This made me want to scream:
1. Right now, the main problem with every plan to reopen schools safely is lack of money to implement it well. I will be writing more about this in coming weeks. A massive infusion is likely needed from a variety of public and private sources, national and local.
— Dana Goldstein (@DanaGoldstein) July 2, 2020
Not to pick on Dana, who is just answering a question related to the safe reopening. My problem, though, is WE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE TALKING ABOUT REOPENING FUCKING SCHOOLS. The pandemic is nowhere near even remotely under control. Honestly the last thing we should be focusing on right now is re-opening anything.
It’s so god damned frustrating. These idiots have spent the last five months obsessing about the fucking economy when the solution was simple- END THE PANDEMIC and THE ECONOMY WILL BE FIXED (well, not fixed, but back to where it was before the pandemic). The economy didn’t crash because of external reasons, we shut the fucking thing down. Now, though, that the virus has spiraled out of control because we spent all our time focusing on jobs and the market, we have no good options.
Five months ago, we had a very good chance. President Cole would have given every family 75% of their income a month for six months, and given those without an income 1500 a month, ramped up testing and contact tracing and ppe production, and told everyone to stay the fuck home. It would have cost several trillion dollars, but in the long run it would have been cheaper. Instead, we’re now in our HIGHEST one day test totals since this fucking mess started, and it is getting worse. We’re gonna be in a full blown depression by election day, schools will not be open, and we’ll be looking at a half million dead and a decimated medical system. And that’s not even going into all the people who are going to die from non-Covid causes because they couldn’t get a bypass or their lump was not detected or what not.
We’re so fucking stupid. And btw- schools are not going to be fucking open in the fall. And if they are, it won’t be safe.
Hamilton!
S. Cerevisiae
They are counting on it killing mostly the poor, the brown, and the elderly who they see as useless eaters, I have read online wingnuts calling it “culling the herd “
luc
We will have school re-opening data from Europe and other places before the US schools are going to open.
Obviously we have to assume that all common sense guidelines will be a lot harder to implement over here.
Bruce K
When the gist of an overseas video call is “I miss you, but don’t come here because it’s not safe”, with “here” being the entire United States of America, that says something bad about how things are being managed here.
I’m beyond rage, well into fury, and there are ugly parts of me that this crisis has exposed, and those ugly parts of me want blood. Or at least to see people rot in prison for their role in turning this crisis into an apocalyptic catastrophe.
Tim C.
@S. Cerevisiae: Their respect for life ends the moment someone is born.
Cermet
And to think – this is a minor, tiny fraction of what the world will experience when AGL makes the equatorial regions uninhabital. But that is the future and untold millions yet to be born problem – not ours. Kinda gives a hint of the flavor of the disaster that we are leaving to future generations – including many living now.
Geo Wilcox
If school can be held outdoors it might be safe with masks and distancing. If it has to be indoors it won’t matter how far apart or how many masks there are, it will NOT be safe. Just look at several of the graphs made of actual infections in restaurants. People well over 6 feet away from the carrier got sick because they were in the direct line of the AC air flow.
Cheryl Rofer
You are exactly right, John. I’ve tweeted a bit in this direction and have been thinking of writing a post about it too.
West of the Rockies
Florida governor DeSantis looks a lot like a hairy Vladimir Putin: same bland look of superiority, same squat, round face set with vaguely babyish features.
debbie
President Cole’s alternate plan sounds good, but it never would have happened. No one, but no one, can tell real ‘Muricans what to do. If they want to crowd themselves in to public places, their freedums say they can. Fuck, yeah!
The Moar You Know
We’d just be closing them again in October, with the added loss of at least 10% of the teaching force and several thousand dead kids.
Bunch of hype going around about how NYC kept their schools and day care open. They did keep some of it open, albeit under conditions which are not to be found in any typical public school in America (9 students per room and teachers with actual legit PPE). They also lost about a hundred teachers to COVID, which no one wants to talk about except for their teacher’s union.
PsiFighter37
John, I think it would be a lot easier to sympathize with folks wanting to push to get schools reopened if you have kids yourself. It has NOT been easy taking care of an infant for 3.5 months and counting while working full time, and I can only imagine it is more stressful the older they get. The mental toll is very challenging. My wife and/or I have minor meltdowns every couple of weeks. I completely understand that we need to figure out a way to get schools open safely, but working parents are losing their minds.
Emma from FL
@S. Cerevisiae: Of course, as the herd shrinks… it’s amazing how disassociated they are from their own country. Or from logic and reason.
Wapiti
Echoing Cole’s point: effectively, everyone in the country had a job: limit the spread of the virus. The government should have “drafted” everyone and paid them. The essential workers go to work; the secondary workers stay home, because that’s the job.
PsiFighter37
@PsiFighter37: And I should note that the takeaway is that childcare really needs a big rethink. The answer should not be that one parent has to quit their job to keep themselves sane.
J.
I, for one, am all for a President Cole, the John we need right now. So, who’s your VP?
gwangung
@PsiFighter37: And it doesn’t help that so many employers are unsympathetic to stressed parents.
J.
@PsiFighter37: Did you see this piece in the NYT from Deb Perelman, who runs Smitten Kitchen? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career-homeschooling.html
debbie
Well, this won’t help at all.
Just Chuck
I’m all for President Cole, but only after serving at least a term as VP in the Baud! administration.
azlib
Sadly, you are absolutley correct. We shutdown too late and opened up too early. Meanwhile here in AZ at least one gym is suing the state because our guv reclosed gyms among other places people congregate. Not helping the situation is a completely politicized and disfunctional federal response.
The virus is in control now and magically thinking will not get us out of this mess.
germy
@J.:
John Cole / Imani Gandy 2024
Eric S.
@gwangung: That’s the truth. I manage 9 women. We’ve been working from home since mid-March. Three have school age kids of various ages. Two more help care for grand kids. The company expects 100% productivity while people are working at home. I run as much interference as I can and give them as much leeway as I can but I’m still just the lowest level manager and I have to answer to my bosses.
SandyZ
It’s really college students who should not be back in person in August. They are the ones crowding into bars and living in the same room with a stranger. The schools are desperate to get the full tuition and dorm fees. And, football stadiums with even half fans is beyond ridiculous.
PsiFighter37
@J.: Yep…it’s basically spot on. I am lucky because work has been very slow for me the past month, so I have been able to de-stress a bit and focus more on playtime with my kid. But it’s still a lot. And as for the wealthy…I think you have to be extremely wealthy to house a live-in nanny (for us in Manhattan, having someone commute in from the Bronx, Brooklyn, or NJ via public transit is adding on a ton of risk). We are fairly well off, but not to the extent where we can have the space to house another person to be in a ‘bubble’ with us.
If this whole situation is not fixed by the start of next year, when our lease expiration is coming up, I think we will have to seriously consider finding a place that has considerably more space. Whether that means renting an apartment at a dirt-cheap rate (I have heard of Manhattan renewal rates going down by 25-30% in the current market), or finally taking the plunge and moving out of the city to the suburbs (and possibly have my wife’s parents move in with us to help out, as they are planning on retiring in the next year or two).
On a Zoom with friends, I lamented that this feels like we are going to have a long amount of time of our lives basically stolen from us. I thought it might be months, but realistically – I think it’s going to be a year, if not longer, and the mental and psychological toll of all of this is going to be incalculable.
Cheryl Rofer
@debbie: Far too much is being made of this, because reporters like the scary word “mutation.” The fact is that tiny mutations occur in viruses all the time.
NONE HAS BEEN SHOWN TO AFFECT THE VIRULENCE OF SARS-CoV-2 IN ANY WAY.
A particular mutation, which has no other functional difference from other variants of the virus, is becoming the most prevalent. Nobody knows why. And yes, I am being repetitive.
Here’s the important sentence from what you quoted:
Viruses naturally mutate and scientists have previously said they have observed minor mutations in the coronavirus that have not impacted its ability to spread or cause disease in any significant way.
It’s like having a blue virus and a yellow virus that aren’t different in any other way. The blue virus is becoming more prevalent for now.
dww44
@PsiFighter37: I heard about this side of the issue on NPR yesterday afternoon. They interviewed a working Mom who’s sympathetic to the issues with re-opening but has had great difficulty providing consistent childcare for her 12 year old. She only had one to worry about as well. Plus she was one of those “essential” service workers who doesn’t get paid a lot of money.
My daughter and spouse are both high school teachers with 4 kids of their own. They’ve been out of the classroom since mid March and have been told via email a few days ago that schools will reopen in just a month (early starts here in this red state). She has mixed feelings about it. Worried about everyone’s safety, including her own.
Eric S.
Illinois has been doing a reasonably good job. We were slow to reopen. JB Pritzker and Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot have been more cautious than most. Yesterday, a downstate judge has ruled Pritzker’s stay at home order illegal. It’ll obviously be appealed but it’s examaple 1,253 of people deciding CV19 is not real / not a threat / less important than the almighty dollar.
Mai naem mobile
The schools will open. What will happen is the wealthy and those with enough means won’t send Jaxon and Muhriah to school. The black and brown kids whose expendable front line parents don’t have the luxury of keeping the kids at home will send their kids to school to spread the virus around to their parents and grandparents. Then when their parents die and the kids don’t do well in school, the schools will be blamed for doing a crappy job teaching leading to more public school funds being transferred to the private so called Christian schools that Jaxon and Muhriah will be attending .
mad citizen
@Bruce K: Bruce, I’m right there with you. I have posted here a couple times the shorter version, which is that at this moment the United States is a failed state.
I don’t know about the school issue, but if they are all going to be home, I wonder what would happen for the future if all we did is taught them a shitload of human history (maybe grades 7 +; don’t want to destroy innocence and all that) and told them about the problems facing them and any future humans.
opiejeanne
Washington state set a new record yesterday: 716 new cases. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but three weeks ago we were dipping below 200 a day and thought we were seeing it decline, but there were idiots who kept going out without masks and doing stupid things in large groups. The only good news is that the death rate has gone down to single digits, with two days of no one dying of COVID-19 (as far as we know). WA has done over half a million tests now, and we are a “small” population state, with 7, 600,000 people living here. That only took six months.
Governor Inslee has announced an emergency and as of July 7, all businesses will enforce mask wearing. No more of this “management won’t let us say anything to them” bullshit, and the masks have to cover the mouth AND THE NOSE.
Do I sound a little cranky? I think I might be.
Kay
Not to be a jerk, but if you haven’t been following this politically you may not know what it’s about.
They have to open schools. They know they have to open schools. What this is about is working to get the resources to open schools safely- and I know it won’t be “safe”, but as safely as possible in a risk/harm analysis that also includes the harm to children from not having schools open.
Dana Goldstein is exactly right and she’s one of the FEW (as in maybe TWO) reporters who understand public schools and has been following this daily since the schools closed. She’s really good. She knows what she’s talking about.
Aleta
@germy: Imani / Willow
MomSense
My kid is not going back to school. His school has already said that even if they can open for physical attendance, students have the option of continuing with remote education.
There is no way schools will be safe here once the heat is turned on. Just like Air Conditioning spreads Covid, heating systems will do the same.
Jinchi
It gets more stressful when they learn how to walk, but gets easier once they stop trying to eat everything they can pick up.
Raoul Paste
When I saw this post title “we’re going to fucking do this aren’t we? “, I thought it would be about the fireworks at Mount Rushmore
It just shows how much is screwed up
WaterGirl
@Cheryl Rofer: My understanding is that they are saying that the new mutation spreads more easily, which I take to mean that it is more contagious. Even though the symptoms are not any worse/different with this new version, being about to spread more easily is a big Joe Biden deal.
No?
Belafon
A “huge” amount of how are economy works is built around the daycare feature of school. Both parents can work if needed.
The problem with your hypothetical “President Cole” vision is that you would need all of it for any of it to work. My youngest is 15. We did the last two months of the last school year at home, and he was a job for me after work. Our school system went into teaching via homework, and sometimes I had to fill in the teaching, and had to make sure everything got turned in. This year, he got moved to the top band, and may not experience it.
Another Scott
Diane Ravitch (from June 13):
We know how to re-open the schools. We know what it will take.
The GOP is, as usual, refusing (as much as possible) to do what is necessary – especially for states and localities.
We have to vote the monsters out.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
If you keep insisting schools can’t open here is what is going to happen- schools will open, but they will do it without the 2 months of lead time and (especially) additional funding they NEED.
So choose. But I would suggest that lobbying to keep schools closed is 100% counterproductive and will not get you where you want to go.
Democrats in the House have been great. They have been hitting this every day. What we need now are Democrats in the Senate and Joe Biden to jump onboard.
artem1s
we could open schools in the states where the virus is waining, provided we follow the models developed in Europe and Asia. IF we were opening school. But unfortunately ‘open the schools’ means I MUST HAVE FOOTBALL to the deplorables in the Red states. They are already presently spreading the plague during summer practice. So yes, the plans to reopen schools and campuses come fall will probably have to be put on hold for many states. And the majority of students will have to lose their educations for another year all because of a few dozen students in football are obviously the only important thing happening in public and state schools.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl:
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
In any choice between working parents’ sanity, their pocketbooks, career goals, etc, etc, etc,
and teachers’ LIVES
it should be obvious which is more important. It shouldn’t need to even been spelled-out.
Jesus. Really.
You wanna make it possible for schools to reopen? Then find a way to get everybody to wear a mask in public. Everybody. Everybody. Find a way to close every single nonessential business until we squash this bug everywhere in the country. And if that’s impossible to do, then perhaps reflect on the fact that there are tradeoffs in life when we can’t get everything we want. And our comfort shouldn’t come at the cost of other people *lives*.
Kay
@Belafon:
Also, and I say this as a big backer of public schools and a public school parent, if you want political support for public schools to collapse, tell parents they all have to go back to work but no school employees will. We gotta work together. It’s not parents here and schools over there. We need each other.
We can help them get the funds they need to open. Parents in all 50 states are a powerful political constituency. It’s about 100 million people.
Nelle
@gwangung: My son was ordered back to work in person. The boss was upset that my son’s one and two year old daughters ran through the background of a Zoom meeting, though there are no productivity issues. My son can see, via Facebook, that his young coworkers are hitting the bars. No masks in the office and my son is mocked for asking for physical distance. He’s sending out job applications. And this may be the real benefit of us moving here last year, though as grandparents who are 69 and 76, there’s a limit of physical stamina in childcare.
cmorenc
Western nations have robustly recovered successfully from far worse economic disasters than the immense economic pain the US is / will suffer from CV. West Germany recovered from the devastation inflicted from the literal rubble of its military defeat in WW2 (or WW1 as well, for that matter). And so shall we – which fact is still no excuse whatever for the exponentially greater hardship it will involve in the US because of leadership that is not only grossly incompetent, but pathologically malevolent as well (additional negative adjectives also fit, but you get the point without need of a comprehensive list).
Baud
Parents should do what I did and not have children.
Mai naem mobile
@azlib: Scottsdale did arrest the owner under a misdemeanor charge. The clip of the guy on teevee had him in the gym in front of the bikes/ellipticals with the clients obviously not social distancing. I also saw a blurb about State of AZ pulling the liquor license of Lifetime Fitness(different gym.) I honestly didn’t know gyms had liquor licenses. Also too, I saw a blurb about the State of AZ talking about pulling the license of a Tempe bar which had let several employees continue working after testing positive for COVID. Apparently requiring people to stop working at a bar who have COVID is not expressly written into Maricopa County’s health regs. Oh, and Donny doesn’t have to worry about the border wall on the Arizona side because the Mexican state of Sonora is tightening their requirements for going over to curtail the spread of COVID. Pretty soon Americans are not going to be welcome in the DRC.
Jinchi
Exactly. Schools will have to reopen, eventually. Many parents literally cannot stay home and children need an education. Schools need to plan now more than ever if it’s to be done safely. It’s up to our political leaders to make sure this pandemic is under control before that happens. They have about about 8 weeks before the school year starts. That’s more than enough time for a competent nation to get things under control. We’ve seen it in most countries across the world.
I know we’re stuck with Trump and the Republicans right now, but unless President Cole get’s his plan passed in the next few weeks, we’re going to have to deal with it.
Baud
Via Biden’s Twitter feed.
natem
@Kay: People want schools to reopen in the Fall, not just the “REOPEN THE COUNTRY!1!!1” idiots. It’s a big topic in my household, too, even though we’re fortunate enough that one parent earns enough income that the other can home-school. But let me tell you, home-schooling is hard work! If there is a silver lining out of this, it’s that parents will appreciate teachers.
