The biggest disruption in the history of American education | Hacker News Reader

The biggest disruption in the history of American education

theatlantic.com

21 pointsenraged_camel62 comments

There was no reason for this to happen. It was an hysterical and opportunistic response by the public health authorities and the teacher's unions.

As the article stated, the schooling of the elites continued uninterrupted during the pandemic. COVID did not spread uncontrolled into those homes.

Children aren't born civilized. It's the duty of families and the schools to civilize them. With the breakdown of the family over the last fifty years, more and more was dropped on the schools. They were supposed to provide education and increasingly many support services.

When COVID struck, that responsibility was mostly abandoned for the lower and middle classes. Our institutions failed, for no good reason. People are trying to pick up the slack, but the way our society has been restructured, with both parents working, makes it very difficult to provide the education and supervision that the children need.

> As the article stated, the schooling of the elites continued uninterrupted during the pandemic. COVID did not spread uncontrolled into those homes.

That's not what the article stated.

"Students with household incomes above $200,000, in contrast, lost about 54 days—still considerable"

And the very next sentence after that one:

“Many elite private schools, meanwhile, avoided pandemic-related schooling loss almost entirely.”

And the very next sentence after that one:

"Of the Forbes top 20 private schools, our research found that 14 met fully in person for the entire 2020–21 school year."

So, 6 of the top 20 private schools did not meet fully in person for the entire school year.

Also, that's talking about 14 schools in the entire county, which is a minuscule number of schools and students.

Moreover, what's the evidence for the claim that "COVID did not spread uncontrolled into those homes"? I'm not saying it did or it didn't, I'm just saying there's no basis whatsoever for this claim.

Anyway, the issue isn't just the homes, it's the teachers. Who wants to die for a job? Nobody signed up for that.

If there had been a plague in elite homes, we would have heard about it. (And there aren't all that many elite homes.)

Teaching school during the pandemic isn't some kind of death sentence. Teachers mostly retire before 65, and the vast majority of COVID deaths is people over 65. Solution - stay open, and if a teacher wants to retire at 55 - fund that fully, with Fed help, if necessary.

> If there had been a plague in elite homes, we would have heard about it.

Why?

> And there aren't all that many elite homes.

Ok, so why is there any general lesson here? And approximately how many homes are you counting as "elite"?

> if a teacher wants to retire at 55 - fund that fully, with Fed help, if necessary

I eagerly await this policy. Though it's too late for anyone in the 2020-2021 school year. And how do you plan to deal with the resulting teacher shortage? There's actually already a teacher shortage, because many decided to quit in the past couple years.

> why

Because we hear of everything COVID that helps to raise the fear factor.

And, I don’t count teachers paid to sit at home as “teachers”.

You mean that you don't count teachers teaching from home as day care providers?

They count. It's the ones not teaching, just collecting.

>it's the teachers

This is all it was ever about. The Teachers Unions showed their priority wasn't the students and I suspect that will never be forgotten. Some of us always knew that, but now pretty much everyone does.

My kid goes to a private school. Not only was it closed less time than the public schools, but when my second grade daughter fell behind in reading (because distance learning doesn’t work) she got private 1:1 tutoring every morning to catch up after returning to in person school.

Meet your average Millennial American office worker: generalizing, but it's a prevalent pattern: they tend to be 25 to 35, either party like they're 17 or are un-social hermits, mouth-off risking trouble in the real world, and are self-absorbed. It's the result of failures in education and parenting with extended adolescence, absentee parenting punctuated by helicopter parenting, and not enough challenges.

Education needs to practically instill theory of mind, The Golden Rule, teamwork, cooperation, conflict resolution, life skills, and a foundation of knowledge and curiosity. If it can't do all of that and is going to obsess over standardized tests rather than excellence, then it's going to produce dysfunctional adults.

Home schooling, Parochial and Private Schools. The only choice.

All my best business partners and nerd friends were one of the above and rarely public school educated.

And force state governments to pay for these as an option instead of public schools. Such school closures with nothing substituting combined with the recent SCOTUS ruling this week mean the door for that is wide open!

You can only have shitty, dilapidated, extraordinarily expensive public schools for so long before the gravy train ends and parents rebel. In Boston we pay some of the highest per-pupil spending in the entire country (~$25k) and they are contemplating putting the entire system under state control https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/state-to-recommend-decl...

It’s completely insane how “jUsT GiVe ThE TeAcHeRs MoRe MoNeY!” is argued in good faith when what we have is so absurdly fucked and ruinous.

