I don't think having a cold or two is going to put many people in this category. Decades ago when I was in public school, the kids who were chronically absent like this were the ones who clearly had some behavioral issues or problems at home.
The linked study also demonstrates that the rates are strongly associated with socioeconomic factors. I think the real issue here is that a subset of people simply have fewer fucks to give about school, and that has been accelerated by the distance and space that COVID created between students/parents and school.
Obviously it’s not doable to stay away from school that much, and I only did when I had a fever or was puking. That said, there were probably some years I at least got close to that 18 days. I would think the few years I went on a vacation I definitely went over it.
Have you been around kids post COVID? Winters after the pandemic have been a nightmare for many parents. My nephews have basically been "sick" the whole winter (getting sick, staying home, recovering, going back to school, getting a new virus, repeat).
Another thing I've noticed is that post-covid they've come home from school with more stories of the teachers just putting on videos and having the kids watch that, or else they just read crap on their tablets. What I'm saying is, it seems like education has also changed post-covid. It's like the teachers are still remote-teaching even though everybody's in the classroom.
This is public school, and maybe that's how they do it these days?
Is there some catalog of how many videos and things are watched during school hours, because I never remember that as a kid. Yes it would have been a VCR rolled out and all that, but if I wanted them to just watch a movie I could do that from home. So weird.
I remember watching video 4 times in school total. At the time teachers didn't know how to start the video player so a kid always did that, the teachers weren't used to showing videos in class at all.
The worst case I remember was a social studies teacher in junior high school who, during the World Series, turned on the classroom television to the game and had us all watch it with him.
Has anyone seen any actual research into why this is? It seems pretty serious.
Now we’re sick constantly, it seems. It’s so much worse than before. I think our immune systems are doing some catching up.
[edit] for the timing, we started getting sick a bunch right around the time masking dropped off to near-zero everywhere around us.
Tuesday we are getting sick again, sigh.
I can definitely see how COVID shutdowns unmoored some families from school and the return process made it a generally less compelling experience. If you aren't learning, socializing all happens on your phone, and you'll graduate regardless, then why go?
Some parents are even giving negative-fucks about school, in other words being actively against public education, teachers, and so on. I know of Facebook groups where parents share tips on how to maximize the number of absences without triggering various flags. And, a surprising number of my wife's friends from church have opted for homeschooling, so they can teach their kids from the Bible and skip all that science and math "liberal indoctrination". It's scary.
I can't believe how much of this is creeping into even HN too, a group of presumably above-average educated techies. Just look at the comments in this article dunking on the school system! Education is, for most people, their only shot at achieving the ever-shrinking middle class.
If find this ironic considering liberals think math is racist and don't believe in biology, statistics and especially not in economics.
>> Education is, for most people, their only shot at achieving the ever-shrinking middle class.
You believe education can only be attained in a school?
I can assure you, the people newly complaining about "liberal indoctrination" in schools don't mean science and math. It's fine to disagree with people about what should be taught, but it's not productive to ignore how much education has changed and why people object to it, and then disingenuously mischaracterize them.
Things aren't always getting worse. And IME the schools tend to get better in the long term.
There are probably legitimate criticisms of recent changes to public education, but it's never the things that Republican politicians harp on.
Also, for what it's worth, much of what my generation was taught in school was utter bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me. If anything, the idea that my children would be taught that the Pilgrims and Indians were best friends, that Columbus was someone to look up to, or that the Civil War was really about states' rights is what would compel me to homeschool, not "liberal indoctrination." But many, like DeSantis, still appear to believe that these lies should be taught.
"Opposition to what was purported to be critical race theory has been adopted as a major theme by several conservative think tanks and pressure groups, including The Heritage Foundation, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and organizations funded by the Koch brothers. [...] In 2021 [Christopher Rufo] wrote on Twitter, 'The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'' and 'We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'"
"The Economist and Reuters have conducted polls on how much the general public understands CRT, a 'once-obscure academic concept', and they found that most people are unfamiliar with CRT and misunderstand it."
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_controversies_around_cri....)
It is absolutely a conservative boogeyman and (for the most part) has never been a taught subject outside of college.
I would assume you also oppose teachers getting their Master's in education? After all, that's not a subject that has never been taught in any primary school ...
