As School Moves Online, Many Students Stay Logged Out (nytimes.com) 149
Teachers at some schools across the country report that fewer than half of their students are participating in online learning. From a report: Chronic absenteeism is a problem in American education during the best of times, but now, with the vast majority of the nation's school buildings closed and lessons being conducted remotely, more students than ever are missing class -- not logging on, not checking in or not completing assignments. The absence rate appears particularly high in schools with many low-income students, whose access to home computers and internet connections can be spotty. Some teachers report that fewer than half of their students are regularly participating.
The trend is leading to widespread concern among educators, with talk of a potential need for summer sessions, an early start in the fall, or perhaps having some or even all students repeat a grade once Americans are able to return to classrooms. Students are struggling to connect in districts large and small. Los Angeles said last week that about a third of its high school students were not logging in for classes. And there are daunting challenges for rural communities like Minford, Ohio, where many students live in remote wooded areas unserved by internet providers.
The trend is leading to widespread concern among educators, with talk of a potential need for summer sessions, an early start in the fall, or perhaps having some or even all students repeat a grade once Americans are able to return to classrooms. Students are struggling to connect in districts large and small. Los Angeles said last week that about a third of its high school students were not logging in for classes. And there are daunting challenges for rural communities like Minford, Ohio, where many students live in remote wooded areas unserved by internet providers.
They just haven't yet learned the best practice (Score:4, Interesting)
that we in the industry worked out. Which is to log in at 8:30 while in bed, join the meeting, and then go to sleep.
Re:They just haven't yet learned the best practice (Score:4, Interesting)
We've been doing this exactly one day where I live, and I agree, this isn't fully baked. The material the teachers send home is good quality, but difficult for me as the uh...test proctor? to administrate without also reading along (minus math. math is easy). They give work in week-long chunks all due at the end of the week, this si good for people who may not have consistent or predictable computer access, but also is difficult to partition and police. I want to coach kids and make sure they're trying to stay on task, but it's not easy for me to parcel the content out daily and see that it gets done. And I imagine many parents aren't even making that much effort, or even have any clue that there's stuff their kids should be doing. Here in the republic of texas we still have a few barnacles who think school is something between daycare and a waste of their tax dollars, they can't be relied upon for anything intelligent.
On the kids side, looking right now at what my son is doing on his computer. He has his classwork open but is watching silly youtube videos. Obviously I will go rattle his cage, but again I need a set of deadlines to hit and a way of making sure he's actually learning something. It's a lot of freedom for young kids to manage, it's good for them to learn, but it's not the lesson we intended. It is actually quite representative of the skill and discipline they will need in the real world.
I think over the next few weeks we need to work with teachers to boil down their lesson plans into things that can be absorbed and complied with.
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To me this really points to flaws in our current education system model and the fact that within our education system, we should let the learner dictate the subject and the pace of learning, so that each student is learning about what they are interested in, and at a pace that they are comfortable with.
You are describing college, you want public K-12 to be more like college? How exactly would that work out?
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I had a math class in college that was essentially work at your own pace. I think most students kept up with the teacher but a half dozen of us were quite far ahead. Luckily, the class had more then enough lessons that most of the class would never get to.
Back when they use to give an office class, my friend and I ended up finishing the entire class about half way through. The teacher turned us into TA's to grade the work of the other students and we also got to learn some computer maintenance. I recall him
This is a sad fact, but not all students have (Score:2)
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computers. And not all schools give out computers. Or, if they do. A deposit is required for the student to have that computer. And again, if the parents can not or will not afford the deposit. The student does not have a computer to log in.
You seem to be missing the biggest issue, which isn't just access to a computer, which I would guess most kids do have (assuming a phone / tablet counts).
It's access to an internet connection.
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Just so I'm clear:
Some people don't have computers, and if they do, some don't have access to an internet connection, and if they do have a computer and an internet connection, they may live in a large family, so that they can't concentrate.
Maybe what we need is a one-child rule, that way every child would have the full attention of their two parents (oh wait, some don't have two parents...), their parents could afford a computer and better home in a community with internet access - yeah, that sounds great.
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The actual problem is the teachers don’t have a freakin clue what they are doing. Inner city school teachers in public schools get trained up on how to deal with large class size
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The problem is big (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a situation where school funding is based on their test scores. Which is stupid because of the school who do best scholastically are often in neighborhoods with wealthier parents who have the resources to care about their children's education vs the poorer neighborhoods where the parents are spending their time for their children's survival. You take the Straight-A Students from the Burbs and send them to the inner-city school they will still be Straight-A Students even without the school resources. However, if you take the Failing Students from the underfunded schools and put them into the safe well-funded school districts that will take time to give them extra support and education they will prosper better, perhaps not Straight A but perhaps C's
For these students, Home is a bad location for education. I am not going to say they are bad parents, but their parents are unable to properly support their child's education. Things like Internet Connections, giving a quite private work location, enough food to give them energy, or they may need to work hours that will prevent them from proper interactions.
