[batrachos]

> I am...glad you were able to afford expensive private schooling to shield your kid from the effects of the deadly pandemic that led to more than a million deaths in the US?

I'm another poster who did the same thing and I'm also very glad.

> Ultimately I don't understand why so many parents keep taking potshots at remote learning a couple of years afterwards.

Because, as documented in tfa, it was a disaster in terms of learning outcomes.

> If you were able to throw pots of money at the problem, good for you.

Meanwhile, poor parents who weren't, their kids suffered learning losses.

> Can someone explain to me the logic that thinks test scores for young children at specific should keep going up?

I was sympathetic to this line of argument until I looked up what good scores are generally held to be. This is a situation where the national averages are around a third proficient. Clearly a lot of room for growth. If we were in the 80s or 60s, sure, why not. We'd probably maxed things out and demaning additional gains might be squeezing blood from a stone. But ~30% proficient? We can probably do better.

[rayiner]

> Meanwhile, poor parents who weren't, their kids suffered learning losses.

Not even poor parents. The suburbs I mentioned (Fairfax and Montgomery) are among the most affluent in the country. Their schools were closed for two years or almost two years.

[quadrifoliate]

> ...the most affluent in the country. Their schools were closed for two years or almost two years.

Yes, to deal with a highly contagious virus that mysteriously seems to keep being absent from the conversation.

Schools are notoriously bad about hygiene. Currently, RSV, which is completely unrelated to Covid is spreading; and stretching some children's hospitals to their limits [1].

I know that public health and education are probably two different ideas in your mind, and the narrative of incompetent people in charge of your child's education is much easier to throw around; but I invite you and other commenters to consider the case that maybe they might just be related.

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[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1130764314/childrens-hospital...

[batrachos]

You've made a lot of arguments itt: 1. Closures, all two years of them, were fully justified from a public health perspective. 2. Learning losses weren't all that bad. 3. The tests are arbitrary anyways.

On point 1, it would be helpful to look at the public health outcomes of districts that closed for two years vs. those that didn't. I don't know the answer on that one, although I do know my kid's private school was open for much of that time without anyone being hospitalized.

On point 2, we "only" went back to 2003 levels. "Only" 20 years worth of losses doesn't convince me.

On point 3: Yes? Tests are to a certain extent arbitrary. But these ones show a clear bad trend. You could ask the children to paint pictures of clowns as a test and if the number went down it would probably be a bad sign. These tests are less arbitrary than that, and lower reading scores in particular are correlated with a higher high school drop out rate.

You could argue that "bad things happened but it was worth it." But you can't reasonably argue that "nothing bad happened and the tests are all bunk and also it was totally worth it."

[quadrifoliate]

> But you can't reasonably argue that "nothing bad happened and the tests are all bunk and also it was totally worth it."

What I am arguing elsewhere in the thread is probably more along these lines:

- Something bad happened due to a once-in-a-lifetime event. Education probably did suffer, quite badly due to this once-in-a-lifetime event.

- It is hard to definitively say that specific problems happened due to specific causes in the cause of such an event

- So, if you try to bolster your preconceived notions about public schools with poorly-controlled data like a 2% dip in some standardized test scores, I'm going to point that out. If you say stuff like "Well, the data points out...", you have to be able to defend the data.

[rhino369]

And yet nearly every single kid got Covid anyway. So the intended goal of the school shutdowns failed.

You can't just consider the intention of a policy, but whether it worked.

One might say "well we had no idea it wouldn't work," but that isn't true. Public health officials had no rational reason to expect closing schools for 1-2 years would prevent kids from getting such a contagious disease. It was only rationalized as a short term measure that stretched to years.

[quadrifoliate]

> And yet nearly every single kid got Covid anyway. So the intended goal of the school shutdowns failed.

Proof please? Most schools reopened "properly" in our area after kids could get their vaccines, and all the adults in the school were vaccinated.

So I don't think 100% of the kids got Covid, and certainly the intended goal of the shutdowns, which was not to prevent the kids from getting Covid, but to prevent them from being carriers for the disease to a much larger percentage of the population failed.

[rhino369]

The CDC reported 75% of kids had it after Omicron, and that is likely under-counting since many kids are asymptomatic. My kids have had it twice but don't show up in the official numbers since they didn't even go to the doctor for an official diagnosis.

School closures were not justified (at least publicly) as just reducing spread to others. Most areas had bars and restaurants open with schools closed. If it was just about reducing overall spread--that is a pretty unjustifiable stance to take.

[ryandrake]

The point of closing schools was not to prevent kids from getting COVID. The point was to help slow them from spreading it to more vulnerable, older family members at home. I'm eternally grateful that out of all the businesses and institutions (most of whom utterly failed to strictly adhere to closures), our local public school district did not screw around at all and implemented remote learning. It might very well have saved my (or my partner's) life--we'll never know. You can mitigate delayed school progress. You can't mitigate death.

[acheron]

Fairfax County schools were closed for 1 year. (March 2020 - March 2021). They should have opened earlier (and we sent our daughter to a private school for the 2020-2021 year for the same reason), and I resent that I now have to pay attention to school board elections to vote out everyone who was on it. But it wasn't two years.

[quadrifoliate]

March 2021 was just when a vaccine was coming out. The schools in my area reopened as soon as the teachers could get vaccinated and protect themselves. Some of them were high-risk for various reasons.

> I resent that I now have to pay attention to school board elections to vote out everyone who was on it.

Voting out everyone on a school board because they implemented what were reasonable public health-based restrictions at the time to avoid the virulent contagious disease is a good way to get anti-science people on your school board. Even if it feels satisfying to you to vote them out in the short term, it is...not what you might want in the long term.