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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it's not just the educational loss now, it's the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we're causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. There's a lot of things that cost less than a thousand person-hours that could be done to help schools stay open.

I'm not a huge fan of cost-benefit decision processes but they are useful for removing some false dichotomies. Like "we can't afford to do the right thing" when the right thing is actually more cost effective.

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> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed.

I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays?

Stresses by the pandemic itself have likely caused parental productivity to plummet. Remember that "classrooms" are not the sterile abstractions you seem to bucket them into, they are staffed by teachers who are both employees and often parents themselves; with the accompanying stresses. They are required to face Covid, often from students who are imperfectly masked or unmasked.

I don't understand the American blind spot that allows people to think of schools being as essential as hospitals; and requires them to both face Covid infections while paying teachers $40k and doctors $400k. Clearly the rates at which teachers are paid indicate that US society doesn't consider them as essential.

I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity?

Because child care has long been part of the value proposition of public schools. It's amusing how "you shouldn't have had kids if one parent wasn't willing to stay at home full time" is now something that the far left and far right agree on.

> It's amusing how "you shouldn't have had kids if one parent wasn't willing to stay at home full time" is now something that the far left and far right agree on.

I consider myself somewhat left wing, and I don't agree with this statement at all. Cooperative babysitting, more flexible work arrangements, larger friend groups, joint families, and more social cohesion in general are a good way to balance childcare.

I actually agree that teaching can provide some part of this, but don't understand the fact where everything else runs according to a hyper-capitalist algorithm, but teachers are expected to take on outsize responsibility and risk adverse healthcare outcomes because "Think of the children".

It does take a village to raise a child. Let's do that, and not just leave it to two parents and a teacher.

Replace "teachers" with "schools." There is no reason we can't appropiately resource schools to provide these services. We should be paying teachers enough for them to be eager to come in to work every day. Telling parents they are on their own to figure it out is not "a good way to balance childcare." It amounts to saying everyone fend for themselves, to saying that we don't really care what happens to kids whose families can't afford childcare. And sadly in our society, it mostly amounts to dumping those burdens specifically on women, who get saddled with the bulk of childcare duties in the American household. It's regressive, and it hobbles the effort to achieve equality for women in the workplace.

For better or worse American public schools have basically become an essential service as a free day care system for busy parents. I'm not saying this is good, I think it's a huge problem, but pretending that is not the way it is doesn't help fix it. The question is how to make improvements to our education system to prevent it from being misused this way, and on top of that how to actually politically make those changes happen when there's a huge number of parents that just want to pawn their children off to the state and would oppose such improvements.

That's not a bug, it's a feature. Why shouldn't we have socialized childcare? Our economy needs parents to be able to work 40 hours per week while raising children. If anything, we need to provide better support to families who can't afford childcare every summer.

Why do you need parents to work 40 hour weeks? Wouldn't it be more beneficial for anyone if they 'somwhow' have time raising their own children without running poor?

Many parents in Europe heavily depend on our social net, and I know that's a different debate, however single parents or families where both HAVE TO work full-time sounds like the wrong approach to me.

<i>Our economy needs parents to be able to work 40 hours per week while raising children. </i>

Let's be honest. Our economy only needs people to work 20-25 hours a week max.

Isn't that a good thing? The externalities are universally good - single parents have it significantly easier. Even married moms have easier time to find work or occupation outside of the house - whether for money or to not be restless and isolated.

"I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity?"

Why the resentful reaction? Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing!

I'm proposing that the cost benefit analysis would show that we should invest more in keeping schools safely open, and doing so will probably pay off immediately without even factoring in future harm or benefit to children. It's not wrong to factor in that future, but if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus. (It's still not easy to build a consensus, but that's because our civil society is running on automatic and we struggle at making even win-win decisions)

> Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing!

It certainly isn't. What I'm saying is that:

- Your repeated statement that "Schools increase parent productivity" is far from proven in the first place (see the point about summer, which is not consider a major 'productivity hit' event at most companies, unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving).

- And even if it were true, it's an incidental factor, and not one that is planned for.

> ...if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus.

Sure. All I'm saying is that the consensus which you're talking about should emerge from first principles, and should not just happen to fall close to "schools should stay open as usual, disregarding the pandemic sweeping the nation". If schools do indeed have a measurable effect on parental productivity, then the consensus could look like companies being required to enter into a profit sharing arrangement with all the schools of their employees' children.