A friend of mine teaches In-school suspension and detention for an inner-city school. The kids are good kids, perhaps rough around the edges. However, they will often get themselves in trouble in school. Just to stay in detention so they spend more time away from home, as it is safer and more structured there.
My father never graduated from High School and my Mother has only a High School education. However, both my Sister and I have Masters degrees and good jobs because they created an environment where we could focus on education. There were enough circumstances that allowed them to do such, such as my father was drafted into the Vietnam War, thus having military service to boost his resume plus he was able to drive Semi-Trucks, which allowed him to make a good middle-class living. Which gave us a safe place at home to study.
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>Students from the Burbs and send them to the inner-city school they will still be Straight-A Students even without the school resources.
Usually, yes that's how it works out. Just look at public "magnate" schools where admission is based on test scores. The kids in that school have the same resources as kids in other high schools in the city, yet somehow they do better academically.
Also school-funding is usually based on property taxes, with the caveat that students in poorer areas are heavily subsidized
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No competent urban planner believes this.
Inner cities represent huge subsidies to the surrounding regions, because they bear a disproportionate load of the needy and distressed.
Some degenerate gambler from the opulent suburbs develops
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Usually, yes that's how it works out. Just look at public "magnate" schools where admission is based on test scores. The kids in that school have the same resources as kids in other high schools in the city, yet somehow they do better academically.
"Magnet"schools are schools that focus on certain subject areas (performing arts, STEM, Foreign Language Immersion, etc.), and the kids in those schools DO NOT have the same resources as other schools.
Perhaps "the kids in that school" "where admission is based on test scores" "do better academically" because, you know, better test scores?
I think you are conflating Charter Schools with Magnet Schools - Charter Schools manage with fewer resources than the average school, Magnet Schools typically have better/g
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However, if you take the Failing Students from the underfunded schools and put them into the safe well-funded school districts that will take time to give them extra support and education they will prosper better, perhaps not Straight A but perhaps C's
You're talking about forced school integration AKA desegregation or forced busing. It was tried many times throughout the latter part of the 20th Century in the US, but recently some of the woke peeps are calling for it to make a comeback.
Ultimately it alwa
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We have a situation where school funding is based on their test scores.
You are wrong, right there. We do NOT fund schools based on their test scores - where the hell are you getting that idea?
Most locations in America fund their public schools through defined school taxes levied against every property owner in a municipality - I've never heard of property taxes going up or down based on student test scores.
Re:The problem is big (Score:5, Insightful)
We can just call them Bad people and Ignore the problem, so the next generation that grows up will be in the same boat.
But being we a product of over a billion years, where reproduction is instinctive to our human nature. Poor people are going to have kids. No ethical (and non-ethical) methods are going to stop it for any long period of time.
So we can either just keep them as an underclass, possibly missing out on the next rare genius who can change the world for the better, keeping you entitled place in society knowing no matter how bad you are, you are still better off than those people. Or we can try to elevate or at least give a different path for these people (for those who have worked with the lower class people, are not dumb, they are actually very smart) where they can have options to improve themselves and their situation.
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Poor people can't afford $25 at planned parenthood? You know they're buying cigarettes and booze already so come on.
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Poor people can't afford $25 at planned parenthood?
There's a significant portion of the US population trying to make sure Planned Parenthood doesn't exist.
Re:The problem is big (Score:5, Informative)
There's a significant portion of the US population trying to make sure Planned Parenthood doesn't exist.
No, there's a significant portion of the US population that thinks the people that avail themselves of Planned Parenthood's services should be the ones paying for the services, not the taxpayer. As it stands right now the government gives PP about $500M/yr for non-abortion services, but somehow PP can't figure out how to arrange their finances to segregate abortion services money from health services money.
PP argues against locating their facilities near a hospital, against having their abortionists have admitting privleges at nearby hospitals, against parental notification, against regular oversight by Health officials, and so on - all because they are concerned about "women's health"?
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A significant portion of the population lives over a hundred miles from a planned parenthood location or any location that offers family planning services. If you don't have access to a car, 100 miles away might as well be the moon.
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Poor people can't afford $25 at planned parenthood?
What service do you imagine Planned Parenthood offers for $25 that could help with anything we're talking about? (Abortions are about $700 as I understand, and condoms are given away freely).
It is lot of work (Score:5, Interesting)
For starters, this assumes we have four working, charged devices with webcams and a good internet connection - which we do have (and keeping everything charged is hard). None of the students are old enough yet to remember all their usernames and passwords. This means a parent is trying to get four video conferencing apps set up and running at the same time (or when the kids accidentally log out halfway through). This means having to constantly monitor the progress to make sure the kids are not back on youtube instead of doing something with their class, but the kids have to be in different rooms due to the sheer amount of noise produced by four concurrent video conferences. This means lots of running and having to play tech support on different devices. As someone who has done tech support for over two decades, this is hard for *me* to handle.