Jinchi
This is a problem parents have to deal with:
Good luck homeschooling your kids with rules like that.
Baud
@Jinchi:
It’s like I don’t even exist.
cmorenc
@Wapiti:
IDEA! The secondary workers staying home could all work as bloggers!
Baud
@cmorenc: Wouldn’t that be worse than the virus?
PJ
@cmorenc: JFC, would you please get with the program? The stay-at-homers would all be podcasters and/or Tik Tok stars, of course.
Kay
Schools have some advantages over other entities in infection control. For one thing they have as stable an consistent a population in the building as one could ask for- that’s test, track and trace. They have elaborate records on each and every person in the building and can reach their families with a kind of police power- public schools can bar entry to sick kids – they do it every day for other infectious diseases and they can reach a whole infected family. They have the ability to order children to follow school rules in a way that simply doesn’t apply to adults, no matter what one or another wingnut governor is doing. Their power to put in rules on “health and safety” is much more expansive than a lot of other entities. They are given wide discretion there.
They also have really consistent staffing. They could put the employees who are most at risk in positions that allow for more protections because there WILL be a vaccine- it isn’t permanent. One of the things our school is looking at is putting the most at risk staff on the remote learning end, but for small group tutoring, not classes. There’s a recognition that the kids have lost ground and will need extra help.
We can do this. We WILL do this. The only question is if it we will do it with additional funding and smart planning or if we will just patch some garbage together and ship it out the last 2 weeks.
germy
The Moar You Know
@natem: Absolutely is not happening. I see parents and school boards treating teachers as they do supermarket baggers; “get the fuck back in the hole and I don’t give a shit if you die.”
Main difference is that supermarket baggers aren’t locked in airtight rooms with their customers for seven hours a day, and most have been provided reasonable PPE. None of that is in the offing for teachers.
patrick II
@debbie:
I have read two things about that possible mutation: 1. it spreads easier, 2. it it not quite as deadly.
Our infection rates are skyrocketing, but deaths may have not been (so far) at the same high rate. They can’t tell for sure yet since the early days had so many deaths among people in elderly care, and now more young people are getting it and aren’t as ill.
Kay
@natem:
Because they think their kids are being harmed, and they are. I love public schools – I value them- but if public schools abandon parents in this crisis it will be really difficult for me to defend them.
They have to show up for us, and we have to show up for them, by getting them what they need. They need a lot, and they are going to need much, much more once states start gutting budgets. We can’t do this without each other.
Susan Einbinder
Here’s an off-the-wall idea: Transform college dorms into boarding schools for K-12 schools and have teachers, aides and volunteer parents – and the students – move to campus for the fall. It’d be a challenge for many parents to agree to send their kids to live somewhere else, but it’d be a ‘safe’ place, if the adults ensure that … just a thought.
Jinchi
@Baud: I see u. Just missed your comment.
trnc
@Cheryl Rofer: But it isn’t just the reporter saying the word “mutation,” and the discussion is about a trait that is clearly important, not something benign per your example.
Obviously, there’s a lot of wiggle room there, so it might turn out to be nothing, but coming from Fauci, I don’t think we should just blow it off.
Belafon
@Chetan Murthy:
This misses the exact point that some parents need the daycare that school provides so that they can support a family.
Until we get people in office that are willing to make the changes necessary to allow a family to survive with one parent not working – and realize that some families only have one parent – we have to deal with the realities of right now.
Kay
It’s also not true that “no one” is talking about this. I listened to an hour and a half of discussion in the Michigan statehouse where even Republicans were advocating for federal rescue funds for schools. They know schools are essential.
The Democrats in the House have been stellar. They’re looking at all kinds of things including federal upgrades of mechanical systems- HVAC- to mitigate transmission that way. That’s what the Big Three are doing- they’re using everything at once to keep employees from getting sick. If we can do it for making a truck we can do it in a school.
The Moar You Know
@Kay: There are quite a few viral diseases that we’ve been fighting now for over a hundred years that we have not been able to develop vaccines for. Signs are hopeful for this one – but any reputable virologist will tell you it is absolutely not guaranteed. And the people saying we will have one by next year are just plain wrong.
(I’m being too kind. Most of them are flat-out lying)
opiejeanne
@Mai naem mobile: Gyms with liquor licenses??? I know I’m not hep and with it, but I’ve never thought of a gym selling booze
ETA: and I see you are with me on that.
satby
That’s what’s going to happen anyway. And that’s not even taking into account the hundreds to thousands of teachers and students who won’t return until the pandemic is more under control.
trnc
That you know about, anyway, amirite, nudge nudge wink wink, saynomore.
Starfish
@PsiFighter37: It gets harder until about early elementary school. Later, it gets easier because they can go entertain themselves.
One thing that is forgotten about schools is that they are providing other services besides “woo, free childcare.”
They are providing meals for kids whose parents may not be able to afford them. They are providing various IEP services for kids that need them. This can be occupational therapy, speech therapy, etc.
The people that I feel the worst for do not have enough money to feed their kids or have kids with complicated medical needs that need constant monitoring.
Jinchi
I don’t think they’re the ones making this decision. It will be done on the city/county/state level. Schools will have a mandate (re-open/stay closed), (full capacity/half capacity) and they’ll have to deal with it, and they’ll have to respond immediately if the mandate changes. They’ll be responsible for measures like spacing students, cleaning facilities, and mandating masks, but they won’t get the final say on whether to keep the school open or not unless there is literally an outbreak on school grounds.
Chetan Murthy
https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/07/what-if-you-cant.html
We live in a country where, excepting the Northeast, everywhere else is either on fire, or starting to smoke pretty severely. The *idea* that we’re going to have this epidemic contained enough to reopen schools in the fall is ludicrous. All we’d be doing, is setting up more mixers for the virus.
Pretending that we can “follow the German or East Asian” model, is what made the IHME model (remember that one? Good time, good times) so valuable, eh? Remember? They said “oh, we’ll be fine by summer, if we do what the Chinese did”. Yeah, right. You can’t go adding virus mixing parties to our society (and that’s what schools are) until you’ve actually suppressed the virus. I mean, jesus, look at Korea: they have repeatedly had to close their schools when outbreaks pop up. The entire country is an outbreak right now.
opiejeanne
@Baud: How can they do this? And WHY would they make this a law?
Roger Moore
@WaterGirl:
As far as I can tell, the only evidence they’re providing that the mutant virus spreads more easily is that it’s become the dominant form. But that is indirect evidence and isn’t necessarily very strong. Until they can show a higher R0 from the new form, it’s an inference rather than direct evidence that it’s more infectious.
Kay
IMO too, there is nothing wrong with parents saying “I have to go back to work so they must go back to school”
Which parents and kids will be harmed THE MOST in that scenario? The Costco worker or the 6 figure parent who will be able to hire help?
I don’t see any point in lying about it, and pretending people don’t have to work. They do. Does that make schools “daycare”? No- they’re still schools but the fact is kids spend 6 hours a day there.
Chetan Murthy
@opiejeanne:
This has got me to thinking, and bear with me for a moment here, that maybe Teh Jeenius of Markets [sic] is not the best way to address a rapid-onset pandemic.
germy
Can Air Purifiers Stop Spread of COVID-19 Virus?
West of the Rockies
@Baud:
Well, to be honest, you’ve sort of become Adeli Baudenson–always running, never quite becoming prez. I mean, I of course support you (kind of… from a certain angle in the right light). But you need to find your political lane and gun the engine.
Edit: Oh, I thought you were talking about your campaign again.
trnc
@Jinchi: Sounds like U of F hacked FS email.
Hoodie
@Kay: They won’t provide adequate funding and the plans I’ve seen are not necessarily going to provide tangible benefits in improved outcomes for these kids. The numbnutz running this joint (and the fuckwits who elect them) think it’s more important to let bars and restaurants open. All of this risk is cumulative, so clamp down on anything that really isn’t necessary. Close the bars and make restaurants curbside only. Put the unemployed waiters, busboys, bartenders, etc. on UI; they’re relatively cheap anyway. Help them take online college or GED courses, whatever. Shut down anything that even remotely resembles mass entertainment (e.g., college football). Screw people if they’re bored. Enforce masking rules. I took my son to the airport today and saw way too many arrogant assholes who think that they’re too special to protect other people. Give them a $100 citation to make them pay attention.
Then we can talk about opening schools. I would certainly give them high priority (if not among the highest), but I don’t see why my wife (teacher) needs to be exposed to this risk with the distorted priorities we’re currently seeing. People are too willing to expose other people to danger for speculative risks (long term harm to the economy, psychic health of kids) that are not as concrete as the risk of dying or suffering long term physical disability from getting the virus. Give us at least 12-18 months to see if a vaccine comes through before you decide you need to make all these tradeoffs that sacrifice lives.
Kay
@Jinchi:
I think it depends on the state. Ohio has given them wide discretion. Columbus City Schools are half opening and most of the rural districts are opening fully. I’m willing to bet the richer suburban districts around Columbus will be opening, not because parents want or need “free daycare” but because those parents are freaking out thinking their kids aren’t getting an education. Which is true, BTW. They’re not. There’s wide variance even within my county.
In Ohio, you can actually close a public school if 20% of the kids are out sick. It happened twice with the flu just this past year in small rural districts.
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
My understanding is that they are saying that the new mutation spreads more easily
My understanding is that, having sequenced the gene that changed, they found that it codes for one of the critical ACE2 binding proteins in the “spike”, and that structural considerations make it look as if that change might make it better at entering a cell. But no clinical studies to corroborate, because you can’t ethically run controlled experiments that require you to expose uninfected people to two different strains of a pathogen. And epidemiology is path-dependent – the new strain is prevalent, but it’s tricky to tease out “why”.
So it may be a long time before we “know”. It really shouldn’t change anyone’s calculations about how to stay safe, as the original strain is already wildly infectious.
leeleeFL
@S. Cerevisiae: someone said exactly this to my 69 year old face! His wife ham-hock punched him so hard, I felt it!
scav
Isn’t the viral mutation already a bit in the rear view mirror? ‘The’ mutation (and there are others) is between the strain that romped across Europe and then into the US v. the strain that come directly from China to the US, no? That’s been observed for a while and now it’s being better understood. And, isn’t it a mutation/adaptation that makes this Corona-virus stickier in the lungs (and deeper lungs) already a part of why this one is worse than SARS or MERS?
MomSense
@Jinchi:
I think this is the time we dig in and fight. Schools cannot open safely. They will bring the virus home to their families and it will cause disproportionate harm to immigrant families who have multiple generations and multiple branches of family living together.
We need family centered employment and economic policy in this country. The rich assholes will keep their kids home and they will work from home while the rest of us struggle and a lot of us die.
Kay
@Hoodie:
My daughter’s a PA in NY, she’ been treating Covid patients (although she missed the crisis part because she was on maternity leave) and she is an evangelist on this approach. Shut down what’s non essential, lower the transmission that way, but reopen schools. They’re essential and bars and non-food retail is not.
Crashman06
Just wanted to chime in with my personal experience. Both my wife and I work full-time; we have an 18 month old and a 7 year old. Our employers are both very flexible, but the last few months have been excruciating. Remote learning was a total bust for our older one and the little one was just out of control all the time. We managed to keep our heads above water but with regular emotional breakdowns and serious repercussions for our sanity. Daycares have reopened and after many sleepless nights considering our options and talking it over a few times with the pediatrician, we sent the youngest back. The eldest is bored and stuck with us for the summer, but things feel more manageable now. All that said, as working parents, we (and a lot of our peers), feel forgotten and overlooked in the reopening discussion. We’re in a privileged position, since we both have our jobs and some small savings, but I am worried sick about this fall and it’s keeping me up at night.
germy
Another Scott
@Jinchi: +1. This is the bottom line for me.
Public schools don’t determine their own funding. Local property tax revenue is going to crater in many places (closed businesses, unemployed people who can no longer afford the bill). State tax revenue is going to crater because of the de/recession, increased medical costs, etc. The only possible source of funding is the federal government. If the GOP gets their way, states and localities are not going to be made whole, so there will be huge funding cuts to schools.
That means teacher and staff lay-offs, no money for PPE for them, no money for remote learning tools and networking for those without, and no money for extra space to spread kids out in class/lunch/etc. It’s exactly the wrong direction for safely re-opening schools in a pandemic.
The issue is funding (and a sensible set of policies). The choke point is Moscow Mitch and the rest of the GOP. They’re the ones everyone should be yelling at.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@MomSense:
Their families are going to be at work. They’re already at work. Tens of millions of them never stopped working. All you’re doing is slightly decreasing their risk and vastly increasing the harm and making it permanent, as to those children. They won’t catch up. They barely hang on as it is. If they lose 6 months or a year it will stay lost.
germy
Jinchi
I understand your point, but you’re trivializing the problem parents are dealing with. Forget sanity, career goals, etc. etc.
Pocketbook issues are serious, though. People are going to start getting evicted soon. They are going to lose jobs when they can’t show up, because they have young kids at home. Then they’ll be showing up at food banks. Especially if they have the option to work, but refuse to. If they leave young kids alone so they can work, they risk prison. So no housing, no food, no medical insurance and now we’re back to talking about people’s lives.
You have to present a solution to those problems. Otherwise, their alternatives are school or daycare (assuming they can afford that). Either choice ends up with large groups of children together with adult teachers in settings where the virus can spread.
WaterGirl
@Chetan Murthy: You are absolutely right.
debbie
@Cheryl Rofer:
Okay, thanks. This is what had me worrying: “Enhances viral transmission.” We already have plenty of that.
Kay
@Crashman06:
Agreed. I hear this every day. It doesn’t apply so much to me because my youngest is 17 an while remote learning sucked and he hated it and he was mopey and depressed for 3 months he is basically done with school and will have mostly college classes senior year.
But I sympathize. If mine were younger I would be frantic.
Help us lobby for funds for schools, so they can reopen. They need us and we need them.
WaterGirl
@patrick II: Everything I have seen talked about the first, but has not said a word about the virus being less deadly.
I would love to have a link to where you have seen the latter part.
opiejeanne
@germy: Santa Clara School District, to be exact.
Crashman06
@Kay: Thanks. In a previous comment you mentioned something about the harm that this is doing to children and honestly, I don’t think that’s being talked about enough. This is harming children in a real way: emotionally, socially, and academically. Both my kids had their regular checkups recently and both their pediatricians talked in detail about their deep concerns about this. Let’s acknowledge it, please?
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore: Good to know.
NotMax
@Kay
It is also the case that there can be no one size fits all solution/policy. Physical plant of schools is hardly uniform. What procedures, traffic and crowd control can be modified or altered in a school with 600 students versus one with 2500 students must needs vary. Practicing and enforcing distancing on school buses is as close to impossible as anything can be, as one small example. Do classroom windows open or is ventilation a closed system? How (if at all) will population limits in bathrooms be implemented? Can textbooks be taken off property (thus subject to potential contamination)?
In any case it is all going to be trial and error. Some policies will be effective, some will be window dressing,. some will be ineffective (or, FSM forbid, outright detrimental). Identifying and addressing that last category without delay and not hesitating to change or cancel any such is paramount.
cain
@S. Cerevisiae:
The elderly is their reliable voter and the target of their grift .. it’s the main funder of wingnut welfare.
Culling that herd is not a good plan. But then we aren’t talking about a smart group of people. Whatever dirty tricks they have they still need those voters.
Chetan Murthy
@Jinchi:
One privilege of rich people in fat countries, is never having lived thru catastrophes where there are no good solutions, only better or worse tradeoffs. No, there are no solutions, not when a pandemic is raging, when basically the only safe part of the country is the Northeast, that is only now *emerging* from that pandemic, and where it might go back right back in. Everywhere else? Dry tinder, and there are embers flying everywhere. Everywhere. Even here in San Francisco, cases are rising again due to people meeting in groups, esp. young people. And Southern California is a charnel house.
The *idea* that somehow this can all be *solved*? That’s wishful thinking. And as Atrios put it well, wishing for a thing doesn’t make it so.
What can we do? We can try to limit the damage. That’s all we can do. And that means that schools should only be open for the children of essential workers. Everybody else has to suffer (and yeah, states should pass laws forbidding employers from sanctioning employees who mix childcare with their work time).
And why? Because [again, as Atrios said] if there’s a raging pandemic, then go ahead, open the schools; you’ll be closing them down again presently. Because that’s how it works in raging pandemics. Look at Singapore, South Korea, even Germany. They reopened schools in areas where the pandemic was *suppressed*. And when outbreaks flared up, they closed schools down.
