NY Times: Pandemic School Closures were Harmful and Useless

@sh76 said
===Oh, and by the way, studies have shown that missing out on the last year of primary school does not have any serious or long lasting effect on students.===

What about the first year? Or second?

Not every child was in his/her last year of primary school in 2021.

Anyway, as I've been on record saying many times, I don't blame anyone for closing schools in the initial p ...[text shortened]... at's up with that? Is it just a rule you have that every post has to have at least one wild element?

Anyway, as I've been on record saying many times, I don't blame anyone for closing schools in the initial panic of the Spring of 2020. I blame those who made the same decisions after there had been plenty of time to clear their heads.

Stop beating around the bush, mate. You really wanna discuss who NOT to blame? Who is history NOT coming for?

The national review wanted to blame teachers. Ridiculous. This would be like blaming the construction worker for a traffic jam.

You wanna blame teachers? Or?

@wildgrass said

Anyway, as I've been on record saying many times, I don't blame anyone for closing schools in the initial panic of the Spring of 2020. I blame those who made the same decisions after there had been plenty of time to clear their heads.

Stop beating around the bush, mate. You really wanna discuss who NOT to blame? Who is history coming for?

The national re ...[text shortened]... is would be like blaming the construction worker for a traffic jam.

You wanna blame teachers? Or?

No; I don't blame teachers. It's absurd to blame someone who takes advantage of an opportunity to make their lives easier without losing pay.

I do blame the leadership of the teachers' unions. But I especially blame the politicians and administrators who allowed schools to be closed into 2021 (and beyond, in some cases).

@sh76 said
No; I don't blame teachers. It's absurd to blame someone who takes advantage of an opportunity to make their lives easier without losing pay.

I do blame the leadership of the teachers' unions. But I especially blame the politicians and administrators who allowed schools to be closed into 2021 (and beyond, in some cases).

You blame the teachers union for sticking up for teachers? The hybrid model asked teachers to work two jobs at the same time with more students enrolled for the same pay.

Politicians somehow have dodged criticism, but you see the trick. The governor hires a "public health director" to evaluate the situation. That director holds many meetings with the team and they come to a closed door agreement on a course of action with said governor. The hired bureaucrat then makes the announcement publically and the governor comes out the same day with a press release saying he disagrees and wishes the schools were open.

Govt accountability was a huge loser. We should vote them all out, but instead we're watching one of them running for president 3x in a row. And maybe winning.

@wildgrass said
These are the highly cited seminal papers, something like 2,000 plus citations in follow up studies so it was correct for NYT to use it in their analysis. More recent studies are still using this datasi your "early" criticism isn't founded. It fits the time period being discussed here, and the conclusions drawn in the NYT article are supported by this rigorous well controlled dataset.

What "conclusions" in the article are supported by data? The data in the article says most of the drop in test scores happened regardless of whether there were school "closures" or not and there is zero data regarding the health benefits of such actions, just conclusory statements unsupported by the links you provided.

You, sh76 and a few writers at the NYT can keep "holding your breath until you turn blue" but quite frankly your claims are completely at odds with reality.

@sh76 said
No; I don't blame teachers. It's absurd to blame someone who takes advantage of an opportunity to make their lives easier without losing pay.

I do blame the leadership of the teachers' unions. But I especially blame the politicians and administrators who allowed schools to be closed into 2021 (and beyond, in some cases).

How many deaths and hospitalizations avoided would you consider as a sufficient benefit to offset the cost of an, at most, 1/5 of a grade equivalent drop in standardized test scores?

I wonder if our resident Trump troll will admit that not everything Trump did was wrong and not everything Biden did was right,

@sh76 said
No; I don't blame teachers. It's absurd to blame someone who takes advantage of an opportunity to make their lives easier without losing pay.

I do blame the leadership of the teachers' unions. But I especially blame the politicians and administrators who allowed schools to be closed into 2021 (and beyond, in some cases).

make their lives easier as in not losing them

From Slate:

"Here is an example of what the test scores do show: Fourth grade and eighth grade reading scores both dropped three points, on a 500-point scale, over the three years of school closures. This is simply not a crisis. We know because we actually have a group of students with similar scores to compare this cohort to. Students tested in 2022 performed on average about as well as students had in the year 2000. Children who were in fourth or eighth grade 25 years ago are now in their 30s. Despite the slightly lower reading scores of 20 years ago, they are all right, intellectually. During the first 10 or 15 years of their working life, per capita GDP and productivity continued to rise. They managed to master computers and the internet, the new technologies of their day. Relatively small changes in test scores simply do not tell us everything—or even very much—about the quality of schooling or about children’s futures."

"Yes, school closures factored into the decline in test scores. Math scores did decline faster during the pandemic than they had been previously. On average, student scores dropped more in schools that took longer to return to full-time, in-person instruction. However, the effect is small and inconsistent: Students in some school districts that returned to full-time, in-person learning only in fall did better than those in some districts that were closed only very briefly. Overall, the differences in scores between students attending schools with distance learning, all in-person learning, or a hybrid model were small."