The video conferencing solutions are OK but not great. They drop calls, randomly drop meetings, have glitchy audio, someone is muted and can't unmute, someone is connecting over 4G and sounds like they are in a tunnel - now someone just disappeared OK, they are back again. OK now someone's dog is in the frame. Focusing on the teacher long enough to learn anything is hard. Now the teacher's dog is barking and she has to go make it hush. It is not a good environment for study, and many teachers are piling on homework and assignments.
Oh, and BTW - many parents are working from home, having to attend our own mandatory trainings and webinars with essentially a full-time load. My wife works as a therapist for the schools and because her hours can be billed to insurance she has been expected to keep working a full-time job, just now trying to limp along remotely. Not to mention all the other stuff - can't go anywhere, endless cooking/cleaning/laundry because now the kids are home all day, and then having to deal with all the nationwide stress amplifiers....
Now take the same mix - what do you do if you have two kids needing access to two different classes and you only have one device? What happens if you are on a capped/metered connection (yes, some not all have raised caps)? I know many people in my area who only can get DSL - 4Mbps down / 1Mbps up. Video conference no likey those speeds. I can list places in town that have no *cell* coverage.
The online learning is nice but not sustainable as a viable option.
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Re:It is lot of work (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a university professor. I have been teaching a master level elective algorithm class that was transitioned online about a month ago. So you'd expect these students to have better access to the type of computers and network access that would work.
I am doing the best I can, and I know my colleagues are doing the best they can. We are probably doing a bit better than average because we were in the process of opening our first fully online master degree. So some colleagues have taken a lot of training on how to teach online and have made online a good part of their classes.
And it has still been difficult. The online video conferencing tools are actually no where near as good as they claim to be. They are not stable. I am using webex on Debian. There are no desktop client for Linux systems. The webclient only works with very recent firefox (or you don't get camera) or with google chrome. Except there seems to be a thread leak or a memory leak of some kind because my memory and CPU utilization keeps going up until I lose audio or chrome freezes.
Half of the time, the join by link do not work for an obscure reason and I have to fish the meeting ID to type it. People, sometimes, do not send the meeting ID, just the link.
Canvas is working ok but not great. If you use the "embedded video conference" option they can't take the load. All notifications (email typically) are delayed excessively, sometimes by more than a day. Simple file download can be in kB/s at some time of the day because everyone is using it. (This has gotten better, I guess they adjusted the cloud resources they get.)
Turns out half of my student do not have camera. Fortunately it is not necessary here. Some do not have internet at home that is good enough to maintain a connection. So they log in by phone. But then, they can't share screens.
At the undergraduate level, we have done some surveys to see where the student equipment stands. about 30% do not have access to a computer steadily throughout the day. The most common pattern seems to be, 2 parents and 3 kids, maybe 2 actual computers and a couple tablets. And these are students in a BS in Computer Science, you would think they have access to computers.
So in brief, I think people are doing what they can. But it is hell right now!
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Why would the students need a camera? They need to see you, or at least the whiteboard you're presenting. Why do you need to see them?
My company has us working from home. The rule was initially that everyone was to join meeting with the video on. The idea was to be able to monitor that everyone was there and paying attention. Due to bandwidth issues, we have all just migrated to having the video muted, and the problems have goine away.
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Work is much different, you shouldn't need to monitor adults the same way, and workers can often decide if they need to attend a meeting or not.
not logging on, not checking in or not completing (Score:2)
So they're acting link college athletes?
Good for them. (Score:2)
You don't learn anything meaningful when it's something that's done to you. Those students are correct to refuse to waste their time on this shit.
Bailout of the education system. (Score:2)
Once these kids are young adults, the system will say that these kids had all of the same chances and that it is because of their work ethic that they are poor and not educated. These kids, just like their parents may not be able to pay for school for their kids. The system will say the same about those kids. In some cases, jobs that these kids could have been trained to do will be given to high achievers that immigrate with H1B Visas. The cycle will continue.
The disparity in this country is in full
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I believe in the US, we already pay more per capita for the public education of our children than anywhere else in the world.
If it were just a matter of throwing dollars at the problem we'd be #1 already.
It isn't the money.
It is bureaucracy, booted levels of money spent on admin and rulesets that do more harm than good to enforce.
We've had at least
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The disparity in this country is in full view with the Pandemic. I think it is a real shame that we don't invest more in our children's education. Just imagine if we had a 4 trillion dollar bailout of our education system.
Imagine how great teacher salaries, benefits would be - imagine how it would make no difference to the children.
It wasn't that long ago one person donated $100 Million to one school district [businessinsider.com], that's one hundred million dollar over and above all local, state, and federal funding the district was receiving. Today you can't drive through the district and point to anything that was made better because of that donation.
Pouring money into the schools doesn't solve problems outside the school building.
communicated (Score:2)
I don't think the plan for distance learning has been well thought through or well communicated by my school district (and it's a reasonably affluent one).
There were a few weeks to put together a plan and the outcome seems to have been left to individual teachers, the messaging is rather vague and non-commital.