The entire country is an outbreak right now. [aside from the Northeast]. The entire country.
Kay
In my office, we have two assistants with 6 children between them. They are desperate. They are worried sick their children are being harmed AND they have no fucking idea how they will homeschool next year with both parents working in one case, and ONLY the mother available at all in the other.
This has to dealt with. These people aren’t whiners and they’re not people who hate teachers or public schools. But they’re staring into a freaking abyss and telling them to suck it up and stick the kid in front of a Chromebook for the next year, alone, is not responsive.I can and did put them on unemployment. We did a shared work plan where they cut their own hours by half and got unemployment (plus the 600 bump) for the other half. But I actually need them to work at some point, or I can’t continue paying them.
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: I appreciate all the detail, thanks!
So it sounds LIKELY, but not PROVEN. Very little with COVID has clinical testing, right? So it seems to me that we have to do a bit of tea leaf reading to figure out what’s happening.
Wondering if you agree with those statements.
JPL
@PsiFighter37: If it had been handled in the beginning, we’d be in a different position. My son and his wife struggle because their son 16 month old is on zoom all the time. I can help out as long as they have been isolating, but that is not always possible for them.
If we’d live in the magic land of competence, the administration would shut down states with numbers that are rising. No way should delta be flying passengers from FL, GA, TX, CA, etc, to the north east.
azlib
@Mai naem mobile: Yes, there have been arrests and shutdowns enforced, finally. Governor Ducey is being hammered in the press here on a daily basis for his inept leadership. He was hoping everyone would just voluntarily do the right thing. Unfortunately, here in AZ as elsewhere there are enough nut jobs who are not taking the virus seriously. There is even rumbling in the legislature to rescind the governor’s order.
debbie
@Kay:
Here, they’re planning to open, and they’ve already announced budget cuts, er, “pauses,” to bus services, art, music, and theater. The parents are up in arms, but the Ohio GOP will likely do zilch. And this is one of the better districts in the state! I can’t imagine what will be going on in the rest of the state!
Kay
@NotMax:
If it were me (and it is in a small way “me” because I’m on a school committee and we’re doing this) I would jettison the social distancing as a tool. It isn’t going to work and putting time and energy there takes from things that WILL work, like moving more vulnerable staff to positions with less contact, taking temps and doing symptom checks, getting families on board to report infected people in the household to the school, handwashing and masking and track and trace, and mechanical systems (ventilation).
Drop social distancing and start talking about the things that are possible. We know more than we did in March.
RSA
I’m in touch with faculty from a few public universities, and it’s eye-opening.
At some places, the faculty are almost in revolt: Policy for opening in the fall is being set by people outside the university system, and decisions are being made that bypass faculty senates, which gives the people in the classroom no say in the conditions under which they work. (Not that adjunct faculty and grad students ever had much say, which is a scandal in its own right, but now everyone’s in the same boat.)
And about stresses on universities: One department I’m familiar with projects that a drop in enrollment of overseas students will result in a decrease of between $5 and $10 million to the university, compared with 2019. It wouldn’t be surprising to see small public campuses permanently shuttered if this goes on for more than a year.
Suzanne
@Kay: Agreed. The kids have to go back to school in some form or another. Pay older and high-risk teachers to take early retirement if needed, but we have to figure out a way for this to happen. The kids being at home is simply not sustainable.
I’m of the opinion that we should use the Trump Plague as an impetus to get a lot of people out of the workforce permanently. Lower the retirement age and provide free college so adults have other productive things to do. Provide a significant social benefit to families so one parent can stay home without that being a class privilege and change Social Security so SAHparents aren’t fucked at the other end. It is likely that there just will not be as much paid work needed in the future, so we should be more intentional about spreading it around and not leave behind those who don’t have it.
debbie
@patrick II:
It’s not safe to make any assumptions yet. A teenager here died from COVID earlier this week. They’re trying to understand some of the lasting aftereffects of the virus in young people. We still really don’t know a lot about this.
debbie
@opiejeanne:
Employers’ feefees are hurt at the thought employees are taking advantage of them. //
Kay
@NotMax:
I also have no problem with putting staff who are most at risk and can’t or won’t do work that requires no contact – like online tutoring, which kids will need- on short term disability, with compensation. I don’t think older or vulnerable staff should be punished, and they’re experienced and valuable. Maybe give them small online groups of the kids who REALLY fell behind, which is about 20% in our school. The kids with the most chaotic home lives and/or poor kids dropped off the face of the earth. They didn’t do a lick of schoolwork for 3 months. They are going to need help.
debbie
@germy:
Seems like an omen to me. //
NotMax
@WaterGirl
No, if anything that’s a distraction quite capable of leading to unsound and/or incomplete conclusions. We need to wait until the scientific consensus is firm.
JaySinWA
@opiejeanne: I believe the “Florida State” is short hand for the university, not the government.
Chetan Murthy
@Kay:
And what, precisely, do we know more of, than in March, that tells you that we can drop social distancing? Because everything I’ve read says that social distancing is a -complement- to masking, and that masking cannot substitute for distancing. Masking reduces the spread of aerosols; but you get enough people in a confined space, and those aerosols are going to build up regardless. And [per that article above about air filtration] to get enough filtration going to suck out those aerosols requires some prodigious HVAC equipment.
What exactly, do we know, that makes it all safer now?
Kay
@Suzanne:
This is a small district but our most highly regarded teachers are also (often!) the older teachers. Not to use a broad brush but it is true. The teachers who parents seek out for their kid are the most experienced. We have some here who had every single one of my kids. They could do small group online tutoring. The kids who lost the most in the shutdown would get the best teachers and they would be safe as houses.
It’s a huge job, but it’s mostly logistics. It can be done and done well.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@RSA:
Friends who teach in the Georgia university system have been told they cannot teach remotely and watch children at the same time. If they’re caught trying to do that, their permission to teach remotely will be revoked.
debbie
@Suzanne:
Hire unemployed parents to work as teaching assistants to help make it easier for the teachers.
Brachiator
@S. Cerevisiae:
I’m not sure who “they” are, but since this is not how the virus works, “they” will inevitably be disappointed.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
Idunno, man. I keep waiting for it to take Dan Patrick [spit] (TX Lt Gov) and it never happens.
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
I would change LIKELY to POSSIBLE and PROVEN to CONFIRMED (proof is only in math, nothing in science is ever really proven)
Kay
@Chetan Murthy:
We know that children themselves are not at high risk. We now have reams on that, including daycares in the US that never closed. We know that well enough that pediatricians groups say the harm to children from no school far outweighs the harm to children from school.
We also have lots and lots of experience with the tens of millions of parents who stayed working and returned home to these same children, day after day, bringing all the risk that parent encountered delivering groceries or driving a truck or working in a hospital right back to the house.
Suzanne
@Jinchi:
Absolutely. I remember saying this months ago on the blog and being accused of being insensitive or cavalier with people’s lives, but I think you are 100 percent correct here. Younger adults (under about 45), especially those with kids, are completely financially screwed here and just saying that schools need to be closed for safety is insufficient. Younger adults are less likely to suffer the worst effects of COVID and yet we need them to give up paid work so that they can watch their kids and slow the spread, but we are not giving them the tools to do so. And they’re less likely than the older cohort to have savings to rely on, so they need to work, and yet we are asking them to act counter to their best interests without incentivizing them to do so.
trollhattan
Our city district does not yet have published return plans. The suburban districts have proposed reduced schedules to physically spread the kids, with on-line learning for the other portion of their week.
We’ll see how the caseloads vary for the next month. If they keep going up I expect the in-class plans to get spiked for fall.
SEC football will go full blast, no matter what,
Another Scott
Having to shut the schools down a month after opening because of new outbreaks isn’t going to help achieve the goal you want.
Yes, we know more than we did in March. The main things we know are:
Saying otherwise doesn’t make it so.
CDC Schools FAQs:
As with the economy in general, the course of school re-opening depends on the course of the virus. If we’re being smart…
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Suzanne:
Prepper homeschoolers are feeling very smug ATM.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
Ofc not! We can finally have those Blogger Ethics Panels! Our long national nightmare will be over!
LuciaMia
I for one would welcome our new overlord, President Cole. His daily news briefing must include pet updates.
patrick II
There are so many problems, some more solvable than others. Wouldn’t it be great if someone, somewhere had the authority and resources to craft a national policy? There is no thought, that I can see at the national level, to create an integrated strategy for the country which would set priorities and think systemically as to how the coronavirus affects not just the education system, the health system the economic and social systems — but to think of them in an integrated manner and have a broad strategy to move forward.
Instead, we are led by an emotionally bereft sixth-grader who hates everyone (some groups more than others) and acts with dim perception of who might hurt his feeling the least in the next half-hour. Of how he can avoid the horrible pain of being himself.
It’s like watching someone new play a computer game, crash his racing car into the wall spectacularly, get a new life, and crash again. And again. Except in the real world with real dead people.
NotMax
@Kay
One thing I was attempting to convey is that schools ought not be married to specific policy – and continuing it – simply because “that’s the way we chose to do it now.” Flexibility to react and change course with alacrity as circumstances unfold is vital. Internalizing and accepting that procedures implemented are a treatment, not a pat solution, is vital.
Suzanne
@debbie: That’s a good idea.
Essentially, I think once someone’s worked full-time in this country for (approximately) 25 years, we should thank them for their service to the country and provide full retirement.
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Florida too. Also, be aware that a lot of companies are using tech tools to monitor work at home employees and the tools are really sophisticated. So if people are thinking they can jiggle the baby and conduct the 2nd graders zoom class while pretending to work it isn’t going to go unnoticed.
In the practice where my daughter works they monitored the docs and PA’s who were doing telemedicine and they were sternly warned on the lack of productivity. They were all schooling/juggling while diagnosing – not ideal, probably.
Nicole
Yesterday Twitter lit up with people attacking parents who were complaining about the challenge of parenting in a pandemic, with “YOU CHOSE TO HAVE CHILDREN.” I lightly commented that the kids of today will be paying our Social Security in a few decades and someone retorted NOT HER SHE WAS SAVING HER OWN MONEY. And complained about paying school taxes.
America is frequently such a mean, petty society, and I swear, one of the things that struck me every time I travelled overseas is that other countries really seem to like children a lot more than we do.
This should not be so hard- shovel all the money being sent to corporations to schools instead. We have the money; we just don’t want to use it where it’s needed.
Walker
@RSA: As you may have seen in the news, our (Cornell) leadership has determined that controlled in person is safer than online (with students in the local community). But this is not outside — this was done through the faculty senate (I am a senator).
The big caveat is that we have the resources (through our Vet school) for wide scale and frequent testing. There are also plans for extensive and regular sanitation.
There is still some skepticism here about all this, but we have done a fairly rigorous job of planning. So if we fail, it will fail everywhere.
JPL
When my DIL had two days of meetings, she went into her office and my son had parenting duties on one of the days, and the imp came here the second. No one is in her building so it was as safe as wearing a mask to the grocery store. Son had done something similar.
scuffletuffle
@Nicole: Amen.
sdhays
When “we” decided that we had to have bars open now, NOW, NOOOWWW we ended any possibility of being able to open schools safely in the fall. There shouldn’t be any indoor bars open for the rest of the year. Restaurants – carryout/delivery only until things are under control, and then only outdoor seating.
My god, this fucking country. No wonder John Kerry lost in 2004 – “We’re the can-do country”. No, John, we haven’t been that my entire life.
Kay
@NotMax:
In broad terms, I think the worst thing educators could do is set this up so they’re arguing their work is not essential. That seems like a profoundly bad approach to me, for educators. If you tell people it’s optional and no one is harmed by not having it, don’t blame people when they take you up on that.
germy
@trollhattan:
While their children are quietly terrified.
Chetan Murthy
@Kay: Read that CDC FAQ that @Another Scott: posted. Note
Recall that, indeed, we have evidence from other countries that schools can be operated when the virus is suppressed, but no such evidence when the outbreak is raging. I mean, you talk about people going to work and coming home to their kids, but ignore that all that recent experience led us to this pass, where we’ve blown past every red line and have a raging epidemic nearly-everywhere. I mean, the idea that somehow our experiences give us reason for confidence ….. doesn’t pass the laugh test.
And last, I’ll note that the above quote comes from the CDC, which has been noticeably timorous about telling the truth. If anything, the reality should be mush harsher than what the CDC is recommending. Look to the countries that have squashed the bug; find some that reopened their schools during the worst of the outbreak, and then we can talk about how “we know how to do this safely”.
Kay
@Nicole:
That’s helpful. You don’t have to support children’s programs because you like or have children. You have to support children’s programs because everyone WAS a child and got the benefits of them. Everyone. Did you go to school? Yes? Now it’s time to support one, just like lots of childless people supported yours.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
This. We need to suppress this pandemic before we can safely reopen schools
Brachiator
@RSA:
I was recently listening to an episode of the NPR podcast “Make Me Smart.” NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway predicted that colleges would not re-open. And if cases continue upward, it is less likely that these schools could safely let students and faculty come back.
Professor Galloway thinks that colleges could slash budgets and leverage technology to make college more accessible to more people. This would include remote learning. This might help offset some of the projected losses, and even include foreign students. You still might end up losing some institutions.
Chetan Murthy
@Nicole:
Yes, exactly. And this is what John said in the OP, too. You’re a parent? cool! Your kids are an investment we all make, so that they can fund our retirements N years from now. We want your kids to be productive. We also don’t want parents, uncles, grandparents, and respect elders to die. It’s a generational thing.
Parents: you’re angry and frustrated. Don’t kick down (at teachers). Kick up at the bastards who won’t make it possible for you to telework and care for your children simultaneously. Get your legislators and cities to pass laws protecting parents. Get the government to increase transfer payments to parents.
But don’t condemn your children’s teachers to death and maiming.
Another Scott
@debbie:
(In reference to a FTFNYT story: )
(via LOLGOP)
Cheers,
Scott.
MomSense
I say this as a former teacher who was reduced to a budget of $0 per student and a fucking cart with supplies I paid for myself, the schools will not be able to open safely. This virus is more contagious and increasingly affecting young people. Do not open the schools. They will not get the budget they need to do it safely and the proposals on the table now are a fucking joke.
Make people call oui sick citing child care. Make employers cough up some fucking money – real money – if they want their employees to return to work. Only a crisis will do it.
Kay
@Chetan Murthy:
I would support rolling closures. I’m open. What I’m not open to is “nothing can done”. But it really doesn’t matter what I’m open to. My kid is 17 and I work 3 miles from my house. IMO, the “nothing can be done” position is politically untenable and educationally untenable and practically untenable and won’t happen.
Governor DeWine announced Ohio schools will open yesterday. They won’t all open completely, but what he’s doing is pressuring them to get cracking and figure out the safest way they can do this, because he knows it has to happen.
I’m lobbying for funding. I’m a long time public school funding pain in the ass. I know they need it.
patrick II
It’s ambiguous. Some doctors in Europe think so and our lethality numbers have not been climbing as fast relative to infections as earlier, but it may just be better treatment, different age groups are being infected now, and more tests. From the WP.
And I am not optimistic. I am avoiding unnecessary personal contacts for the foreseeable future.
Nicole
Which is why it makes crazy when municipalities excuse seniors from paying school taxes. IT’S NOT ABOUT WHETHER YOU HAVE KIDS IN SCHOOL RIGHT NOW.
It’s so frustrating, because this pandemic, while being horrible, is also an opportunity to rethink work and schooling, but Americans are so inclined to be punitive that we can’t get our brains away from a world where both parents are working 8 or 9 hours away from home every weekday.
A friend of mine is a teacher, and while she fully supports in-person schooling (the socialization cannot be replicated online), she also says 7 hours in a school is not the most efficient (or effective) way to teach kids; we do it that way because parents need at least 7 hours of daycare (and more, really).
But we live in a society that has decided the most valuable thing in our society is the stock market, and so the majority of government actions must be directed towards the health of the stock market, to the point of actually harming the economy. It’s astounding, the number of people I’ve talked to who have NO IDEA that food stamps are one of the best economic stimuli available.
Walker
@Brachiator: The vast majority of the budget is salaries and fixed costs on buildings that are not going anywhere. The only way “leveraging technology” means cheaper is either (1) eliminating jobs and (2) increasing class sizes. And the classes that can be increased with technology are already large enough as it is. In the fall, I teach an intro class with 1000 students.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Jared’s on it.
//
Cheryl Rofer
I would not draw that conclusion. I realize it’s an easy one to draw, but nothing about this virus has been obvious, so it’s better to stay agnostic.