"By May 2023, nearly 16 million children had gotten COVID. While most cases were relatively mild or entirely asymptomatic, 2,300 children died, 200,000 got sick enough to require hospitalization, and over a million had serious symptoms (including memory and concentration deficits) lasting three months or more."

"Both early and current critics claim that school closures were all downside, with little benefit in curbing the spread of COVID-19. The most recent studies indicate that they were wrong. Although nearly half of children infected with COVID-19 have no symptoms, between one-third and one-half of even presymptomatic or asymptomatic child cases carry virus in their nasal passages. They do shed virus and they can transmit it to others. A systematic review of studies conducted thorough mid-2022 concluded that the weight of the evidence was that school closures were associated with reduced COVID-19 transmission and a significant drop in morbidity and mortality in the community, although the authors of the paper conceded that the certainty of the evidence was low. A 2023 study found that in more than 70 percent of households with viral infections suggestive of COVID, it was a child who had transmitted the infection to the others in the family. This was especially the case during periods when children were attending school. Other studies suggest that when community transmission is low, reopening school buildings may not contribute much to the virus’s spread, but that when community transmission rises, the risk to the community also rises. How can people look at all this evidence and still insist closures were unjustified?"

https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/school-closures-covid-pandemic-learning-loss.html

@zahlanzi said
make their lives easier as in not losing them

If you never let them ride a bicycle, or swim in the sea or a river, or a lake that would be safer too. The safest of all is keep them locked in their room 24/7.

@no1marauder said
From Slate:

"Here is an example of what the test scores do show: Fourth grade and eighth grade reading scores both dropped three points, on a 500-point scale, over the three years of school closures. This is simply not a crisis. We know because we actually have a group of students with similar scores to compare this cohort to. Students tested in 2022 performed on avera ...[text shortened]... ustified?"

https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/school-closures-covid-pandemic-learning-loss.html

Your use of bolding is suspect. Why not here?

...the authors of the paper conceded that the certainty of the evidence was low.

Where's this paper? Slate's trying to put forward a thesis using the most persuasive info they can find, and "low certainty" is their best effort. It seems like the low certainty, in light of the many studies showing no benefit, would raise some doubt in your mind?

There are lots of good research studies out there saying the opposite of what the Slate author is trying to argue. Regarding the "when community transmission is low" comment from your article, the reverse causality can easily be controlled for. The school was open because transmission was low.

Here's that paper (i am not sure why the Slate author chose not to cite this):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8

Why didn't Slate cite this article?

"After controlling for case rate trends before school start, state-level mitigation measures and community activity level, SARS-CoV-2 incidence rates were not statistically different in counties with in-person learning versus remote school modes in most regions of the United States... Schools can reopen for in-person learning without substantially increasing community case rates of SARS-CoV-2."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01563-8

@wildgrass said
Your use of bolding is suspect. Why not here?

...the authors of the paper conceded that the certainty of the evidence was low.

Where's this paper? Slate's trying to put forward a thesis using the most persuasive info they can find, and "low certainty" is their best effort. It seems like the low certainty, in light of the many studies showing no benefit, wou ...[text shortened]... why the Slate author chose not to cite this):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8

Why cite a very early study focusing on only one country - Japan - in the first few months of the pandemic when you have one with megadata from 132 studies alone regarding the effect of school closures on COVID transmission?

Are you seriously asserting that moving from in person learning to hybrid and or remote learning had absolutely zero effect on transmission? That seems absurd on its face and is not supported by the vast majority of studies.

@wajoma said
If you never let them ride a bicycle, or swim in the sea or a river, or a lake that would be safer too. The safest of all is keep them locked in their room 24/7.

Loneliness decreases life expectancy more than smoking a pack a day.

@no1marauder said
Why cite a very early study focusing on only one country - Japan - in the first few months of the pandemic when you have one with megadata from 132 studies alone regarding the effect of school closures on COVID transmission?

Are you seriously asserting that moving from in person learning to hybrid and or remote learning had absolutely zero effect on transmission? That seems absurd on its face and is not supported by the vast majority of studies.

Why cite a very early study focusing on only one country - Japan - in the first few months of the pandemic when you have one with megadata from 132 studies alone regarding the effect of school closures on COVID transmission?

If you actually read these studies with an open mind you would understand why. In a nutshell, the confounding factors of what all else is happening in that society policy wise and culturally beyond just the schools are difficult to control for when you use megadata from a billion people where one group is in rural Wyoming and the other is in Mumbai. Some of the smaller studies have better control groups, for example two neighboring counties who made different decisions on school openings.

Why do you keep contesting the "very early" studies as if that's bad? The paper was quite clearly trying to look at that specific time period so the publication date is perfectly appropriate.

Are you seriously asserting that moving from in person learning to hybrid and or remote learning had absolutely zero effect on transmission? That seems absurd on its face and is not supported by the vast majority of studies.

Yes, yes, that's what I am asserting. (edit: sort of. The other paper is discussing the important issue of timing the return to school, not initial closures). Read the two Nature Medicine papers I just posted and tell me why they're wrong.

Your Slate author omitted contradictory evidence, opting instead to cite a study admitting weak statistics and very small effect if any.

@no1marauder
I will add that other mitigation strategies (distancing, masking etc.) did work. Closing schools did not. This is good information to know going forward.