What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later

[Celerity]

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/upshot/pandemic-school-closures-data.html

https://archive.is/TsmZI

Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic. Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year. A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting. While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.



“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place. There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects. But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.

The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students. At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade. (A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.)

Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year. Some time in person was better than no time. As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.



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[Hugin]

1. I don't believe that this one example demonstrates that remote learning is...

Inferior to in-person instruction. It only demonstrates that the system was unprepared to do it. Especially on the scale which was attempted.

I do notice that this article seems to be biasing the outcome somehow on Democrats even though the peak was when the Trump Administration was at their worst.

[Shermann]

25. There is another aspect to this

Classroom training is a rare luxury in the corporate world these days. Much of what you learn on the job will be self-taught, especially with highly skilled jobs. And remote work is here to stay.

So, if students aren't flourishing remotely, perhaps they aren't being adequately prepared for the realities of today?

[Hugin]

27. That's an interesting expansion...

I really thought that the experience of COVID would inspire research and development into remote training and education.

[Yavin4]

59. Online learning for adults is entirely different for children

Cannot compare the two. Adults on the job are going to be more highly motivated to learn than children who are just learning about the world.

[Shermann]

76. I don't think you can draw a hard categorical line like that

High school sophomores are old enough to join the workforce and do. The reality is that many students found ways to be successful during the pandemic. Those that did will likely go on to find even more success in their careers and their triumph has been largely overlooked. Unlike in sports, the rules of this game can change. There's probably another life lesson there.

[WiVoter]

56. Thank You

[Tickle]

2. I am grateful my grandchildren

school only closed for about a month. They were living with me at the time and I knew this wasn't working out well.
We live in CT and this state is our home. Worts and all

[jimfields33]

30. Yes only closed a month for our area.

I think it was a huge mistake to have kids out of school over a year.

[90-percent]

34. Also a nutmegger here

Only state that's more blue is Massachusetts, about 15 miles directly north of me.

-90% jimmy

[Tickle]

39. Then we are neighbors

I work in Springfield MA 17 miles away. What part of Massachusetts do you almost border?

[90-percent]

81. ma.

tolland granville is directly north. spent some time in springfield. helped customers at smith and wesson ten fifteen years ago. former employer is in agawam, i'm in barkhamsted near winsted and north of torrington.

-jim

[Tickle]

89. You have your own slice of heaven

I used to live in North Canton and I was forever going through barkhamsted 179 and 202 area. I thought it was so lovely. All four seasons shows the beauty of barkhamsted. It was also very nice in North Canton to. I live in Windsor now and work in Springfield.

[Elessar Zappa]

3. Schools did what they thought best at the time.

[Attilatheblond]

72. Many schools were already underfunded & crowded.

No way many/most could implement safe practices for in-person classes on short notice.

Kids need social skills practice along with academic instruction. But Covid had the bodies piling up and I wouldn't have sent my daughter to school if she was young at that time.

The data doesn't surprise me, but online classes was probably the lesser evil until the vaccines were readily available (thanks, Joe)

One thing the data makes me worry about is a lot of home schooling. I know parents who are capable and combine home schooling with activities to provide social skills development and cultural enrichment. But I have seen way too many people who do it because they just don't want their kids to get educated and independent, they do not want to be challenged as their kids grow and learn. The results include people growing up with dismal social skills, many being totally ill prepared to deal with life because they are naive and/or gullible. That does not bode well for the kids, nor the society.

[Shermann]

4. I don't think the effect on the spread of the pandemic is knowable

The argument here seems to hinge on observable symptomatic spread when asymptomatic spread was the signature feature of Covid. Pandemic simulators proved to be unreliable during the pandemic, and I'm skeptical that they are any more accurate even now with hindsight (neither addressed nor demonstrated in the article).

The article is an appeal to consequences without the full consequences being convincingly detailed.

[underpants]

15. I agree. It's impossible to know what the alternative would have caused

The bottom line was that keeping people isolated made the most sense at the time.

[yardwork]

19. Good point. Also, broadband availability is unequal.

I know that in my community - which, overall, includes a lot of well educated, well paid people - there were large areas where students didn't have access to internet. Their parents were driving them to McDonald's to get on Zoom for a class or two.