To pick a nit here, when most people say "Give teachers more money," they mean exactly and precisely that, giving a higher salary to the boots on the ground in the classroom. What ends up happening though is that more money goes to the school system, and some paltry amount may trickle down to the teacher, but most if it get's eaten up by principals, superintendents, and an army of other administrators, who do not actually improve outcomes.

It's my firm belief that most of the issues with our educational system would be rectified overnight if every school district halved their administration.

One of the points of the article is that the schools are not just trying to deliver an education, they're also trying to deliver social services to kids.

Why is that? Well, as a society we've decided that adults are generally unworthy of a social safety net, yet we still consider kids to be "innocent", and so instead of helping the parents of the kids, we insist on providing social services directly to the kids in school, bypassing the parents. This adds a lot of cost and layers of administration. And of course poorer kids are more in need of social services, so the poorer schools are often more expensive to run, even factoring in teacher salaries. You can say the schools are "failing", but they're also being asked to do too much.

If all the pubic student went private (and let's not forget the special ed students), are there private schools available to serve them?

Private schools have the luxury of cherry-picking the easiest students.

I would rather let those with the most potential have the best possible opportunities than lower everyone’s standards for special ed students. We can make vocational schools for those that can’t succeed academically, but for those that can we should provide them the best. I’d rather boost up the best than bring everyone down.

This reality was intentionally engineered so that ghouls like Devos can make their millions and billions in the inevitable privatization

The purpose of no child left behind is to literally close schools in low performing areas. Leaving families no choice but to go with other options.

This is the classic Republican playbook of tearing down institutions not in the name of small government but rather to replace core functions with private offerings. Doesn’t hurt in this case they can also stick it to a union at the same time

If a public school has been delivering failing results for more than a decade, maybe shutting it down isn’t such a terrible idea. What’s the alternative? Continue to throw money and resources at teachers and administrators who have proven they can’t effectively educate students?

The answer is not sending them to a unaccredited strip center mall charter school like some people want. Or a bible thumping parochial that doesn’t teach evolution.

So we should keep them in failing schools?

If the school is truly rotten sure maybe let’s close it. But the problem isn’t the schools.

Probably the best thing we could do to produce better educational results is to correct the damage done to city centers by rapid deindustrialization and the war on drugs, and invest in rural communities left behind with infrastructure like broadband. Obviously I don’t think either will happen. But just shifting kids around isn’t going to do anything (but there is money to made in sectors like edtech)

So we should close failing schools, but schools aren't the problem? Just trying to make sense of your argument.

The argument is the general problem is the negative synergistic feedback loop of poverty, over-policing, drugs, and local culture. These are the problems to solve.

I don’t say never so I suppose a school could fail for endogenous reasons in which case action is needed. But there are less drastic actions than shutting it down, such as firing all the admins.

Shutting a school down would be easier than firing the admins.

Would you consider the possibility that the negative synergistic feedback loop you describe is actually caused by failing schools, instead of the other way around?

Gentle reminder to steel man, not straw man, but whatever. You brought up a point I am curious about, since my own formal education was severely lacking in many many ways.

Is the teaching of evolution really such a big deal?

I was never taught creationism, nor evolution, nor anything even remotely touching those subjects. In High School, I was barely taught what a variable was; my math education capped out at rote solving of quadratic equations. I learned the atomic model. of the day, and memorized a quarter of the periodic table. I learned that Shakespeare existed and that sentences in English usually have an object and a subject. I learned that a blood cell contains a lot of little things that I can't do shit about.

I was top 1% of my class.

The argument would be that serious science educators would not stay long in a position where the curriculum is censured to that degree. Sure there are probably counter examples. But why risk hamstringing the development of future generations like this? Especially as the world gets more competitive. Other countries who take education seriously will have an advantage

Well on that I absolutely agree. Education all around needs to be better, and by better I mean more thorough, both in breadth and depth. I just don't think every human born is interested enough for that to work in the way the predominant one-size-fits-all public schooling pedagogy of today demands.

If we must go to a core set of things that should be taught to all, I can't see much reason why the trivium and quadrivium have been so thoroughly abandoned, yet my niece knows exactly what gender she wants to be when she turns 7. And FWIW I'm sorry for bringing that last part up, and no I'm not joking or trolling.

Build better facilities, hire more staff, expand hours, feed the children?

My wife shared pencils with her peers when she was in grade school in Indonesia. They had one math textbook for her whole class. They copied their homework questions out of that book by hand so they could take them home.

Four out of the fifty kids in her class went on to become doctors, 10 became engineers, two of which now work at SpaceX. Resources are not the problem. Discipline and motivation are.

