Online school put US kids behind Some adults have regrets Online School - Schooling HEAD TOPICS

Online school put US kids behind Some adults have regrets

10/21/2022 5:36:00 PM

Some schools remained closed a year into the pandemic despite evidence they weren t contributing to increased COVID-19 spread thanks to masking and social distancing efforts

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Some schools remained closed a year into the pandemic despite evidence they weren t contributing to increased COVID-19 spread thanks to masking and social distancing efforts Some schools remained closed a year into the pandemic despite evidence they weren t contributing to increased COVID-19 spread thanks to masking and social distancing efforts Preliminary test scores around the country confirm what Kargbo witnessed: The longer many students studied remotely, the less they learned. Some educators and parents are questioning decisions in cities from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles to remain online long after clear evidence emerged that schools weren’t COVID-19 super-spreaders — and months after life-saving adult vaccines became widely available. The scale of the problem and the challenges in addressing it were apparent in Associated Press interviews with nearly 50 school leaders, teachers, parents and health officials, who struggled to agree on a way forward.School closures continued last year because of teacher shortages and COVID-19 spread. It’s conceivable another pandemic might emerge — or a different crisis. Read more:
KGUN 9 On Your Side » Whites now more likely to die from covid than Blacks: Why the pandemic shifted COVID Rates Back Above 20% in Parts of Manhattan as Virus Rebounds US warned to prepare as COVID cases rise in Europe Philadelphia Orchestra cancels upcoming 50th-anniversary China tour

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Read more >> Whites now more likely to die from covid than Blacks: Why the pandemic shiftedAs the pandemic progressed, the damage done by the coronavirus broadened, and the toxicity of modern-day politics came to the fore. Yikes. Big reason: far right messaging. Republican candidates are pushing crazy cures and disparaging effective vaccines. Facebook-sponsored vaccine disinfo hits white people more. COVID Rates Back Above 20% in Parts of Manhattan as Virus ReboundsCOVID-19 positivity rates are back above 20% in parts of Manhattan, as the latest city data indicate the virus is digging in ahead of winter. The rolling seven-day positivity rate in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan is up to 22.5%, according to city data Wednesday. That is by far the highest rate in New York City, and no other… US warned to prepare as COVID cases rise in EuropeUnder 15 million Americans have received the latest booster shots. No one wants to die from a heart attack Open America to non vaccinated I hope they never get it, too Philadelphia Orchestra cancels upcoming 50th-anniversary China tourDaily News Philadelphia Orchestra cancels upcoming 50th-anniversary China tour I named my baby after the COVID-19 pandemicThe new mom was inspired by her time in lockdown. Welcome to the world, Panic Scam Smith! New COVID Subvariants Rising: How Concerned Should We Be?There is concern that COVID-19 virus subvariants BQ.1 and BQ1.1 will become a major threat in the US and that XBB could alter the COVID picture globally. At this point, infectious disease experts have only predictions. MedTwitter 🤣🤣🤣…in the vaxxed, who have weakened immune systems! Vivian Kargbo thought her daughter’s Boston school district was doing the right thing when officials kept classrooms closed for most students for more than a year.Article Share SOMERVILLE, Tenn.In the heart of Manhattan, the COVID positivity rate is above 20%, and across the island, transmission is rising as well Published 2 hours ago Updated 2 hours ago NBC Universal, Inc.FAUCI REJECTS COVID RESPONSE CRITICISM, SAYS IT'S 'COMPLETELY CRAZY’ TO CALL HIM POLITICAL However, falling temperatures have sparked concerns about increased transmission, as well as the looming threat of a more infectious variant. Kargbo, a caregiver for hospice patients, didn't want to risk them getting COVID-19. And extending pandemic school closures through the spring of 2021 is what many in her community said was best to keep kids and adults safe. Two places that felt like night and day. But her daughter became depressed and stopped doing school work or paying attention to online classes.5%, according to city data Wednesday. The former honor-roll student failed nearly all of her eighth-grade courses. Doing things like sedating patients to insert tubes into their airways. “She’s behind,” said Kargbo, whose daughter is now in tenth grade.6 and BQ. “It didn’t work at all. Advertisement “It was a lot easier to stay away from others,” his widow, Hollie Wilson, said of the largely White and predominantly conservative county of about 42,000 residents. At the same time, the transmission rate in Manhattan, at 172. Knowing what I know now, I would say they should have put them in school.” Preliminary test scores around the country confirm what Kargbo witnessed: The longer many students studied remotely, the less they learned. Less chance of exposure. Some educators and parents are questioning decisions in cities from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles to remain online long after clear evidence emerged that schools weren’t COVID-19 super-spreaders — and months after life-saving adult vaccines became widely available. Stay informed about local news and weather. There are fears for the futures of students who don’t catch up. The imbalance in death rates among the nation’s racial and ethnic groups has been a defining part of the pandemic since the start. (PATRICK T. They run the risk