Kids who didn't have access to high speed internet fell behind, of course.

[usaf-vet]

78. Question how many senior citizens and other aged infirmed people are still alive because kids weren't bringing home....

....Covid to the extended family. The complete picture is hard to fathom.

In an ideal world, everyone would follow the national guidelines and maskup to protect themselves and limit the spread to others.

If families with kids in and out of schools would obey the national guidelines regarding vaccines and masking. Things might have been different.

But that would never happen in this world where national "leaders" suggest DANGEROUS alternatives that are contrary to science-supported guidelines.

My wife and I both worked in public schools, which we jokingly called the largest Petri dishes in the world.

So we never knew what to expect in our home in terms of illness.

[malaise]

5. Fascinating

Thanks

[sop]

6. It seems pretty obvious: the longer kids aren't learning in school or at home, they further they fall behind.

And kids in poorer districts (lower income households) are less likely to receive adequate instruction while at home, falling even further behind. This would argue for increasing school funding for things like effective remote learning and more teachers to help lagging students catch up.

Research does not support this conclusion: "Today there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid." The most comprehensive study of that topic done so far arrived at a much different conclusion:

'The Effects of School Closures on COVID-19: A Cross-Country Panel Analysis'

"Conclusion: Results suggest that school closure is effective in reducing the number of people who are infected with COVID-19. Unlike what has been suggested in previous analyses or with regard to other diseases, its efficacy continues to be detectable up to 100 days after the introduction of the policy."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8660653/

[plimsoll]

32. This smacks of "motivated" research.

I'm pretty confident your explanation of parental involvement has much more to do with academic results than the "remote" schooling model precisely. And lest we forget, many of the "home school" models are built on a similar approach and the we hear such glowing results from them.

I think what we're seeing is a direct result of how much time and effort parents were willing or able to monitor and invest in their children. The one thing that is absolutely true of remote work of any sort is that it depends on the individual to remain focused and engaged. In a classroom you have at least one person who can monitor and try to keep individuals and the class focused. In a remote teaching scenario teachers have very limited means of bringing children back into focus.

From second hand reports there is loss and continuing gaps, but it is not all students universally behind or failing to catch up. It is the students and parents who would have been challenges in person who got furthest behind and are taking the longest to catch up. The results tend to show this, there is a funding issue, but students from families with more economic pressures aren't getting the support they need at home because the parents are trying to make sure the children survive. Same as it ever was, Covid just highlighted an existing problem.

So was there a better alternative? It was an experiment in real time, one based on prior experience from 1918. In that era most of the students would have been 6' apart and the rooms would have had better ventilation. That point was not lost on school administrators.

[sop]

45. Good points.

A lot of kids didn't have access to devices and internet connections necessary for remote learning. And often parents either weren't available or were unqualified to do home schooling. I imagine those are the students who fell behind the most during the pandemic, and are in greater need of remedial instruction today.

I do take exception to this study's conclusion that Covid-19 school closings didn't prevent (more) infections. I suspect these are the same "experts" still arguing vaccines and masks weren't effective, closings of offices, businesses and public spaces were unnecessary, and we should have simply relied on herd immunity or God's protection during the worst of the pandemic.

[ProfessorGAC]

7. Around Here, They've Caught Up...

...at almost all the schools I go to, at least in science & math.
At a few schools, the test scores are trending up but still slightly behind the pre-COVID numbers, but most are at parity.
It did take at least 2 years, in some districts 3.
Since I subbed through all that, I support the first comment on the thread that the schools simply weren't ready to execute on this.
One thing worth noting is that with schools being close here from mid-March to a week or 2 after Labor Day (in some cases later) achievement would be 12 to 14 weeks behind because there was no school at all. That's over 30% of a school year, so the baseline is not zero.
Since I have no exposure to 100% online districts, I'd have to say that this study describes my experience pretty well, other than the fact that I wouldn't consider any of the districts still needing further catch-up.
My one quibble is that it is NOT generally accepted that closing schools did little to stop the spread.
There are contradictory studies available online, one of the most recent by Oxford, which suggests it definitely did help, but perhaps not enough to offset the educational & social impact they had.
There is much debate on that issue, and had they not closed the schools & spread did accelerate it would have been seen a disastrous decision. This report could have left out the "not helping to stop soread" commentary.

