Yah. There's a whole big subset of the population that barely manages to stick with school at baseline. Educational interruption in other circumstances has been shown to have bad outcomes. We're trying to do better this time, but the school system as a whole is overtaxed.

I'm a middle school teacher. Even with best practices for remote education, I've seen all kinds of negative impacts. It's going to take a whole lot of support to get these kids to anywhere near a normal curriculum.

It's not. The amount of learning that happens in a typical school year is not very high. The world can skip an entire year of school, and the educational cost it will pay will not be very high.

The cost of missing a year of childcare, that school provides, on the other hand, is pretty massive.

A year off probably won't have much impact on children with families with the capability to care for and educate them at home. This is not the case for all demographics. For some students, a year off school literally means nutritional insecurity during a time when brains are developing and the only stable environment they have is gone.

My friend is a first grade teacher and has about 5 students who are homeless. It shouldn't be a shock that they are not attending class via zoom.

In a lot of areas, schools are still open to serve breakfast and lunch to kids, school buses are dropping off food, and in states like mine, half the families are getting extra cash for food right now. Families will receive $193.80 total for March and April for each eligible K-12 student, and another $182.40 total for May and June.

I taught in an inner city title one school. While it would have made teaching those who showed up easier, I'd bet that over half the students would not show up without forced attendance. We had under 2% of students who would go on to graduate a four year college and something like an 80% transitory rate (meaning 20% would complete all four years at the school - this might have been up to 95% transitory, it has been a while since I was there). Gangs, violence, and poverty and no examples of school helping anyone in their lives.

What do you do with kids in that kind of situation?

Are they getting an education now?

According to most metrics - including this article - more and more students are passed without meeting the requirements for their grade level.

I think there's some value to recognizing where you've come from and the hardships you faced / still are facing. But there is fundamentally a mindset of inferiority laced within your comment that is completely unnecessary and frankly just disrespectful to yourself. You say you're "almost 30" as if somehow you're another decade from death.

Forgive me if this is harsh, but I think it's important for you to hear this. You're acting like a loser right now, and if you don't change that, you're going to stay a loser for the rest of your life. Your comments about yourself and their self deprecating nature will end up 100% true if you don't snap yourself out of this nasty and grisly self-fulfilling prophecy. This doesn't have to be the case though, and it is completely up to you whether you want to continue walking down the current path you are following. Whatever your circumstances from the past, whatever things outside your control, there is one factor that you have complete sovereignty over, and that is yourself. Everyday you make a choice in how you live your life. Individually they have relatively little impact. In combination, they are quite literally the definition of what your life is, "destiny" or "fate" being some words that people often use in order to absolve their personal responsibility to the final outcome.

So what will your choice be for today?*

* A reminder that choosing to do nothing is still very much a choice.

The problem with that is if you can't fix their environment for 8 hours a day (most schools are more like 6 these days but for argument's sake), and you propose fixing their environments 24 hours a day ...

This is not going to work for those kids.

So it depends who you want to help. You want to help disadvantaged kids? This will, certainly in the short term, make it worse for them and make life better for advantaged kids.

> If the issue is students falling behind, it's ... because school starts too damn early,

Yes.

> kids don't retain info over the summer,

Yes.

> and their home lives don't permit the best possible out-of-class education situation.

Yes. Fully compounded by the utter lack of access to brain building, adultless, free range time+area.

source: father of five

You don't have to lower the bar. There are other options. There is no fundamental law of physics that says a generation has to graduate at age X, so we -- the society -- should be perfectly able to delay that process for a year, instead of lowering the bar.

That said, there's something deeply wrong either with the society as a whole or with the HN audience if you read "poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food" and you say that the biggest long term problem is the lowering of the bar because kids skipped school.

You don’t think that describing poor kids who cannot go to school and likely cannot afford to eat on their own as packs of feral dogs is problematic at all?

Which subject can they study at school that they cannot study at home?

Don't be ridiculous. The amount of parents that do this is practically non-existent.

> Particularly for grades 8-12, in school education is vital.

I disagree. I've worked in a top 5 largest school district for over 22 years. Under normal circumstances a handful of kids graduate high school with trigonometry under their belt, some with only algebra, and some in between (its the same for science). There's plenty of wiggle room in there. Colleges already offer remedial classes for kids that need it and its unfair to the students that managed to succeed even in this environment.

> You seem very concerned about the economy.

I shouldn't have used the word economy (as that tends to translate directly to "the stock market"). I really meant its bad for labor (but good for the companies that exploit labor).

Let me re-iterate my most important point: If everyone is held back, the dropout rate will be catastrophic for years to come.

I’ve only looked at the data for literacy and its impacts on life outcomes. (I do charity in that space.) Something like being 6 months behind in third grade can materially predict high school graduation rates, SAT scores and incomes. Even if one controls for gender, race and income.

i mean, according to the general sentiment of HN at least, there is something horrifically wrong with urban planning in the US. in the meantime, the schools need to settle on a "least terrible" schedule.

And depending on what grade the student is, that 2.5 years could have repercussions for anywhere from 6 months for the older students trying to be competitive in college, to the rest of their lives. I really, really, really am afraid for students who are just learning the fundamentals and are missing so much social/emotional/educational development.

My money says this is going to have repercussions for decades.

You stop going to school. There's a teenager next door who lives in a troubled home and from talking to him it sounds like he hasn't really attended school since the beginning of 2020 because there are no consequences for not showing up in zoom and his single mom is too tired to make sure he's attending his classes or to homeschool him...

Honestly I don't know why that would be an issue. Say you go to school for 12 years and you miss 3 months because of this. That's 2% of the total time of going to school. I doubt you will have a measurable impact in performance later in life.

Hell, I slept through most of grades 7-9. I was a teenager, always sleepy and unmotivated. Then I started catching up in grade 10 and graduated at least in the top 5% of my class.

Also you can learn so much outside school, it might even be beneficial to have your parents at home, like it used to be pre-industrialization.

I completely agree. But we can't fix this in the next few weeks, so for now keeping schools open for those who need it is the thing to do.