Public Schools Lost More Than One Million Students During Pandemic
wsj.com
wsj.com
Pre pandemic, I feel we were in a positive cycle of renewed cities, increased social capital. Now it feels like we're in a negative cycle of people avoiding each other, leading to negative feedback loops and lack of social support.
1 - https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-soci...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/31/violent-cri...
> In the latest FBI study, around four-in-ten police departments – including large ones such as the New York Police Department – did not submit data, so the FBI estimated data for those areas
The homicide rate rose 30% during 2020, taking us back to roughly mid-late 1990s levels: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-kno....
That said, I think this somewhat misses the point. Large numbers of cities saw violent disturbances over the last couple years. Anecdotally, I've noticed an increase in street racing and those sorts of general jackassery. Technically I'm not the victim of a violent crime but there definitely seems to be more of an edge to life these days. Understandable that people feel less safe and violent crime technically not going up isn't much solace.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/briefing/crime-data-us-ma...
The worst of 2020's disruptions doesn't come close to historical highs, even in the 90s, and it's already fading.
The FBI’s 2021 statistics show a further increase from 2020. For 2022, New York City is down a bit from 2021, but you’re still talking about wiping out a decade of progress in lowering homicide rates: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_p...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/08/the-problem-wi...
How much of that is due to actual drops in crime levels and how much of it is due to decriminalization of offenses and a the resultant drop in crimes reported?
Both the Uniform Crime Reporting Program from the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey have methodological have problems. There isn’t even a consensus between when about what constitutes criminal activity. And in some jurisdictions, only incarceration worthy crimes are considered ‘crime,’ where as in others fined infractions like speeding in a vehicle count. To say nothing of the tendency of crime data to suddenly regress towards the mean, which has been a problem for researchers.
I am wary to accept short term crime statistics, because it’s so politicized. There’s a great discussion here, though it’s a tad dated:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/when-crime...
Which violent crimes have been decriminalized?
I don’t know what I’d like to know on these subjects, to be perfectly honest. I’m still learning and didn’t wade into HN today to spread my perfect knowledge on the subject. Hope there is still room for that.
Here’s what got me thinking about the whole subject in the first place:
https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=18...
https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/the-decriminalisation...
But I think there need to be actual studies on reporting rates and reasons for non-reporting before too much pure speculation is applied to dismiss these statistics. People have been making arguments close to the above for years if not decades, at some point one would assume the reporting rate would stabilize.
I'll go ahead and suggest something like zero. This is a conspiracy theory.
An interesting illustration of this phenomenon is the movie “City Slickers.” I just watched it again the other day. Its depiction of New York City life was completely unrecognizable to me.
A lot less people are holding doors. They just pretend not to notice you.
At stop signs folks used to wave each other to go. Now it’s a race to stop and go first.
They complain because 1) As someone who did it when they were younger, they expect all young people to do it for them now. 2) In general society is just not as polite to old people, and society notices you’re getting older much quicker than you do.
And yes, I agree with the inexcusable example you gave -- it's like the person who stops dead to let some car left turn through traffic. "Oh they've been waiting a while and I'm not in a hurry today I'll be a nice person" Yeah that's great for you but you just caused a damn traffic jam behind you and maybe someone behind you WAS in a rush. You just inconvenienced upwards of a dozen+ people to help one person. You were a net loss on society's progress in that moment.
Just follow the rules, be predictable on the road.
Driving seemed to be worse initially post-pandemic, but I think it has gone back to the normal pre-pandemic levels of bad now.
With respect to cities, in the US, a lot of cities (including those we consider elite today) were losing population until 20-25 years ago. There's no guarantee that the young college-educated demographic will continue to move into cities in greater numbers than their parents did.
There used to be two good, big dev conferences a year in my metro area. Now there are zero. The meetup realized it's now or never for them and recently tried to get rolling again.
Regarding cities and urban areas, the social unrest of 2020 and its aftermath must also be taken into account.
Broadly speaking, there's two things going on. One, just getting out of the habit of regularly meeting and socializing has been detrimental to the social capital. Secondly, the national political dialogue ended, and in many cases people have applied this accordingly at a personal level.
When I was in an office, even if an evening event was definitely out of the way (as was typical), the fact that I had to get in my car anyway meant that it wasn't that big a deal to go into the city. I find the bar for leaving my house to take an hour drive to an evening event is a lot higher and mostly I don't do it.