[plimsoll]

33. Great response.

On thing that needs expansion, had the districts remained open you can rest assured that they would have been sued by any parent who lost a child. We forget that "not enough to offset the educational & social impact they had" is a collective judgement, and the impacted individuals will not feel that way.

Schools were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

[stopdiggin]

57. +1. and thanks

also had to pause at the statement that closing schools had no effect on spread. Rationally that just doesn't make a lot of sense, and I'm glad a few posters have come forward to say, "either not true, or at the very least highly debatable."

Also glad to hear that, in your experience, a lot of schools have made up significant ground on the deficit incurred. Good news indeed.

[WiVoter]

8. For Many, It Was A Choice Between

Stay home & do virtual schooling & maybe get behind in their education or risk COVID death. Tens of thousands of people died every day. People forget. Seems kind of like Monday morning quarterbacking here.

[ismnotwasm]

9. So, when I go to work today

I will take care of people who have had Covid and who are still paying a very high price. Godamn, for the wonderful examples of humanity during a global pandemic—and there were, there is a shithead who killed their memaw or their uncle with a double lung transplant. There are people right now on a transplant waiting list because their kidneys didn’t recover. There are people struggling to learn to live with necrotic digits. They are people who will never be able to work again.

When we estimate the human cost of survival, it’s very easy to leave out the rest of the story. The shutdowns in America didn’t work because there was never full compliance. Ever.

[Hugin]

17. "The shutdowns in America didn't work because there was never full compliance. Ever."

Absolutely, the bottom line.

[lindysalsagal]

20. Esactly. The shutdowns were a joke. We should have really shut down, completely for a few weeks and ended the spread.

[ArkansasDemocrat1]

49. We would have if Hillary had been Prez. Nt

[Mariana]

60. I doubt it.

The people who refused to comply would still have refused if Hillary had been President. The same governors would have insisted on no restrictions in their states. Etc.

[Ace Rothstein]

80. We never would have ended the spread.

Last edited Sun Mar 24, 2024, 06:02 PM - Edit history (1)

Every country in the world would have had to close down for months. No emergency rooms, no going to the grocery store. Just completely unworkable on a global scale. Once it got out of Wuhan it was with us forever.

[MichMan]

83. I agree.

Instead, the states designated over half of all businesses as essential. In my state, I couldn't get a root canal or have my pets treated, but recreational marijuana, liquor stores, and lottery tickets were called "essential"

[keopeli]

40. This is the correct response to the article. Remote learning does not directly correlate with self-controlled isolation.

In many cases, students stayed home BUT their family would mingle in social circles, defeating the whole purpose of keeping schools closed.

[JT45242]

10. Except for that killing teachers problem

We can't get kids with 100 degree fever to stay home, but let's risk the lives of teachers, custodian, lunch workers, etc.

I am glad I was already out of the classroom when the pandemic hit because my life and the life of my wife would have been entirely expendable.

[tanyev]

28. Exactly.

Even if most kids who got Covid rebounded quickly after a few days, there's the risk to all the school staff you mentioned and higher rates of spreading it at home to parents, grandparents, etc.

[Quixote1818]

77. Bingo! nt

[brooklynite]

11. I serve on a School Board. COVID had huge impacts on academic success and learning skills

Post-COVD test scores have dropped notably, and one of the reasons is that, when attending school remotely, its far easier to be distracted by your phone, your tablet, another screen on your laptop, etc.

[Elessar Zappa]

36. It was unavoidable.

My dad is a teacher and he wasn’t about to put himself at risk in a classroom with potentially sick kids. And the union agreed with him.

[HariSeldon]

44. Do you factor in dead students with 0 scores?

How about the experienced, older teachers? More of them are still around to help students learn today because they didn't die in the pre-vaccination part of the pandemic.

I'd rather all students fall behind than unnecessarily put students and teachers at risk of their lives from in-person school.

[brooklynite]

47. Where did I say this was a bad choice?

I stated the facts my school encountered.

