There is also evidence that remote learning didn’t work very well for K-6 students, but worked okay for high schoolers. Also, high schoolers can stay home without parental supervision, whereas K-6 kids cannot.
All that leads to a potential compromise where elementary schools open, but middle school and high school remain closed. Supervision for middle schoolers *might be able to be achieved remotely so parents can work.
Maybe DSeid answered more curtly than necessary but the truth is, you don’t know that is the net effect of remote school. It is perfectly reasonable to assume child and parent/caretaker interaction will simply be less structured – not really lessened so much.
“Curt” and “condescending as fuck” aren’t synonyms, but I’ll address what you say.
Sure: I don’t know for certain that remote learning will tend to isolate family groups. But, compared to family groups being in school, it will almost certainly do so: it’ll hold kids in front of a screen, and it’ll require family supervision.
This isn’t just me shooting off at the mouth like some other folks are doing. This is a major reason why hundreds, if not thousands, of districts around the nation are choosing remote learning. We’ve got to act to get this thing in control, and blithe, condescending dismissals of folks’ concern and of the scientists studying the outbreak is going to make things worse, not better.
A group of children may or may not maintain social distancing all the time. My suspicion is that they will not. Even if they wear masks in the classroom or have some type of plexiglass shield. The question is how much that might matter for different cohorts. Any precaution which would reduce transmission IN PRACTICE should be taken. But it might make more sense for people to take all their classes together to the extent possible. I admit I have not seen recent studies and would place emphasis on what other countries have done. Including how rigidly social distance was maintained and if this was important.
The huge difference between the US and other countries is that, at least in many places, infections are currently raging out of control. This wasn’t true anywhere else that kept schools open or reopened them. We have a ton of confirmed cases, and positivity rates of 10-20%, showing that we have a lot of infection spreading undetected. Hospitals are stretched thin.
At a time like this, it seems like we should be reducing the amount of gatherings of all types, especially densely packed ones. Increasing such gatherings dramatically seems insane.
Yes, but in a time like this all the health and safety people are going to work. All the industries that supply them are going to work. All the Walmarts and grocery stores are going to be open. Where do their kids go? Why is teaching a class inherently more dangerous than those jobs?
Shelly Miller, a professor who studies the transmission of the virus through the air says,
the three most effective ways to mitigate the spread of the virus in schools are to require masks, to circulate outdoor air inside school buildings, and to minimize the time students and faculty spend indoors.
Two of those are done at a systems level, ventilation and meeting outdoors. Both may be difficult in places, but nobody said the best solutions would be easy. Kids aren’t required to comply to modify the air handling system to bring in more fresh air.
Meeting outdoors may turn out to be easy in some places, where it will be very effective. It will be unworkable when it is raining, 103, or 22, but very protective when 75 and sunny, like much of the fall here.
I agree the situation in some States complicates things a great deal. At any level, it involves some gambles. It also may not be politically feasible not to have measures in place. Masking is cheap and easy but may be of only partial efficacy in schools. Social distancing is very expensive, if class sizes are much reduced.
I would push in person school for k-6 almost regardless of community spread. If things are too crazy for even that, you still need child care for essential workers. We can’t just friggin expect grandma to do the job for free until covid goes away.
The idea is to only open the minimal number of places necessary. It is easy to come up with solutions (harder to implement) for what to do with the kids of essential employees. There already have been daycare and other facilities opening just to take the kids of essential workers.
No reason something like that can’t be extended to the schools. Open some school locations to only children of essential workers. That will be far fewer kids than opening for everybody, making it much easier to get physical distance, and probably less staff will be necessary. It could even be run as in school distance learning (you know, the worst of both worlds), so the kids aren’t getting anything much different than those doing distance learning at home.
Do you think “have school only for the children of essential workers” is even a remotely plausible plan?
Well, the disconnect continues; as I said early, you are missing now that you do live in a civilized country, it is different in the USA and the pandemic is showing why a lot that should have been there to deal with the pandemic is not there.
“The low-fee, universal system has been so successful in attracting new mothers. It has induced an incredible increase in the labor force participation rate of young women in Québec.”
Fortin claims that 85 percent of women ages 26-44 are now in the workforce in Québec, the highest participation rate in the world, according to Fortin.
The increase in working women means more tax revenue, he says. Enough to pay for the cost of the universal program.
Here in the US, there’s an ongoing conversation: How the high cost of day care keeps some women with small children from taking jobs and missing out on career opportunities. Some people point to places like Québec, Sweden and France that have some form of universal care and ask — why can’t the US have something like this?
Actually, at one time, it did.
During World War II, while men were fighting overseas, women filled jobs in shipyards and factories. Think Rosie the Riveter. A lot of women moved for these jobs — away from the traditional support systems they had to look after their kids, such as relatives or neighbors. Bosses complained that women missed work when no one was around to look after the kids. Rosie needed child care and Uncle Sam was there to help.
So, Congress passed the Lanham Act of 1940, which provided subsidized care for at least 600,000 children 12 and younger in more than 3,000 centers across the country.
Winona Sample from the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota used to work at one of those centers in Paso Robles, California. She spoke about the experience in 2005 at the age of 88, with an oral historian at the Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton.
“My mother-in-law took a job there. And she said it was such fun, ‘Why don’t you volunteer?’ I said “OK.” My son was 6 [he was born in 1936]. So I said, ‘OK.’ Two weeks later, they offered me a job as an assistant. About a month later, I was a director. It was really fast job growth,” Sample told the historian.