The solution is simple, but few people have the guts to implement it. Sad, but true. I think outcomes in a lot of these failing schools would be better if we took money away from them. Make them focus on what matters and give teachers and administrators the power to discipline or expel problem students.

To be clear I am not talking about buying pencils, and I don’t disagree bureaucratic reform is badly needed in many institutions (which is the opposite of privatization). Unfortunately kicking the bad apples out is becoming increasingly more difficult in our hyper-individualistic culture where every parent views their kid as an extension of themself, and administrators care more about chasing statistics than real outcomes. But I digress.

The solution that follows from your story is not that poverty breeds innovation/grit or whatever. It’s easy to come up with counter examples to this (affect of war and depressions on educational outcomes). The thing that your wife’s classmates had was hope. Hope that if they worked hard enough they would be successful.

For many reasons, kids growing up in certain areas have very little reason for hope. And this is not irrational thinking: there parents likely are one of the millions of people left behind by the neoliberal era or they are part of a permanent underclass of society. This is what we need to address.

And yes every kid should have a pencil. And not have to worry about breathing in Asbestos. If the answer was just cut funding to bad schools, no child left behind would’ve been a success (narrator: it was not a success).

Every kid does have a pencil. Judging from stories my mother and mother-in-law tell (both public school teachers, one in the inner city), the teachers have to provide one for them because the kids have not been taught how to remember to bring them and they have no ability to punish them for forgetting them.

My mother-in-law literally hands out a bag of 10 mechanical pencils at the start of the semester to each student, which she pays for herself. A week later these kids are asking her if they can have a pencil.

Again, the issue is discipline and motivation. The kids have zero incentive to remember to bring a pencil, and zero consequences if they forget. If anything, they're being taught that you don't have to be responsible: the teacher will bail you out anyway and can't impose consequences if you don't remember.

These kids, even in low-income areas, go to school in palaces. These buildings get so much funding from states, federal government, and the Department of Education that they often abandon perfectly useable buildings to build brand new ones to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Your comment about asbestos is a complete strawman.

You want to make a kid feel hopeless? Put him in a 45-minute math class where the teacher has to spend the first 15 minutes of class dealing with three troublemakers who are so disruptive they have to be sent to the office multiple times a week. The kids in that classroom will quickly internalize the idea that education doesn't matter, discipline doesn't matter, that they themselves don't matter.

That's what's driving the hopelessness you describe. Multiply that by 180 days a year, 12 grade levels, and yeah, you'll get the negative synergistic spiral you described in another comment.

If kids don't learn discipline at home, and don't learn a modicum of it at school, well, you get crime. Not a year goes by where my mother-in-law doesn't see the mug shot of one of her students from 10 years ago on the nightly news. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that after living 18 years without any real consequences for their behavior, these kids get out of school and sometimes turn into criminals.

Teachers can't even teach in many of these schools. They spend more than half of their time writing up troublemakers for the nth time this semester and leaving voice messages on their absentee father's phone. Who wants to sign up to be a teacher in that environment? The exodus of teachers from the public schools proves my point.

You want to give those kids hope? Discipline them. Kick the troublemakers out of school if they continue to misbehave. Show them that they matter enough to properly educate and train. Not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the basics of society: some behavior is not okay and will not be tolerated, things are expected of you, and their are real and sometimes painful consequences for not meeting those expectations.

Do that and you'll see something crazy happen: those kids will start learning, behaving, and growing into productive, honest, good citizens. Most of the problems you describe will disappear. Until we do, expect more of the same.

I already ceded the managerialism, hyper-individualism, and metric chasing of our neoliberal society is partially to blame. The bad apples should be separated out of the common classroom. It’s ok for some people to fail.

But it doesn’t seem right to discount the effect of resources on educational outcomes (not talking about football stadiums either - looking at you Sunbelt).

I largely benefited from attending well funded schools. My parents moved to the districts with good public schools, so I was able to take AP classes and such. However, a whole world was revealed to me going to college. The kids who went to Georgetown Prep or Andover had probably read millions more (assigned) words than me and had taken Linear algebra and Diffeq already. Their HS tests weren’t multiple choice - they were essays. And their HS class sizes had been small and taught by Ivy League grads.

Conversely, I know people whose schools offered exactly zero AP classes and were way behind going into college especially for technical tracks.

There are all kinds of anecdotes about irredeemable neighborhoods or conversely about stereotypical bootstrap stories. But at that end of the day the correlations are clear. Ruch parents are not going to send their kids to a school that intentionally or unintentionally deprives students of resources. They understand, as we all should, that education is an investment in human capital where you put dollars in hoping for future returns.