[Timeflyer]

12. What about the deaths of educators pressured into working during a lethal viral pandemic?

Those are losses that will never be recovered.

[lindysalsagal]

21. Extremely little coverage of teacher losses. Tells you how much we don't value our teachers.

If it had been nfl or mlb baseball player deaths.....

[senseandsensibility]

73. Could not agree more

This loss in learning is no surprise to anyone who has taught. Anyone who has taught knows how difficult it is to keep students focused and learning for several hours per day. It is exhausting even for the most experienced teacher. So the idea that remote learning could replace in person learning was never realistic. What this learning loss should be showing non teachers and others is how valuable teachers are and how much difference they make. That is in addition to our value as day care providers which we provide as well, and the lack of that contributed greatly to the economic emergency. The whole experience should be showing everyone how valuable our teachers are and how difficult the job is. Instead, it is never even mentioned.

[Liberal In Texas]

13. They should add to the charts the in-school students who got sick and the in-school students who died.

This was a deadly disease spread in the air people breathed. At the time we suspected that contact with things touched by an infected person would
cause one to get infected. Falling behind academically was the price to curb the spread of the infection. An infection that was causing incredible numbers of deaths.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

14. That remote learning didn't happen in a vacuum, though.

[yardwork]

16. The teachers felt very vulnerable.

If this happens again and it's decided to keep schools open, how will we protect the teachers?

My job went fully remote at the beginning of COVID and stayed that way. I have the luxury of drawing my pay and benefits while doing my job safely at home.

The lowest paid, hardest jobs are also the riskiest. Nurses, doctors, teachers, grocery store workers, garbage collectors - all those people who keep our systems running had to face the disease every day. In the beginning, with no vaccine, no proven treatments, information hidden by Trump - it was terrifying.

How do we pay and support them better?

[limbicnuminousity]

48. How do we pay and support them better?

The answer being explored seems to be "replace them with AI." We're unlikely to see a course correction anytime in the foreseeable future. Governments and techlord boyars are intent on chasing the next new shiny thing hoping to gain an edge in the digital arms race they've created. As to the jobs Nvidia has already proposed replacing nurses with AI for 1/10th the cost. Instructors and doctors are safer for the moment as the debate oscillates between asserting AI can do the job on its own vs AI will do the heavy lifting leaving teachers and doctors free to monitor the process while devoting more time to the specific needs of the individual. That doesn't mean the jobs are protected. It simply means they want a human on hand to take the blame when the algorithm hallucinates and screws up.

[sop]

18. A lot of these "public health and education experts" are people like Ron Desantis and Dr. Joseph Ladapo.

These are the same fools who railed against Covid-19 vaccines, wearing masks and closing schools, offices and businesses during the Covid pandemic. Here in Florida Dr. Ladapo still opposes vaccinating children for entirely preventable diseases like measles, and tells parents school quarantines are not necessary during a measles outbreak.

"As the highly contagious disease (measles) raged in a Broward county elementary school, (Dr. Joseph) Ladapo, a politically appointed acolyte of Florida’s far-right governor, Ron DeSantis, wrote to parents telling them it was perfectly fine for parents to continue to send in their unvaccinated children."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/03/florida-measles-outbreak-preventable

[lindysalsagal]

22. These averages are misleading: There are always students who can just "do the math" with or without teachers

So if you remove their scores from these averages, the losses for a larger percentage of students is more like a year. I'm sure there are classes everywhere where easily half or more of the class is a year behind and really should continue with a 13th year before college. I'm not saying the schools did the wrong thing, by any means. It's just a reality.

[Sympthsical]

23. "Trust the science"

Unless it says something I don't like, then the science is wrong. Clearly.

Ah. Humans.

I see the academic problems from Covid with my own eyes daily. Saw it with my nephews in real time. See the aftermath in college. It's a mess. In 10-20 years, there's going to be a lot written in hindsight about how poorly it all went. Government policy, yes, but also how hysteria governed people into useless behaviors. You still can't criticize stupid things now without a freak out. "No, I needed my magic talisman!" It's funny. With all our knowledge and technology, we proved a frightened herd is not too far removed from being medieval people.

People now will never let go of their notions of things. You'll need another generation removed from the situation to look at it with a dispassionate eye before obvious things are obvious again.