A team at the school district shoudl have come up with a concrete plan and confidently projected it forward to the students. Instead there was no communication at all for at least a week or so (presu
Re:communicated (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you basically got it...
I don't think the plan for distance learning has been well thought through
I mean, that pretty much sums it up. I don't think anyone in the educational system meaningfully thought about the logistics of having to do remote learning for every student in the district simultaneously. That's something that simply isn't precedented since the internet entered the same league as 'electricity' and 'phone', so the reality is that even the most competent, well-meaning, well-funded school district didn't have a system in place that suddenly needed to be implemented, tested, and utilized by the 28-year-old computer teacher and the 63-year-old French teacher alike, in a weekend. Nobody is going to be having a good time with that.
Now, let's take a look at things from a teacher's perspective: Many of them muddled through computer class in high school and college, for reasons anywhere from 'I'm not interested, and who gives a damn about MacOS 4 anyway?' to 'having a teacher who got hired because they have a general-purpose teaching degree and did some time programming FORTRAN back in the day and doesn't have much better of an idea as to how any of this works than the students', to 'getting stuck in a classroom with a half-decent teacher who got stuck with their curriculum and equipment decided by two different departments who don't communicate with each other, so now they have a stack of Chromebooks on the left, and a stack of 'Office 2019' textbooks on the right'. The spectrum is far greater than most other disciplines.
Teachers at every level of technological competence have to suddenly not only learn whatever system they can get to work, but now have to provide a certain amount of tech support to their students and their parents (i.e. 'users'). Even if they have a well-meaning competent IT department, *everyone* is calling them at the same time, so there's either going to be long wait times or a hastily-written e-mail trying to provide procedures and FAQs, which they now have to figure out. Meanwhile, they had a bunch of lesson plans of activities to do in the classroom, only to now have to circular file those and figure out how to get the core concepts across to parents and kids using what they may-or-may-not have in the house, rewrite tests in ways that allow parents to proctor them (possibly going from paper printouts to Google Forms or similar), and then figure out how to grade them.
Instead of trying to carry on the same old way just "over the internet" thay could have tried to explout some of the internet's relative strengths and sidestepped some fo its weaknesses, for example they could have taken the opportunity to video record some lessons and then arranged small group audio conferences for example to check on student progress
I don't disagree that this would be a lot better solution. I'm sure that administrators, school boards, teachers, and IT departments will be analyzing what was and wasn't done for a long while after students are back in classrooms, and I'm sure that there will be ways to facilitate distance / independent learning going forward, as we implement such options as an integral part of classroom flow well after the quarantine has been lifted.
But we didn't have months of analysis, planning, prepping, QA, training, and optimization. We had, apparently, a very-stressful week, and the results reflect it.
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I'm sure it has been stressful, but it hasn't been a week. I see an announcement that SATs were cancelled and schools closed more than three weeks ago. I agree that the end date changed at one point and, I suspect, is likely to change again, but the writing was on the wall and it should have been enough to kick off a planning session
I don't see what tech literacy has to do with this, Im not asking teachers to code their own version of zoom, just to maybe create a meeting and try it out with a few of their c
Not just in High Schools - Personal observations (Score:2)
Although the article most directly references the problems in high schools in different areas, I see the same problems in my NYC (CUNY) community college. The transition from in-person to online classes via teleconferencing was so rapid that a large proportion of the students were unable to adapt. In the first few days after classes resumed, class attendance was _sparse_ (read: down by 50-60%), and many of the students that did show up for the meetings were using their cellphones or tablets to connect. S
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Let's not confuse cause and effect (Score:3)
The absence rate appears particularly high in schools with many low-income students, whose access to home computers and internet connections can be spotty. Some teachers report that fewer than half of their students are regularly participating.
High bandwidth is not necessary for routine school assignments. Wanna bet that the malingering students are taking quarantine as a virtual spring break, pounding away on MMORPGs with their gaming rigs? if Mother is at work and Daddy is a sperm cell, there's nobody at home to make sure that the kids are doing their school assignments.
There's an old saying that if you gave everybody a million dollars and then just waited a few years, the distribution of rich and poor would be about the same as before.
The problem in my district... (Score:2)
... isn't the kids, at least in the circle of parents I keep up with. For my own 4th grade kid, I am staying on his ass conscientiously, so that he completes the work assigned to him conscientiously. Same for the parents I know.
Nor is it access to technology; the district has made Chromebooks available to any student that needs one, and apparently have spares.
Nor is it access to the internet. Again, the district has made wifi hot spots available to anyone who needs one, and while they've supposedly run out,
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Schools and districts are just not set up for this; perhaps this is a lesson learned and they will be better positioned next time.
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I somewhat feel the same way, but what are the teachers supposed to be doing? If 30-40% of your class is gone - essentially completely out of contact - how do you realistically keep teaching?
This seems like an odd question to me. Would they stop teaching at the grade school level if 30%-40% of a class wasn't in attendance at school? Why would they stop teaching in an online environment?