It's a really cold feeling. It demonstrates to me why these rituals were important in the first place. It is like the person just disappears.
In America we have replaced them with the Internet.
eg in Europe I don't think much of that has happened along with their secularization – if anything I think its more cafes (of which the American versions suck cause they're never open past 9pm) and nightclubs...
It’s possible the other institutions I’m thinking of (labor halls, etc) preceded secularization.
I'm sure there are sitcom examples from the 50s/60s as well but look at even a show like The Flintstones. The guys are down at the lodge while the women look after the kids. Yes, it's just a cartoon, but that sort of working class lifestyle wasn't fabricated out of whole cloth.
My very limited exposure to such places in recent times--for a time I played in a work softball league at a Knights of Columbus location--was that they were very past their prime.
In addition to actually being open, the local public schools went all in with BLM.
That’s not bad by itself. But in practice it means the local school board is spending its time figuring out how to promote racial equity.
How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important.
Private schools and rich suburban school districts are flooded.
If you were a teacher, you fell into progressively more extreme content streams.
If you were a parent, you read about teachers falling into more extreme content streams.
The actual classroom environment might not have changed one iota, but everyone spending all day reading about bogeymen online for two years seems to have soured the relationship.
...as it should be. If the privileged keep playing their privilege games while neglecting equity, society does not work.
What is new to me is the extent to which indentured servitude was practiced in Central Asia; no doubt people brought their histories with them to the USA.
Without a law to force those kids to stay where they are, what can society do? In that case, parents are much more interested in a "raise all boats" story rather than a "raise boats that were lower at the expense of boats that were higher."
Society isn't a game of wealth transfer. Equity is the goal for one ideology, not for the vast majority of Americans. It's fine for that to be your goal, but you should understand that it isn't for most others and that they're going to act accordingly. When you aim to take away from them and their children, even if it's well intentioned and justified by your belief system, many are going to flee.
Decisions about how to raise your kids is where the DEI rubber hits the road.
As a homeschool family, I can tell you that this is a lot of it. It's not a new change, but having their kids' classroom streamed into their homes made a lot of conservative-leaning families realize that many public schools have chosen a side in the culture war, and it isn't theirs. I've heard it over and over.
You can expect to see school choice initiatives being pushed hard by this constituency.
Experts and parents alike agreed that schools should have remained open. Instead, the US was the standout among Western nations at not getting kids back into the classroom: https://webarchive.unesco.org/web/20220629024039/https://en....
Teachers' and their unions also became somewhat bad actors here too - undermining good faith attempts to resume classroom teaching and constantly moving goalposts well after the vaccine was available. It also pitted teachers directly against their local policymakers and voters.
The irony is that while everyone stayed home for a year and studied up on social justice, the lack of schooling will hit poorer families much worse. We were able to put our kid in a private school. Time will tell the lingering effects on less fortunate families.
Really telling is that almost no one is attending PTA meetings anymore (unless to yell at teachers or to yell at the people yelling at teachers). Anyone who actually cared about partnering with/challenging teachers to improve education has since moved on.
We don't go around constantly blaming the people and decisions that led up to the World Wars, it happened and we accept it and move on from it. Also sending kids into private schools in the US I think is part of the problem - there are many proponents that'd love all public schools to go under and to teach their brand of "science" and "history" to their students while knowing they are not providing an actual education. That is not all private schools, but many do have an agenda and little to no oversight in the US.
Sure, but does ensuring my child has a good education not part of protecting my family? I faced about a 0.5% chance of being critically harmed by Covid versus an unknown chance that my child would permanently be affected by school closures. That's not so cut and dry a choice as people make it.
And we can find all sorts of reasons to knock private education, but they actually stayed open and provided education.
No amount of argument or action could alter Randy Weingartner’s strategy. She was going to close schools nationwide and mischaracterize any criticism of her strategy as anti-science in order to stigmatize her opponents and increase her own person power, until the political environment shifted and she had to be less lazy.
The numbers showed very early on that kids and healthy adults weren’t all that susceptible to COVID.
Part of the reason public schools struggled to open was precisely because of parents "challenging" things. That private school could do better, in part, because it had the freedom to exclude assholes. Public schools don't have that freedom.
My son is in a private middle school. There's a good chance they wouldn't be in private middle school if the pandemic didn't happen. He was very frustrated being at home with Mom and Dad. After a year, he was getting very angry and depressed. I didn't expect to be paying for private school, but given his situation, here we are...