of never learning to read, long a precursor for dropping out of school. They might never master simple algebra, putting science and tech fields out of reach. Early in the crisis, the differing covid threat was evident in places such as Memphis and Fayette County. The pandemic decline in college attendance could continue to accelerate, crippling the U.S. “I don’t want to say that we weren’t worried about it, but we weren’t,” said Hollie, who described her 59-year-old husband as someone who “never took a pill. economy. In a sign of how inflammatory the debate has become, there’s sharp disagreement among educators, school leaders and parents even about how to label the problems created by online school. Over time, the gap in deaths widened and narrowed but never disappeared — until mid-October 2021, when the nation’s pattern of covid mortality changed, with the rate of death among White Americans sometimes eclipsing other groups. “Learning loss” has become a lightning rod. Some fear the term might brand struggling students or cast blame on teachers, and they say it overlooks the need to save lives during a pandemic. And at times during that same period, the overall age-adjusted death rate for White people slightly surpassed that of Black and Latino people. Regardless of what it’s called, the casualties of Zoom school are real. The scale of the problem and the challenges in addressing it were apparent in Associated Press interviews with nearly 50 school leaders, teachers, parents and health officials, who struggled to agree on a way forward. That wasn’t Skill. Some public health officials and educators warned against second-guessing the school closures for a virus that killed over a million people in the U.S. That was Skill. More than 200,000 children lost at least one parent. “It is very easy with hindsight to say, ‘Oh, learning loss, we should have opened.” So, she said, Skill commiserated with like-minded people in Facebook groups and on Parler and Rumble, the largely unmoderated social networking platforms popular with conservatives.’ People forget how many people died,” said Austin Beutner, former superintendent in Los Angeles, where students were online from mid-March 2020 until the start of hybrid instruction in April 2021. The question isn’t merely academic. “We decided to err on the side of not doing it and accept the consequences. School closures continued last year because of teacher shortages and COVID-19 spread. It’s conceivable another pandemic might emerge — or a different crisis.” New immune-evading covid variants could fuel a winter surge Capt. But there’s another reason for asking what lessons have been learned: the kids who have fallen behind. Some third graders struggle to sound out words., known to everybody as Skill, died of covid Jan. Some ninth graders have given up on school because they feel so behind they can’t catch up. The future of American children hangs in the balance. He fell ill not long after transporting a covid patient to the hospital. Many adults are pushing to move on, to stop talking about the impact of the pandemic — especially learning loss. “As crazy as this sounds now, I’m afraid people are going to forget about the pandemic,” said Jason Kamras, superintendent in Richmond, Virginia.5 percent among people taking coronavirus tests."People will say, ‘That was two years ago. Get over it. The pathogen, free of politics or ideology, had a diverse reservoir of hosts and found fertile pathways for growth in the inequalities born from centuries of racial animus and class resentments.’” When COVID-19 first reached the U.S. Cumulatively, Black, Latino and Native American people are 60 percent more likely to die of covid ., scientists didn’t fully understand how it spread or whether it was harmful to children. American schools, like most around the world, understandably shuttered in March 2020. The Post analysis revealed the changing pattern in covid deaths. That summer, scientists learned kids didn’t face the same risks as adults, but experts couldn’t decide how to operate schools safely — or whether it was even possible. It was already clear that remote learning was devastating for many young people. But as 2020 progressed, the death rates narrowed — but not because fewer Black people were dying. But did the risks of social isolation and falling behind outweigh the risks of children, school staff and families catching the virus? The tradeoffs differed depending on how vulnerable a community felt. Black and Latino people, who historically had less access to health care, remain nearly twice as likely to die of COVID-19 than white people. In summer 2021, the nation saw some of the pandemic’s lowest death rates, as vaccines, shoring up the body’s immune response, became widely available. Parents in those communities often had deep-rooted doubts about whether schools could keep their children safe. Politics was a factor, too. The virus mutated, able to spread among the vaccinated. Districts that reopened in person tended to be in areas that voted for President Donald Trump or had largely white populations. By winter, studies showed schools weren’t contributing to increased COVID-19 spread in the community. After delta’s peak in September 2021, the racial differences in covid deaths started eroding. Classes with masked students and distancing could be conducted safely, growing evidence said. President Joe Biden prioritized reopening schools when he took office in January 2021, and once the COVID-19 vaccine was available, some Democratic-leaning districts started to reopen. From the end of October through the end of December, White people died at a higher rate than Black people did, The Post found. Yet many schools stayed closed well into the spring, including in California, where the state’s powerful teachers unions fought returning to