Further, there are likely plenty of teachers who don't have high-speed internet or computer systems at home (many full-time teachers live in poverty as well).
Possible, but unlikely in my district. Also, as I mentioned, the schools are making devices available, and the ISPs are providing cost-free internet. Finally, I know for a fact that my kid's teacher has no problem with access. As I mentioned though, my experience is entirely anecdotal, and I am only criticizing t
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Setting aside classes that aren't easily home-assigned in this manner, perhaps your kid didn't really need to be at school more than those two hours?
I know I wasted lots of time in school.
Possible, but I won't speak to that one way or another, other than to say I wasted a lot of time in school too. It doesn't excuse the lack of effort from the district and teachers, especially because even if my kid is having an easy time of it, there are certainly others who aren't, and need that extra engagement from their teachers. The one hour a day, two days a week availability really galls me.
Teach time management (Score:2)
You're honestly wondering? (Score:2)
First, the infrastructure. Internet access is, believe it or not, still a luxury to some people. I have no idea what you pay for your connection, mine costs about 70 bucks a month. That is some serious money for a lot of people who have to get by on maybe 700-1000. And you can't pay internet with food stamps. But hey, you might say, everyone can get a cheap cell phone contract with a "free" (read: adhesion contract for 2+ years with your provider) phone. That's true, and the average conference session will
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Carriers have anounced the suspension of caps and overage fees for families affected by this crisis.
The federal government (through the FCC) forced carriers to offer low-cost internet plans (typically around $10/month) for low-income families.
Low-income families across the country qualify for, and receive, so-called free Obamaphones which include data plans.
Every American on unemployment will get an additional $600/week bump in thier benefits for the next four months. (That's the tax-free equivalent of a no
Now they just have automated reporting (Score:2)
Many kids duck out of real-world school. If you watch the local high school, you can see lots of kids entering in the morning. A few minutes later, you can watch many of them leave out the side doors. They check into homeroom, then leave. Most of the teachers don't have the time, or interest, to check attendance in every class period. So the kids are just assumed to be present.
In contrast, the online classes track logons (attendance), and give reports.
Students not logging on? (Score:2)
I doubt it's lack of Internet access, more likely the students are too preoccupied watching live stream gaming commentators or fapping off to chaturbate. But they're definitly not staying off-line.
well ... (Score:2)
... you know what? We are all home, and my kids don't have a private office, and no, you aren't getting video of their bedroom either. So we've said no Zoom meetings.
If you want to post videos of you rambling on for them to watch, fine. But now might even be a good time to actually figure out how to use the capabilities that online learning has to offer, instead of just trying to replicate the classroom experience!
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Everyone's parenting experience is different, but my point of view is the exact opposite of yours. I'm happy to allow my kid to do a Zoom meeting with his teacher and classmates. The interactivity is a good thing, especially since he can't see his friends face-to-face right now. If anything, I'd appreciate much more of that.
In our case though, we have a communal office set up in what ought to be the dining room of our house, and all three of us have desks and computers of our own. My kid's is five feet away
Unintended effects (Score:2)
Just like the cratering of the economy has had unintended benefits such as cleaner air, less traffic congestion, and fewer deaths due to seasonal infections, I wonder if the cratering of traditional education will have unintended benefits for poor students. For example, I'm guessing reported truancy has disappeared. Poor students may not be participating in online schoolwork, but they likely aren't being punished for truancy and aren't getting suspended or expelled. Bad grades are disappearing as schools
Re:Government schools are terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
More likely it's the lack of resources at home. To participate you need internet with decent bandwidth and caps, and a computer that the kid can use exclusively for hours a day. Two computers if you have two kids.
In the UK they have had to keep the free school meals going for children not going to school because otherwise their parents couldn't afford to feed them properly. Having access to online learning is a luxury they certainly can't afford if they need free school meals.
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I'm not sure what you are getting at. Government schools are "daycare"? Maybe it's an American English thing, I read that as they are taking the children off the parent's hands during the day which allows them time to work.
I'm not saying that isn't valuable but... Are you saying if free daycare was available it would provide them with computers and other materials? Like a school but without teachers or something? Perhaps we got our wires crossed.
Re:Government schools are terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
> I'm not sure what you are getting at. Government schools are "daycare"?
It has been known for decades that public indoctrination system [amazon.com] doesn't actually teach kids how to think [maa.org].
Quoting The Underground History of American Education:
That is SLOWLY changing but the question remains: WHY did it take so long?
How is that we had BETTER literacy BEFORE mandatory schooling???
Today kids would rather stream Fortnite on YouTube instead of learning about the world around them. i.e. Americans being clueless about geography is a meme.