Its prevalence is becoming greater than the other variant. I’ll stick with that for now.
satby
@MomSense: Agreed. And as far as the security theater of entrance door temperature checks:
JPL
Brian Kemp’s rallying cry is if you want college football this year, wear a mask. Schools opening though y’all.
trollhattan
@Kay:
When we lived in Seattle they had a school levy election every year. When I was kinder age it failed and my parents had to pay out of pocket to send me to kindergarten.
What a great system that was.
Fair Economist
@debbie: That article is being alarmist. The D614G mutant is more infectious but it’s not a huge difference, and immunity is fully cross reactive. It’s not mysterious either, it’s just a point mutation and probably happened in Europe.
Chetan Murthy
@satby: Here’s another: https://www.france24.com/en/20200530-covid-19-german-high-school-tests-students-twice-a-week
In Germany, where they have the bug suppressed, they test schoolkids twice a week. This is the sort of thing you have to do, to make school safe. And again: it’s (maybe) enough in Germany, where the bug is *suppressed*. If it were a raging epidemic there, even this wouldn’t be enough. Because the test isn’t perfect, there’s a lag between getting infected and testing positive, and people can be contagious during some of that lag.
Flame-resistant pajamas are great. But not during a wildfire.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
I’ve felt for awhile that DeWimp has been caving to pressure to reopen, even if it wasn’t safe to do so. I’ll never forgive him for not making face masks mandatory in public. Now that spikes are starting to happen, I doubt he’s going to shut anything down again. In fact, I truly wonder what the circumstances were surrounding Acton resigning. Maybe DeWimp forced her out? He sure didn’t seem to go out of his way to defend her
FlyingToaster
Granted, WarriorGirl goes to private school. But we’re under the same rules as everyone else; guidance is straight from the Commonwealth’s dept of Ed. (Massachusetts)
It looks very likely that all preschools and early grades will be back to something like normal. The preschool WG attended is definitely on for 5 days a week.
Right now, our plans are all “up to Thanksgiving”.
For us, PK-K-1 will be in 4-5 days a week.
Because her school does a lot of 2-grade team teaching, it’s looking like 2-3 will be in 2 days a week, 4-5 will be in a different two days, and each two classes will use all four classrooms, plus the hallway breakout nooks, to get enough between-space and low enough concentration.
Middle School, however, is a fucking nightmare. None of the state guidance allows for changing classrooms; they want everyone to stay in the same bubble and have teachers move. Our joint is still working on at least once a week in-school per grade for specialist classes (art, instrumental music, science lab, PE; all the courses that suffered being remote), but they’re still facing a hybrid model because the middle school has 3 classrooms, a multipurpose area and a library nook. There’s simply no way to space out 50 kids plus teaching staff at the same time; 15 or so kids at a time is safe, 50 just ain’t.
The Watertown Public Schools are in the same bind; the grade schools (PK-5) look doable, the middle and high schools look catastrophic.
This is not even a (specifically) money problem; it’s a “here’s the volume of space, here’s the number of people safe with the airflow you’ve got.” Short of turning our converted warehouse into a wind tunnel, there’s no way to put that many people into that small a space and not turn into “closing for 14 days a month to control COVID breakout” models. You either need more buildings and staff, or you cannot possibly run full schedules. South Korea and the repeated “in-person” then “remote” then “in-person” cycles are the model we’re now facing.
Note: our Bars won’t be opening until 2021. Our restaurants have a limited opening, and retail is open with SEVERELY limited numbers of people in store. Although the state says they can open, none of the museums we belong to will open before Labor Day (they announced this 1 May, because they’re staffed by scientists and curators and people who aren’t fucking idiots).
The Unis are our nightmare; Boston normally has 600K students coming in around Labor Day. I’m suspecting that’ll be about half in-person, half remote, and a likely switch of the two groups come January. That’s our guaranteed 2nd Wave, about which Fuck All can be done.
Nicole
But I guess, the refusal to actually look at what is needed to open schools safely is unsurprising in a country where the Washington Redskins still feel the need to “review” the team name rather than just change it and be done with the whole thing. And that’s an EASY thing to do.
America: In the Sunk Cost Fallacy We Trust.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: We can’t wait for firm scientific evidence with COVID. If we did, docs wouldn’t have started putting their patients on their stomachs, of made the switch from traditional ventilators to high flow oxygen.
Cheryl Rofer
joel hanes wins the comments on the variant strain. I am going to repeat his comment, because others are getting it wrong.
His bottom line is the bottom line. Just, please, be very careful in interpreting scientific papers and preprints.
Fair Economist
@satby: Temp checks would be security theatre for a hospital or nursing home, but for public health a 30 percent reduction in transmission is great.
RSA
@Walker: You’ve reminded me of another issue that’s sometimes raised, policies based on what we know, in particular scientific results. It sounds as though Cornell is developing a good plan, given all the uncertainties. Good luck.
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: Corrections gratefully accepted!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
Just like Peace in the Middle East!
A slogan worthy of Prince Jared!
Cheryl Rofer
Please do not do tea leaf reading on scientific papers and preprints. There’s a lot to figure out, and one paper isn’t going to give the answer.
Hoodie
@MomSense: This. We live in a relatively affluent area and the plan the county just published has kids staying home every other day anyway, which won’t provide parents with that much help with the childcare issue. Before the pandemic, we didn’t have enough funding to properly maintain and clean the schools, and my wife constantly had to buy supplies that the system could not afford to provide. The skinflints in our GOP-controlled leg are not going to begin miraculously providing funding for teacher PPE and better cleaning, much less the additional expenditures for added bus miles due to limiting buses to one child per seat (as if the driver can keep that enforced anyway). They just want to kick people off of UI, goose the stock market and/or reward donors in the travel/hospitality industries. The same morons are repeatedly passing bills that require opening bars and gyms that the governor has repeatedly vetoed. Opening the schools will not work with a bunch of assholes like this running the show.
WaterGirl
@patrick II: 4th grade, max.
Brachiator
@sdhays:
Bars and restaurants became the only game in town. They were the only social space available to people. You can’t go to the movies. You can’t go to a college, pro or even little league baseball game. You can’t even go to the beach.
And bars are just one part of the problem. Many cases are related to community spread, where friends and family get together, but don’t wear masks or observe social distancing and have parties, picnics and informal get-togethers. Children and younger adults who may be infected, but asymptomatic help spread the virus more effectively among the group. In one recent sad case, a person who was ill and part of a family group spread it to a number of people, including one man who died, and whose father became seriously ill.
People cannot remain on lockdown for an indeterminate period of time. But we have to figure out ways of managing social spaces better. Even the countries that dealt with their lockdowns better than the US are having to deal with outbreaks as they cautiously re-open. We need to watch and learn from them.
Nicole
A friend’s son is going to Vassar in the fall, and he told me the college is planning on testing all the arriving students, and those that test negative get to go on campus, where they will stay, without being permitted to leave or have visitors, until Thanksgiving, when they’ll all go home and finish the rest of the semester remotely. I assume then they do the same thing in January, ending on-campus instruction at spring break. I wonder what they do about dining hall employees, maintenance, professors with families, etc, though.
My son’s school hasn’t settled on the plan for next year, but his best friend’s (middle) school is splitting the week into two in-person days (5th and 6th grade Mon-Tues and 7th and 8th Thurs-Fri), two remote days, and the remaining Wednesday either remote or in-person for the kids who need more in-person instruction. Which is going to be a huge challenge for working parents.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Guess it wasn’t glaringly obvious enough I was referring to analysis of the structure, vitality of transmission and robustness of viral strains, not to treatment for infection.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
DeWimp is a moral abscess, just waiting to be punctured and drained. He fucked up, and knows that his only political chance lies with pulling the economy out of the ditch. So his calculus goes like this:
X-axis: (1) pandemic peters out, (2) pandemic doesn’t peter out
Y-axi: (a) I reopen the economy, (b) I don’t reopen the economy
(1,a): economy revs up, I win big! Huzzah!
(1.b): economy sputters, I lose big. Sad!
(2.a): Lives burnt like kindling, economy sputters (b/c pandemic). I lose big. Sad (for me)!
(2.b): We limit loss of life, but economy sputters. I lose big. Sad (for me)!
Obviously, a moral monster would choose plan (a), b/c outcome (1.a) is great! Great! And who caresa bout outcome (2.a) where people die like kindling? Because they’re just common people, who cares about them!
West of the Rockies
I thought I heard a couple weeks ago that if everybody wore masks for just two weeks, with only essential work being done (no damn family gatherings or bar-hopping or Petri Dish of the Ozarks swim fests), we would knock the virus on its ass. I suppose two weeks of staycation is just too hard for some idiots and selfish, spoiled a-holes.
WaterGirl
@MomSense:
THIS.
NotMax
@NotMax
Or better, what Cheryl said above at #169.
Sure Lurkalot
@Kay: This country hasn’t repaired its infrastructure in decades. The government could not and still cannot adequately provide PPE to HCWs, much less the general public. So I don’t see how we are going to upgrade HVAC systems in all our schools in the next 6-8 weeks or insure that school staffs have a steady supply of PPE.
I am retired and childless. I have the utmost empathy for the conundrum this puts parents in as well as the kids whose lives have been upended by astonishing incompetence and malevolence.
sdhays
@Kay: The problem, as I see it, is not with the desire to reopen schools. It’s with the pathological resistance of significant parts of the government and society at large with bearing ANY of the considerable burdens required to make that workable. You can have the best controls in the schools, but if the rest of society is staggering around screaming about the tyranny of not being able to breath on a hundred other people at a fucking bar and having to wear a mask in public, then it’s not going to work.
The plan for reopening schools is bigger than what’s under the control of individual school districts. I would submit, those parts that are not under the control of school districts are the more important parts, and our track record so far is abysmal.
Gvg
@Kay: Not responsive is my definition of the GOP. None of your ideas can work IMO because they need Federal funds, and McConnel won’t budge. He didn’t budge when he should have in all the debt standoff clashes and he has just dug in. I don’t know why his party hasn’t voted him out as majority leader, but they only have one trick, no negotiation, no compromise. My opinion that the schools can’t reopen is based on the view, that they won’t do any of the things that can make it possible. The country is just hunkering down and trying to survive until we can vote them all out. There is nothing else to do. Afterwards, we will have to try to rebuild the crashed results. Try to have as few dead until then. School years can be repeated. I know this is bad. It should make us bad. But I think schools reopening for longer than 2 weeks is a fantasy.
Brachiator
@Walker:
The Make Me Smart episode might be worth a listen. The professor had ideas about cutting costs.
But some buildings could be sold. And with remote learning, you can possibly increase class size.
Another Scott
@West of the Rockies: Marin Independent (from June 6):
(Emphasis added.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Gvg:
This. This. I know it’s hard with children, elderly parents, jobs, etc. But try not to act in a way that will kill other people.
Hoodie
@Brachiator:
Indeterminate does a lot of work in that sentence. How about determinate being “as soon as Rt is sustained below x for y weeks?” WTF is wrong with this country? People had to endure rationing until Germany and Japan were defeated, but we can’t even seem to find the will to enforce the weak tea of CDC guidance. Other countries seem to be able to get this concept. A big part of leadership is inspiring people to do what they don’t want to do, and fatalism that just passively accepts people’s weaker impulses is not helping.
We know pretty damn well that it is nearly impossible to significantly impede spread associated with indoor dining. Bars are probably worse. Neither is essential. Sure, people can get infected at family gatherings, but that’s no reason to not shut down bars and restaurants. It’s harder to police informal gatherings, but it’s not impossible to make a dent in egregious ones, like the stupid frat parties at U of Alabama where people were deliberately trying to get sick. Throw people in jail for that kind of shit.
Kay
@Gvg:
I disagree. This is a negotiation and we’re holding all the cards. Schools will get the money. Trump is so confident they’ll get the money he announced yesterday that some of the low quality hires in his employ are planning to take 10% and give it to private schools.
We have the nation’s employers held hostage :)
They can’t work with their kids out of school! I watched this in action. We were always “essential” and it’s a small office and we have one incredibly valuable employee and she came in. Half time, but she came in. She spent 5 of 15 hours juggling her kids using her cell phone. Also- she has a special needs 6th grader who is now completely adrift. He learned nothing at all online. This isn’t going to work. It’s harming parents and it’s harming kids and it’s harming employers. They’ll cough up the money.
Another Scott
@Hoodie:
Didn’t happen.
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-parties-are-not-a-thing/
HTH.
[eta:] Otherwise +eleventy-billion. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chyron HR
@Brachiator:
As always, the point was not to go into lockdown for the rest of human history, the point was to lock things down long enough for the US government to get the pandemic under control the way that every first world country did. The fact the US government is run by an syphilitic neo-nazi who imagines he’s implementing Aktion T4 does not entitle you to go cough on the servers at Twin Peaks regardless of how bored you are at home.
Hoodie
@Another Scott: Stand corrected, but the point is that you can police overly large gatherings. Of course, it would help to have president that doesn’t hold vanity rallies with no social distancing.
debbie
@Another Scott:
Partnership, not dictatorship.
Also, most companies can keep going without their figurehead/CEO, but never without their workers. Employers should never forget that.
Brachiator
@West of the Rockies:
Interesting guess, but no one can guarantee this. California did relatively well with it’s lockdown, and yet flare-ups happened as soon as things were opened up.
Among other things, we need a more effective testing regime. We also need to test more in places that open up, as well as test and track individual people.
There was a recent outbreak at the LA Apparel company, at three locations, possibly related to workers being too close together despite guidelines and other efforts. Five people tested positive at one location, and 65 and 67 people at two other locations. And these people could have spread the virus to others.
bemused senior
@Kay: the idea that 8 weeks ( or in my teacher daughter’s case 5 weeks) is enough time to get funding, find contractors or supply sources, establish a totally different schedule and routine for schools is absurd. I support vigorously attacking the tasks, but not pretending that it can be done before this year’s school year begins. My God, we can’t reliably get PPE for hospitals, much less teachers.
scav
@WaterGirl: There was no firm scientific evidence that traditional ventilator usage was the treatment if choice for this disease — it was an assumption, a working hypothesis, evidence accumulated and treatments changed on the basis of it, It wouldn’t be that surprising for still more evidence to accumulate and the exact instances when ventilators are the preferred treatment option could be identified.
Another Scott
(Points to U of Washington press release.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Tim C.
@trollhattan: I’m not so sure. My experience with that community is that they are *VERY* anti-science. Many of them are parts of hyper-conservative religious denominations that view their “right” to gather in their small churches shoulder-to-shoulder as being essential. Likewise, most of that community doesn’t so much home-school their kids so much as “home” them.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
*What* lockdown? Kids were still partying, neighbors still having backyard parties, etc. There was no enforcement. I mean, c’mon! The police in Italy and France were handing out tickets to people without documentation for why their trips were necessary. Here? *crickets*. As someone pointed out a few months ago, you could *still* drive from LA to NYC. That’s not a lockdown.
And yeah, California is burning again. Could it be because down in SoCal they’ve been having mass demonstrations against mask-wearing? Idiots. Even here in NorCal, the FUCKING CHURCHES have been having masses with more than 12 people at a time. And kids breaking all the distancing rules. And on and on. Even the Italians are better at obeying public health decrees than we are. Even the Italians.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
“Moral abscess”. Perfect way to describe him! He puts on a good act for those briefings though!
debbie
@Fair Economist:
If you think that’s alarmist, take a look at this:
John Cole
@Kay: I don’t know why people think I WANT schools to be closed. I don’t. I want schools to be open. But the virus doesn’t give a shit about politics, it doesn’t give a shit about parents, it doesn’t give a shit about any of this stuff. If we are getting 100k new infections a day it doesn’t matter how much money or how many HVAC systems we install, it’s not going to be safe.
Walker
@Brachiator: Sell the buildings to whom? NYU builds are fungible in the large context of NYC real estate. That is not true for college campuses in general.
And you cannot further increase class size beyond what it already is without degrading instruction. To handle a 1000 person class I have 100 TAs. Quality control of those TAs (much less hiring that many talented students) is a major challenge in its own right.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@debbie:
Eh, that reads as pretty sober to me.
Felanius Kootea
@Another Scott: There’s going to have to be federal funding for public schools. Republicans definitely need to be voted out – they are worse than useless in a crisis because they repeatedly take actions that cause more long-term harm.
debbie
@Chetan Murthy:
His fuck-up was letting go of Amy Acton to appease the mad dogs of his political party.