classrooms, citing lack of safety protocols. In Chicago, after a six-week standoff with the teachers union, the district started bringing students back on a hybrid schedule just before spring 2021. The Black death rate jumped above White people’s when the spike in cases and deaths overwhelmed providers in the Northeast, resulting in a bottleneck of testing and treatment. It wasn’t until the fall that students were back in school full-time. Marla Williams initially supported Chicago Public Schools' decision to instruct students online during the fall of 2020. “Usually, when we say a health disparity is disappearing, what we mean is that … the worse-off group is getting better,” said Tasleem Padamsee, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who researched vaccine use and was a member of the Ohio Department of Health’s work group on health equity. Williams, a single mother, has asthma, as do her two children. While she was working, she enlisted her father, a retired teacher, to supervise her children’s studies.” That’s exactly what happened as the White death rate surpassed that for Black people, even though Black Americans routinely confront stress so corrosive it causes them to age quicker, become sicker and die younger. Her father would log into his grandson’s classes from his suburban home and try to monitor what was happening. But it didn’t work.H. Her son lost motivation and wouldn’t do his assignments. Once he went back on a hybrid schedule in spring 2021, he started doing well again, Williams said. Officials must figure out how to connect with “communities who are ideologically opposed to the vaccine” while contending with “the cumulative impact of injustice” on communities of color. “I wish we’d been in person earlier,” she said. “Other schools seemed to be doing it successfully. “What that did was intersect with covid-19, meaning that embodied history is part of this pandemic, too.” Officials were divided in Chicago. The city Department of Public Health advocated reopening schools months earlier, in the fall of 2020. The Post interviewed historians and researchers who study the effects of White racial politics and social inequality on health, spoke with relatives and friends of those lost to covid, and compiled data from federal databases and academic studies. The commissioner, Dr. Allison Arwady, said they felt the risk of missing education was higher than the risk of COVID-19. Resilience gave way to fatigue. Others, such as the director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University, advocated for staying remote. “I think the answer on that has been settled fairly clearly, especially once we had vaccines available,” Arwady said. Medical mistrust and misinformation raged. “I’m concerned about the loss that has occurred.” From March 2020 to June 2021, the average student in Chicago lost 21 weeks of learning in reading and 20 weeks in math, equivalent to missing half a year of school, according to Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, which analyzed data from a widely used test called MAP to estimate learning loss for every U. Mask use became a victim of social stigma. S. school district. Researchers at Ohio State found Black and White people were about equally reluctant to get the coronavirus vaccine when it first became available, but Black people overcame that hesitancy faster. Nationally, kids whose schools met mostly online in the 2020-2021 school year performed 13 percentage points lower in math and 8 percentage points lower in reading compared with schools meeting mostly in person, according to a 2022 study by Brown University economist Emily Oster. The setbacks have some grappling with regret. As public health efforts to contain the virus were curtailed, the pool of those most at risk of becoming casualties widened. “I can’t imagine a situation where we would close schools again, unless there’s a virus attacking kids,” said Eric Conti, superintendent for Burlington, Massachusetts, a 3,400-student district outside Boston. His students alternated between online and in-person learning from the fall of 2020 until the next spring. 1 cause of death for 45-to-54-year-olds in 2021 was covid, according to federal researchers. “It’s going to be a very high bar.” Dallas Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde initially disagreed with the Texas governor’s push to reopen schools in the fall of 2020.K. “But it was absolutely the right thing to do,” she said. Some school officials said they lacked the expertise to decide whether it was safe to open schools. Hildreth played a central role in the city’s pandemic response. “Schools should never have been placed in a situation where we have choice,” said Tony Wold, former associate superintendent of West Contra Costa Unified School District, east of San Francisco. “With lessons learned, when you have a public health pandemic, there needs to be a single voice. After it became clear that communities of color were being disproportionately affected, racial equity started to become the parlance of the pandemic, in words and deeds.” Still, many school officials said with hindsight they’d make the same decision to keep schools online well into 2021. Only two superintendents said they’d likely make a different decision if there were another pandemic that was not particularly dangerous to children. “Getting to make this decision for themselves has primacy over what the vaccine could do for them,” said Lisa R. In some communities, demographics and the historic underinvestment in schools loomed large, superintendents said. In the South, Black Americans’ fear of the virus was sometimes coupled with mistrust of schools rooted in segregation. “They’re making a different calculus. Cities from Atlanta to Nashville to Jackson, Mississippi, shuttered schools — in some cases, for nearly all