=== Textbooks ===
The elephant in the room is that textbooks are a bigger scam. Every new edition has minor changes yet students and teachers are forced to buy the latest version because publishers are trying to kill the used textbook market. It's not like the fucking Law of Physics have changed since the last revision! Richard Feynman pointed out how corrupt publishers of textbooks where in his chapter Judging Books by Their Covers [unios.hr] in his book Surely Youre Joking Mr Feynman when he points out the utter stupidity and corruption:
Note that this was before computers became ubiquitous so Feynman was quite short-sighted on the importance of binary and hexadecimal base conversion:
=== Literacy ===
You can tell how intellectually healthy a society is by noting who they value:
* Entertainers are paid the most money but provide the least long-term value to society.
* Educators are paid the least money but provide the most long-term value to society.
America's future is fucked as their public Indoctrination system continues to pass students who can't even read [google.com].
If America was smart they would be investing in their kids. Instead they are buying beer nuts -- it is only a matter of time before the chickens come home to roost.
Re:Government schools are terrible (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure where you are getting the information that "complex literacy" was as high as 100% in 1840, but that's simply not possible given that a large portion of the population in the Southern United States was enslaved and in many cases prohibited by law from being taught to read. Moreover, there's no way for a reliable or comprehensive survey to have been performed at the time when much of the population lived in what was then remote frontier. Even of one was done, there was nothing like a modern universal standardized test to measure literacy.
Arguments that today's youth are lazy are as old as written history. Plato wrote "'The children now love luxury; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise." That was written around 400B.C. Today's youth are no different from yesterday's. Just as today's old folks yelling "get off my lawn" haven't changed either.
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I'm not sure where you are getting the information that "complex literacy" was as high as 100% in 1840, but that's simply not possible given that a large portion of the population in the Southern United States was enslaved and in many cases prohibited by law from being taught to read.
You must've missed the clause hidden in the quote he used to cherry-picked his data - 'where it mattered'. In 1840, it didn't matter if women were literate. It didn't matter if slaves were literate. It didn't matter if the poor were literate! Public education expanded with voting rights. In theory, illiterate people can't vote. The purpose of an education is to make sure that the public can remain informed and vote freely. Illiteracy is a powerful form of voter suppression.
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No argument on textbooks. Or c
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How many Entertainers make > 10 Million?
Now list how many Educators make > 10 Million, let alone 1 Million?
America doesn't value Educators.
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I regret asking.
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How is that we had BETTER literacy BEFORE mandatory schooling???
We didn't. Laws mandating school attendance were adopted state-by-state between 1920 and 1940. Literacy rates then were significantly lower than today.
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Because it's clear to critical thinkers that a person joining a discussion for the sole purpose of calling poor students in pubic schools "daycare" is trying to do nothing more than incite an inflammatory response from the conversation participants.
If you want to have a discussion about the statistical efficacy of poor student schools, the price being paid, and by which tax payers, the graduation rates, the eventual work force quality generated 2 decades later, juvenile and eventual adult crime rates, finan
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Not to mention the parental role.
A student in school that is generally good and willing to learn may still lack the will to ignore alternative activities without help. In school everything is geared toward not having much to do apart from the actual learning material during class. At home it falls to parents to do that, and parents may not do that well.
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>In school everything is geared toward not having much to do apart from the actual learning material during class.
Hmm, it sounds like you haven't been in a classroom in years. Kids these days are constantly on their smartphones, and depending on the socioeconomic-level of the school ignoring the teachers, the teachers have to fight the students to get them to pay attention (sometimes literally). If anything at home they don't have the distraction of the other kids as an excuse.
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Kids are on their phones a lot, but at least in physical schools they have a teacher telling them to put it away. Some teachers take away phones, too. Not all schools support teachers with that, so not all do it.
They'd still have other kids as a distraction online, though. Texting and other social media.
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I have a kid in school and two public school teachers in the family. Mostly I hear and have seen what I roughly remember.
One teacher did speak of a real life example of that stereotypical dystopian school, but even they said that after working at many schools, they'd only seen one in such dire shape.
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More likely it's the lack of resources at home. To participate you need internet with decent bandwidth and caps, and a computer that the kid can use exclusively for hours a day.
I know, what we should do is send every dependent child $500 so their parents can afford to buy them a computer ($500 will buy a perfectly adequate desktop or laptop computer).
Two computers if you have two kids.
Good news! Every dependent child is getting $500 - it's like an Oprah episode - "You get a computer, you get a computer, AND YOU GET A COMPUTER TOO!"
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I heard Google was donating Chromebooks.
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In the UK they have had to keep the free school meals going for children not going to school because otherwise their parents couldn't afford to feed them properly.
As far as I know, most schools in America are doing this too. Or at least tons of ones I've seen. I guess I can't speak for all 50 states, though.
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"a computer that the kid can use exclusively for hours a day. Two computers if you have two kids."
My two kids use Chromebooks that I bought off of Craigslist for a little over $100 USD each. I don't know the solution to "lack of resources", but there are ways to bring down the cost.
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And right now, likely one or both parents are working from home, and they're going to use the "good" computer.
Let me get this straight - two professionals, with jobs they can perform from home, live in a house with only one "good" computer? Neither has a laptop from work?