[Shermann]

26. You have thick skin to not to be a little freaked by exponential viral spread with overcapacity emergency rooms. nt

[Sympthsical]

29. I'm not talking about the early stages

That is understandable.

I'm talking about once we had a handle on what was going on, and there continued to be an insistence on measures that even then were fairly known to be useless.

And to this day, people still defend irrational behavior.

With Covid, there's no talking people. I don't even try anymore. It's over. Until the next thing. Where it will be rinse and repeat.

[Shermann]

37. Some right-wingers were calling to "let Covid rip" at the time.

That seems more irrational to me. In reality there were only bad options to choose from, there wasn't a clear choice between the rational and the irrational. We never fully had a handle on things, even with the vaccines and their poor durability and low adoption rate.

[stopdiggin]

66. are you including the closing of schools

as among those irrational and 'fairly useless' behaviors?

In my own opinion the 'once we had a handle on what was going on' - didn't come along until well into the arc of infection. And in fact, there's still a good bit we haven't fully figured out. Now the 'disinfecting every surface, including packagers left at the door' thing was clearly paranoid overkill. But I also think that people gave up that kind of over top behavior relatively quickly, and without a lot of cavil, once respiratory and aerosol transmission became fairly clear. Wearing masks on the other hand - despite a mountain of caterwauling and ridicule - saved lives, and would have saved more with better compliance.

Methinks, on balance there was a great deal more 'irrational behavior' - on the part of the nay sayers and those getting their 'information' from Fox News and talk radio - as compared with those that were avoiding shaking hands for a short while.

[ret5hd]

31. what magic talismans are you referring to?

[plimsoll]

42. Not at all.

Trust the science also requires trustworthy scientists. Sadly not all of them are. We know there are gaps, and these numbers may be correct, but when you do this kind of study you should state your hypothesis upfront and work break it. If your hypothesis is that we should have sent the kids to school because it didn't help, you need to have some controls for glaringly obvious contributing factors:

Parental involvement
Student Involvement

Where are the controls for that? You can see hints that the problem is more complex by their inclusion of the economic factors in the results. They hint that parent involvement in the remote schooling had a big impact. Why isn't that controlled for?

Trust the science, but question it. Doing it when it confounds your belief is easy. Doing it when it confirms your belief was the missing step here as far as I can tell.

[Prairie Gates]

24. The closures in Spring 2020 were probably sufficient

The extended closures into Fall 2020 and then some even in Winter/Spring 2021 were almost certainly excessive and damaged children's progress.

At the same time, it was really in some ways an unprecedented situation without a lot of data, and with a panicky, unsteady government response. The last similar situation was 100 years before, and the data from that was not good. This time we've kept better data and will have learned more that is actionable for the next time. I think the models you've presented here are likely accurate, but I do think "spread" is different than deaths. We really don't know how many more (!) would have died had we kept the schools open. EVeryone got it eventually, sure, but we had more effective countermeasures by Fall 2020, and vaccines in circulation by Winter 2021.

A million people died. A MILLION. It's all well and good to tsk-tsk in hindsight, but a million people fucking died.

[ArkansasDemocrat1]

50. A million dead. Where are the Nuremberg style trials for that?

Should be easy to prove malicious indifference and malevolent intent.

[Attilatheblond]

75. And we must NEVER forget that Trump's administration threw out the book

on pandemic response methods that Obama's administration had carefully compiled.

Yeah, Trump & company's racism wouldn't allow even considering the carefully compiled data for best practices in dealing with a widespread threat to the nation's citizen health. Anything the black guy did went into the trash bin.

That probably cost a lot more lives as Team Trump never could get their act together, but some of them did find ways to monetize the situation to their own benefit.

[Bad Thoughts]

35. No compassion, no imagination

Studies on how Covid spread through school, being the primary vector for the virus after Summer 2020, make it clear that the students had to stay home

This study tells me that teachers and administrator were unwilling to do the work to resolve the problems of the students' education caused by lockdown. They had kids move through the system as of nothing had happened.

The politicians didn't fail. The school did after the fact. They should spend more time with students, allow them to hold back a little without penalty, in order to solidify the skills they are expected to learn.

