths died within 14 days of exposure.
Fin..
No. No no no we aren't doing this. NOPE. NO. The only reason I was able to go back to school is that it's all online. My community college was die-hard majority on-campus until Covid brought them online and they kept adding more classes because they realized it's MORE ACCESSIBLE FOR EVERYONE.
If people want the in-person experience that's fine for them, but what we AREN'T GOING TO DO is invalidate the rich, rigorous learning experience many students are capable of having online. Interaction still happens online; social interaction happens in life outside of online classes.
And this isn't replacement. Online classes are being *added* to the options at the community college I transferred from- meaning EXPANDED access to class options. Nothing is being taken away. Often the professors use open-access materials to reduce costs, & MA has made comm college free for many.
No, they’re being used as replacements. As someone currently dealing with this, classes ARE being taken away to replace them with significantly cheaper to run and worse quality online classes.
I don't know what kind of online classes you've taken, but the ones I am in are rich, challenging, and provide a great amount of depth for topics relevant to our world today. I'm talking honors courses, engaging in our communities, and really incredible programs.
Literally every online class I’ve taken has been trash quality. I’ve taken online honors courses. They’re not honors courses. They’re a slop class that weights your GPA.
It's fine if it doesn't work for some people- and for some subjects obviously in-person learning is necessary- but that doesn't mean all online learning is "bad". My bachelor's & master's will be completed with just as much rigor as stepping foot on-campus w the accommodation of not having to.
Gutting in person learning for online classes is bad, actually. It’s worse for students. This isn’t debatable. We know, for a fact, online classes are not the equals of their in person counterparts.
3. This is obviously just a SS of the study but I immediately have so many questions about these West Point students and their Econ class- was it taught by a professor who engaged with the students or was it an online modules with computer learning? Was this their first semester of college?
4. What level of econ- 101? Macro? Micro? Were the students expecting to be away at school and suddenly kept home attending classes online (pointing to emotional detachment/emotional effects of the pandemic overall), how many of them experienced other covid-related hardships?
5. Why just econ? Why not other courses too- and again, if this is online vs. in person, are we talking the same curriculum or completely different? What??
Bottom line is- aside from me saying ABSOLUTELY NOT, NO, WE'RE NOT DOING THIS again, this is a bad take even if my ? are answered in the study.
Focus! We are losing our freedoms, one of which is the right to education, right now! Does it make people feel like they have more control by rehashing the pandemic? With the govt we have now we could soon have another. Look at the tornado disaster this past week & the non-response from Washington.
The science on the effect of school closings on various virus outbreaks are all over the place. We just don’t know if or when it helps. It depends on what kids do instead of being in school, the virus, the home environment, etc.
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How do you even account for that level of stress and uncertainty?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159124003891
Being alive is more important than being a good cog.
I don’t read anti-school closing arguments that don’t consider the lives saved so i don’t read a lot of anti-school closing arguments
You realize how you sound, right?
Teachers of all levels of tech-savviness had to just figure it out — no prep, minimal remote tech support, poor equipmt, no experience.
Versus their whole career of experience teaching in-person.
I don't know why anyone would ignore it saved lives, unless they're poor thinkers or are taking a paycheck from bad people. Cuz that was the fuckin point.
Oh wait, nevermind. I answered my own question, I guess.
If anything, this *disproves* the anti-lockdown media framing that online instruction was an unforgivable crime against humanity
People never want to accept a tough decision with consequences as being the right thing to do.
"Policy has costs" =/= "Policy was a mistake"
Like, two things can be true at once. School closures were an epic disaster for education, and school closures were the least-bad option available.
It's a disease of the elderly and those who already have chronic illness. Healthy children rarely got it, rarely transmitted it, and never died from it.
Although younger children had lower viral loads than teens and adults, they were most likely to transmit COVID-19 in their household.
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/study-sheds-light-sars-cov-2-transmission-homes-kids
A total of 183 children 1 to 17 years old who died of COVID-19 were reported in the National Fatality
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As in, was the cure worse than the disease?
Are you suggesting that perhaps instead of rushing a vaccine we should have taken reasonable steps, like masking & school closures while we were able to gather information regarding the virus & vaccine efficacy?
Maybe just saying let the virus spread wasn’t best idea?
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Fin..
Bottom line is- aside from me saying ABSOLUTELY NOT, NO, WE'RE NOT DOING THIS again, this is a bad take even if my ? are answered in the study.
Implying that online learning is at fault, especially for k-12, is a wild take. Unless it's a hail mary to create an argument against losing the DOE?
That’s why these feckless cowards have nothing to say, like ever.