Its fascinating to see the lengths people are going to cast this a serious problem - now we are to believe that dual professional income families fall into the same dire straits as the dual income manual laborers families are in?
You know iPads, laptops, etc. are perfectly adequate - "good" enough - for school work, running WebEx, Meet, Zoom, etc. B
Re:This is a good test... (Score:4, Informative)
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>If they were just slackers... why did they participate when they had to physically go there?
But did they participate? I suspect that the same amount of kids were the ones disrupting the class, and the first chance at not being in school they refuse to do any work.
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"it's particularly high in low income areas where people may not be able to afford reliable internet". It seems like at least a large part of the problem isn't "slackers" as you call them... but kids with poor parents or live in an area where reliable internet connection is unobtainable. So your solution is to make sure that when school returns to a form that they can actually participate in... they can't get back into it? If they were just slackers... why did they participate when they had to physically go there? Why is the lack of participation having economic trends (wouldn't you expect the people with easy lives to be the ones least motivated to work hard).
Correlation does not equal causation. There is no evidence that lack of connectivity is a primary cause or even a significant factor, its just a default assumption that isn't even challenged. There are many who have good connections who are not fully participating, and there are differing reasons. One is that some parents must work and leave their kids unattended, and kids are not disciplined enough on there own. Another is older kids who are babysitting younger siblings while parents work. And then there a
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Is "we have flaky internet" the 21st century version of "the dog ate it"?
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Is "we have flaky internet" the 21st century version of "the dog ate it"?
Sigh... Perhaps you live in an area where you always have a good internet connection. Some of us don't. Some have to rely on satellite connections, which is pretty low bandwidth and high latency. Some are still on some form of dial-up.
For me it's a dish on the side of the house pointing towards a water tower with something like 802.11a connectivity. It works pretty well until a thunder and lightning storm comes along, then for the safety of the equipment in my house it's best if I unplug from that dish un
Quite Elitist (Score:5, Informative)
In my community, there are many students living in poverty whose parents can't speak English (and most are here legally), work really long hours trying to stay afloat, and cram 5 or more people into a 2 bedroom apt 1000sqft apt. It takes some serious motivation to focus on your homework while your younger siblings are running around and your parents are fighting in the same room.
I don't view this as virtuous darwinism, but more a tragedy....people who grew up with little and will get left behind...and as a result, society suffers. We want these kids to get an education and better jobs, get off welfare, stay out of the criminal justice system, and have less unplanned pregnancies.
The COVID-19 economic toll will be huge, especially on the poor, unless a miracle happens and the curve flattens really quickly and we can get more people to work. There are the issues we are anticipating, like the months out of work, but what about the impacts of kids missing 3-9 months of school and social services, meals provided by the school, special ed, social worker interaction, etc. Middle class families will do fine, but a lot of families in every community are struggling and this will make things a lot worse for them in ways that will certainly impact us all.
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I agree with the sentiment, but abject poverty doesn't account for the article's claim of "half" of students now being absent. Though they do point out that the stats show it being worse in low-income schools.
It doesn't change the GP's point though, a good portion of these students are actually slack. My wife is a teacher doing the remote thing (In Europe, in a high end bi-lingual school) she has noted a general increase in tardiness in homework being submitted late or not at all, students not attending vid
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"the article's claim of "half" of students now being absent. "
-1, strawman
The article does not claim that half of students are absent.
"a good portion of these students are actually slack"
-1, fact not entered into evidence.
You offer no data and only one anecdote that even then makes no effort to distinguish slacking from bad stress-coping strategies.
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...to cull out the slackers from the real students. When the schools reopen, make sure the notice is given in the same manner, so the slackers can stay home and not waste our time.
Tell me, what are you planning on doing with the 50% of students who fail your "slacker" litmus test?
You act as if laziness and cheating isn't insanely popular these days.
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Well, ONE lesson I hope this pandemic situation will teach us as a country, is that we desperately need to bring back manufacturing back to our shores.
If we do this, we will need unskilled labor to work those jobs, much like we did last century.....
We also need to re-invest in trade schools, to try those that are not attuned to gett
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Manufacturing is no longer an unskilled job. It used to be that all you did was screw widget A into widget B. But that's increasingly not the case. Manufacturing jobs often require sophisticated understanding of interdependent systems and knowledge about complex machinery and computer systems.
There are still unskilled manufacturing jobs in the world, but those are only viable in places paying third world wages. If they were brought to the U.S., the use of automation and required skill set would increase dra
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The absence rate appears particularly high in schools with many low-income students, whose access to home computers and internet connections can be spotty.
So, it has been determined that this disparity is absolutely and exclusively due to access to technology, and that other factors such as parental involvement have zero impact?
First of all, going to ignore your straw man that the phrase you quoted in any way implies that access to technology is the primary factor.
Second, students in low-income areas probably also have parents who have jobs that don't offer vacation, paid leave, or are not amenable to working from home. So their parents are probably out having to work while their children stay home.
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First of all, going to ignore your straw man that the phrase you quoted in any way implies that access to technology is the primary factor.