>Schools increase parent productivity

I'm a parent, and I work-from-home. We just had winter break. I had 2 kids not in school and 2 kids not in day care. I definitely had a productivity drop.

I had a meeting where all 4 kids took turns interrupting me. I had things to do, and a daughter would "just appear" and ask me about some weird question. They would come in each afternoon and ask me when I was going to finish work amd play with them - and yes, I played with them (no regrets!).

Also, my oldest daughter tested positive for covid yesterday, so we kept all 4 home today. Even with my wife handling the "learning form home", I still got interrupted: how do I log in, what do I need to learn, where is the website, can I eat "this".

I'm not sure I follow your point of separating productivity hits from summer/Thanksgiving/Christmas. My points about these past 2 weeks hold for thr upcoming summer.

Sounds like work from home isn't working great for you, you should probably go into the office to work. Oh wait, but there are probably safety concerns preventing that.

You could also get professional childcare for your children to cover the day, but you probably don't want to pay the amount it costs. I am not sure why you don't have a friend or family member watch the kids for a day; few seem to be able to depend on close friends or family members in the US to do things like this that are considered simple favors in some other countries.

What I don't understand is why you think things are any different for teachers. People act as if teachers have the same training, PPE, and pay as medical professionals. They don't.

(I realize that I'm straying a bit from the point, but so is everyone else. There are far too many anecdotes in this thread that boil down to "I had a bad day with my child's education".)

You keep turning the discussion to teachers, but frankly, that's not germain to the initial comment in this thread, which simply stated that the costs of this pandemic to children may be much higher than we realize. No one has even argued for a specific policy like keeping schools open no matter the risks. But you seem unwilling to simply concede that this is an ongoing disaster for kids. I mean, remote learning has been a farce, particularly for young students whose parents can't work from home, are technologically or otherwise illiterate, or don't speak English. But I guess it's all our fault because we don't live near retired or underemployed friends or relatives who can take on childcare responsibilities for months on end?

> You keep turning the discussion to teachers, but frankly, that's not germain [sic] to the initial comment in this thread

Teachers do the the bulk of the work in keeping "schools" going. A majority of the essential employees in schools are teachers, but a very large margin (the next biggest is janitors and other support staff). Perhaps I am overreacting because discussion about this I have heard tends to descend into thinly veiled blame for the teachers. A typical disingenuous comment that I have heard repeated ad nauseam is "Oh, we are not blaming the teachers, we just want schools to be open". Well okay, we can throw open the doors then without enough teachers, and I guess the students can just...teach themselves?

> But you seem unwilling to simply concede that this is an ongoing disaster for kids. I mean, remote learning has been a farce...

Yeah, my statement would certainly be more nuanced than that. I would concede that:

- There is an ongoing pandemic that is a disaster, especially with the model of healthcare that we use in the US

- It has changed the fabric of our society in many ways, including expectations about "going to work" and childcare

- This change has affected children's learning in ways that are unpredictable

What I don't get is the isolation of these unpredictable changes to a simple, easily hurled "schools and learning are a disaster" comment. Society is a disaster right now, and unlikely to go back to normal in a hundred ways.

> it's all our fault because we don't live near retired or underemployed friends or relatives who can take on childcare responsibilities for months on end?

Certainly not, I feel bad for you. I'm just implying that the lack of these is a part of why society (not just "schools") is such a disaster right now. A society with more cohesion that balances responsibility of child rearing across multiple people would have done a much better job.

I don't know what you are going towards. I'll put aside (for the moment) any argument about school improving productivity for working parents.

You keep mentioning that there are ways to take care of kids that don't include "kids in schools with teachers" - you want teachers removed from the equation because they shouldn't be forced to be exposed to kids.

No matter how I think about the alternatives, I keep coming back to a building shaped like a school, staffed with people that look like teachers.

Example 1:

I get a retired person to watch my kids. Well, this person is still exposed to my kids (just like a teacher), and exposed to my house. Also, where am I going to find a retired person who is willing to be in my house, but not willing to go to the local school and do the exact same work?

Example 2: I get an underemployed friend to watch my kids. I don't know any underemployed people - they all have kids and jobs like me. Would I find someone on the internet? I'm certainly not going to let a stranger take care of my kids... not unless that person had similar qualifications as a teacher

Example 3: maybe I partner up with other families. We take turns watching our kids. 5 families, we watch our kids 1 day a week, we work 4 days a week. It's awesome. And I just invited homeschooling. If we are really good, we'll expand. And I just invented school.

