[remote_phone]

He said generations worth of damage. Come on. It might hurt a kid for her SAT if it was this or next year but to think she would have long term damage from a couple of shitty years of school, that’s preposterous. Kids are made of sterner stuff than this.

[nostromo]

Yes, most kids can catch up after a missed year of content.

Many won’t. There’s a lot of data about how students fall behind in a compounding way: they start to feel dumb compared to their peers; start to think school isn’t for them, or that they just aren’t smart enough to ‘get math’ — fast forward a few years and they’ve dropped out completely.

[monodeldiablo]

But if their peers are missing school, too, I'm not sure how that research is relevant. Is there research showing that, when the whole class misses in person school, there's appreciable damage done?

Allow me a counter example: My significant other was a war refugee and had severely disrupted schooling from the age of seven to about nine years of age.

Yet her generation had higher graduation and matriculation rates than their parents. Indeed, their achievement rates were in line with other countries in the region that didn't experience war.

I'll readily concede that, for children in an abusive home, less time at school is dangerous to their wellbeing. But the hand wringing about long term learning damage to all kids seems overwrought and unsupported by any evidence I've seen.

But I'm more interested in being informed than winning arguments on the internet, so if you can point me in the direction of studies, I'd much appreciate it.

[sokoloff]

I benefited from my parents’ achievements (scholastic, work ethic, and financial support). My kids will benefit from mine in the same way. It’s not hard to imagine that a year of subpar schooling could cast a multi-generational shadow on the most vulnerable.

[edmundsauto]

Do we really think missing 8% of required schooling is that dramatic? I can’t be the only person who thinks the education being afforded the folks hit hardest is minimally valuable.

School sucks fir the vast majority of kids. It’s a warehousing system so parents can both work.

[sokoloff]

I don't have much doubt that this will increase educational inequality and it being only 8% of compulsory education might understate things, given the "stacking" nature of each year building on the foundations set in prior years.

If you miss learning addition well, subtraction and multiplication is going to be hard. If you can't subtract and multiply, then learning division is going to be hard. If you can't multiply and divide, algebra will be impossible, but many life tasks will also be more difficult.

[edmundsauto]

Isn't it possible that it's the elite students who will be hurt the most? Suppose they are getting 100% value from education. If a less privileged student is only getting 20% value from education, a 10% relative decrease only makes them 2% worse off.

My point is not that this is the right interpretation, it's just that I don't think it's settled about how much it will impact students, and which groups will be impacted disproportionately. Points about nutrition, getting out of abusive homes, etc., are all interesting and relevant and outside the scope of what I mean, which is purely focused on education outcomes.

[sokoloff]

Elite students from lower socioeconomic strata will likely be harmed. Elite students from upper strata will probably pull farther away (though may or may not suffer as compared to the counterfactual non-pandemic case).

To use your model, what you say is possible, but I think it's equally possible that the delta is additive rather than multiplicative. A 20% student and a 100% student might both lose 10% or 20% to [10%, 90%] or [0%, 80%] without intervention by involved parents.

My kids (grade 4 and 6) are getting a ton of dedicated 1:1 time including more coding time, paid math programs they enjoy playing, white-boarding problems with us, watching Nova/Nasa/other science content with us, and a lot more reading than if they were chained to a desk learning 2 hours of material in 6.5 hours. They might do better in this half school, half home school situation.