Kay
@bemused senior:
Well, they’ve been planning and unless I’m misreading it they’re planning with the assumption of federal funding. Schools are local so they’re really fragmented, but Americans are in love with “local schools” although in a lot of ways it would be better with more standardization but people fucking hate when I say that so I gave up a long time ago. The point of public schools is to serve the masses. That’s what they’re for. Everybody has to compromise, because we got all kinds of kids and all kinds of families and we do volume. They’re not hand-crafted and experimental for a reason. That’s for private schools. I actually think the “compromise” part of public schools is a strength for students. It’s not a bad thing to learn, how to operate in an imperfect system where sometimes other peoples needs come before your wants.
But Americans love the sentimental notion of “Ohio schools” (like that’s a real thing) so I gave up on national. But it would be easier in a pandemic.
Rick Taylor
Kevin Drum makes a case for re-opening schools. He says that some studies have shown they do not have a large impact on the spread of Covid.
Yet another study says school closures have no impact on covid 19
What’s the deal with school re-openings?
Another look at reopening schools
WereBear
@S. Cerevisiae:
I guess they are reveling in saying the quiet parts out loud.
NotMax
@Walker
MexicoChina will pay for them.//
Brachiator
@Chyron HR:
Sweden and the UK, among other countries, fucked things up. And UK prime minister Boris Johnson seems to be competing with Trump for stupidity and incompetence.
I sing California Governor Newsom’s name to the heavens and have nothing but respect for the local leaders and health authorities who continue to do a hell of a job in dealing with this pandemic.
And unfortunately the states are still going to have to find a way to work around a federal government that is both incompetent and hostile to most rational efforts to deal with the pandemic.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
Funny you should mention that. I was talking with my uncle (late 60s) at Christmas about education/schools. Can’t remember the exact details, but I remember suggesting looking at what other countries do. The first word out of his mouth? “Why”? You’re right when you say you can’t win with a lot of people. Hell, Common Core got demonized and it’s an interstate compact
Chetan Murthy
@debbie: Y’know, I want to blame DeWine as if he’s uniquely responsible. But he’s not. Look at Newsom: he relaxed things when professionals like Sara Cody were screaming “No you fool! Slow down and do it carefully! You fool!” OK, she wasn’t screaming, but that was the content of her column discussing Newsom’s “reopening” plans. And voila, it came to pass that she was right. I’m sure she wasn’t happy about that.
Re: school funding: yeah, I can see Yertle passing sufficient school funding to allow schools to properly reopen. Sure, and I can see getting a pony for my birthday. And even if they pass that funding, they don’t have the time to rehab the facilities with enough HVAC to make it safe.
Necessity isn’t always the mother of invention. Sometimes, necessity is just the warning of unavoidable catastrophe.
Kay
@John Cole:
I think you are going to have a hard time selling that to parents who are trotting off to their own unsafe workplaces.
You’ve been out. Have you seen a single business actually using social distancing? I mean, they’re going to ASK, John, those parents. And they have a point. It’s ludicrous. We’re telling people who are taking this same risk every day that the one thing they NEED and their children NEED is off the table, while they’re heading off to deliver groceries.
The same people who are telling me we will “never” get money for school are telling me the solution is to guarantee income for 100 million parents, indefinitely, and provide one on one tutoring or whatever. Okay, which is more likely to pass the senate?
Hoodie
@bemused senior: Exactly. Throw all these open up plans into the dumpster and start again with another lockdown, this time one hopefully more coordinated than the clusterfuck we executed the first time. We do know a lot more now, but we have a fire that needs to extinguished first. We know how long that should take — look at the curves for the EU. Extend UI and delay schools opening until after the numbers are consistent with what we’re seeing in Asia and Europe. Hell, Trump might even be less of an impediment because I think he’s about given up and even fewer people will care what he says. We have polls here in NC where even Republicans are saying things are too lax.
Patricia Kayden
trollhattan
@Tim C.:
Definitely an anti-science anti-gummint bias and also very confident in their own superiority. They’ll happily watch the virus take its toll from their bunkers and revel in their endless supply of TP and ammo. Betsy DeVoss will make sure they get some ed-you-cation money because reasons.
They will also not get the vaccine, should one eventually be offered.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
California did relatively well with it’s lockdown, and yet flare-ups happened as soon as things were opened up.
Despite everything you rightfully note, cases, hospitalizations and deaths declined during the California lockdown. Same is true of New York and other states.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
Those problems are a result of the bad policies of employers. They need to be pressured to do better and required to by areas Democrats control.
That’s too bad. The virus doesn’t care. If we send kids back to schools that aren’t designed for social distancing before the pandemic is brought under control first it will end in disaster. We can’t even do sports practices without some players testing positive
It’s not we’re not sympathetic Kay. Just sending everybody back isn’t a solution as much as indefinitely locking down isn’t either. Think about parents and grandparents potentially getting ill and dying. Or hell, even the children. They’re not totally immune. Some have been hospitalized after having inflammatory immune reactions to the virus. It’s rare, but imagine millions of kids being infected in a short amount of time. Even 1% (or whatever percentage of children will have this condition) can add up to a lot
Hoodie
@Kay: It may be easier to pass UI than school funding because they’ll look at the latter as a new “entitlement” that will live on past the virus, while UI will go away. They’ll pass some funding, but it will be inadequate and no amount of funding will solve the fundamental problem that school involves concentrating people in poorly ventilated spaces for several hours at a time. It would take years to renovate schools to provide a better environment, and that might not even work.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I actually went thru Common Core because I am an obsessive and I was a big fan.
People are ridiculous. Massachusetts has the best public schools in the country, broadly, year over year. You tell me I’m getting their program I’m thrilled. There is no “Ohio algebra”. WTF with these idiots. Don’t reinvent the wheel! I’m fine with comparing my kid with a NY kid, or a DC kid or a CA kid. None of my kids stay in Ohio anyway. It’s going to happen sooner or later.
I thought it was kind of cool. My youngest learned math that way and he flies. It’s different than how I do it, but who cares? They spent an entire semester on a long poem in one of his CC-compliant classes. That NEVER happened in my public school.
Chetan Murthy
@Kay:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-child-care-centers-stay-in-business-15210522.php
In the Bay Area (as in many advanced countries), schools -are- open, but only for children of essential workers. TODAY. TODAY. Is this what you envision? Because it isn’t what most people mean, by “reopen the schools”. This is uncontroversial. This is wise.
NotMax
@West of the Rockies
Been done in Hawaii for 6 weeks (or is it 8? or 10? one loses track) and people have been very good about keeping to it, plus enforcement has been vigorous. Masks still remain mandatory for entrance anyplace. And no sooner was the door to ‘reopening’ pulled ajar a crack than it got up off its ass.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
And what’s maddening about CC is that it has had a lot of educator input. NCLB never had that and is a big reason why it failed
Brachiator
@Rick Taylor:
How could he know this when some countries are only beginning to open their schools?
joel hanes
@debbie:
Hasn’t jumped to humans.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
In CA they never declined enough to *lift* that lockdown. And yet, lift it Newsom did, eh? He was a follower -into- the lockdown, but he sure as hell was a leader coming out. If he’d only -kept- following the public health directors in the Bay Area, maybe we’d actually be coming out around now, with the damn Rona actually suppressed. So sure, maybe it was -a- lockdown, but it wasn’t a *sufficient lockdown*.
Again: it’s easy to know when a lockdown has worked: it’s when you’ve *suppressed* the outbreak. Your public health directors can tell you when that is, based on case statistics and surveillance testing. So no, we didn’t have a sufficient lockdown here in the Bay Area. And hell, SoCal, as I noted before, is a *charnel house*.
Kay
@Hoodie:
We think we can mitigate some of that by using common spaces. But we’re in better shape than a lot of schools because we have a brand new facility. We actually have a public preschool and we built for that- that might have to be suspended so we can use the rooms. It’s a shame. People love it.
I don’t like the plans that keep teenagers at home. In my experience they need contact more than anyone. My 17 year old (admittedly a committed extrovert) was really flagging. I was worried about him and he’s an easy going person. Just blank, you know? All the life went out of him.
I asked his 7th grade teacher what he seemed to be interested in, meaning academically and he laughed and said “other people. That’s what he’s interested in” True, too.
John Cole
@Kay:
I don’t think *EITHER* is going to pass, but that still does not change the fact that I think it is insane we’re charging forward with re-opening schools.
Another Scott
@Rick Taylor: Drum loves being a contrarian. While he’s often right, he’s often too glib. I think he’s too glib here.
E.g. your first link, to the Nature paper. They note that many of the measures took place at the same time (schools closed along with businesses, social distancing rules, etc.). Yes, there doesn’t seem to be a big effect in the US closing of schools, but look at the error bar and look at Italy in Extended Data Figure 5 – pretty big effect there.
It looks like they tried to tease out factors that were in place simultaneously, but there’s (educated) guesswork.
It’s clear that lockdowns & school closings & social distancing & … all together cut the infection rate. Drum saying that “school closings makes things worse” based on such noisy, co-mingled, data seems risky to me.
YMMV.
Cheers,
Scott.
bemused senior
@Kay: There can be no federal funding till it is appropriated. Then it has to be disbursed. Then the states have to decide how districts get the bucks, and the districts have to decide how to spend it. Then the contracts have to be let, the work done or the goods delivered. This doesn’t happen in 5 weeks. My daughter’s district is at the planning stage of putting out a straw poll to teachers of “do you want to teach on site or virtually” (with a theory that on-site classes will be split in two). No word as to how the extra teachers needed for virtual teaching vs. on-site will be obtained (in 5 weeks). Many teachers (10 to 20%) are opting for early retirement/quitting rather than being forced to work when they or someone in their household is in a high risk .
FlyingToaster
@Kay:
Enforcement works, if you can be bothered to enforce at all.
All of our businesses are requiring masks and distancing, even Home Despot. I saw the manager of the Allston Star Market call the cops on a woman who refused to either mask, give him her shopping list, or leave the premises. (Granted, elderly Karen was cursing a blue streak about her privacy, to which he yelled “nobody cares if we fetch you Depends, bitch!”.)
Massachusetts has a Republican governor. But Charlie Baker used to be the CEO of BlueCrossBlueShieldMA, so he’s not fucking around. We still have 4 hosptials with full-up ICUs, our testing capacity has fallen (goddammit), and it’s incumbent upon us to not fuck it up.
Here in Watertown, we have 2 malls. There are stores still not open because they can’t figure out how to comply with the guidelines; our municpal Health Department inspects before they allow anyone to reopen. The brand new movie theater and (next door) brew pub are desperate to finally open. But they both know that this won’t happen quite yet.
When one town on the Cape voted not to enforce, a bar which opened was then shut down first by the Alcoholic Beverages Commission; then cited by their Health Department. Yarmouth’s been informed that the State Police will be serving warrants for the foreseeable future.
If your state will not enforce its own guidelines, you can go ahead and open schools in September. They’ll just be closed by October.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The NPR European correspondent (Sylvia Poggioli/sp?) said something like, the Italians tend to be rather joyfully anarchic, but they don’t want to die from it.
Hoodie
@John Cole: Reopening schools under these conditions is doubling down on an already failed policy. You can’t open anything except stuff that involves minimal contacts until you can trace contacts and quarantine people, and even then it’s a challenge. What’s so stupid about this debate is that we already know what works, we just refuse to do it. Churchill commented that the US finally does the right thing after exhausting all other options, but this time I’m not sure we’ll ever do the right thing and we’ll just let half a million or more die and damage the health of hundreds of thousands more before a vaccine arrives.
Miss Bianca
@John Cole: John, just out of curiosity, what’s the plan for your college? Are you supposed to be doing ftf classes with your students come fall?
Chetan Murthy
@Hoodie:
I’m with @Gvg: on this: try to minimize the deaths, and wait for President Biden. Remember that EVERY OTHER ADVANCED COUNTRY (except sweden! except sweden!) has knocked this thing on its ass. Every other advanced country. If this were a test, everybody else got A-/A/A+, and we got a D-. That means the fault is in us, not in the test. And that it’s not a hard test to pass, if we just would buckle down and study. It means (returning from the metaphor) that it doesn’t need brilliant government: merely *competent* government is enough.
Elect Biden! Competent is enough to save us! Elect Biden!
In the meantime, minimize the deaths.
P.S. And then sure, it’ll take months and months to get it suppressed. But at least, we know it can be done, and that lots of countries can show us how.
jonas
Schools need to reopen this fall and here’s why: if they don’t, what do you think desperate parents are going to do? Well, the rich ones will hire a tutor or something to give the kids a private education in the entertainment annex of the house while mom and dad work at whatever white-collar jobs they have. Poor and working class parents will either 1. leave kids home alone, where they can get in trouble *and* won’t be receiving any education, or, 2. if they don’t have a parent or relative willing to babysit, seek out underground, unregulated daycare arrangements or coparenting arrangements with a bunch of other families who can’t really afford much and where there probably won’t be *any* preventative measures and kids won’t learn anything. This will be devastating for educational progress and it will impact poor POC the most, of course. I’d rather see schools back in session with some modicum of PPE and distancing practices, even if they’re not perfect. Biden had better make rolling out a comprehensive policy on helping states do this a major part of his campaign and get Congressional Dems to sign on to it and run on it as well.
Chetan Murthy
@jonas: As I noted above, SF (and Germany, I think the UK, probably other advanced countries) reopened schools (or kept them open) during the pandemic, but *only* for children of essential workers. Until the pandemic is suppressed, that’s the safest course.
Ruckus
@azlib:
What are you trying to say, that magical thinking is bad?
That magical thinking doesn’t work?
I mean what kind of presidency would we be having now if not for magical thinking? Or is that mystical thinking, or mistaken thinking, or metaphysical thinking, or just totally not thinking at all….
RSA
Worth reading the comment thread for this line alone. Rude but… I laughed.
Citizen Alan
@artem1s: I agree with you about football. But I was a HS band director before I left for law school. And it is heartbreaking to me to think that a profession I once loved may cease to exist. Because if it’s too dangerous to have football practice outdoors, then it’s way too dangerous to have 80 kids in a single room blowing air through musical instruments as hard as they can.
JPL
Fulton County Schools will give families the choice to either send their children to school or to learn online at home.
…….
Staff will be given two reusable masks and will be required to wear them. Students who ride the bus are expected to wear a face covering and will be strongly encouraged — but not mandated — to wear them in school.
ah I see the problem… There is a petition to make masks mandatory both at school and on buses.
Hoodie
@bemused senior: Yeah, the sentiment is in the right place, but the schools have never been the best place to fix our social ills, much less to deal with an exigent crisis like this. It is far easier and quicker to disburse Fed funds to UI, PPP and similar things, particularly if we do a lockdown that we actually stick to. I have more faith in improved treatments and a possible vaccine than I do in being able to overcome basic physics and the inertia of the construction process. There is also going to be a point where our health care workers are going to say “fuck it, I’m not doing this any longer.” Don’t add teachers to that list. Sure, we might be able to do some limited programs for particularly at risk kids, but we really can’t base policy on whether some average 7th grader is feeling alienated because they can’t see their friends.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
Actually, it’s not. But good imagery.
Now that Newsom is backpedaling on opening up, do health authorities think this will make a difference?
You referred to Sara Cody. I don’t know much about her. But I see that she is taking heat, as was the case with the Orange County health official. In addition to advising Santa Clara county, was she also advising the governor?
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy:
How many states had lockdown before California did so the weekend of March 14-15, and how many states have been slower than California to ease restrictions?
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Does it spread easier and if so how?
Or is it being spread more readily because so many people are ignorant fucks and the virus is smarter than they are?
Redshift
My county released their plan for school in the fall last week, a mix of remote and in-person, with only part of the students in on any day. Parents can choose entirely remote (which is of course another inequity against lower-income parents who can’t homeschool or have child care.)
Teachers (whose leadership was involved in the process) are basically in open revolt, recognizing that while the plan provides some protection for students, it provides little for staff, despite lip service in that direction. Teachers get a choice of whether to teach online or in person, and there are calls for all teachers to choose online-only.
My brother is an in-school social worker, and also has asthma and isn’t young. He’s thinking of taking a year off (they have a program that allows that) and he’s far from the only one.
Hoodie
@Chetan Murthy: That is what is so maddening. So many Americans are just pig-headed and too proud to admit they were shown up by a bunch of “shithole” countries. So we’ll concoct elaborate rationales involving our special need for self-expression, yada yada, instead of doing what is as clear as the nose on your face. Trump’s narcissism really is a reflection of a larger psychology at work in the country.
pamelabrown53
@Kay:
Your comments for me are invaluable. They so often cut to the chase and deal with reality and allow me to emotionally distance (somewhat).