Thank god (ha, ha) for immigrants I guess.
The Internet’s been a disaster for civil society.
You're equating attending public school with "Education". The two can be mutually exclusive.
I loved college and was able to learn. I didn't get great grades but I was participating in the education process.
Anecdotally that seems to be the case in my kids' school district (although one complicating factor is that a lot of kids have family back in India or China and go back for long absences at winter break), and the culprit is generally illnesses, which have been extremely rough the past 2 winters.
I am glad my parents allowed me to be, because school was really, really damaging to my mental health when I ended up needing to be chronically absent.
And yeah, I simply just needed to be away from school. I guess I’m more so making a point that during the pandemic there was also probably a ton of students who realized they can learn without school, and it might even be better for them.
To some degree elementary school has always been a large part daycare and small part teaching. But the one big change from my experience is that amount of standardized testing even 3rd graders do. Every month or two there's another day or two spent on testing and then several days before that getting them ready for it. I can't imagine being a teacher trying to craft lesson plans around all that.
The other reasons were… everything else. Consistently toxic work environments across several schools, a culture of “just do a little more—it’s for the kids!”, shit pay, low social standing, watching students have mental health crises or terrible troubles at home and occasionally kill themselves while not being able to do much about it, corrupt petty-dictator superintendents, constant flailing between expensive “frameworks” implemented so incompetently that they plainly have no hope of working right, et c. The small part of summer they’re actually off and not prepping for the next year was the only good thing about it, by the end. The insulting demands, organizational dysfunction, and lack of support during Covid was the final straw—for her and lots of others, now the field has a severe teacher shortage.
This was definitely a fashionable thing to say last decade. But in a post-Covid world where we’ve seen meaningful deficits in skills as a result of disruptions to in-person elementary school attendance, I think we should re-evaluate this prior. It seems evident that there’s a lot more going on in school than just babysitting.
Why did missing school under Covid have such bad outcomes?
I don't know what happens in school (in person), but it must have been something or you wouldn't have seen such a dramatic change.
To be specific: there was a big decrease in resilience in the face of difficulties (in addition to knowledge).
For those of us who can't just do work or school remote, I sure wish we could at least do like Japan and mask up. It seems like it should be common courtesy.
I think i never used to think of it, but after the pandemic like if my throat is a little sore but I don't feel tired or groggy am I still just expected to sit inside?A weak cold can linger for days, weeks sometime. I get multiple ways of thinking about it.
I don't understand why people still believe that masking, at least as commonly practiced by the public at large, works in any meaningful way for the purpose you propose, especially after everything that happened between 2020 and 2022.
For commonly-available and affordable masks, the fibre spacing is typically much larger than the sizes of the particles that the masks are supposed to be stopping/limiting in this case. The particles pass right through, unimpeded, in both directions.
The claim that masks stop/limit contaminated "water droplets" is easily shown to be false when one witnesses somebody wearing a mask in 0° C (or lower) temperatures, and you can literally see how the water vapour from their breath is merely redirected out the gaps around the edges of the mask. In practice, their breath ends up focused at around head-level toward anyone next to or behind them, and this concentrated breath tends to linger longer than it otherwise would have.
From what I've seen, masked sick people will often just cough directly into their masks, too. Given the ineffectiveness discussed above, this just results in more forceful and unimpeded spreading of the particles than if the person had coughed into their hand (which is solid and can form a much tighter seal).
The ineffectiveness was further proven through the forced masking that millions upon millions of people in many places endured between 2020 and 2022. In Canada, for example, public masking was forced for well over a year, and even up to two years in a city like Toronto. Despite numerous other simultaneous lockdowns and restrictions that severely limited, or even outright eliminated, most social interaction, the problem that the masking was supposed to help mitigate apparently continued on unimpeded. If masking actually worked, it wouldn't have been needed for years.
At best, masking is a practice that makes the wearer think they're doing something "courteous", when they really aren't doing anything beneficial at all. It certainly gives others a false sense of security. Even worse, the mask is merely redirecting the wearer's breath toward anybody who is close by.
> At best, masking is a practice that makes the wearer think they're doing something "courteous", when they really aren't doing anything beneficial at all.
