In order to protect 8-year-olds from a virus that was killing Americans at a median age of 82, Science said that it made sense to close public schools for between 3 and 18 months, depending on the degree to which Democrats controlled a city/state. (Adults continued to mix freely at alcohol and marijuana stores, on Tinder, in quickly-reopened restaurants, etc.) This was almost certain to result in premature deaths many decades from now due to the correlation between years of education and life expectancy. However, it looks like the loss of years of education has continued beyond the 18 months that schools were closed in the Cities of the Righteous. From the New York Times, March 29, 2024:
The article is primarily based on “Long COVID for Public Schools: Chronic Absenteeism Before and After the Pandemic” (American Enterprise Institute, January 31, 2024).
Lengthy school closures were primarily perpetrated by politicians and bureaucrats who claim that racial equity is their first priority, but it turns out that the school systems that suffered the worst long-term consequences were “majority nonwhite”:
Florida isn’t mentioned in the article, but if we dig into the underlying PDF report, it turns out that Governor DeSantis forcing teachers to return to work in the fall of 2020 was minimally helpful. Chronic absenteeism went from about 20 percent to about 31 percent in Deplorably Open Florida, very similar to Virtuously Closed New York’s numbers.
Maybe the answer is that even a few months of school closure communicates to about 10 percent of American families that school isn’t important?
Could we use Science to solve this created-by-Science problem? If half a year off school (Florida) was just as pernicious for attitudes toward attendance as 1.5 years off school (New York) maybe we should eliminate the summer break from school for at least two years to re-instill the habit of going to school every day. If unionized teachers refuse to work more than 185 days per year, we could either hire some summer-only teachers or distribute the summer days off more evenly around the calendar so that teachers worked the same number of days. We could have multiple three-week breaks during the year, for example.
Who else doesn’t bother showing up to school since coronapanic introduced them to the joys of being home M-F with the Xbox? Teachers! NYT:
Teachers typically receive paid sick days and a small number of personal days. Over the 2022-23 school year in New York City, nearly one in five public schoolteachers was absent 11 days or more, an increase from the previous year and from before the pandemic. In Michigan, roughly 15 percent of teachers were absent in any given week last school year, compared with about 10 percent in 2019, researchers found.
Related… from Science itself (the CDC), which said “yes” to booze and “no” to schools (and maybe the CDC itself was imbibing when it told everyone to wear cloth masks as PPE against an aerosol virus):
In the case the tweet gets memory-holed:
The illustration shows a roughly 600% increase in alcohol deaths, while the numbers show only a 29% increase. While still sobering*, the graph illustrates an increase 20x reality.
* Pun intended
FB: People at the CDC need to read Edward Tufte’s books!
Making the X-axis non-zero facilitates the exaggeration. Since it’s not labeled, it’s not necessarily inaccurate, though it is misleading.
emphasizing new deaths from a bad habit that was pushed on country as a policy.
While a few (moms) were sporadically allowed (pretend) to work from home, my FL employer closed its doors to the public for six weeks at the start of corona-panic. My employer also allots all employees 96 hours of sick time each year, accumulable to 500 hours. At the end of each year any sick time accumulated over 500 hours is converted to vacation time at 2 hours to 1 hour.
But how exactly “chronically absent” is defined?
>Maybe the answer is that even a few months of school closure communicates to about 10 percent of American families that school isn’t important?
If you go to any amusement parks or ski resort during school days (even pre-COVID) you’ll learn that american families are well aware of this fact. I have few acquaintances whose high-school children are into top-level sports, they all attend “online self-study schools” without mandatory lessons conveniently organized around training schedules.
That’s the chart-junkiest chart junk I’ve seen in a long time.
News from Maskevhusetts:
THE MELTDOWN AT A MIDDLE SCHOOL IN A
LIBERAL TOWN: A post-pandemic fight about racism, the respectful treatment of trans kids, and the role of teachers’ unions has divided Amherst, Massachusetts
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-meltdown-at-a-middle-school-in-a-liberal-town
.
Wow. There’s a serious lack of structure in that school district. It’s like a middle school being run by middle-schoolers.
Getting paid to not work is what most people will choose given the option. I don’t see an easy way to take away that option in our local school system.
This just in… teachers can’t work when it will be dark outside for 2-4 minutes. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/04/03/solar-eclipse-2024-texas-schools-closed-monday-april-8-classes-canceled/73177280007/