Your willingness to jump in and discuss this issue expands the conversation. I deeply appreciate you: you’re one of my most valued commenters.
BTW, my Biden yard sign is rocking. Will give more context on an open thread.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: Ours began in Colorado on March 16, iirc.
PIGL
Kay, The problem is that your government will force the schools to “show up for you” and Actively prevent you from “Showing up for them”. How would that work exactly? Other than by large infusions of tax dollars that the states don’t have and wouldn’t allocate if they could.
Redshift
@JPL: Yeah, our schools also had a “staff must wear masks, students will be encouraged to.” That drew a lot of flack during the community forums, but I don’t know if it’s been changed. The reasoning was clearly “it’s going to be really hard to get students to do it,” but come on, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder if you don’t make it mandatory, just like it makes it harder for businesses to enforce it if you leave it up to them. Don’t expel kids for not wearing them, but make it clear that it’s required.
However, this may all be moot because the statewide requirement for masks in all businesses and public buildings will likely still be in effect.
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: A few things.
CA was the first state to lock down, so I’m not sure how that makes Newsom a follower.
He only accepted opening things when Trump made it clear that was the national strategy and it was becoming clear that the political winds were tilting in favor of reopening. To his credit he established a pretty decent framework that helped keep places closed a bit longer. He should have resisted that, but California can’t resist everything – he yielded and then when the winds started blowing back the other way, he clamped down hard again. The statewide mask ordinance came up pretty fast when the county ones started to fall. OC had one day of no mask ordinance, after our public health official was forced out, the new guy dropped the ordinance, and then Newsom put it back in place.
SoCal has been doing relatively okay. Not great my any measure, but we never spiked like NYC did, we’ve been in this slow burn the whole way. We got our Reff to about 1 and just kept it there, and now it’s creeping up. The problem areas are inland – Riverside, SB, where numbers are starting to get worrying.
Yes, we’ve had more fatalities, but we have WAY more people. Our infection rates per capita are still lower than most of the country.
I wouldn’t say it’s been great, but it’s not been terrible. Without a national strategy, the best I think we can hope for is a Reff that keeps the hospitals from getting overloaded.
A Librarian
Just de-lurking to weigh-in for a moment.
I’m a public school teacher in NYC. So far, the messaging from our union has been that either HEROES passes, or we stay in a remote learning situation. We’ve had teachers die here from COVID-19 — anecdotally, a couple of my co-workers were confirmed to have had it during those first few weeks in March, when there was a refusal on the part of the NYCDOE to shut down schools, and one will be on an inhaler for the foreseeable future because of it — so having funding for PPE, for hiring additional health support staff, and the like is vital to re-opening schools in any capacity.
But the biggest reason why it will be a challenge for us? Space. We’re one of the largest school systems in the entire country, and overcrowding is practically a way of life; even in elementary schools, it’s going to be nearly impossible to implement the CDC guidelines without having to rent out other buildings or switching to an alternating-remote schedule. (As it stands, there was even talk of seeing if boiler rooms could be repurposed as small classrooms!) And while it’s easy to say, “well, we need funding to overhaul HVAC systems,” we’re still dealing with asbestos in some of our school buildings, so installing new ventilation would require more funding and time than even the most optimistic forecasts would have us receive.
Remote learning hasn’t been optimal, don’t get me wrong — this is not something any teacher I have spoken to has wanted to do, especially with how many of our at-risk and lower-income kids are put at such a disadvantage because of not having the physical space to go to during the last three months. At least we’ve had some luck with the “enrichment” centers, staffed by teachers who volunteered to do so, for those children whose caretakers were essential workers, and if we remote in the fall, that model will probably expand to keep up.
But I just don’t see how we actually can open-up safely, especially with McConnell and his enablers doing what they’ve been paid to do, not when we’re already potentially looking at up to 22,000 layoffs for city employees come October 1 if we don’t receive $1 billion in funding for New York City alone…
(As a side note: at least families here in NYC and our school administrator’s union are all more-or-less on the same page about re-opening in the fall. Part of the “perks” of being the hardest hit in the country, at least early on, translates to a lot of people knowing the risks involved, I guess…)
James E Powell
@Kay:
I definitely share your concerns about the need for schools to re-open. I teach in a working class school in Los Angeles. The schools are essential for the families – if they are going back to work – and these students cannot afford to have their education degraded.
The author of this literature review – draft in progress – does not share your respect for Dana Goldstein. I have no opinion on her, but I do not have confidence in studies that are less than one year old. At the end of that google doc, the author takes issue with how NPR presented the story. (“It’s not reporting when one reporter interviews another reporter.”) I had to laugh because that is how NPR & cable shows handle nearly every story.
My take on this is heavily influenced by my disdain for the structure of public education. The program of 35-40 children in six different boxes with one adult in each, for one hour a day, five days a week needs to end. But that’s a discussion for another day.
There are a very large number of things I can say about this, but I will limit myself to these two. 1) Whatever slap dash plan our district comes up with will be met with resistance, incompetence, and lax compliance, and 2) the first time there is a school or two with an outbreak – or even a rumored outbreak – the parents are going to keep their children home. When our district closed schools on March 13th, parents were already keeping them home. I was at about 50% on the last day.
Our district has announced its commitment to open on August 18. That’s six weeks from now. We have no idea yet what the plan is. This should go well.
Another Scott
Kindasorta relatedly, BlueVirginia.US:
Well worth a click over.
Cheers,
Scott.
James E Powell
This is from a couple weeks ago, but it’s about what epidemiologists want to do with their children.
Davis X. Machina
I’m sixty-three, type 2 diabetes and stage 3 chronic kidney disease. I teach high school.
I’m going into the building to teach for very practical reasons. I expect they’ll carry me out feet first sometime around Thanksgiving.
Through my union I have 3x my annual salary term life insurance at a very low rate.
Otherwise, I’m uninsurable at any non-silly rate.
If I die while employed by the district, my wife gets a payout that’s roughly x10 times the money that the little bit of whole life I stll have is worth — the little bit I didn’t cash in to send kids to college, and pay the mortgage when she was unemployed for a while.
Phylllis
@James E Powell: We had a meeting yesterday & plan to stick with our scheduled 8/17 start with no real instructional plan in place yet except to provide virtual instruction for the parents who request it. We are planning a modified schedule for the kids who attend face-to-face, but the principals haven’t figured out what that will actually look like. In all fairness to them, I can’t wrap my mind around how the day will work with everything they’re going to have to do, such as daily health screenings. I think they’re hoping for a miracle & Gov. McMaster will require virtual for everyone for the first nine weeks.
bemused senior
@Redshift: This sounds exactly like my daughter’s district in San Mateo County (norcal). The plan has not been “adopted”, but rather the teachers have been asked to say whether they want to teach on-site or virtually. No questions have been answered about the numbers mismatch (where will the extra headcount come from to cover teaching virtually vs. onsite classes.) And definitely teachers are opting out of teaching this coming year. My daughter is a preschool SPED teacher, so would need PPE to teach safely onsite. Her family lives with my husband and me, and I am a cancer patient on chemo, so very at risk (Already been in the hospital once for a septic infection due to inadequate immune system). Her twins are 4, and she is going to reluctantly choose not to send them to on-site classes. Her husband will be a home schooling stay at home dad. No questions have been answered as to whether the district will provide PPE and she expects to have to buy it herself.
Ladyraxterinok
@gwangung:
Remember a few yrs ago when there were studies about how corporations penalized/punished their emplyees–male as well as female–when they had children, when they asked for any time off for child-care etc
Heard yrs ago that German employers were legally tequired to hold her job for her forv3 yrs after a woman had a baby
IIRC there was some sort of legal requirement that the parents could alternate yrs taking time off from a job after a birth
mrmoshpotato
Well well well…
Cam-WA
For a contrarian view, it’s worth reading this Kevin Drum post on the subject.
schrodingers_cat
I agree with our blog host. The virus does not care about human problems. Opening schools without social distancing and any vaccine will give it giant petri dishes to thrive. The number of infected will keep increasing exponentially. The schools will shut down again in a month.
You can take this to the bank.
ETA: Think of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. You know your thermonuclear bomb.
Martin
Of course they won’t be safe. But nowhere is safe, and that’s not going to change until there’s a change in administration. Our best case scenario right now is a slow burn, and you can absolutely open schools in that scenario. Schools where students change classes is a serious problem. Large university classes are impossible, but putting students back in schools structured properly will mean that a Covid case in a classroom looks like a lice outbreak – generally contained to that classroom or that grade. You then hard quarantine them, your contact tracing is generally already set up so you can notify the moment it happens, and – this is important – schools can serve as auxiliary testing frameworks to increase testing and detection. Part of what helped places like China get theirs under control was their ability to take temperatures going into grocery stores and push that information into a national database that would immediately lock that individual down. We can’t do that in the US in general, but we can do something awfully close to that in schools. It is not easy by any means, it requires yanking out a lot (holy shit guys you have no idea) of administrative plumbing and reworking it, shifting costs, adding staff in key places, building in flexibilty so if instructors cannot be in the classroom because of their own medical condition or that of a family member they care for, and so on, but it can be done. I am at least convinced of that much.
Part of the goal is indeed to get kids back in school, but part of it too is that you lay down a structured, organized way of testing family members, and notifying them. Schools can work closely with contact tracers and county health agencies to help meet broader goals and to fill in details on tracing.
We are failing this thing in part because government is not sufficiently involved in solving it. Schools are primarily government and can pick up some of that load. And schools augment the effort to train the public – at least family members of what they should be doing. Many, many public health issues get solved through the schools, and always have. Schools are how we ensure people get vaccinated. It wouldn’t work at all without schools. Its where much of our anti-smoking and obesity/diet education comes from. I know we roll our eyes at DARE but it works. Lord knows its the only place people learn how to fuck and not catch a disease or get pregnant. Give us 48 hours and we’ll have every kid in the united states going home knowing how to wear a mask and berating their parents for doing it wrong.
This is not a radical role for schools – it is the long established normal role for schools. Letting people back into restaurants doesn’t solve any of that. They don’t add to the contact tracing puzzle. They don’t add to the education problem. Schools do that, and only schools do that.
And as for universities, I know the national expectation is that the moment they get on campus it’ll be a kegger but I don’t think that’s going to happen. There are exceptions of course, but in my experience, students know which rules are important and which ones they can break, and they’re at least as good if not better than the general population at following the important ones. They are good at, and kind of lean into that part of adulting. I think if we establish that this can only work if they stay healthy and keep their classmates healthy, they’ll rise to it. And that’s in part to the reality that among that generation, Trumps approval rating is below 20%. They fucking hate that guy, they understand the weight of this moment, they know they need to pull together, and they will. They just need people to trust them. That’s what universities should be for.
The Moar You Know
Well, my involvement in this idiots debate is done; my wife will be calling district HR on Monday and requesting indefinite leave of absence due to medical reasons. I expect she won’t be the only teacher doing so.
We will lose our home. I don’t care. The districts plans for reopening are not safe for either the kids or (especially) the teachers, and the bottom line is what Cuomo said: “worse than death?” No. Losing what we worked for over thirty years is going to hurt like hell, but we will both be alive to see the other side.
Reopening the schools will be a public health catastrophe of a magnitude this nation has not yet seen and I would bet anyone right now that there will not be one single public school open in the United States by Thanksgiving.
schrodingers_cat
Agreed. I am a big fan of Kay’s no-nonsense analysis. But she is ignoring/denying scientific reality here.
James E Powell
@MomSense:
I share your optimism. My district has over 600,000 students in over 1,000 schools.
Hoodie
@Cam-WA: That post is kind of superficial. He cites one study that he admits is incomplete. He cites success in countries that got their transmission rates down before opening up. I would be less disturbed about opening schools if we weren’t seeing the current levels of infections in some places like Arizona, which has a 24% positive test rate. I can believe that children may be less effective vectors for transmission because they don’t seem to get sick from Covid (hence, probably have relatively low viral loads), but at infection levels like this, any structural impediment to spread may be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Sure Lurkalot
@Miss Bianca: March 26 and opened early, though with a semblance of a plan if not meeting their own guidelines. While Colorado isn’t experiencing what other states are, our testing is not exactly vigorous and I truly believe that indoor dining is ridiculous. At least the bars have re-closed.
raven
@Martin: It’s happening here in Athens and we’re not even in session. I think lots of kids have paid for lodging and they are her in town and partying like it’s. . .
Kent
Another HS teacher here late to the thread.
Here in WA we are on schedule for full in-person schools to start up in the fall. Most schools here traditionally start the day after labor day weekend in the first week of September so we have a couple more weeks than some of you.
I also have two daughters going into 9th and 12th grades who are both in marching band and are scheduled to start marching band camp the second week of August. I expect they will probably still do that but keep it entirely outdoors and distanced so probably can’t practice all their formations. I don’t have any idea how they will ever pack 6,000 fans and the marching band into our HS stadium in the fall like normal.
I don’t see my district spending any great additional money on expensive infrastructure changes so I’m guessing that whatever they will be doing come fall will be mostly performative, much like TSA screening where they take all your water bottles and tubes of toothpaste.
Probably they will have temperature screenings at the entrance, mandatory masks inside the building (we’ll see how long that lasts) and then lots of hand washing stations and hand sanitizer stations all over the building. Possibly no cafeteria but rather boxed lunches delivered to the classrooms by carts, or “grab and go” boxed lunches stationed around the school for kids who don’t bring their own from home.
I dunno how this will all turn out. But there is no way we get back to anything like normal until there is a vaccine
We are an affluent suburban one-HS district with about 7,500 students K-12. And mostly new-ish facilities with little overcrowding, and a low percentage of poor students. So in a much better position to deal with this than most. And I don’t think we are remotely ready.
James E Powell
@Kay:
I really liked the common core and didn’t see it as that much of a change from what we were already doing (California Content Standards). The teachers in my school felt pretty much the same way. There was a shift in emphasis to non-fiction text analysis and that gave all of us English Lit types a big sad.
WaterGirl
@Davis X. Machina: That’s sobering. And sad. And downright depressing. Fuck these fucking fuckers who are running our government.
Sab
@Chetan Murthy: I have never been a deWine fan, but he understands his state and has done a very impressive job of governimg a bunch of idiots. I think he was as strong as was politically possible. With a different governor we would have been like Texas or Arizona.
Acton quit because nutjobs were physically attacking her family. DeWine was unhappy to see her go.
Kent
I teach science so not affected by the Common Core (which is math and ELA only). But similar multi-state science equivalent is the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) https://www.nextgenscience.org/ which I think have been a complete disaster, largely because of the total lack of follow-through by states in terms of curriculum development and support. They basically threw a bunch of new standards at teachers and said “figure it out” without any support. Meanwhile every resource we have from textbooks to lab equipment is all geared towards the old standards.
We are about 10 years into NGSS at this point and there is not one science textbook or curriculum package available from any textbook publisher that is geared towards NGSS from ground up. They have mostly just re-packaged all their old stuff with a big cross-reference index in the front pointing to which of the new standards each chapter covers. Which misses the point entirely.
bemused senior
From mit: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/30/1004625/is-it-safe-to-send-kids-back-to-school/
pamelabrown53
@Hoodie:
What I think Kay is saying is that schools are microcosms with the ability to test, trace and adjust to circumstances as warranted. In their environments, they already have public health authority.
So, let’s have a master plan that is national, flexible and FUNDED at a federal level so our kids can be educated, our parents (who will be mandated) can work.
Even if the school plan has to be put on hold during this terrifying spike, we STILL need a plan and funding and we need it now.
Jeffro
@Another Scott: Wilson’s very right: running *only* on local issues doesn’t work anymore. Maybe at some point the hyper-partisanship will die down but it won’t be for a while, that’s for sure.
Ruckus
My question would be how many people alive have ever seen a pandemic? You’d have to be over 102 yrs old and to have actually known about it would probably have to be over 108-110 yrs old. That’s a pretty small number of people. And at a time when transmission was mostly local, while it’s worldwide now. I’t’s been 6-8 months and every country on the planet has been affected. The only places doing OK now are places that closed down and masked up massively. And every single place can skyrocket again because they refuse to do the right thing, something that is difficult but not all that horrible in the overall picture but that picture looks depressing when you see fucking idiots just ignoring realism. Now part of this may be my age as I’ve actually enjoyed my time off as I’m putting off retirement just to build up a rather small nest egg before I can’t work any longer. And this crap about not wearing a mask because fucking freedumb is the most asinine thing I can remember. That the leader of the country is such a fucking idiot that he thinks it’s all a story to wreck his presidency, when he (and his political party) is by far the largest failure of his presidency.
