[ajross]

OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise.

I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.

[amanaplanacanal]

The article says that scores have been sinking since 2013, many years before the pandemic.

[wedog6]

It says this but the numbers in the article actually show flatlining after 2013 with a huge drop off after 2020.

2022 8th grader cohort missed much of 6th and 7th grade. 2024 cohort missed 4th and 5th grade. These results are extremely in line with that effect, despite what people want to say about social media, teacher pay, etc.

[nosuchthing]

Most studies are showing children with neurological damage from continued exposure to covid outbreaks in schools multiple times a year.

Lockdowns did not last more than a few months for the vast majority of school districts in the US.

[7e]

Three-quarters of urban school districts were operating fully remote until late 2020. That may skew the results.

[nosuchthing]

New York City had hybrid in-person and remote as an option, so only about 4 months were remote for most students. Seems like a perfect A/B test case to test the theory that a remote learning was actually associated with cognitive decline 5 years later. Meanwhile every year since 2020 there have been studies published from nearly every country on the neurological and cognitive damage from mild covid cases. Seems to be more of a cognitive dissonance issue, that people don't want to confront the elephant in the room. 100 years ago when TB and Polio were taken more seriously than today, the common solution was fresh air. Schools today are even more sealed off to the point where a simple lack of oxygen starts to noticeably reduce cognitive ability after a few minutes.

[nosuchthing]

Most schools across the US were available for in person teaching by April and June of 2020. By August of 2020 the vast majority of schools were opened back up.

https://ballotpedia.org/School_responses_to_the_coronavirus_...

The science for what's actually causing cognitive decline is linked more to the neurological damage from poor ventilation and lack of hygienic conditions in the schools causing kids to get sick multiple times a year, directly causing neurological damage.

  In the most expansive study of its kind, researchers have for the first time shown serious and prevalent symptoms of long COVID in kids and teens. The August study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is among the first large comprehensive studies of the disorder in this age group. The study, which followed 5367 children, found that 20% of kids (ages 6-11) and 14% of teens met researchers' threshold for long COVID.

  We know that COVID harms the brain. Neuroinflammation, brain shrinkage, disruption of the blood-brain barrier and more have been documented in adults, as have cognitive deficits. These deficits have been measured as equivalent to persistent decreased IQ scores, even for mild and resolved infections. Millions of people have, or have experienced, “brain fog.” What, then, do we guess a child’s COVID-induced “trouble with focusing or memory” might be?

  When you put together the estimate that 10 to 20 percent of infected kids may experience long-term symptoms, that many of the most common symptoms affect cognition, energy levels and behavior, and that children are being periodically reinfected, you have a scientific rationale to partly explain children’s widely reported behavioural and learning challenges.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/long-covid-is-har...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28227...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96191-4

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7131a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

https://theconversation.com/long-covid-puzzle-pieces-are-fal...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/07/23/covid-te...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

https://www-news--medical-net.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.new...