of the 2020-2021 school year. In Clayton County, Georgia, home to the state’s highest percentage of Black residents, schools chief Morcease Beasley said he knew closing schools would have a devastating impact, but the fear in his community was overwhelming. “I didn’t think that that polarization would transfer over to a pandemic,” Pruitt said. “I knew teachers couldn’t teach if they were that scared, and students couldn’t learn,” he said. Rhode Island was an outlier among liberal-leaning coastal states when it ordered schools to reopen in person in the fall of 2020. A lifesaving vaccine and droplet-blocking masks became ideological Rorschach tests. “We can’t do this to our kids,” state education chief Angélica Infante-Green remembers thinking after watching students turn off cameras or log in from under blankets in bed. “This is not OK. That’s what happened in northern Illinois, where a father watched his 40-year-old son succumb to covid-19.” But in the predominantly Latino and Black Rhode Island community of Central Falls, more than three-quarters of students stayed home to study remotely. To address parent distrust, officials tracked COVID-19 cases among school-aged Central Falls residents.” Brian Boam was a PE teacher at an elementary school in suburban Chicago. They met with families to show them the kids catching the virus were in remote learning — and they weren’t learning as much as students in school. It worked. Brian Boam was there with his 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son. Among teachers, there’s some dispute about online learning's impact on children. But many fear some students will be scarred for years.” And he did — but got sick again, the 73-year-old said. “Should we have reopened earlier? Absolutely,” said California teacher Sarah Curry. She initially favored school closings in her rural Central Valley district, but grew frustrated with the duration of distance learning.” Just after the new year, Brian Boam, who was hypertensive, went to a hospital feverish and vomiting. She taught pre-kindergarten and found it impossible to maintain attention spans online. One of her biggest regrets: that teachers who wanted to return to classrooms had little choice in the matter. As he waited, he sent what would be his last text message to his parents. But the nation’s 3 million public school teachers are far from a monolith. Many lost loved ones to COVID-19, battled mental health challenges of their own or feared catching the virus. I love you. Jessica Cross, who taught ninth grade math on Chicago’s west side at Phoenix Military Academy, feels her school reopened too soon. “I didn’t feel entirely safe,” she said. There, his family hoped he would be healed, but his organs began to fail. Mask rules were good in theory, but not all students wore them properly. She said safety should come before academics. 8. “Ultimately, I still feel that remote learning was really the only thing to do,” Cross said. A representative from the American Federation of Teachers declined in an interview to say whether the national union regrets the positions it took against reopening schools. “You’re taking away from heart attack patients and stroke patients. “If we start to play the blame game," said Fedrick Ingram, AFT’s secretary-treasurer, “we get into the political fray of trying to determine if teachers did a good job or not. And I don’t think that’s fair. It was denied.” Regrets or no, experts agree: America’s kids need more from adults if they’re going to be made whole. The country needs “ideally, a reinvention of public education as we know it,” Los Angeles Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. And it all goes back to one person, as far as I’m concerned. Students need more days in school and smaller classes. Short of extending the school year, experts say intensive tutoring is the most efficient way to help students catch up. The first two don’t count. Saturday school or doubling up on math or reading during a regular school day would also help. Too few school districts have made those investments, Harvard economist Tom Kane said. Those triggers are layered upon each other, stoking stress, said Derek M. Summer school is insufficient, Kane says — it’s voluntary, and many parents don’t sign up. Adding school time for students is politically impossible in many cities. It’s just experiencing stress,” he said. In Los Angeles, the teachers union filed a complaint after the district scheduled four optional school days for students to recoup learning. The school board in Richmond rejected a move to an all-year school calendar.” When it comes to racism, most people think of something that occurs between individuals. There are exceptions: Atlanta extended the school day 30 minutes for three years. Hopewell Schools in Virginia moved to year-round schooling last year. Prejudice and discrimination, even if unconscious, can be deadly — and not just for the intended targets. Even the federal government’s record education spending isn’t enough for the scope of kids’ academic setbacks, according to the American Educational Research Association. Researchers there estimate it will cost $700 billion to offset learning loss for America’s schoolchildren – more than three times the $190 billion allocated to schools. Stress is a hard-wired physiological response, triggered at the first sign of danger. “We need something on the scale of the Marshall Plan for education,” said Kamras, the Richmond superintendent. “Anything short of that and we’re going to see this blip in outcomes become permanent for a generation of children — and that would be criminal. Persistent surges of cortisol and other stress hormones can wear down the body, increasing the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart attack or premature death by damaging blood vessels and arteries.” .