I'm Swedish, and none of my friends with school-age kids have mentioned any problems with this. Schools were open, and only older kids (16+) did hybrid or distance learning to keep them out of school and reduce spread, because it was deemed that they were old enough to handle it, while smaller kids weren't.
But there's no hysteria anywhere, everyone just kept chugging along. I have plenty of friends' kids who got infected, but recovered. Their teachers got sick, and recovered. I have teacher friends, I don't know if anyone of them got infected, but absolutely no-one has been afraid or hysterical about the situation or thinking about quitting their job because of the pandemic.
And everyone agrees that distance learning is absolute shit for kids, and those of my friends with high-school aged kids can clearly see that it was bad for their kids.
There's a difference in how US teachers are treated, under ordinary circumstances, versus those in Sweden, I expect, that accounts for some of this. I'd not be surprised if the average US teacher is always closer to quitting than the average Swedish teacher.
> But there's no hysteria anywhere
Whether it was hysteria or not, the fact was that an awful lot of US teachers were ready to quit last year, if they couldn't teach remotely or in an environment with masking + distancing + quarantine-after-exposure. Enough that there's no way they could have had normal in-person school last year, over the whole country, especially while also trying to do distancing and such (you can't go to 40+ kid class sizes to try to make up for lost staff, and still distance). Again, quarantine-after-exposure policies and burn-out mean they're having serious trouble staffing schools this year. It would not have gone better last year, and trying to open in person without quarantine policies or remote-teaching options would have driven out so many teachers that it would not have made matters better.
> And everyone agrees that distance learning is absolute shit for kids, and those of my friends with high-school aged kids can clearly see that it was bad for their kids.
All school have suffered for what'll be 2.5 years, when this school year is over—if we're optimistic, perhaps 2 years total, because maybe the second semester of this one will markedly improve. Most schools are almost entirely back in-person this year (some still have online options, but I don't think they've had as many takers as those options had last year) and it is not going great. Not as bad as last year, but it's still not normal. Hopefully next year is better.
Right, and this mindset simply doesn't exist in Sweden and many other parts of Europe.
This fear doesn't exist there.
The average American is horribly misinformed about the actual risks of covid, many young healthy Americans still believe the unvaccinated risk of death is about 10% for them, they're off in their estimate by four magnitudes. It's absolutely unbelievable how misinformed they are, and how they're allowed to perpetuate this unfounded hysteria unopposed.
I haven't seen similar surveys for Sweden or other European countries, but from talking to my friends and family, it's clear that their risk estimates are much more in line with actual reality. And consequently, their fear level is much more proportional and rational than that of the average American.
I'm sure that's a factor, and it may even have been the main one, but of the people I know who were talking about quitting, it was more like, "if you make me choose between ever letting my kids see my elderly parents for the entire school year, and working, I choose the former" or "my kid has cancer and is receiving chemotherapy, so, uh, yeah, I quit if you're gonna make me come in and risk COVID exposure". That kind of thing. It wasn't "this might kill me" (though, for a few older or ill ones I know of second-hand, it was) it was "this will limit my life in ways I don't accept, or it would be personally irresponsible" with some sentiment of "having schools fully open is socially irresponsible" on the side. All this on top of some serious burn-out from the COVID-stricken end of the 2019-2020 school year and the scramble and uncertainty of the Summer, which was its own special mess.
I agree with you that people in general have badly mis-calibrated their risk assessment when it comes to COVID, and concede that it's entirely possible that poor risk-assessment was actually the main driver of teacher resistance to returning, nationwide—though that's not what I personally saw.
Incidentally, there were lots of parents demanding a remote option last school year, too, not just teachers. The parents alone might have been enough to make it happen—though they may well have been acting on the same poor risk assessment you bring up, of course. That's possible.
IMO you are clearly making an unfounded assumption
That would be an unfounded assumption.
> But why do you think this? Are you aware that many parts of the world have returned to fully in-person school for several months or longer at this point? That here in deep blue parts of the US we are unique in our rabid devotion to denying children in-person school?
Because they're—US schools in my city—barely managing this year, due to staffing/substitute shortages? I'm not in a deep blue part of the US, incidentally.
> > The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online cohorts.
> [Citation Needed]
I have insight into districts that accidentally ran experiments for this, by running in-person and fully online programs concurrently. I can't share the numbers (they were in internal documents, with only some presented at school board meetings, which I certainly didn't save links to). Look at education & public policy journals in the coming years, should be some "fun" results (spoiler: everything was extremely bad, not just online learning)
> First of all I actually reject the premise that avoiding spread is necessarily a good thing.
.... ok.
> [quarantining teachers] could still teach remotely to a class of in-person kids (yes you might need some other adult to oversee things, but I'd wager even without such supervision you'd still have far better results than the unmitigated disaster that "distance" learning has been)
The amount of planning and support you need to make this work, on short-ish notice, under the constraints and in the environment schools were operating in, makes it unrealistic.
Overall, you're severely underestimating the disruption this has all had on in-person schooling, and the stress it's added for staff. You're overestimating how much extra work and (perceived, if you like) risk teachers were willing to take on, before they'd have simply quit.
> But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that, the only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been able to keep fully in-person school running last year" is purely itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine policies, and has nothing to do with an actual lack of staff nor an actual crippling health problem preventing people from being able to work.
I 100% guarantee you there'd have been a significant loss of staff at schools in our area if you announced a policy that all staff & students were to come in unless actually too ill to attend. You'd have had serious problems with sick-outs among the rest. Again: schools would have been crippled due to staffing reasons. You may disagree with what those people chose to do in response to that policy, but it's what they would have done. Source: I know a shitload of teachers in my area, and all of the ones who could afford to walk away from their job, spent most of last year right on the cusp of doing so, and they were absolutely serious about it. That kind of policy would have pushed every single one over the edge, instantly. Again, I'm not even in a "deep blue" area (rather more red than blue, in fact). I assume that effect would have been even worse in "blue" areas.
Your plan would not have worked, for staffing reasons. In-person school this year is barely working... for staffing reasons. That's just a fact, source: go talk to any public school teachers or administrators and ask them how the substitute supply situation is going, and how school attendance is going (80-85%ish daily attendance rates are common this year). Get ready for some stories. Attempting it last year would have gone even worse.