I strongly suspect many students have just completely fallen off the radar. Who knows what will happen to them.
I think there are enough private schools to handle much of this.
And homeschooling is not “fallen off the radar” either.
But I don’t doubt some have fallen off the radar.
If public school attendence goes down in such a system, the school districts (and therefore the schools) get less funding, but tax collection probably doesn't change. Instead there will be a surplus in the general fund. California has a lot of formulaic budget requirements, so if attendence dropped enough, it might derail the rest of the budget, but I'm not familiar with how close to the requirements the school budget tracks.
In terms of teachers, maybe not, but in terms of facilities, any school that was around in the 70s-80s should have plenty of classrooms and lockers. And I imagine that as public schools shrink, there will be teachers looking at those jobs.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/
The 5 to 9 population is more than 1M less than the 10 to 14 population, and the 0 to 4 is ~300k less than the 5 to 9.
Unless a lot more kids immigrate to the US, school enrollment will fall by 250k per year in a few years just due to fewer kids.
Anecdotally, I heard from some public school teachers that when they moved to online school during the pandemic, some students, who previously were failing, blossomed and excelled, but went back to failing when in-person school was brought back. It turns out that in-person school doesn’t work well for everyone.
Expensive, world-class facilities. When I was a kid, no school had a swim team because we didn't have pools. Can't put in a new school without state of the art gym, sports fields, often a pool. Giant auditoriums so your taxes can pay whack-job public speakers.
And for what? So kids can learn to read, write, and do math? We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation?
Good riddance. Public school is a scourge on man kind.
Public "education" made me despise learning and helped suppress my love of reading to the point that I'm only just starting to rekindle it. I performed well in school, but not well enough to be in advanced courses. It was complete torture, constantly vascilating between things being so easy that I'd stop paying attention to then being difficult because I'd fallen behind. This isn't even including disciplinary nonsense, I've got stories about that.
I should clarify, it's not just "bad books" that were the issue. There definitely were bad books, but there were also books which I've reread and enjoyed. The issue is more pertaining to the context of the books. Being required to regurgitate things about a book which you didn't have time to read thoroughly, being forced to focus not on the content but on how you can write a report that will please your particular teachers tastes. This, combined with numerous other issues, created terrible associations.
You assume. If there was no public school, there would be some other thing that fills this void. In fact, even with public school, there are a variety of alternatives.
When I was a kid I attended at least two schools built decades earlier, that had pools, but they weren't in use because they could no longer afford the cost of maintenance and (I assume) insurance and such. None of the newer buildings had pools at all. Ones they've built in the couple decades since I graduated don't have pools, either.
These weren't in, like, slums, either. These were relatively rich districts.
I associate pools with 60s and 70s schooling, mainly. Was probably really damn nice.
[EDIT] Not sure why the downvotes. My point is the parent is extrapolating an awful lot from a very narrow set of experiences. Maybe that wasn't clear enough.
I think the problem with public schools is really the teachers. They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex.
After the chaos of the pandemic, we put our kids in private school and haven't looked back. Kids are happier and there really is something to be said when the teachers actually have to listen to the parents, instead of dismissing our concerns and telling us they know best.
[0] Thus with little recourse.
In these states, the only things that make charter schools "public" is the fact that they take money from the district or the state, and tuition is free, but in all other respects they are basically private schools.
In other states they are directly under the control of the school board, and are indeed public schools.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/02/02/charter-...
2. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-are-charter-scho...
> "parents can take the kids to another school if things aren't working out. And since they're paid a certain dollar amount per warm body, the school has a pretty direct feedback loop."
Indeed, this is exactly why British private schools like Eton are called "public schools," because anyone can attend if they have the money. But in the US we use a different definition.
Teacher quality has always been a distribution, with some good and bad outliers, but the vast majority are sufficient.
What hasn't always been the case is the inability to get rid of kids who are extremely disruptive and make it impossible for education to take place. There also seems to be a bigger share of that disruption now than two decades ago, when I was teaching. I think a lot of it relates to feedback loops: in the suburban schools in my area, as well as the elite public high school in my area (requires an academic test for entrance), these problems don't exist. The problems only seem to exist in the schools where there are higher concentrations of antisocial expectations/behavior. This does tend to correlate with poverty, but poverty doesn't apprar to be causative, merely correlated:
I would point out that poor kids who test into the elite public high school tend to do just fine. But, they are all there for a reason (i.e., it is a self-selecting group of people who want to test), and also worked hard enough to pass the entrance exam.