GMAFB, the summary explicitly cites it twice in the two paragraphs. Your 'strawman' contention that it isn't even implied as a primary factor beyond ridiculous.
Show me where in the summary it says students are missing school only because of a lack of access. All I see is the summary noting that the absenteeism is higher in lower income areas.
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This is my thought. While I'm sure there do exist people that have issues, there has been great efforts to overcome that. My cell service lifted data caps and provides tethering despite my plan. My kids school went out of their way to check on resources and did hand out school computers and still had some left over.
Despite all this, the 'class' meetings had like a third of the class actually bother. The kids have access to basically whatever they could want to, in an environment where they are accustome
Re:Poor == poor connection? (Score:4, Insightful)
People often talk about a lack of parental involvement as a way of saying that when a poor kid doesn't achieve academically, it's really their own fault (or that of their parents). What they don't realize is that "parental involvement" is not free.
It's a lot harder to stay involved when you can't afford childcare and you work jobs that require physical presence. An office worker can work from home- a janitor can not. Even during normal times, coming to things like parent-teacher conferences is a lot more difficult when you work random shifts instead of the regular business hours most white collar workers are used to. That's not even getting into things like language barriers and the fact that poor parents often lack the education themselves to be involve or know how to get involved.
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Re:No Excuse (Score:4, Informative)
If I were unable to afford the internet, I'd go to the public library, which provides internet access for free, along with a variety of extremely valuable subscriptions (ValueLine being one of them). There, children would have not only access to the online curriculum provided by their school, but also to a wide range of information and educational materials in both digital and print format.
All public libraries in my county (and in other counties as part of a regional system) are closed.
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Then I would go and use a coffee shop's free wifi!
> All of the places serving food are take-out only, and they've picked up the chairs and tables to prevent people hanging out there.
Then I would go to the supermarket and sit in my car and use their wifi!
It's actually come to that. Schools around here are setting up open wifi networks that extend into their parking lots so that kids without internet can have their parents drive them to sit in the parking lot while they do work in the back seat. I'm not su
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Schools really are doing the best they can. The problem is that if you've never planned for a major crisis, you're only going to be able to gimp along as you fight your way through it.
Yep. My sister teaches elementary school level special ed, and she had to do online lessons. My mother in law works as a teacher in a small private school and they make them long on and eat lunch with the kids over video chat (God knows why?) Instead of doing all this and cancelling the rest of the school year, they should really have tried just delaying schools for a month or 2 and made it up over the summer.
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I think the best move now would be to complete the semester in the fall, and then in January, start the first semester of next year. The schedule would remain the same, only kids would move up in grade over Winter break rather than Summer break. Why the hell should we throw away a successfully completed first semester? Isn't that why we compartmentalize the classes in the first place?
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Instead of doing all this and cancelling the rest of the school year, they should really have tried just delaying schools for a month or 2 and made it up over the summer
This isn't going to be over by summer. I wouldn't be surprised if the next school year is also remote, or mostly-remote. Maybe we can avoid that if the lockdowns turn out to be much more effective than they appear, and allow us to knock the case count down far enough that we can manage with less-thorough social distancing plus aggressive testing and contact tracing. But I doubt it. We'll have to relax the constraints a little, but unless we can get a lot better control than I think we can, that will have
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As much as it would suck, you may still be able to use their WiFi from outside the building. Several regions have chosen to increase the power of their routers to assist in this. No guarantees, but you can at least ask.
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Actually, a lot of those kids in Africa aren't going to school at all (especially the girls). Parents can't afford to lose their labor when they are barely able to eat as-is. Those kids will indeed be condemned to a life of poverty, and there's little their parents can do to get them out of it. Yeah, some kids beat the odds either through luck or exceptional ability/determination, but being exceptional shouldn't be a prerequisite to a decent life.
Perhaps you had exceptional determination and ability. But th
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-Unlike the U.S., many countries don't attempt to offer quality education to everyone. This results in the U.S. comparing its full population against other countries' wealthy.
-Content expectations differ from country to country; subjects receive different weights, content is in different order, and so on. This makes it difficult to know what content to test internationally in a manner that is fair.
-Many other coun
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We're going to have to fail a lot of students this year.
Oh I think you're wrong. The district I live in, and several in the surrounding area, have gone to pass/fail rather than letter grades for the rest of the year. Pass is a 100, Fail is a 69.
I expect that all the kids are going to get "Pass" in all subjects for the last quarter. The complaining from parents would be deafening otherwise.
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if you didn't learn the material and can't pass the tests then you're not ready for the next grade.
Where is this mythical publlic school system where all children either perform at grade level or repeat their last year?
The city of Baltimore is graduating senior classes where NONE of the students are performing at grade level in math. [educationviews.org]
Inner-city schools graduate illiterate students all the time - if they didn't, their teachers might not get their performance bonuses or be able to negotiate generous salary/benefit increases year after year.
In Baltimore, a district where NO students are proficient (grade-lev