Lot of liberal pundit handwringing to the effect of "we can close schools now that we know of the great harms to kid's mental health"
which, yes, but...
(CTU maybe aside) is anyone pushing closures that aren't solely prompted by staff shortages due to their own infections?
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Like pundits seem to be fighting the last war. Excepting SFUSD, they've been mostly back for a year. And even SFUSD isn't headed toward indefinite closures.
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Suppose you think that school closures were a disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision. Shouldn't that merit some further reflection?
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You think this was a policy decision (which of course is totally a decentralized one) equivalent to the deaths of 460,000 people and the destabilizing of an entire region?
And...do you think parents and educators have not been reflecting, ffs?
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Yeah, I think depriving tens of millions of school children of an in-person education for a year or longer is absolutely on that magnitude. No question.
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I mean, just for starters, where excepting SFUSD were kids kept out of school for a year. Please account for the "tens of millions."
And, often, it was their own parents pushing for remote (or at least remote options) until vaccinations were available.
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There are about 50 million schoolchildren and 20 million college students in the US. They experienced a spectrum of disruptions from modest to severe. The total amount of learning loss was extremely large.
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Uh huh. And you would have ordered them all back into in person exactly when? Before we knew something of risks to them? Before their teachers or elderly relatives at home had vaccines? When bodies were piling up in NYC morgues?
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I'm saying the magnitude of societal impacts from these decisions is extremely large and it's ridiculous to suggest it's offensive to talk about that.
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Personally, I think the returns to high-quality education, both from a societal and individual standpoint, are extremely high. And I think the literature mostly supports that. I used to think this was a standard liberal viewpoint but apparently it isn't any longer.
Jan 6, 2022 · 3:36 AM UTC
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