Public schools are both bad and expensive and it’s somehow Republicans’ fault. :-/

Unironically yes. The war on public schools started when the Feds wouldn’t let southerners run their segregation academies. Conservatives have been trying to sabotage the system ever since

You are misinformed, if you think it was the “Republicans” who were running the “segregation academies”. The problem won’t be solved until the partisanship decreases.

I said conservatives. I am adequately informed about the mid-20 century party re-alignment of the Dixiecrats. It’s not the semantic gotcha you think it is because politics is not a team sport to me.

These folks can’t stand that they lost the civil rights battle, the Roe decision (till now), and less remembered the affirmation of the rights of the detained. Maybe there would be less partisanship if they just stuck to trying to lower taxes rather than wage an full assault of personal liberties.

Moderates just want oppressed groups to lay down and take it so their prized stability is not jeopardized

I love how Democrats like to claim there was a “realignment” of the parties in the civil rights era, but then claim The mantle of FDR, who was President decades before the civil rights era. Also, Roe was decided by 7 Republicans, against the dissent of a Democrat, 40 years after FDR.

There was no meaningful change to the parties since the 1930s. FDR Democrats believed in social engineering, and Biden Democrats believe in social engineering. All that’s changed is that FDR Democrats wanted to discriminate against Black people, and Biden Democrats want to discriminate against white people.

Don’t think I said I am a democrat. I might vote that way sometimes as a harm reduction strategy though. I’ve seen what happens when Republicans get power (millions dead in Middle East, world historical wealth inequality, destruction of public institutions - don’t want to hear how moderate Dems aided in these, I know)

What you might call social engineering, others might call rejecting social Darwinism. Now the elderly and disabled can live till old age instead of dying on the streets like they did pre-social security. Thanks FDR? The TVA was pretty sweet too.

The core of the Democratic Party (the oldest in the world) has been distrust of big business and advocating for the common man (literally white men for most of it but that can change). It’s essential they go back to these roots and start attacking things like Citizens United with the same verve Republicans go after their goals

Advocating for the common man (as in human, I get it) is stymied by hyper focus on the uncommon. I don't mean ignore any minority, but the opposite tactic, the coalition of smaller, disparate identitarian groups convinced to coalesce in explicit opposition to perceived majority, well, it ain't the wisest choice imo.

Keywords: identity, marginalized, disproportionately, underserved.

Can’t tell if I’m missing a reference if I’ve been arguing with AI this entire time.

But if this is real, this thinking falls into the trap of thinking in final binary outcomes rather than viewing politics as a discourse. Are unions perfect? No. But the center of power has shifted so far in the opposite direction that there needs to be elements far on the other side to bring things back to a sane level

Edit: iPhone autocorrect was bad on this one

Haha nah not a bot, not even a properly paid fascist republitard shill, just a regular dummy who doesn't belong on HN because I'm too dumb to do tech so I end up commenting on general purpose threads where I can hopefully inject some humility and realism.

What I meant to say, to be more clear, is that Democrats need to pull back from the messaging about how important it is to be LGBTQIAPP+ and Disproportionately Affected Marginalized Communities of Every Shade of Color Except Pink and get back to the roots of being against corporatism, rather than changing the corporate logo to a fist or rainbow for a month twice a year.

And hey look, if it makes you feel any better, I'm browner than pink and I'm on a lot of spectra. I'm not bitter or scared or hateful (OK well sometimes any combo of those), just shaking my head at it all.

The wording seemed a little generated to me at first that’s all. I’d largely agree that moving to the left economically is the only real choice. It’s the only way democrats can become competitive again in rural areas

> Don’t think I said I am a democrat

HN seems to be incapable of differentiating between national political parties and wide, more genal political ideologies.

If it's not a team sport for you, you fooled me. I'm engaging with you because you are hyper-partisan.

There was no realignment. Who owned the slaves? Who was responsible for Jim Crow and the KKK? Which party set up the Great Society which destroyed the black family? Which party controls the teacher's unions and the public schools?

The Democratic party. 100%. Those are just facts.

We can't fix this until we quit the partisanship. We need to fix the public school system. You'll remember the teacher's union official, who, when asked when he was going to start thinking about the kids, replied, "When they are old enough to vote."