[plimsoll]

43. I'd agree, but there wasn't much relief on the state mandates.

You had to do those tests. They were suspended (mostly) in 2020 and some in 2021, but back to full on by 2022 and 2023, but the politicians who set the mandates had their point to prove. Who knows what that really was.

[WiVoter]

55. "Teachers and administrators were unwilling to do the work

Last edited Sun Mar 24, 2024, 05:55 PM - Edit history (1)

to resolve the problems of the students’ education caused by lockdown.”

“The politicians didn’t fail. . . schools did after the fact.”

As a national and state award winning public school teacher who busted my ass and did EVERYTHING I could prior, during, and after Covid to give my students the best education I could, I am stunned by your broad brush smear of teachers, schools & administrators. If I am wrong on your message, please enlighten me.

[snpsmom]

79. Thank you

I'm SO sick of being blamed for the failures of the education system in this country.

For a brief and shining moment during the pandemic, I hoped we might be allowed to make some changes that would benefit everyone, but nope. We went right back to the broken status quo. You know, the one that teachers don't control wbut still have to work within.

Teachers come to work every day and do their damnedest to teach each and every student. But by all means, people should continue to scapegoat us.

[pinkstarburst]

38. We simply don't know that closing schools did nothing

to stop the spread. We can armchair quarterback this all we like with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but it's pointless now.

We know that children in general were not badly affected by covid compared to adults. What I am absolutely sure of is that had schools remained open, there WOULD have been additional deaths of teachers, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, paraprofessionals, admins, substitutes, and everyone else connected to schools, including the adult spouses of those workers, grandparents who may have been living at home with them, and anyone else who then came into contact with them. We would have lost countless more adults.

[hay rick]

53. Public health measures in the pandemic tried to balance competing risks, each unknown.

It was understood that reopening schools risked accelerating the spread of covid and the bottom line would be an unknowable number of additional deaths. At the same time it was known that keeping kids out of school would have adverse consequences for many students and their families, especially in poorer communities.

[GusBob]

46. On this Rez

Where I live and work
You could see the difference
We have 8 year olds that don’t know the letters on an eye chart
My teacher patients tell me it’s hard because the kids behind are holding everyone back
They all had lap tops and free breakfast and lunch still but to little avail

The luckiest kids had a mom grandma or auntie that was a teacher

[limbicnuminousity]

51. A few thoughts.

Americans sucked at lockdown, refused to mask, refused to vaccinate, refused to socially distance, and bounced back and forth between "it's a pandemic" and "it's totally fine" while the pandemic remained in full swing.

The American plan was never to stop or prevent the pandemic, not really. The plan was to control the rate at which the virus spread to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Despite the many criticisms that may be leveled against the US Covid response it is fair to say that the response, half-assed as it was, did throttle the rate of viral spread. Education was sacrificed in the name of survival.

[Yavin4]

61. "did throttle the rate of viral spread" No. It did not.

No evidence shows that any non-pharma interventions stopped or even slowed the spread of the virus. Even in places where mitigation measures were more extreme like China did little to nothing to slow the spread of the virus.

We were all going to be exposed to it at some point, masks or no masks. The vaccines allowed our bodies to be better prepared to fight it.

[limbicnuminousity]

65. Well, I'm hard-pressed to see how you arrive at that conclusion.

New Zealand is a prime example of effective intervention. Singapore was another.

Add to that the fact that minimizing interpersonal contact is an established means for reducing the spread of pathogens and what you're saying starts to sound a bit like science-denial.

[Yavin4]

69. New Zealand had a high rate of spread as well as Singapore even with Draconian mitigation measures.

"minimizing interpersonal contact" works when people exhibit symptoms. Covid could be passed asymptomatically. People who were infected but didn't know could pass it on to someone. So, one person in a house forgets their mask, wears it incorrectly, etc. gets exposed. Comes home and infects the entire house and does so without being sick themselves.

[limbicnuminousity]

74. And the spread lagged behind other nations by significant margins.

Quarantines, properly imposed, work when imposed on the basis of potential exposure rather than established symptomology.