These child care centers were the first of their kind. Unlike today, where those needing government assistance to defray child care costs must be of a certain income level, Lanham Act centers were open to all families of all income levels.
Like the Québec program, these centers didn’t come cheap. In today’s dollars, the total cost was more than $762 million according to Chris Herbst, at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs.
When the war ended, so did the funding for most of these centers, Herbst says.
“And the reasons for that I think, have to do with, you know, perceived costs of those programs. Who’s going to pay for them?” Herbst said.
Another question was who should care for kids. Moms or the government?
“Public opinion, and certainly the opinion of government administrators, was pretty negative on the role of institutional child care. Child care was very solidly seen as a private responsibility or the responsibility of families.”
Chris Herbst, Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs
“Public opinion, and certainly the opinion of government administrators, was pretty negative on the role of institutional child care. Child care was very solidly seen as a private responsibility or the responsibility of families.”
The war was over and men returning from the war needed jobs. It was said that moms should return to the home. But they didn’t. According to Herbst, the percentage of women who worked before and after the war jumped 10 percent, and it stayed that way.
Herbst says even though the Lanham Act program didn’t survive, it did change public opinion about child care outside the home. It also helped increase women’s participation in the workforce — just like the program in Québec.
In 1971, the US got close to adopting universal subsidized child care. Congress passed legislation, but Richard Nixon vetoed it.
But that’s the last time the US seriously considered it.
“School is NOT daycare”, says my wife, the soon-to-be former teacher. “It’s not my job to risk my life to help the economy”.
(Elsewhere I posted that my wife has been diagnosed with cancer, so she will take this school year off, at least, and might never go back.)
It is blatantly obviously child care regardless what your wife says
I don’t think we should be doing those things, either. There should be strict controls on things like traffic in essential retail, to protect workers and customers. Curbside pickup should be heavily pushed. Bars and restaurants should be closed except for take out.
I am not particularly concerned for my safety. I am concerned that opening schools with idealistic, unworkable, inadequate, unfunded “safety plans” will lead to an explosion of cases, especially in places already on the edge of overwhelming the hospital system.
This is why she’s leaving the profession. Too many people who think teachers are nothing more than day care workers.
I mean, childcare is a huge part of the job. It’s not the only part, but it’s huge. I don’t mind recognizing that our economy is predicated on public schools.
But stuff like Realitycheck’s open admission that he’d push for schools to be open “almost regardless of community spread” shows exactly what I’m talking about: people who have made their minds up regardless of the facts. That’s literally deadly to people like me and my family.
There are alternatives to our current economic structure. If the choice is between keeping our current economic structure and preventing thousands of deaths, which one you choose is significant.
Uh, not really, the departments of ed over here do see them as different and, remember what I said about Child care not available for many in the USA? There was a temporary solution by helping essential workers get temporary child care. Unfortunately funds are not certain to come back, and the child care places already in place before the pandemic are not public, but private.
It is very clear now that a lot of schools in the USA will not open, and that in turn, will make child care a bigger problem.
One more thing: It should be clear then that teachers should also be considered essential workers, so to open the schools properly in the USA, besides masks, protection for teachers, contact tracing and more testing available, we should also include child care to be available for teachers, because for some reason it looks like if many that are eager to open schools forget that many teachers have kids too.
It doesn’t matter what I think, there are already places doing it. This is just the first article that came up in a search. A school in Queens, New York currently takes care of 130 children of essential workers everyday. At the moment other kids aren’t in school, but the special center has been running since March. According to the article they allow 9 kids per classroom, clean thoroughly, and have not had any COVID spreading incidents. That is just an example, similar things are happening in other places.
Personally I never experienced sexual intercourse to be condescending but YMMV …
In this case this is exactly you shooting off at the mouth.
I’ve already provided the citations that in the past school closings have not been associated with kids just staying home. You choose to ignore that.
I can attest to hundreds of conversations with families of all SES levels, from very upper levels to very low wage worker single parent households, by now. There were not many parents of any SES stapled to their kids who were held in front of screens, at most a handful. Some kids just didn’t do any work at all. Some were the go getters, got up early, and powered through the online material in 2 hours each day, playing the rest of the day. Some checked in and tuned out. Keeping kids of any age in indefinite solitary confinement, your “best practice”, is not happening.
For many households (more so on the lower SES level but not only) having a parent stay home is not an option. Some districts are with dramatically rising rates but many across the country are in phase three or four: factories are open; restaurants are open with limited capacity meaning people are working in kitchens and as servers and cleaners; “non-essential” businesses inclusive but not limited to retail are open with mitigations in place; beauty parlors, barbershops, nail salons; of course health care … Parents are working outside the house, hopefully taking safety precautions but still exposed to non-zero risk, not supervising their kids in front of the screens all day. The kids, all ages, are often staying with retired older relatives during the day, and seeing the working adults twice each day instead of being sheltered from them.
Your certain statement that end of day higher risk and more contagious adults will be intermixing less, not more, as a consequence of preventing on site instruction is without any evidence to back it up, is in contradiction of past experience with closures during other pandemics, and is not what I am hearing talking to hundreds of families.
It is ignoring what the science says and selectively attending to the few who say what you believe without evidence.