Fortunately in 2024, individuals have the freedom to choose to wear an N95 for their own personal protection. These devices are effective when worn properly, especially compared to vaccines when trying to minimize transmission to prevent reinfections which increase the risk of long COVID.
When the droplets that you exhale through a mask change direction, they lose velocity, and consequently range.
I blame the lack of hands-on science education for the large number of people who don't intuitively grasp concepts like this. It's easy to blame things like right-wing media, but the media would have less power over people if they were given the opportunity to cultivate some common sense in childhood. In that regard, it sounds like things are only going to get worse.
I'm not going to speak to the particulars of the various mask mandates. That's a complicated and nuanced question. One thing I know for sure: N95 masks, properly applied, make a huge difference to (at least) the person wearing them.
Because those breaks don't line up with other cousins' breaks.
Because those breaks don't line up with great-grandma's 95th birthday, and she lives a full day's journey away.
Because those breaks don't line up with your work schedule, or your partner's work schedule.
Because my child is excelling academically, and I absolutely don't think that she'll get as much value out of being in school on Thursday & Friday as she will visiting her relatives in a foreign country for a long weekend.
As my child's parent, it is my duty to be aware of their educational performance, needs, and shortcomings. Based on all that info, I have no problem deciding to take them out of school for two days to go trout fishing with grandpa, or to view the eclipse with grandma.
It wasn't super common, but it was common enough that there was a standard procedure around it (basically you'd get the classwork/homework that you'd be missing and be expected to present it upon return).
I think a bigger part now is that schools are somewhat more overloaded, so missing class puts you "out of sync" and there's nothing to help you catch back up. When I was young the parents were expected to do that: I don't know how common it is now.
1. Assimilate immigrant children into American culture so that they would think of themselves as "American" first and whatever ethnicity they came from second. (Hence, the Pledge of Allegiance, national anthem, American football games, focus on history & social studies in class, etc.)
2. Provide childcare during working hours so parents could go to work. (Hence, compulsory education, hours that aligned with a factory schedule, high student-teacher ratios, etc.)
3. Teach children the skills they would need to be successful in the factory system. (Hence, attendance, arriving punctually, moving between rooms at the bell, following orders, not complaining, etc.)
What's happened over the last 40 years is that the factory system in America fell apart, and so the skills needed for it no longer seem all that relevant compared to actually getting a good education, which school is not all that effective at. Meanwhile there are new waves of immigration with parents that were often highly educated (moreso than native-born Americans, oftentimes) abroad; they don't buy the "this is what a good education looks like" explanation, because they have had an actual good education abroad. And the Internet in general makes people much more suspicious of institutions, because you can see the ways that different power centers try to enforce control of the discourse, and there is no unified discourse to get behind anyway. The public school system in America is deeply embedded in the industrial institutions that were developed from 1900-1980, and as those institutions collapse, the public school system collapses with them.
Pretty much no one raised an eyebrow about this sort of thing, certainly not at the 10 day total mark.
Why do you think the rules have remained the same?
Similarly, I don't think I ever had an "excused" absence, I didn't have to provide evidence or doctor's notes to the school when I was sick. That simply wasn't a thing that was tracked at all.
But that's overall, in aggregate. All those drops fill up a river. But a single drop won't be missed.
And it isn't even that folks are wrong; but evidence is fairly clear that nobody has a solution for education that works. We do know of a bunch of small things that can work in some situations, but at large, we are still trying.
I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong on this, of course. Just peruse the top posts and you will see all sorts of assertions about how this isn't actually a problem. There are more than a few pointing out that schooling is irrelevant.
Again, these aren't necessarily wrong. But they are ignoring a whole lot more than they are talking to.
Truth is, some families just don't take education seriously.
(My parents’ background was dirt poor, rural, and white, to set the scene—but skipping by choice was something not to be taken lightly, you go to school, that’s how it is)
If course taking a kid out of school for once in a life time events should be okay, even applauded. And children who are excelling should be allowed to take that trip to Europe during school. They will learn more there than in a class room.
BUT, those excuses hinge in good academics and support at home.
I heard someone say once that at the end of the day, everyone is home schooled. If students are not raised in an environment that values education, it really doesn't matter if they are going to school everyday. In my opinion as a dad of two young kids, attendance is a symptom not a cause.