It’s been 102 yrs since the world has seen anything like this. WWII may have been as catastrophic, but even most wars have not been as destructive as the current conservative parties around the world. They are failures of humanity and politics. Most are not addressing the poor of the world, or the actual needs of the vast majority of the world. They are addressing the
needsdesires of the moron monied and ignoring everything else. We may have one of the worst case examples in charge, in name only, but he’s not the only one.James E Powell
@Kent:
Dirty little secret and I’m not the only one. My first year of teaching in 2005 was the last year that I used the English textbook.
Kent
On thing I know I’m going to be doing next fall is testing how far into the parking lots and outdoor areas the school wifi reaches. Because I’ll be holding a lot of classes way the fuck outside until the weather turns. Scatter the kids out 20 ft apart on the lawn to do their work. And even if it doesn’t reach they can still do google docs and such on their chromebooks and save the work locally on the SSD drive until in reach of WiFi to let it update to their google drive accounts.
I’m probably also going to require every student buy a clipboard as a required classroom supply so that we can go outside and they can work on worksheets and such.
Martin
Let me add some context to the above.
You cannot open schools absolutely. You can’t open them in AZ right now, in any capacity – the outbreak is too bad. But even in states with wingnut governors, the schools will establish their own safe open/close schedule. In CA, the first institutions to close were the universities, and that signaled to the public that there was a serious issue here, and helped push the governor to act more broadly. We did it independently of the state govt, and a lot of states need that. The more layers you have working independently the better. In some cases the schools will be overruled by the governor, and in some cases the schools will move first. That’s good for a consistent response.
No school can open without the augmented funding. It really just isn’t possible. But if we view schools as a problem, they’ll never get funding. And if we set them up as part of the solution, they might get funding. If y’all are out there screaming about what a bad idea this is, without considering the implementation details, then yeah, you’re going to lose some of the tools we would use to solve this.
When you have out of control spread, the only thing you can do it shut everything down. But that’s not everywhere, even now. NY state has their shit relatively together on this. Their new cases statewide are in the hundreds with a 1% positive test rate. They are past the point that shutdown can further improve things because you have to bake in a small % of the population that either won’t, or can’t, get on the program. At that point you need to switch to control points, much the way good security is done. You have bottlenecks where you test and contain populations. You have that at a large scale (state borders, etc.), and you have tiers that subdivide that into smaller geographic or population groups where you retest and recontain. Ultimately you solve this by divide and conquer.
The role of government is to establish and enforce those bottlenecks. In theory that’s what TSA does at airports – establishes a safe space past the checkpoint. That’s what border patrol in theory does, etc. China turned every building into a checkpoint. Schools can do that. We can guarantee your kid gets tested on a certain schedule. I remember my school being where I got vaccinated, because the school could guarantee that 99% of us got that vaccine. We got regular TB tests there. That’s where we were tested for colorblindness and hearing tests and a bunch of other stuff. Schools are great at being that kind of a checkpoint where certain things reliably happen, where notification is guaranteed, where information is reported to the county or state or feds. You NEED schools to solve these problems – at the appropriate time, and with sufficient funding. And that funding will be cheaper than any alternative, as it always has been.
But the public needs to push for that to happen.
Davis X. Machina
@WaterGirl: Equal parts “Welcome Back, Kotter” and “Blackadder Goes Forth”.
different-church-lady
1 ) We should be talking about it
2 ) In a whole lot of cases, the result of that talk should be, “Let’s not.”
3 ) Not every part of the country is like every other part. There may be places where it’s feasable and safe, and others where there’s no question it’s a bad idea.
evodevo
@Mai naem mobile: Yes. This. Can I steal this cogent summary?
Martin
@raven: It is up to the state and the institution to communicate the expectations and to invite them in as necessary to solving this. If you don’t do this, it won’t happen.
Look, I know we’re all beat down, and in a mode where government can’t do anything but fuck up. Trust me, that is my first hour or two of every day. But, if we ask schools to do this, and give them the resources they need, they are pretty much the ONLY government infrastructure with the necessary mandates and authority to do this. Kids are required to go to school, and even homeschooling doesn’t absolve them of certain responsibilities in most states. Every community has schools of some form. Government provides for that. We have teachers who are public employees, and can be organized and trained to do this. Schools are an institution with built-in healthcare infrastructure to varying degrees. That has eroded somewhat over time in terms of having full time nurses, etc. but there is still some responsibility for helping kids with medication, kids who are diabetic, have allergies, and all that. And schools are a place where that stuff can be enforced. And since we all agree that some of the broader problem is a lack of education, that’s what schools do as well. And all of that applies even at universities. We’re generally one of the places where the health care infrastructure is still largely intact. We are still the leading chokepoint for vaccination enforcement.
Schools can do this if they are empowered and funded to. Schools have for decades done this. We are wired to do this.
Kent
Yeah sure. Me too most of the time. But English is also much easier to do that than science because your source material is more readily available and accessible. You can assign Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Faulkner, Morrison, etc. Try assigning an original source research paper from the International Journal of Theoretical Physics to your freshman physical science classes and let me know how well that works.
It is especially difficult when you have multiple preps. Last year I had 3 separate science preps including one class I had never taught before. I simply do not have the time to generate my own material for every class and every assignment. I have to rely on the textbook material or at least their workbook material for problem sets, homework, and for all the kids who are absent, sick, traveling for school sports, etc. I don’t use physical textbooks much at all but rely on .pdf chapters of textbooks at times.
And yes, I can google up a bazillion worksheets and material on Teachers-Pay-Teachers and other sites like that. But I fucking shouldn’t have to. If it is so easy for a teacher like me to build a complete curriculum on the fly for three separate preps during my one prep hour per week that isn’t being consumed by SpEd meetings and such, then surely the State Department of Ed that has mandated these new standards can spend a little money actually developing new materials for us to use as well
It also really depends on the subject. There is a completely wealth of good online material in the biological sciences like, for example https://www.hhmi.org/ but there is nothing remotely comparable in the physical sciences. That is mainly because cutting edge physics and chemistry today is utterly unrecognizable from what we teach in the classrooms. That is not the case for biology where we teach all the modern stuff at the HS level.
raven
@Martin:
Students, Faculty Ask Georgia’s Public Colleges To Require Face Coverings
My friend was interviewed for this.
Another Scott
@Martin:
NEA (from June 5):
(I think) We all agree that schools are “essential” (as much as anything is “essential”) – the problem is getting Moscow Mitch and the GOP in the Senate to act. Only bad things are going to happen unless they act; and even after they act, it will be very, very difficult.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@Kent: When I was on the development team for our online freshman English we developed two courses knowing that some of the content would not fly in South Georgia.
bemused senior
@Martin: I agree with your general point. What is off base is the timing. 5 weeks is insufficient. I would favor a CA statewide effort to create a concrete plan and schedule to do safe reopening by, say, January. Have a mitigation plan for kids at risk and critical workers. But quit pretending we can reopen in August.
ProfDamatu
@Brachiator: You really can’t increase class size with remote learning, not if you want students to learn much. In fact, online classes need to be capped at *smaller* enrollments than face to face classes in order to work. They can be effective if done right…but doing it right requires more work per student, not less, than face to face. In my experience, anything more than about 20 or so pushes the workload beyond what’s realistic or reasonable – you could maybe double that or push it to 50 if the professor has a few TAs that can assist with grading and breakout discussions.
With large online classes, you very rapidly reach a point where you’re limited to video lectures and largely machine-graded assessments, at which point parents (rightly!) start to question why they’re paying $$$$$ for tuition.
Now, we could totally increase the number of sections to allow for effective online education, but of course that would require existing faculty to be paid more for the additional work, and additional faculty to be hired. I’d love for that to happen, but I’m not going to hold my breath!
RSA
Maybe, but it’s not clear.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/05/26/children-transmission
raven
@ProfDamatu: It sounds like you also realize that the course materials and discussions need to be carefully structured and have a rubric in place for those discussions so the students know what is expected of them.
Kent
Awesome! I expect they probably wouldn’t go for how I teach Evolution and Climate Change either
Of course in my experience it is only the parents who object. Never the students. Back in Texas it was often the kids of fundie parents who deliberately chose to do things like research Charles Darwin as their research projects. But then I mostly had juniors and senors.
Martin
@Kent: Exactly this.
Conceptually they are good ideas. But the thing the US is great at, at all levels, is wringing every last dollar of efficiency out of whatever slice of the economy you have. Health care seems like an exception to this, but it’s not – the hospitals are wringing every last dollar out of their stuff, and the insurers doing the same, but they are working at odds with each other, which is why it’s such a mess. But each sector is doing a great job of the narrow thing they care about, and failing the larger whole. This is equivalent to companies cost-cutting when sales start to fall off and thinking they can just keep cutting until the sales pick up again, because they’re awesome and of course customers will come back. It’s a very american exceptionalism way of thinking. China is about moving fast. It’s about finding a way to earn a new dollar rather than saving one. They are pretty wildly inefficient at a whole bunch of stuff, but get in front of new problems very quickly and then dominate those markets. They at least could afford the inefficiency because their standard of living was so low.
Anyway, we change these standards and then expect the textbook market won’t act exactly as the textbook market has always acted, which is to put everything into trying to get their one golden book into every school in the country, rather than develop new books. Even at the university level we’re still using almost all of the same books as I used 30 years go, just 9 revisions newer (but not really changed).
When you put forward changes like this, the change has to answer all of the downstream questions as well. You can’t assume Mifflin is suddenly going to acknowledge the brilliance of your idea and pivot to help. When I pushed my district to change to integrated math through high school, I told them to not vote on the idea until the teachers came back with textbooks that they felt would work, because if those didn’t exist, you’d have to write them yourself.
Outside of the techbros, we are a nation that is economically paralyzed, and that fucks up a ton of stuff (like our ability to get PPE).
Marcopolo
Thread is probably dead but I just saw this article which is actually on topic:
My favorite line, the following from a University Vice President:
I mean sure I did some stupid things when I was in my teens & twenties but I’m sure I never felt bulletproof enough (at least according to my current memory) to go out and run around in the middle of a pandemic.
Patricia Kayden
American exceptionalism.
Ladyraxterinok
@MomSense:
So a science fiction style conspiracy theory—super wealthy devise this to kill off many old, poor, minoritiehs. Little education. Then they have lcontrollable work force.
Didn’t Project for a New American Century call for some way to get rid of a lot of people? IIRC they were thinking of some sort of controllable war
We may need scifi imagination to help us get out of this. Maybe see what Scalzi might have to say.
debbie
@Marcopolo:
Isn’t that story the one the media twisted into “College Kids Have Parties to See Who Can Get COVID First” which was later proven to be false?
Martin
@raven: Right, and ensuring that PPEs are available for teachers, on the institutions dime, should be a requirement of reopening. If a state can’t deliver PPEs to teachers and students, then you have to tell parents the schools will remain closed for that reason. That is non-negotiable.
I would add that you cannot force teachers back either. However, in some cases you can have them continue to teach remotely. That’s fine. Or you keep them on to serve in more of a supporting role. I’m pretty sure the reason teachers are so averse to returning too the classroom is that not nearly enough work has been done to ensure that students and teachers will have PPEs, that testing will be done, that student populations can remain isolated (you can’t do traditional lunch rooms, you can’t do traditional outdoor PE, you can’t do assemblies, you must isolate groups of students in this approach) there is a developed covid curriculum that everyone will cover, etc. that most teachers will come back, recognizing that this effort is helping to reduce the overall spread, and that they aren’t taking undue risks in the process. And for those whose personal health is compromised, etc. that they aren’t just kicked to the curb as a result. You are going to need a LOT of support though this, and more staff not fewer. Experienced teachers will have plenty of work to do remotely if they can’t safely be in the classroom.
Martin
@Kent: When my son started 7th grade we went to back to school night and I spent some time talking to his teacher about their reading for the year. My school had a mix of teachers that would assign a ton of reading, entire books, and some that would have us just read excerpts of books. I hated the latter. There was no context, no way to absorb the whole concept being presented in the book that way.
She started listing off the books that they’d be reading and I asked her, ‘if I didn’t know better, those would be exclusively banned books in other states’. She smiled a little bit, and said it was important that young minds be challenged and have interesting ideas to discuss in class. It was all I could do to not hug her right there. 8th grade was also all banned books. Turns out, that was the general attitude across the district.
Aleta
@Marcopolo:
Patricia Kayden
J R in WV
@Hoodie:
Fixed that for you. Those guys would laugh at you, pay the citation, then use a second $100 bill to light a $200 cigar.
Just give them 30 days in a work camp, burying corpses in mass graves, like the video we’ve seen of mass graves being dug in NYC. Promise them a second offense with no mask results in a 6 month hitch in the work camps. That MIGHT teach them something.
ProfDamatu
@raven: Yup! For the only “lecture” class I’ve done totally online, a small-enrollment (only 8 this session!) intro class, it’s old hat: Read the reading assignment, respond to one of the discussion prompts on the discussion board for that chapter/paper/whatever, then respond to at least two classmates’ posts (at least one of which must be responding to a different prompt). And then I get on the thread myself and amplify/challenge/correct misconceptions, and so on.
And this is an assignment that’s basically a participation grade, so the grading isn’t super-rigorous!
Sure Lurkalot
Marcopolo: I could have written this comment as I happened upon that article earlier and a friend and I recently reminisced about our own risk taking in our teens and 20’s, wondering what we would be like if we were that age now. Our current prudent selves or let it ride crazy. Probably not somewhere in between, we mused!
raven
@ProfDamatu: Good work, the program I worked on was 100% asynchronous (except for office hours) and we got 4 content experts and techie and myself for a YEAR to develop each course.
Kent
@ProfDamatu: At the HS level and lower grades it is even more time consuming and exhausting.
Sure, I can just assign a video lecture and some sort of online worksheet to 100 chemistry students across 4 class sections and then just grade whatever gets turned in the next day. Which if lucky might be 50%.
If I am in a physical classroom I can circulate and re-direct those students who are dis-engaged, on their phones, doodling, working on Spanish homework, sleeping, or chatting with their neighbor about whatever is their latest buzz.
In the online world that is far more difficult to keep a class engaged. Is the kid not responding because they don’t understand the topic? Because they are living in their grandma’s kitchen because they got evicted and their chromebook is still at their abusive dad’s house? Because they are stuck home looking out for 3 younger siblings? Because they don’t get internet in their rural compound because their MAGA conspiracy theory dad thinks that the FBI is using it to spy on them (really…I had a student in that situation).
Sure I can just pass everyone who dutifully does the work and fail everyone who doesn’t. And it will mostly be the middle and upper class students with stable homes who will pass. Maybe that’s what happens at the college level. But you really aren’t meeting your obligation to all your students if you do that.
Online teaching absolutely doesn’t scale at the K-12 level. It is more exhausting and time-consuming than in-person classroom instruction.
James E Powell
@bemused senior:
Agree completely. And I would add that once the plan is created, faculty and staff should run through it for a week before students return to discover problems, make adjustments, and be familiar with personnel and procedures.
And somebody has to come up with the plan for the students who do not come back.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin:
As long as there’s cash for the hookers and blow, yeah.
Major Major Major Major
Apropos of nothing, we’re getting the ball rolling on our Canadian permanent residency application. Happy independence day!
Martin
@Walker: At a lot of institutions buildings are a separate budget, which is abstracted so far away that it’s hard to see how to get those dollars into the operating budget.
Honestly, so much of our problems center on the factory model – this notion that learning should have a fixed investment in time and a variable outcome. We have our dependent and independent variables backward. The outcome should be fixed and the time variable, and technology should be used to enable that to happen. Then you would have students moving forward in the curriculum with a relatively uniform understanding (which doesn’t happen now) and a lot less having to either rehash prior concepts, or find the energy to plow ahead when ⅓ of the class is completely lost.
That would also require giving up ownership of individual course content. And it would necessitate changing the underlying mechanism for how faculty get paid. And those institutional pilings have been driven so deep in the ground I don’t think they can be changed without burning the institutions down and rebuilding them (much as I think policing suffers from problems of a similar nature).
Kent
When I was 18 I did a lot of insanely dangerous stuff from playing football to drunk driving home from keggers to jumping off bridges into rivers to street racing to playing with explosives to dabbling with illicit drugs.
