"We are actively dealing with problems remote learning caused. A whole generation of kids is further behind than they were tracking to be behaviorally, mathematically, and in reading scores."
Gee I wonder what would do that, is it three+ years of unmitigated exposure to a virus that causes brain damage? No, the problem is they stayed home, which makes you developmentally challenged, as we all know. Oh, you don't want to get COVID? Then stay home.
They stayed home for less than half a year half a decade ago. Not a single school in my area was shut down for any length of time since then, except of course when there were staff shortages cause so much of the staff had Covid thanks to unmitigated spread. People are just looking for anything to blame our decline in education that’s not just years and years of gutting public education.
Me in 2019: Please don't make microplastics the lead paint of our times.
monkey paw curls
2020: A global pandemic is caused by a very infectious disease that causes brain damage.
Exactly. The monkey's paw didn't even hold up its end of the bargain with a tainted promise. Covid killed millions, is still killing at a rate that isn't even permitted to be tracked while causing repeated incidence of brain damage with increasing severity, and yet we're still poisoned by microplastics (along with vast swathes of the rest of the biosphere) which is likewise a serious and worsening issue that isn't getting covered much for similar reasons that Covid is ignored and denied.
On top of that, I'd bet my life that PFAS ("forever chemicals") are doing more harm in more places than almost anyone realizes yet. So far as "leaded paint of our time" goes, the difference now is that instead of pretending to give a shit and make at least some inadequate efforts to correct or regulate the issue, the response ranges from "yeah, there's all kinds of nasty shit out there like lead but that's just how things are," to "lead isn't actually all that bad" to "there isn't lead in the paint, that's a hoax so there's nothing we need to do." Hell, they won't do anything about lead in the water now so long as it's only poisoning the poors. Shit is bleak.
to be honest I’ve kind of given up. I’ve spent nearly every day of the last 5 years constantly agitating in every social group I’ve been a part of in hopes of getting them to care any little bit at all about COVID — to speak nothing of all the rest of the very valid crises you mention — and none of them listen. None. They laugh at me. They spit (intentionally coughing) on me. They don’t say it, but their actions tell me to disappear, mortally or otherwise. I have two friends remaining of a previously not-insignificant social circle because all the rest abandoned me to catching COVID from them on repeat. There has to be a point when you realize you’ve lost and I think I’ve hit it. The reaction has won. I can’t do it anymore. I’m devoted to surviving and that’s it. I gave almost 20 years of my life mired in poverty, disability, and immense hardship to activism, learning, being involved where I’m able in trying to help these people and not a damn bit of it mattered, because in the end they all think they’re God and they won’t take no for an answer. All I have left to say is you won’t catch me crying when the chickens come home to roost.
The last study I saw showed the effects of lockdowns depended entirely on where the child was. In some places student scores came out ahead, some came out behind. Different states and cities handled it differently. The ones who went back to normal sooner, red states, didn't necessarily do better than those that had longer remote learning.
Let's just not mention the trauma of having over a milliion people die, and a million or so more aquiring debilitating health problems.
And the fucking virus causes brain damage, ffs. This is not a controversial statement. It's well proven at this point, and so many people were convinced kids weren't effected by covid (because they didn't die very much) that a lot of them have been repeatedly infected. It's nuts.
It's essentially like we gave 20% or more of kids a concussion. What would we expect to happen after that?
you don't breathe in 20 trillion concussions every time you go to the grocery store
Plague rats gonna plague rat; then blame the consequences of their plague rattery on everything but the fact that they couldn't hold to the barest discipline locking down, socially distancing, or even so much as masking
I wonder how students in China are doing? If the lockdowns caused all these problems, surely the place that did the strictest lockdowns would have the most problems
I had to keep teaching online (kindergarten) during the lockdown in Shanghai. The online teaching tools provided were a little rough at the start but got better over the course of the lockdown (and after I set up dozens of macros to manage the class, and eventually some OBS gimmicks). Major difference between what I saw and what American teachers saw was supervision during class time. Almost everyone lives with their grandparents. I had to constantly beg grandma and grandpa to stop answering for students, stop hand feeding students during class so they could answer, to wear clothes during class, to tell their grandchild to wear clothes during class. My students all met academic goals pretty close to their normal ones. The only thing that was really hard to teach was tracing and copying for the computer kids, but the tablet kids did okay.
It's not the lockdowns in a bottle, it's how they were implemented. Lockdowns in US education had virtually no support and rules changed so frequently teachers couldn't keep up.
There were also so many people who were "essential workers" who were mostly poor service workers. So many parents had to go to work while their children were mostly unsupervised at online school. I have no doubt China had different plans and implementations.
It isn't the concept of lockdown that is the issue but how it was implemented
I'm certain China handled lockdown significantly better than the west
I'm teaching students right now who were 11-12 during the lockdown and it absolutely affects them. They lost important years of socialization, they're teenagers and they don't know how to talk to each other. They're now also used to having the Internet do all their thinking for them.
I can literally give them the information to take notes on, ask a question that is directly answered by their notes, and their first instinct will be to Google the question and write down the first thing that comes up.
This is not exclusively a lock down problem, but it exasperated and multiplied already existing trends. Education is different now than it was four years ago. Technology went from being a tool to help learning to being a crutch to replace thinking.
Given that you recognize there are multiple factors that are going into declining education and student performance, deep systemic problems that long predate 2020, what makes you think you have enough information to blame any of it on lockdowns?
They lost important years of socialization,
Lockdowns didn't last for years.
I can literally give them the information to take notes on, ask a question that is directly answered by their notes, and their first instinct will be to Google the question and write down the first thing that comes up.
I had this exact problem with students (it was a widely discussed phenomenon) many years before Covid. I knew instructors frequently complaining about it even in the 00's.