You end with this

> A society with more cohesion that balances responsibility of child rearing across multiple people would have done a much better job

I'm pretty sure child rearing has been balanced across multiple people in our society. Many (not all) families have 2 parents. Their kids go to school with people. They may be involved in sports, coached by people. They may even go to places of worship, with more people.

The difference is that in all 3 of your examples you don't have the "Of course it's obvious that the other person should do this job during a pandemic" entitlement.

In your examples, you'd probably pay the retired person or underemployed friend extra during a pandemic. You'd probably make sure that the other families you were exposed to had adequate PPE and weren't exposed to unnecessary risk. If your kid misbehaved, you'd probably keep them at home instead of sending them to other families. You probably can't just abstract them into a "childcare unit" abstraction.

But with schools, you seem to be able to do this. The drumbeat seems to be "Kids should be in school come hell or high water", instead of "We would humbly request other people to take care of and teach our kids, and we understand that they are overworked and there's extreme health risks".

My suggestion for you is – if you really believe in Example 3, why not do it? Try it and see; I guarantee you'll run into the equivalent of staffing problems before long. If not, win-win – you just got free school!

Salaries aren’t determined by essential-ness, they’re determined by supply and demand.

Obviously a nursing home aid is a lot more “essential” than a FAANG engineer, but the latter is paid substantially more. It sounds flowery and noble to pay people based on how “important” their jobs are to society. But it’s simply no way to run an economy.

how about "salaries are determined by the amount of profit they can generate"?

In a market based economy, wage is determined by supply and demand. Then, high wages incentivize new people to enter the high wage field, and low wages disincentivize new entrants.

This is a societally productive outcome, because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. If we had 10x the number of engineers, wages would drop significantly. Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different. But also likely more societally beneficial due to lowering cost to provide software (which in a competitive market, will get passed down to consumers).

A big problem we have though is lack of education/direction given to college students so many of them aren't even really aware of wages of various fields and choose based on likability of the role rather than considering both likability and economics.

Unfortunately many people choose to be teachers regardless of low pay. Given that teachers are primarily government paid, we could elect to simply pay them more to attract higher caliber talent. But most fields aren't government employed, so not feasible for other roles.

Doctors in particular are problematic, because as I understand it the AMA limits number of new doctors creating an artificial shortage. That should be fixed/regulated against... it's pretty much monopoly power of labor to be able to decide number of doctors. Monopoly power on either the corporate or labor sides pretty much always leads to worse societal outcomes.

But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly". You're free as a student to choose a career path that pays better. I'm hugely in favor of reducing barriers to role switching and doing away with the traditional 4 year college program. Could open up lots of doors for people.

Whole conversation around free college is starting from the wrong premise (that 4 year college should even be the baseline). College is largely just a signaling tool, and the long duration and requirement makes switching career paths very costly, and pretty much impossible for people who aren't in their 20s. Even if it were made free

> because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages.

In a perfect market economy, yes. In an imperfect economy, where the value of each teacher is hard to measure, and where teachers cannot capture the full value of their work (e.g. a lifechanging middle school teacher can't charge much more than a normal teacher) this isn't true.

> Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different.

This is really not clear. First of all, as software engineering can be done remotely, there is already a fair level of global competition. Second, migration doesn't always decrease wages (see Mariel boatlift for a counterexample). And even with open borders I don't think the current top 10pct of SWEs would be paid more than 20% less.

> But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly".

Again, assuming that the market is efficient, which it probably isn't.

You're right that the impact of teachers is hard to measure. But we can ask whether educational outcomes would improve by paying teachers more... and my feeling is that the answer is largely no. Most of educational outcome is cultural/determined by the student and their peers rather than the teacher.

An interesting experiment would be running two cohorts of students through the same school, with same curriculum but different set of teachers. And paying one set of teachers more than the other and measuring long term outcomes. I would be interested in seeing the results of this experiment. There was already something like this done as a result of a New Jersey lawsuit, but I would have to vet whether it impacted pay of the teachers. In that case there was no improvement in educational outcomes, despite greatly increased funding for the schools.

Yes, software could have always been done remotely. But it largely hasn't... and timezones become problematic. Show me where FAANG companies are hiring remote workers en masse for US based teams? Maybe it's happening, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of that.

