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Comment by infamouscow | Hacker News Reader

> The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-pandemic-has-had-deva...

> Nine-year-olds lost the equivalent of two decades of progress in math and reading, according to an authoritative national test. Fourth and eighth graders also recorded sweeping declines, particularly in math, with eighth-grade scores falling in 49 of 50 states.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/briefing/pandemic-learnin...

> By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/11/opinion/pande...

> Students “lost out on about 35% of a normal school year’s worth of learning” when in-person learning stopped during the public health crisis, according to a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/health/covid-learning-loss-st...

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And you obviously don’t think kids can’t recover or excel.

Kids are resilient

Their resiliency isn't the issue. The issue is the harm caused by an unnecessary social experiment. The fact is some won't recover as well as others.

It must be nice to live in a world where you judge actions with perfect vision of what science will say 3 years after the fact.

Holy hell. I'm not even sure what to make of this.

If you need scientific evidence to know a priori rapidly transitioning K-12 in person education to remote learning would lead to catastrophic consequences, you need to go back to school yourself.

You don't get to push people down and trample over them just because you were afraid when the fire alarm went off.

This isn’t Reddit.

“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity”

Those are just some of the rules here.

Continuing to move goal posts rather than conceding and completely ignoring the links provided which refute your argument are indications this is not a productive discussion and suggest you're arguing in bad faith.

Instead of replying to points, you're trying to distract from the lack of argument by referring to the rules. You can do both, but choose not to.

I have asked if you believe it is possible for kids to recover.

Let me be plain. I haven’t insulted you. Haven’t been rude to you. You have taken that approach.

So I will ask directly.

Do you believe kids can recover from being 6 months behind?

I am not arguing that overall many kids might have gotten 6 months behind as you linked. I am arguing it can be overcome. You don’t seem to want to address that

> Do you believe kids can recover from being 6 months behind?

No, I don't believe the overwhelming majority will ever completely recover. They might recover to some degree, but that's immaterial to what was taken from them. It's irreparable. But this isn't about my beliefs, it's about science.

Just because something is possible and can happen has no bearing on the effects in aggregate.

You seem to think that optimism and wishful thinking can magically remedy the damage done to entire generation of children, and that one anecdotal data point somehow invalidates or lessens the mounting irrefutable evidence against this argument. I'm only echoing what the researchers are concluding in their papers. It cannot be overstated: I want to be completely wrong about all this. But every day more and more studies are published saying otherwise.

> It must be nice to live in a world where you judge actions with perfect vision of what science will say 3 years after the fact.

If you change a few words, this ostensibly becomes the superior orders defense. I'm not trying to equate or compare the two events, but there's a parallel between the European resistance and those that opposed the draconian school closures on principle or moral grounds. When both are void in an argument, derision is actually the most appropriate thing to do :)

We aren't going to agree here. You think it is science but you don't have any evidence to support your conclusion that this is irreparable harm.

I am fine not agreeing, I don't care to argue that point any further. But one thing I am curious about from your original comment.

You said that we had the vaccine with nurses, doctors, and teachers and why did we keep the schools not in person learning. My question is, are you pissed about the timeframe between March 2020 and January 2021. Basically before vaccines were generally available?

I also assume you are talking about the USA. My kid's school was back to in person school in Sept 2020 even before the vaccines (except for parents who chose to keep their kids home which we did due to autoimmune issues in the home).

So really, the distance learning was between the end of March and end of May for my kids for most of the kids in my school district. And yes, for many kids, they weren't doing shit during that time frame between March and May.

I just don't understand the time-frame you are angry about because schools were back to in person learning (while requiring masking) prior to the vaccine.

You're arguing a straw-man rather than the evidence put forward.

No, I am saying kids can recover. Your position is they obviously can’t

But we're not routinely applying the same logic to LC. It's pretty obvious that in the majority of cases, LC sufferers will /eventually/ recover.

What's the difference?

As a parent of two kids in the US public education system, I just don't view our system as being good in general. I will get around to your question in a moment.

Long before covid, we were doing "irreparable" harm to our children by continuing to educate our children under the current system. Way worse than Covid lockdowns ever did. We have all the science to show our education system is pretty much horrible. We have examples of exactly how to improve it but we don't have any stomach to do it.

So yes, I don't see the 6 month covid impact on education being a big deal when the whole system is screwed. We are doing the exact opposite of what good countries are doing to educate their population (e.g. Finland).

As to the comparison to LC. LC still doesn't have an underlying mechanism that can be pointed to. So saying people will recover isn't correct. My wife has an autoimmune disease, could she spontaneous go into remission? Sure I guess. Same with LC folks. But we don't know the mechanisms at work here.

We have all the science to get almost every kid back on track and ahead of where they should be if we had the appetite to fix it. The US just has no political will to make the education changes we need. But that has nothing to do with Covid

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