I expect a whole lot of those activities carried more risk of death than catching Covid-19 at age 18.
J R in WV
@debbie:
We went to a bank today (Chase) to deal with getting Chase to endorse the insurance checks resulting from a tree falling on our house. Long story, but the Chase “personal banker” had a lot of trouble getting the checks into their system. So I stood around a lot, and heard a senior customer telling the head Chase guy about a Covid case in town. He knows personally the head nurse in the local ER.
18 year old patient came in with severe Covid-19 infection. Very quickly that infection ate her heart valve, was waiting for a heart transplant in order to survive the infection!
Think about that load on the medical system!!
To survive an infection… you need a heart transplant!!!
Those folks understood and acknowledged a need for masks — but I was the only person in the building at that time wearing a mask!!! I mean, WTF — they were talking about the absolute necessity for mask wearing, while NOT WEARING MASKS ~!!~
mali muso
@Major Major Major Major: congrats! Best decision we ever made. At least there is a plan B
sdhays
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. I wonder how a private health care system would look if separate hospital systems and insurance weren’t allowed – only combined insurance + medical networks like Kaiser Permanente
ETA: I recently started a new job and in addition to the standard medical benefit, there were a number of other extra insurance packages I could buy to cover hospitalization expenses, accidents, and critical illness. It enrages me that we live in a country where that kind of thing has a market. It’s a complete and utter failure of the system, and we just accept.
Major Major Major Major
Most asymptomatic people may also suffer organ damage, and we have no idea what the long-term effects are. Entirely possible that a sick 18yo loses more quality-adjusted life years than a sick 65yo who dies.
Marcopolo
@debbie: Nah, the story about kids throwing money into a pool , no not swimming pool, and giving it to the first person to get Covid-19 was located out of Alabama–like U of AL. This is CA & FL.
I would further note that I read today that other reporters trying to track this story down have been unable to corroborate it.
Major Major Major Major
@mali muso: For people with no legal connection to Canada, we get a very good score on the expedited entry checklist, so I figured we should start collecting the education paperwork. (Language testing currently closed indefinitely.) We’ll see how things look in nine months or so, to choose when to actually file…
sdhays
@Major Major Major Major: Where are you thinking of living?
sdhays
It sure is hard to come up with a way to be positive with this shit.
ProfDamatu
@raven: A year! Luxury! :-)
I did an 8-week “online and hybrid course development institute” the semester before I taught the completely online version of this class. Still not enough time, but better than the single week we had to bring everything online this past spring!
Kay
@Martin:
Agreed. I would also say one last thing. Schools are right now in a position to get lawmakers to admit how essential they are, and schools can use that.
Parents need them, kids need them, and employers need them. That’s a good bargaining position.
But if they’re not open no one needs them, and they aren’t going to get shit.
Act like a utility or a water district. Essential. Demand to be up and running and insist on conditions.
Another Scott
GovExec:
This is fine.
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@bemused senior: I never suggested we could reopen in Aug or even Sept. Our plans are Jan at the earliest. But I don’t see many institutions planning at the level they need to. They’re locked too much into the idea that how we did things last fall is the goal for this fall, and that’s part of where we’re failing.
If my plans are adopted, it’ll looking nothing like last fall. You cannot incrementalism your way through a pandemic. You have to be willing to take at least some radical steps in the areas where you can afford to radical. For us, we can be radical at the administrative stuff, my area of expertise. We are doing that so that we can keep the instructional side as traditional as possible. Not completely, we’ll still have online lectures for every course over 30 students or so, but we’re trying to balance that with more in-person time.
What I think I’ve convinced the higher ups of, is that they need to think of their budget more holistically. On-campus housing, parking, food, all that, subsidizes a surprising amount of the other stuff we do. It is cheaper for us to make the investments in adding staff (reassigning mainly), buying PPEs, and all of the rest to get the university into a safe operating mode than to keep students off campus, where it should be noted, they’re still getting sick.
The two biggest obstacles here are the fear that a radical rethinking of administrative approaches will become permanent because students like them better, and where liability falls. It may not matter if we can keep students healthier than if they stayed home if it means we become liable for the sick ones, because right now we aren’t.
ProfDamatu
@Kent: I can only imagine! I really, truly wasn’t trying to imply that I have it harder than HS faculty with distance learning (though as an adjunct, I do have to teach just about as many sections to keep a roof over my head!); just noting that even at the university level, it’s still difficult and expensive to do 100% online education, so more resources will be required to do a good job even if we don’t try to go back to campus in the fall.
We’ve had some of the access issues you describe, as well as students who went home having to take on significant new caregiving and other responsibilities while working from home. This is why I was hoping that we’d just do online from the get-go here, to give students the maximum lead time to get the necessary stuff in place (and the school time to help get those resources out to students who lack them).
JPL
OT The president is going to give a political speech tonight about the left tearing down the monuments. fkfkfkfkfkfkfkfkfkkfk
Cameron
Not with a bad intent to hijack this thread, but I gotta post this before going to get alcohol for the weekend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC1rWb1ZM34
debbie
@Marcopolo:
Thanks. I was hoping it was just stupid talk.
Martin
@Kay:
Exactly. We are the infrastructure for solving about 20% of this problem if you surge us like you are doing with other front-line groups.
The free market is not going to solve this problem. Government needs to solve this problem. For anyone between the age of 5 and 17-22, schools are the government that can solve this, just as Medicare should have been doing that with everyone over 65, but they have failed miserably. VA should have been doing that for vets, and they have failed slightly less miserably.
I’m not willing to throw in the towel on schools even with my level of cynicism.
mali muso
@Major Major Major Major: yeah it took us about five to six months to gather all the paperwork and to take language tests, etc. let me know if you have any questions. Having dealt with both the US and Canadian immigration systems, I can tell you that the latter is WAY more user friendly and transparent.
satby
@Kent: Not a teacher, but was a corporate trainer for the last couple of years of my IT career. We switched to mostly webinar trainings for any required corporate training programs, with generally mediocre results, and that’s with people’s jobs being dependant on following the procedures being communicated.
One of the last years of my employment was spent travelling to several European countries as part of a team to do a third or occasionally fourth mandatory trainings face to face to personnel there, because the repeated non-compliance to the ITIL standards that they had supposedly passed their online training in was going to trigger a multimillion dollar contract penalty on my company.
These were adults, with strong incentives to mastering the material in their online training. Let’s just call me a skeptic on online classes being an adequate substitute for classes with teachers for kids with far less compelling incentives. But still better than opening schools in a pandemic, given that until there’s an administration change, the focus and funding will not be there to do it safely.
debbie
@JPL:
The fireworks will be delayed until sunrise. //
Martin
I will also note, if there were ever a moment to pivot what you can to self-paced instruction, it is now. Everyone will be better off under the circumstances to building that now.
JPL
@debbie: Maybe he’ll miss the festivities he has planned in DC then.
spreading the virus where ever he goes.
satby
@J R in WV: double lung transplant was performed in Chicago on a 20 year old young woman with no prior health conditions once she got covid. That this disease can’t be devastating to younger people is a myth.
Kent
I’m not trying to argue the risks. Just trying to put myself back into my 18 year old brain and recall all the truly crazy stuff I did. I can be pissed at these kids spreading Covid with their frat parties. But on some level I can understand it.
NotMax
@James E Powell
Split classes in half. On odd numbered days one half attends the school, the other half is dispersed among “neighborhood remote learning hubs” (formerly known as “bars”). On even numbered days the two halves switch.
;)
catclub
@Wapiti: Exactly. The China and South Korea and other did whatever was necessary to KILL the virus in their community. That is the only solution. The collapsed their economy for as long as it took.
We could have done that with actual leadership.
Martin
@satby: So, what we’ve found is that about 95% of online teaching content is garbage. The places where it has worked the best is where online teaching is highly interactive – moreso than a traditional classroom.
Too much online instruction assumes that the benefit the internet brings is youtube. It misses the lesson. We give lectures because for decades it was the only way to make education efficient, not because it was better. It was worse. And youtube simply makes it more efficient, and even worse, because it signals to the audience ‘this is so unimportant that we can’t bother to invest more in it’. I do online trainings all the time and they are universally bad.
But, as someone who writes software and has been in this life-long learning mode because the discipline moves so quickly, nobody who codes goes into a traditional classroom, because it’s a bad way to learn. You might go to a bootcamp which is highly intensive but are also ‘do this as we go’ exercises. So you’re getting that immediate feedback that the thing you are doing works and is correct. And even more is going to be online demonstrate/do/validate courses, where you’re walked through something, you then do it immediately, and your work is immediately verified if it works, and feedback given if its not. And that’s all software.
A lot of STEM can be done this way, btw, not just programming. We’ve found that anything which is relatively procedural works well in this environment. Things like safety can work fairly well this way. How you deliver that interactivity can be very challenging, but it’s a lot of fixed cost. Once you build those mechanisms, maintaining them and expanding them are pretty cheap and easy.
Generally if your idea of online is pushing your traditional lecture into video, you’re going to fail. Online instruction done well is not short-term cheaper. It is short-term much more expensive, but long term cheaper. You have to be willing to spend a lot of future dollars today, and a lot of institutions are unwilling to take that risk.
jl
We are in the lose-lose dilemma of poor ineffective infectious disease control, which is a generic very robust finding in research and practice: too much ineffective control effort with too high a prevalence of disease and therefore too high cost of disease in population.
The countries that are successful are the ones that could concentrate coordinated focused well organized and funded effort to drive the prevalence of infection down to very low levels. At very low levels of infection a society can do a lot to beat the disease, at higher levels of infection it can do almost nothing. We are in the latter situation.
In California, I think lack of proper mix of statewide coordination and county level effort has seriously harmed the effort. Also, lack of coordination and enforcement of good practice between state agencies. State corrections and occupational health and safety are messing up very badly. State public health department is in denial, basically maintaining that it has no regrets, and saying that occupational health and safety is not its gig. But in same statement they say that their mission is to protect the health of ALL Californians. Those two parts do not go together. You don’t need to be an epidemiologist or a physician to understand that.
Edit: I think two big problems in CA. Many counties put out very clunky, overly complicated and confusing guidelines for social distancing. They did not work because people misunderstood them, and they were unworkable for staying safe while also getting economic and social life going again. Also, I think ongoing large workplace and correctional outbreaks are responsible for seeding more community spread than is recognized. State dept. of public health seems to be ignoring it as ‘not my gig’.
Major Major Major Major
@sdhays: Toronno, at least until we can get into Quebec.
@Kent: Gotcha!
Major Major Major Major
@mali muso: Oh thanks I’ll keep that in mind! Can I email you at your commenter address?
Walker
@Martin: I have authored online courses that are module based and do just that. Unless you are talking the fail-them-all MOOC model, these are even more instructor intensive and expensive to run. I know because I have seen what success looks like.
Humdog
@Davis X. Machina: I am very sorry for your distressing situation. Make every moment you have as rich and rewarding as you can manage. Good luck to you and your family.
Felanius Kootea
Makes me so sad that anything that requires people coming together and sacrificing a little bit for the greater common good is essentially unachievable in the era of Trump. This virus and pandemic require a spirit of Ubuntu – I am, because you are – in a country where a large sub-population believes in rugged individualism and I got mine, fuck you.
So we will do this the hardest way possible and keep reopening and closing and flailing until we vote out the Republicans or a vaccine becomes available, whichever comes first.
I feel like crying.
Robert Sneddon
@Kay: Question: can you demand that kamikaze teachers appear on day one to run these classes too, assuming enough funding and emergency reconstruction of the facilities in question?
On a scale of 1 to 10 for coronavirus transmission scenarios, where 1 is staying home with the windows taped shut and 10 is running naked and screaming your head off through a hospital ICU full of intubated COVID-19 patients, a school classroom (a plague pit at the best of times) is a solid 8. Demand hospital-grade PPE, I’ll even give you positive-pressure helmets with N100 filtration and it maybe drops to a 7. That’s just for the teaching staff, ignoring the Mixmaster effects of transmission between the little darlings and the inevitable spread through their families at home, Granny with diabetes and Uncle Harry with obesity and COPD, the old folks who have been sheltering in place for the past three months trying to survive. If you’ve taught in K-12 you know how chickenpox and colds and norovirus rampage through schools. COVID-19 is no different, just a lot worse for all concerned.
2020 is cancelled. Accept that, prepare for 2021 and plan how to repair the broken and interrupted educational arcs of a lot of kids next year when collecting them all together in the same space and breathing the same air won’t kill ten thousand teachers and a million people.
Teachers on this blog have said they’ll retire early or quit rather than go back to a classroom soon and catch this virus, guaranteed. I don’t blame them one iota.
J R in WV
@Chetan Murthy:
But the United Kingdom IS NOT an advanced country, thanks to Boris Alexander de poufle Johnson’s failed leadership. To the point where Scotland is considering placing guards on the border between England and Scotland to keep the dammed fool English from infecting the get down with masks Scots.
The UK may not be as failed a nation as the USA is regarding the Trumpean plague, but they are a dammed sight worse than most EU nations. And Americans aren’t allowed into Europe AT ALL right now. How despicable of our government!
cain
@Mai naem mobile:
There will be some epic shit if Americans breaking the wall on our side so that they can hop into mexico on their 4 wheelers to party.
J R in WV
@Marcopolo:
Yet when I was 18, our government felt I was bullet-proof enough to go to Vietnam and hunt guerilla soldiers in swamps and jungles~!!~
Not old enough to vote or buy liquor, but sure old enough to get killed or shot to rags or exposed to cancer causing chemicals being delivered by that very government. Why not drink and party and screw around? Gonna go to war anyway!!!
Plague doesn’t look so bad compared to war in swamps and jungles.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: True enough, CA was early. But CA was early, b/c the Bay Area was early. Newsom didn’t impose lockdowns on the state until after the Bay Area lockdown had been in place for a while. That’s what I meant by “Newsom was a follower”. And when he announced lockdowns, the Bay Area health directors all made a point of saying they would not be following him — that they would remain in lockdown.
mali muso
@Major Major Major Major: yes, that’s the one. Happy to provide any insight I can. The whole process from start to finish took us a little over a year. We were not able to land and activate our COPR in time because of COVID but have been assured by CIC that we can reactivate it once things have settled down.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Hey, good luck with that. And keep us posted on what you learn!
We’re retired, and depending upon how things develop over the next year, may want to seek asylum somewhere, anywhere…
Major Major Major Major
@mali muso: Awesome, thanks–and glad to hear that COVID hasn’t completely fucked you over, too.
slightly_peeved
@Chetan Murthy For what it’s worth, the evidence from case studies in Australia is that child-to-child transmission is extremely rare despite the lack of social distancing between children:
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/coronavirus-schools-study-found-2-pupils-infected-863-close-contacts-2020-5?r=US&IR=T
That being said, one thing we found in Australia is that people have a hard time believing this data. “This virus is very contagious and dangerous, except for small children, so schools can open but workplaces can’t” is a hard sell when the virus is well controlled, so I can’t imagine how hard it would be in the US.
Soprano2
If you want bars and restaurants to close for months and months, then you need to give the owners enough money to pay the bills that don’t stop. I gave our manager about $12,000 to pay the bills in March, April and May while we were closed, and we own the building so we don’t have to pay rent! You have utilities, satellite TV, phone and internet, plus insurance and other things. I totally understand the idea and the reason for it, but what will happen is everyone will go out of business. The PPP was worthless for us, because my employees were better off on unemployment, and the only way to get the loan forgiven was to pay most of it in wages. It was only practical for businesses that were open. I like Cole’s idea, but there has to be help for business owners too or there won’t be any businesses to reopen!
S. Cerevisiae
@Brachiator: I think it is more than coincidence that back in early May when casualty numbers showing minorities dying at a 3 to 1 ratio we started to see all the armed wingnuts screaming to reopen everything
glc
@Cheryl Rofer:
By all means do. I’ve been seeing a lot of this sentiment the past few days, but I take it there’s a huge institutional push to muddle on. And not opening schools will be a disaster as well, if there’s no funding to deal with all the problems that causes.
Meanwhile everyone at my university has received an 85 page pdf which I suppose we are expected to read laying out the parameters for reopening in Fall 2021. (Not the plan – just the parameters.) But it’s kindergarten and elementary school that really worry me.
And then there’s this, which no doubt was up already:
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/more-than-40-school-principals-quarantined-after-covid-19-exposure/2319031/
Brian
@opiejeanne: I dunno; nothing hits the spot after my two-hour bike rides like a Kolsch or an IPA…