I know some die-hards who will disagree with this because they cannot allow their tribe to be attacked, but any objective observer knows this to be true:
The furnace-hot backlash seemed to be triggered by Silver’s assumption that school closings were not only a mistake — a possibility many progressives have quietly begun to accept — but an error of judgment that was sufficiently consequential and foreseeable that we can’t just shrug it off as a bad dice roll. It was a historic blunder that reveals some deeper flaw in the methods that produced it and which demands corrective action.
That unnerving implication has a mounting pile of evidence to support it. It is now indisputable, and almost undisputed, that the year and a quarter of virtual school imposed devastating consequences on the students who endured it. Studies have found that virtual school left students nearly half a year behind pace, on average, with the learning loss falling disproportionately on low-income, Latino, and Black students. Perhaps a million students functionally dropped out of school altogether. The social isolation imposed on kids caused a mental health “state of emergency,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The damage to a generation of children’s social development and educational attainment, and particularly to the social mobility prospects of its most marginalized members, will be irrecoverable.
It is nearly as clear that these measures did little to contain the pandemic. Children face little risk of adverse health effects from contracting COVID, and there’s almost no evidence that towns that kept schools open had more community spread.
In the panicked early week of the pandemic, the initial decision to close schools seemed like a sensible precaution. Authorities drew on the closest example at hand, the 1918 Spanish flu, which was contained by closing schools.
But in relatively short order, growing evidence showed that the century-old precedent did not offer much useful guidance. While the Spanish flu was especially deadly for children, COVID-19 is just the opposite. By the tail end of spring 2020, it was becoming reasonably clear both that remote education was failing badly and that schools could be reopened safely.
What happened next was truly disturbing: The left by and large rejected this evidence.
Read the next few paragraphs if not the whole thing.
I'm a data person at heart, and have been combing government websites for data all year. LA County has a TK-12 data page which includes statistics on "outbreaks". These are VERY loosely defined:
ReplyDeleteTheir definitions of outbreak are:
-- Epidemiologically-linked means that the cases were present at some point in the same setting during the same time while infectious.
-- Outbreaks that are active means that there has been at least one COVID-19 case that is epidemiologically-linked to the outbreak cluster within the past 14 days.
In other words, three cases over 14 days within the same circle of people at a school is enough to declare an "outbreak". No actual proof of transmission within the school is necessary, and the cases can be completely coincidental.
The stats are from the inception of the pandemic, but, since Los Angeles schools, public and private, have been pretty much shut down until August of this year, the stats are really only from August 16-January 9, 2022. Note during that time period, LA County has officially had 730,548 cases total, or about 7.3% of the entire population.
The TK-12 website lists 58 staff members testing positive from "outbreaks".
Only one of those cases is tied to a classroom. All of the rest are from sports.
ONE case of covid in a staff member tied to a school classroom outbreak.
Now, those in the their own little panic bubbles will say that the low numbers are because of masking and hair-trigger quarantine and classroom-shutdown rules. But, combine that with the fact that most kids have been in cloth masks--which the CDC now says are useless--and the school year so far has coincided with LA's worst outbreak of the pandemic, and I call b.s.
Schools have been proven, around the world, not to be centers of transmission, and children are not vectors of The Plague.
The torture of our children and young adults for the last two years will never be overcome...or forgiven.
Ann in L.A.
Sources:
publichealth(dot)lacounty(dot)gov/media/Coronavirus/education/index.htm
dashboard(dot)publichealth(dot)lacounty(dot)gov/covid19_surveillance_dashboard/
Haven't the school busses been shown to be places where transmission occurs? Everyone remembers the visual from China. Don't know about you, but in my area, transportation is a humongous expense and children are on the bus for two hours daily...and in subfreezing weather the windows aren't going to be opened. Quadrupling the number of busses in order to allow social distancing, handing out KN95 masks, or rapid testing before coming to school are effective ideas, but the admin is spending the money elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the sheer numbers. I'm in an average school district for NY. Classes run 45 in the high school, 60 if its a double period core class or gym...and that doesn't include the aides. The stats from Alpha were saying gather in groups of less than X to prevent spread....and our class sizes are bigger than that during both Delta and Omicron. Unlike the colleges such as your alma mater, public school still has staff that see a lot of untested students daily with more than 15 min contact, so have that superspreader potential. The one thing we have going for us is that school is not in session for five day weeks for most of the weeks...the 180 days of instruction is spread out over ten months.