The goal (as far as virologists were concerned) was slowing the spread. Staggering the spread was important in terms of reducing the strain on the healthcare system. The healthcare system was already strained beyond capacity as is. Delaying the spread allowed time for vaccine development to occur.

As of 2020 the the R0 of Covid was estimated to exceed 2 meaning approximately 2 people were infected by the average carrier. That's a generous number, there have at times during the pandemic been estimates of an R0 approaching 6. There are an estimated 50 million primary and secondary school students in the country. Assuming maximal transmission rates (unrealistic, but conveys the point) every single infected student could theoretically result in about 60,0000 new infections within a ten day period.

And people think sticking 50 million potential vectors in a plague-breeding ground wouldn't have made a difference? Please.

[Yavin4]

84. The virus still spread as it is spreading today.

It was always going to spread no matter the lag. Mitigation measures like school closings and forced masking continued long after the vaccine.

In the end, the mitigation measures were too extreme resulting in huge learning losses on behalf of students and raging inflation which we are still fighting to this day.

[limbicnuminousity]

86. SMH.

Sure thing.

[stopdiggin]

70. simply doesn't fit the facts

social isolation and masks BOTH worked to bend the curve - the definition of 'throttle'. And that happened not only in this country/population but in others.

[Yavin4]

85. From the article

“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

[dutch777]

52. It seemed obvious and I advocated for just redoing the Covid two years and every educator said that would be wrong.

And at least in our local school districts they just passed kids along thinking that they'd catch up. Reports from teachers in our family was the kids never caught up, many stopped coming to school regularly out of frustration with being behind and then the districts came up with special dispensation to graduate them knowing full well many were not anywhere close to having all the skills a HS graduate should have. Many were still reading very poorly. That will haunt those poor kids and society is they don't get help or figure it out on their own. We should be ashamed as a country and outraged as taxpayers.

[NickB79]

54. My daughter lost 5th and 6th grade to remote learning

From first-hand experience, it was a disaster. Zoom meetings and emailed assignments were a poor substitute for classrooms and personal interaction with teachers.

You can't extol the vital importance of teachers on one hand, and then say kids will be fine learning largely without them on the other. The pandemic showed us just how vital teachers are to our children's well-being.

Only in the past year has she recovered academically.

[muriel_volestrangler]

58. Hmm - "experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid" isn't backed up with much

It's covered in these 2 paragraphs:

That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.

“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

The earliest link is to a Lancet article published April 6th, 2020, based mainly on MERS/SARS studies - this is, I submit, useless for a discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then we have an NYT article from June 12, 2020 "How 133 Epidemiologists Are Deciding When to Send Their Children to School", which is their best guesses in June (most common answer was "this fall" ), not a study of what the effects actually were.

Then we have an actual study of Covid-19, from August 2020, "an age-structured mathematical model to epidemic data from China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Canada and South Korea ... we find that interventions aimed at children might have a relatively small impact on reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, particularly if the transmissibility of subclinical infections is low."

Then an NYT article from October 2020 saying "schools do not seem to be stoking community transmission of the coronavirus, according to data emerging from random testing in the United States and Britain". But I'd point out that was just before a massive increase in infection in Britain that was worse than the first wave (thanks to the "Kent" variant).

Finally, we have a European report from December 2020, which starts with a big caveat: "This report does not consider the epidemiology of COVID-19 in relation to new variants of concern for SARS-CoV-2, such as one recently observed in the United Kingdom (VOC 202012/01), for which robust evidence on the potential impact in school settings is not yet available". And its conclusion was "School closures can contribute to a reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but by themselves are insufficient to prevent community transmission of COVID-19 in the absence of other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as restrictions on mass gathering".

So really, the NYT is not looking at "did school closures affect the general transmission?", but "did we think they affected the general transmission before variants came along?". And the ideas were mixed then, anyway.

[Scrivener7]

63. And even if children were found to be less likely to become seriously ill, their parents and grandparents

were dying in droves till we had a vaccine. Every child who didn't bring home the virus was a good thing.

[muriel_volestrangler]

90. Turns out "if the transmissibility of subclinical infections is low" was a big "if"

Study: Kids with COVID but no symptoms play key role in household spread

A study today in Clinical Infectious Diseases conducted across 12 tertiary care pediatric hospitals in Canada and the United States shows that asymptomatic children with COVID-19, especially preschoolers, contribute significantly to household transmission.