I worked for a company that primarily hired on H1B, and hiring was a lot easier when pulling people from Europe/India/China due to lower comp expectations. These people were paid the same as everybody else/native US people, but just culturally were less comp sensitive. But H1Bs are highly limited in quantity, of course.

Why suggest the economy is inefficient? In areas where the market has little intervention, it's largely efficient. Though I agree there are areas where there actually needs to be more government intervention to encourage a competitive market. Competitive markets are more important than free markets for a societally beneficial outcome. One example: competitive markets require that information is freely available. Companies can profit by hiding information which disadvantages consumers (e.g. cost of healthcare procedures, cost of enterprise software etc... relies on information asymmetry to enhance margins).

You don't have to explain to me how demand and supply works, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

> Unfortunately many people choose to be teachers regardless of low pay.

I don't think this statement is true any more. At least in the state where I live, teachers were quitting in large numbers before the pandemic, and the situation is far worse after. This is one factor that's not touched on in the article at all, and IMO is mainly responsible for why schools haven't returned "to normal".

> In a market based economy, wage is determined by supply and demand.

A 1973 letter to the editor in the journal Science describes the "famous story" about a physicist whose solution to a poultry farm's egg-production problems began with "Postulate a spherical chicken".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

> Whole conversation around free college is starting from the wrong premise (that 4 year college should even be the baseline). College is largely just a signaling tool,

Maybe signalling your ability to pay!

Making it tuition-free is a good step toward stopping some of that bullshit.

University system is a kind of self-governing guild system. The signal is approval from the older generation who satisfied the requirements of the system in their time. It may be a signal that the younger group has put up with their bullshit hazing. Or that they met some reasonable standards. The money requirement is more like the bullshit hazing.

> and the long duration and requirement makes switching career paths very costly, and pretty much impossible for people who aren't in their 20s. Even if it were made free

Not really. It requires no more time investment than a full-time job. For working age people seeking career advancement not a problem.

Replacing the income of a full-time job is part of the funding requirement that is more important for older people.

> Doctors in particular are problematic, because as I understand it the AMA limits number of new doctors creating an artificial shortage

Any degree system is "artificial scarcity" inherently. Even if the number of spots isn't fixed centrally, you have some social ("artificial") process for including and excluding people. The more exclusive the process, the higher prestige the degree can confer. You cannot remove the exclusivity while preserving the degree.

(And maybe we should get rid of a lot of the degrees and the social divisions they create... I don't especially feel that way for MDs though.)

Hello, American parent here. In non-COVID times, there are endless summer programs of all variety to provide childcare for kids during summer months. This is not the case during Thanksgiving / Winter Holiday and depending on where you are, Spring Break.

As an American parent, COVID has been rough. I love spending my time with my kids, but there’s also an endless debate of “am I going to take time off work today to properly raise my children, plop them in front a screen when that’s the last thing their young brains need, or try and parent and work simultaneously while simultaneously failing at both?”

If you want to work full time, and your partner wants to work full time too, there’s lots of childcare solutions to supplement school during non-COVID times. Without those options, it’s just a continuous unstable compromise with work, partner, sending your kid to school vs online learning, etc.

—-

I can’t explain the pay thing with teachers vs doctors. I don’t understand how my wife, a healthcare provider, was able to deliver a baby at a private, well-equipped clinic in Kenya for a total cost of $300 USD while having to pay >$6000 USD out-of-pocket after insurance for an uncomplicated birth of her own a few years later in a US hospital. Just the way capital, normal supply and demand, mixed with lobbying has distorted things over time I guess.

I also don’t really understand why people send their kids to private school instead of just putting that same monetary support directly into the public school system. Anyway, these are totally separate issues from the cultural reliance on schools as childcare providers.

I send my kid to private school to get an average class size of about 8 kids. If instead I sent him to public school and donated my tuition checks to the school, my son would have a class size of >20, and I have no idea where my money would be spent.

On some level, I’m a little ashamed of sending my kid to a better school than most kids get, but I’m giving you an honest answer.

The other aspect is that private schools are self-selecting first and selective second. Your kid either needs to be well behaved or fiendishly rich (enough to offset their problems with benefits for everyone). This isn’t the case in public - as it takes everyone as they are.