This is not exclusively a lock down problem, but it exasperated and multiplied already existing trends.
I don't usually care when someone doesn't know what a word means and uses it instead of the correct word, and even if I did I wouldn't normally point it out. I'm sure I make errors like that at times too. But given the context here, I think it's relevant and fair of me to do so. "Exasperated?" Really? Anyway, you say it's not "exclusively" a lockdown problem, implying that lockdowns were still a major cause of the problem. But what evidence do you have that they contributed to it at all beyond a vibes-based opinion?
I'm not trying to be overly harsh with this response, but it really bothers me that people are blaming these long-standing, well-known issues on lockdowns when not only were lockdowns not the problem, but had they been longer (and better implemented in general) they could have actually saved millions of children from the cognitive decline they are now and will continue to experience as a result of a pandemic that literally gives them brain damage.
Teachers are reporting behavior problems in kids who weren't even old enough to go to school during the lockdowns, including some who were newborns at the time.
We can blame the lockdowns on everything, but not how you think
The lockdowns were a perfect opportunity for the ruling class to consolidate power and begin the process of transitioning to a different economy completely
I hear people today talk about their friends in China (they work for Fortune 500 companies and do indeed have friends in China) who were forced to take a test everyday while being on lockdown (like that’s a bad thing) and it only makes me more of a Maoist.
I lived in Shanghai for the lockdown. We were really inside for 3 months, not allowed to leave our apartment complex except for a daily test at the local school. To get out of the lockdown you would have had to jump over a 10 foot gate and people did to buy cigarettes on the black market. About two months in I found a man online that was delivering some expat foods (the government declared foreign foods nonessential) to expats. I bought a baguette. That man was arrested.
People in Florida were going to Disney World summer of 2020 while thousands of people died.
The reason libs linked school so much, is because of the meritocracy myth. This idea of transcending your condition via education is deeply held and cherished by libs. And while this may be the case some times, it often isn't. But it gives legitimacy to the regime.
One of the reasons they hate remote schools, it's because it became obvious to many parents that there were 2-3 house of actual learning a day, and the rest was just messing around. That goes against the previously mentioned belief.
So blaming lockdowns for poor education outcomes is a straight forward reaction.
It's sad to see many people here pedaling this bullshit.
I mask as soon as I leave my house and still get a fever every other month because we stoped locking down, when I used to be supper healthy.
We should be still locking down.
Poor performance is due to cellphones, lack of discipline, boring clases, school emphasis on other bullshit that's not really educational, a cultural dislike of math, poor diets, general economic malaise, etc.
Two things can be bad simultaneously. You can say that the way lockdowns were implemented in USA were ineffective and also bad for students, and believe that covid also affects your brain.
It's not hard for me to believe that a chronically underresourced institution that is subject to the political manipulation of bad faith actors didn't respond effectively. Hell, kids in this country don't even have access to the tools you would need to seamlessly go remote, I don't believe enough steps were taken to make the transition work.
I agree that education institutions were always under resourced, and I think we are seeing the conveniences of that. the difference is that before the pandemic it was easier to hide, due to little parental supervision, afterwards it's harder to lie to ourselves when we see that kids were mostly messing around.
The education system was fucked either way because it's being privatized and what little public education is slowly being choked by austerity minded ghouls. Long COVID has just accelerated the decline.
I said it back then and I stand by it now: they should have just held everyone back a year.
"We are actively dealing with problems remote learning caused. A whole generation of kids is further behind than they were tracking to be behaviorally, mathematically, and in reading scores."
That's real, except for the part about a whole generation. The reason it's not associated with covid brain fog or w/e is because it's not a general trend across the population, but a dramatic dip of people within a specific age group - particularly in kids who are in upper grades in high school rn - kids who were old enough during covid closures to be learning curriculum that you can't just catch up on later, but young enough that a lot of them had no internal motivation to engage with the material.
My siblings kids have both had Covid 4-5 times that I'm aware of.
Long Covid is certainly a factor, but the argument isn’t that the delays are caused just by staying home specifically. It’s that they were caused by not receiving instruction, which is also obviously true. Kids lose progress just from not receiving instruction over spring break. Lockdown was, for a lot of kids, just that for a whole year.
Kids lose progress just from not receiving instruction over spring break.
We don't see articles hand-wringing about this for years after the fact, though. There is no one saying that the whole three months (!!!!) every year that kids are out of school for summer is harming their development.
There are indeed articles about how summer break is harmful to development. They’re just not as popular. And that delay is very much still being felt by teachers and will continue to be felt for another decade+. The effects snowball rather than dissipate over time. Our intervention systems weren’t set up to handle all the kids that need services. Just another ripple effect of failure caused by shitty handling of Covid, I guess. I get your point and I’m not trying to dismiss that people are engaging with it in the wrong way. Just this is something that’s very current for teachers and students.
Fair enough; I am not a parent nor a teacher, so I'm willing to say this is not my wheelhouse. To my knowledge the idea of a prolonged summer break like that is not such a popular concept in other countries than the US so I believe when you say there is a concern, I just wish everyone was consistent instead of this mealy-mouthed crap where we ignore the massive elephant in the room for, I don't know, a tapir or something, and then it's not even all the tapirs in the room!
Absolutely. Some consistency would be a breath of fresh air there 100%. Leaving children disabled by a preventable illness isn’t helped by that same overwhelmed intervention system either.
The current crop of fifth graders around here (those who had the end of kindergarten and all of first grade suddenly shifted to remote) is really struggling socially and academically. There is a very specific type of pain you cannot experience until you watch a first-grade teacher desperately try to get a couple dozen students to mute and unmute themselves on Zoom at the appropriate times.
In a better world, we would have at least used that time to outfit public schools to be as safe as possible and mandated indoor masking. Alas,