But penalizing attendance issues is a lot easier that fixing the core issues which I think are mostly economic and mental health related.
I and many of my peers grew up with one stay at home parent who volunteered at my school occasionally and engaged with my teachers. Now my wife and I both have to work to afford the lifestyle I had growing up. My kids are going to have to be in after school programs which are basically just babysitting even if I am in a position to afford good mentoring.
Cell phones and social media are also causing issues with older and younger students. Peer pressure is at an all time high and academic pressure is not far behind.
We are putting so much stress on these kids, when they are just kids. They need to explore their world, get their hands dirty and be curious. Not take yet another standardized test. American society is not kind to children.
Back to it being a haves and haves not issues. As someone with a sizable household income. I absolutely afford to supplement my children's education with museum memberships and trips to see events like the eclipse and frankly also mental health support. I am lucky to have a job that I can take time off anytime I want. But this is the bubble I am in of tech workers. The vast majority of Americans cannot do that. This divide is just going to continue to widen the gap.
When everyone else is doing the same thing. If you do it at a different time you could benefit from reduced costs and reduced traffic. You can also provide your child with a more rewarding and engaging experience than the drudgery and frustrating inefficiency of the typical school pedagogy.
My first thought reading the headline was that more people are realizing the irrelevance of school and work, and prioritizing other things.
I am in the group that took 1-2 yearly week long vacations in elementary school. Nothing was lost, since I just did the week of required work in half a day after returning from vacation.
We need to stop thinking of "education" as a monolithic school concept that produces worker bees through rote memorization and repetition.
The science teacher at the school probably wishes they could do it.
I and a good many others in my classes were WAY ahead of the curriculum already, and basically sitting bored in class all day. I remember my parents literally asked my teachers to give me more advanced homework because I would constantly say I learned basically nothing or that days would go by wasted reviewing things I had already mastered.
So they were confident that I wasn't really missing much from being out even for a week or two at a time. I don't know if this is standard practice nowadays, but I know my parents also requested from the teacher that weeks worth of coursework so I could do them even while on vacation. I could usually finish a weeks worth of coursework within like an hour or two of sitting down, and I didn't even consider myself a particularly gifted student compared to some.
It will set some back, it won’t set others back at all. Telling a kid who can keep up or who is ahead of the class that they can’t take a vacation because another kid couldn’t keep up if they took a vacation is bizarre. It’s like saying that someone who’s ahead of where the class is needs to go to summer school because a kid in the class who’s behind needs to take summer school.
Why should we use the lowest performers as the baseline, and tell higher performers that they aren’t allowed to do things they’re fully capable of doing?
Is the expectation that a family takes a 2 week luxury vacation every year?
What about schools not sticking their nose too far out into the parts of life that they should not control? Like where and when we take our kids on vacations.
If my kids get good grades and catch up on any missed homework the school should not get spun up about them missing some days.
Turning schools into a mild version of prisons is not good for anyone -- kids, parents or the society. My 2c.
it's not that hard, if you commit to going to school, then just try to go and do vacations during school holidays
otherwise, just home school
Why is this? If true, why this problem is not appearing in private schools that pretty universally do not object to parents taking their kids away for vacations or family events as long as kids master the material.
The teacher needs to have a program of study with specific topics covered, recommended exercises for practice and required homework to check understanding for each. If a student masters the material why does anyone care if he skipped a week? And if the student does not know the material he should get a bad grade, whether he was in every class or not.
That is how the school worked where I grew up (Eastern Europe) and it seems vastly superior to the mess we have in the US today, where many public schools teach to the lowest common denominator, making capable kids bored at best and and a nuisance to the teacher at worst.
Historically, retail gasoline prices tend to gradually rise in the spring and peak in late summer when people drive more frequently. Gasoline prices are generally lower in winter months.
>https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Only at a certain level of upper-middle-class affluence, but for them probably. But even one-week cruises are much cheaper off-season.
Funerals are bereavement leave from school so you don’t need to worry.
I feel like 90% of midwesterners would be agreeing with me…
Other people's family and friends will have multiple destination weddings, etc.
Still suspect it's not a major component, kids can only have so many grandparents after all.