The researchers discovered that 10.6% of exposed household contacts developed symptomatic illness within 14 days of exposure to asymptomatic test-positive children, a rate higher than expected.

"We determined that the risk of developing symptomatic illness within 14 days was 5 times greater among household contacts of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2–positive children," the authors wrote.
...
The finding is noteworthy, as likely more than 30% of all COVID-19 infections are asymptomatic, and asymptomatic infections are presumed to be benign—especially those in children.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-kids-covid-no-symptoms-play-key-role-household-spread

[Scrivener7]

62. Two thoughts: First, on the medical side: until there was a vaccine, COVID

was often a death sentence for the sick person or for a member of their family. This phrase from the article:

Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid

is not particularly convincing. I don't really care what "education experts" say about the spread of Covid. Why are they weighing in on whether the spread was mitigated?

And I'd like to know which public health experts say it didn't "significantly stop the spread." For that matter, what does "didn't significantly stop the spread" mean? Are they saying it didn't stop the spread? We already know that. Are they saying it didn't reduce the spread? I simply don't believe that. And early on, reducing the spread meant reducing deaths. So it was worth the cost.

So my opinion is that, yes, education suffered. But lives were saved. So until we had a vaccine, it was necessary.

Second on the education side: The COVID closures give us some valuable information. For children especially, the outcomes of home schooling are pretty bad. Parents are not qualified to be teaching children. Teachers are trained and now we have compelling data to prove they have much better outcomes. Yet home schooling is still on the rise. And parents are still allowed to dictate how teachers teach. Maybe both of those things should stop now.

[beaglelover]

64. I'm glad we're learning from the mistakes made during COVID so we're much better prepared when the next

virus hits.

[angrychair]

67. This is dramatic oversimplification

That does not appear to take into consideration how unprepared, untrained and desperately underfunded schools were to address the situation.
It was literally like taking a person like myself (fat, lazy and old), pulling them off their couch and demanding they immediately run a marathon.
That isn't reality.
Schools literally had no capacity, technology or training, to give children remote learning at the drop of a hat. In many cases they didn't have those things to do it for in-person learning.

This is just another effort to disparage teachers and public schools.

[JCMach1]

71. Exactly, I skimmed the full report and it left me with many questions

Last edited Sun Mar 24, 2024, 03:00 PM - Edit history (1)

About their methodology.

Just one point lumping all remote/hybrid learning together is highly questionable. District to district, it was a different story with how this was implemented.

The reality is, instruction was fragmented and deviated greatly from district to district given technology resources and experience with remote learning. Did learning suffer, yes. But, is that even a question when all of society was disrupted at the end of the day.

The right has especially pushed the shutdown bad viewpoint to the point that I question every study like this.

[MichMan]

82. The educational establishment are the ones that consider themselves as the experts

Parents that challenge them are often told to STFU and let the experts handle it.

If educators were unequipped to handle the pandemic, and remote learning wasn't effective, why did they promote everyone to the next grade, regardless of whether they learned the material or not ? Just passed then along for the next teacher to deal with. No one is blaming teachers for not trying ,but it was by all accounts a failure.

Should have held the majority back and either repeated the grade or doubled down on mandatory summer school to catch back up.

[dsc]

68. It would be nice if there were even a pretense of caring about the teachers

the closure of schools was, in part, to keep teachers from catching COVID. As someone with comorbidities I appreciated that. As it is, we opened as soon as possible and well before vaccines happened.

[MichMan]

87. What about all the people that had to come to work daily because their job was deemed essential ?

Grocery store employees, food processing workers, farmers, truckers, gas station workers, recreational marijuana, liquor stores, hardware stores etc. etc.

Many not highly paid, yet they had to show up for work every day, while everyone else got an extra $600 per week in unemployment and time off to stay at home.

[EllieBC]

88. Kids with IEPs were allowed back

by mid April 2020 where I am. I know because I have kids with IEPs. And thank goodness for that.

I don’t think anyone doubted that long school closures would be disastrous for kids who need extra support or for families who weren’t able to homeschool or the working poor.