The reasons I’ve considered private school for my future children after talking to friends/parents who have put theirs in private has less to do with the quality of education but more to do with the peers they’ll have. They’ll likely be around decently behaved peers and I’ll be able to shape the discussion of how the school is run - whereas that’s not the case at public schools at all.

Having come from such poor schools where we couldn’t even afford five days a week education and only went 3-4 days/week, I know my kids will get an exceptional education compared to what I got - but I want them to have a good social life too and maybe that’ll work at a public school but maybe it’ll work at a private instead.

You'd be surprised how much parents can shape things, especially if they have time and money (mostly money).

Much appreciate you taking the time to provide an honest answer. I went through that thought process too. You make the best choice you can for your child.

I believe the research that says that, having a more diverse environment (for all senses of the word “diverse”) results in better learning outcomes. I’m sure that diverse classrooms are common in some private schools and not others, and that you also get access to a different kind of diversity.

I also believe the research that says that, after you account for socioeconomic background, public schools are high performing for kids from families with means. Private schools can select their student body in a way that lets them market a unified accomplishment of their students. Public schools must accept all students regardless of their circumstances, which makes their results appear worse in aggregate.

I also believe in supporting our public institutions.

I’m not trying to create an argument with your sincere response, just providing my own rational for not sending my kids to private school even though we can afford to. I do this to address my feeling of doubt in the same way that you did this to address your feeling of guilt.

GDP per capita in Kenya is 30-50x lower than USA. The provider and the facility are probably a large part of the total cost. Wages and land price are loosely correlated.

Doesn’t seem outlandish (without knowing your insurance covered) a 20x difference would occur.

Don't get me wrong, but where I am from parents simply don't work full-time when they have children they have to care about.

Why even have kids if you don't plan on having time for them?

I think that what you’re describing is a healthy way to do things. Impossible to answer your “why” question in anything close to a concise or complete way.

Why would anyone have kids? I adore my children and don’t want a life without them, but I also can’t provide any good rational reason to have children.

The cost-benefit is there regardless of whether the responsibility is there. Path A will have Path A costs and benefits, Path B will have Path B costs and benefits.

- Most parents I know (ourselves included) depend on summer camps.

- yes, teachers are severely underpaid and it makes little sense to me. Education is so important if not the most important matter for democracy but US messed it up so bad. I wish all teachers’ wages to double if not more.

> I don't understand the American blind spot that allows people to think of schools being as essential as hospitals; and requires them to both face Covid infections while paying teachers $40k and doctors $400k. Clearly the rates at which teachers are paid indicate that US society doesn't consider them as essential.

That's not how salaries work at all. Waste collection is extremely essential to society (without it, tens of millions would die of easily preventable diseases, and big cities would be unviable). Yet garbage collectors also earn around $40k.

And water is pennies a gallon while gold is $1,800/oz

Your numbers are completely off. The median salary for 10 months of work per year for high school teachers in 2020 was $62,870 and $60,970 for kindergarten and elementary teachers (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/home....). But this is a large underestimate of the total compensation because it doesn't take into account generous benefits and pensions. In Illinois, for example, 39% of all education spending goes to pensions: https://madisonrecord.com/stories/608526182-nearly-40-cents-.... There is also a very high job stability.

I don't mind the best teachers being paid more but we have to be honest with our numbers first.

Sweden apparently put the values of kids time in school very high, since schools were open all pandemic long for many kids, I believe up to ninth grade, and only high schoolers had some limited periods of online/home schooling. College/university was of course different so more like the recommendations for everyone else.

First, let's learn to account for emotional, mental, spiritual costs. Then we can talk about the productivity hit.

While those are important costs to consider, there is no way people will agree on how to measure such things in comparable terms.

So don't bother trying?!

Nope. That just means it's a moonshot. Besides I don't agree with current education approaches, so why pedestal one over the other.

Also, there ARE metrics of subjective wellbeing and we can use them. There's a culture of denial and aversion to real challenges that leads to people to escape it through numbers and dollars. What you're saying sounds like what that culture says.

Those are all important too, but I think these different indicators all point in the same direction: that we should be putting a lot more effort into keeping schools open

I disagree. We need to stop the nonsense disconnected from reality and nature society of bullshit now, not later. That includes bullshit child care and education and jobs.

Essentialism is what's needed here.

Ok, how do you measure spiritual costs?

Underrated comment. In the spring of 20 all the talk of what was essential and what wasn’t lead me to believe that just about everything shut down was actually the things that made life worth living for many people.

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