Some of the “meh, missing two weeks a year for vacations isn’t a big deal” attitudes in this thread are very surprising to me, also as a midwesterner.
Surely nonstop COVID reinfections aren't doing their brains any favors.
https://whn.global/scientific/spectrum-of-covid-19-from-asym...
Few teachers are going to call the truant police on a high-school aged student who leaves during the day, even though technically they could. Younger students would more likely get the actual police called out of concern for safety, not enforcing school.
Some schools it's so bad that the system just entirely gives up, but doesn't document it - so you have students who have never been to class more than a few days but according to the records, they're always there.
So I don't think they are reasonable at all. If you are sick, you should stay home should still apply.
The pandemic has clearly altered this mentality but it doesn’t seem like a good trajectory. A little cold is barely an inconvenience.
I dont care if it's "just the sniffles" It causes so much inconveniece for my family.
School sicknesses are so common that it might almost be argued that the point of public education is to make sure everyone is exposed to as many diseases as possible.
Regularly washing your hands reduces spread of the flu by 30%. (Old study, not going to find it.)
I will believe anti-disease spread measures are effective until they are proven otherwise.
> You're usually "infectious" before you're symptomatic
This trait of Covid was what made it unusual. For the flu, the most infectious period days 1-3 with symptoms. ("Period of Contagiousness" in [1]... of course there are exceptions.)
Part and parcel of living in modern society.
Even before the pandemic we had that policy, and it's a very good default. No, colds are not the end of the world, but they are genuinely miserable, and you will share it. And if money is all somebody cares about, well, colds also diminish work output, so one ne'er-do-well going in sick can screw up an entire department's metrics over the course of several months.
I see no measurable impact on performance.
No, but whatever industry you work in and whoever your employer is, they should have enough staff to cover minor illnesses and absenses. If you are off sick and your company misses a court deadline thats on your companies poor staff management, not on you for being ill and staying home to avoid infecting coworkers.
We have multiple people in a company of about 15 who have worked there for over 20 years.
Who are you working for?
People need to toughen up. Not every cold is covid.
Part and parcel why I purposefully bought a house where the district was highly rated. Missing several weeks is a serious blow.
When I read this, I thought you were making a more general point, rather than about missing school on account of sickness.
To the general point, I think schooling is entirely unreasonable, and a terrible way to bring up humans. Though, I obviously think it is valuable to learn to read and write, know maths and certain tools to get by in life.
But the rest of it is terrible - institutionalising children, filling children up with government ideas as if no other interpretations are available, the insistence of deference to authority, leaving no space for individuality, the application of some sort of 'people metric' where you are a problem if you don't want to sit for hours or find the propaganda dull. And this is to say nothing of the impossible expectations teachers have on them, which make the lessons even more depersonalising and uninspiring. In the face of this, we will see perpetual ai teachers and the lifetime monitoring as a good thing.
No wonder there are so many lost people - people who have been brought up by loveless institutions can't even conceive of what they have not experienced - the materialistic collectivised mindset seems 'normal', rather than being seen as an ultra-radicalised ideology itself.
Most people have completely lost sight of what it means to bring up children. It's simply not about farming out the job to institutional structures.
We are both lucky enough to even have jobs that let you take a last minute personal day to care for your child, but many jobs do not work this way, or even if you can take off, you lose income. You're not going to keep a kid with a stuffy nose home if it means not having enough to make ends meet.
Tough shit, right? But kids get minor colds a lot. In the winter they just infect each other (and us) all the time. Often, by the time they show symptoms the whole class has already been infected.
The practical realities have to be acknowledged. The solution is to draw a line, on one side you are sick enough to be required to stay home, and on the other, oh well.
I just don't see it as realistic that my kid be 100% healthy to go to school, especially during snotty nose season. But then again I went to school no matter what when I was a kid, it was definitely an extreme in the opposite direction. There must a balance between protecting the school and letting the kid get a good education that isn't interrupted too much (consistency and stability is also important).
In an ideal world, people shouldn't go to work or school when they are sick. Not only does it slow their recovery, but in the case of communicable diseases, it spreads the illness.
Yet a lot of schools have released post-pandemic guidance about how students should still come to school with minor illnesses. And most workplaces have dialed back extra sick time that was available during the first couple of years of COVID.