EDIT: Please read at least the introduction to the "Dixiecrat" splinter party page for history[0]. (Wikipedia isn't known for having a conservative slant on things.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat

It’s not. I don’t care about the blue team. If a yellow team popped up tomorrow that actually cared about the well-being of the public and not corporate interests I would vote for them instead.

Your history conveniently stops at around 1970 and leaves our figures like Jerry Falwell and Nixon’s southern strategy. The partisanship is not being driven by rhetoric - it’s being driven by tens of millions of people being left behind by neoliberalism with zero attempt at mitigating the harm done. If people felt like the current system worked for them then they wouldn’t adopt extreme views.

But sure let’s keep on liberalizing and consolidating economic and political power. It’s worked out great the last 4 decades.

Edit because you edited: wanted to drive home point I can barely stand the democrats. In a sane country they would be the center right party

(I made an edit on my previous)

You know, if that yellow team popped up, I'd likely be right in line behind you.

Both the Democratic party and the Republicans drifted to the left over the last fifty years. And then the Democrats reached around and embraced the elite that a century ago was on the right.

Now, the Fortune 500 C-suite and virtually all the richest counties in the US uniformly vote for the Democratic party. And that party is a strange conglomerate of the lower class, for which they trade votes for handouts (while destroying their culture) and the elite (comprising the tech corporations, the Beltway, the Hedgies, the media and academia), which trades political favors for donations.

I think I'm with you on neo-liberalism and the excessive consolidation of economic and political power. The Democratic and Republican parties, the tech corporations, the media, and academia form the block benefiting from this consolidation. What to do?

Tearing it all down isn't a good idea - history shows that. The kind of people who tear things down are the last people you want in charge of the new order.

But, if we could flex the system over the next fifty years, what should we do?

Yes I’d co-sign the core of what your saying here. It’s pretty alarming actually. And social issues are being used as a wedge/relief valve/distraction to avoid bringing too much attention to where things are materially going. I do believe that many economic issues are deeply related to some social issues and that’s where we might disagree.

I’m not too optimistic for team yellow though. We need good-faith experts to lead us through these times (and social trust) but the last few years have been as disastrous if not not more for wonks as the financial crisis. Between Fauci and J Powell it’s not looking too good

In the course of this, I read [0]. The whole thing is shocking, really.

If you come up with something, ping me in a thread.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement_after_the_Rec...

I first read about the more disturbing (i.e. waved over in school) details of reconstruction a few years ago in Grant’s biography (really good btw as was Chernow’s Hamilton). One of the most shocking events was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1... and also the New Orleans massacre. The klan would violently put down attempts by black peoples to assert themselves politically and would kill the Republicans who helped them in the process.

Thank you. I found it on libbyapp.com. I loved Whitman's epigraph at the beginning!

It's a mystery to me why the blacks switched to voting Democratic. I can only think that the history they learned in school was falsified, and then they were convinced that the Democratic party was responsible for giving them their civil rights.

> It's a mystery to me why the blacks switched to voting Democratic.

Have you considered asking them?

> they were convinced that the Democratic party was responsible for giving them their civil rights.

Democrat Harry Truman abolished segregation in the federal government and military. Democrat Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Democrat Johnson signed it. The Congressional vote broke down by region: >90% of northern state representatives voted for, >90% of southern state representatives against. This was a big factor in the realignment, where southern Democrats switched to the Republican party. Strom Thurmond for example did so in 1964, and the 1964 presidential election flipped many southern states from Democrat to Republican. (In 1968, many of them went to George Wallace, another former Democrat who left and went independent.)

It's true that the Democratic party has a history of racism, and it's also true that Republican Lincoln freed the slaves, but things change over time, and political parties change over time. Today's Republicans are not the party of Lincoln, and today's Democrats are not the Dixiecrats.

"The Dixiecrats' presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, became a Republican in 1964"

The national parties didn't meaningfully realign, that's probably true, but the racists did.

Thank you for pointing this out. Also while re-align is probably an incorrect word, there definitely has been an essential transformation of both parties. The new deal coalition and Clinton’s third way have little in common.

You keep talking about American political parties that OP never one mentioned.

How did you manage to quote Republicans when it wasn’t said in the comment you replied to?

Publc schools are worst where Republican governments destroys them, yes.

> All my best business partners and nerd friends were one of the above and rarely public school educated.

This seems extremely anecdotal.

I went to public schools. Of course I'm not your business partner or friend, but most people on Earth aren't either.

How about funding the public schools at the same level as private schools, which cost 2-4x as much?

tl;dr please.

All I see of interest in TFA is a very predictable request for more money:

"Curing the many harms that school closures have imposed will take money—a lot of it."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com