My wife subbed at one of their elementary schools once when taking a break from full-time teaching to care for our kids.
It was on lockdown that day—and, apparently, many days—over credible threats of violence. Nobody told her this, so she found out when she poked her head out the classroom door and got yelled at by a cop for opening the door. Early elementary kids swore at her and refused to do any work, and there was nothing she could do about it. Admin couldn't handle minor stuff like that because they had multiple fights that day to deal with, despite the lockdown. The other teachers told her they were threatened with violence on the regular—by, like, 3rd graders—and occasionally attacked.
It was fucking insane.
The high school my kids go to changed completely across covid. From no discipline problems to daily fights, vandalism, and generally (many) students ignoring anything short of police presence.
Teachers are quitting in droves in a top tier school district. The only saving grace here is that it's a district that people want to get into, so they get pulled from somewhere else. I can only imagine what's going on elsewhere.
Students depend upon doing well on that test, and the college board has crammed the class full of a whole lot of topics.
I had a group of students who were in love with game theory even before the class, and as an individual I love the topic, too. But all the time I could spend on it was half a class period, and only the very boring cases involved in analyzing oligopoly behavior... Because we had to get back to all the edge cases in monopolistic competition and practicing how to write answers to free response questions in the very formulaic ways that we can be sure the graders will give credit for. I feel like I was forced to teach a less engaging and useful class than I'd have liked to.
Her previous school's teacher was fired for something sketchy but they're brining him back.
I'd argue that there's a huge selection effect on what kinds of students you have. I have the ability to listen to parents because the vast majority of parent feedback I receive is given in good faith and because I don't end up in the ridiculous situations I hear about from public school colleagues.
> They have put themselves on a pedestal and been conditioned into a serious superiority complex.
Really, unless you derive some intrinsic satisfaction and feel some deep desire to do this job-- in public or private school-- there's no economic reason to do this job. Better comp is available elsewhere for most of us, and even in the relatively supportive environment I'm in, I need to cope with a lot of people who don't just think of themselves as my customers, but by social betters/superiors.
I went to public school. Where I'm from our schools, at least high school, performed at or near the top of the state performance (not a state with terrible education). I agree with your analysis. There were only a handful of teachers who were neutral or even good, many were self absorbed and put the role of "teacher", as expressed in the public school environment rather than generally, above all else. If I am able to get married and have kids I refuse to send them to public school, it's either homeschooling or private.
The system molds the kinds of bad teachers you saw, and drives out the good ones who don't thrive in that kind of toxic environment.
This is probably true, and that's why I oppose the system generally. There are a myriad of issues which could be addressed, but unfortunately I don't see that happening, so I encourage disengagement from the public schooling system whenever possible. It's going to be better, and easier, to build new homeschooling networks and private institutions rather than fix government schools.
One of the worst things is how repeatedly we were told to "think outside the box" until that resulted in disagreement or something that didn't fit the grading/testing paradigm. Then it became a time for, as you say, authoritarian crushing down. I can only remember one teacher who fostered an environment that was both structured while still encouraging real discussion and thought, they were probably my favorite teacher which is interesting since they were also the one who I disagreed with most vehemently. I wish it had been like that more.
Actually, the problem is the parents who either don't care about their child succeeding, or only care about making sure that their child is taught exactly what the parent feels is should be true (a teacher I know was consistently harassed at the school by a grandparent who wanted her to teach the children that Obama was a terrible president and human being and got angry when she wouldn't).
Teachers are pretty universally overworked and underpaid in America. They face threats ranging from deadly diseases to school shooters and are expected to give their lives for their students (and have) when the threat from either is acute. They have recently been the target of political activists, causing them to receive death threats labeling them everything from "groomers" to "treasonous" for simply doing their jobs. And on top of all that, teachers are expected to be grateful for their lot. They're expected to not ask for more for themselves or they're selfish. Just look at how Teachers Unions are vilified (even here in this forum). Moreover, they're actually expected to take more abuse than they already are.
In a very real sense, teachers deal with shit that no other profession has to face, especially the underworked/overpaid technocrats here on HN. Does that make them superior? No, but I think it earns them more deference than you're giving them here.