Category Archives: education

“Sharing a household with children and risk of COVID-19”

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That’s the title of a medRxiv preprint (unpeer-reviewed) paper that looked at the risk to adults—in particular, Scottish NHS healthcare workers, NHS-contracted general practice service providers, and members of their households—of contracting the Wuhan Virus (my term) when they lived in households with children with ages ranging from new-born to 11 years old. Total participants numbered more than 300,000 adults and children.

The results are correlative rather than causative, but the strength of the correlation is strongly suggestive.

The risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 was lower in those with one child and lower still in those with two or more children….

And the money quote:

Conclusion[:] Increased household exposure to young children was associated with an attenuated risk of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and appeared to also be associated with an attenuated risk of COVID-19 disease severe enough to require hospitalisation.

That suggests, also (my conclusion; the authors didn’t address the matter), that putting children back in school (at least grade school) poses no serious risk of spreading serious illness from the virus.

The preprint abstract can be read here.

American Education

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Our public school establishment has grown enormously over the last two-and-a-half generations, even as the public school student population has grown not so much, and public school performance as measured by student testing performance has not improved a single minim. The graph gives, as of 2017, the total change of the indicated personnel and student populations; you can see the changes year-by-year here [there’s a replay button at the top of that graph].

Mark Perry put his conclusion succinctly:

Bottom Line: Despite the significant increase between 1970 and 2017 in the number of public school teachers (57%) and non-teaching staff (151%) relative to the 10.4% increase in students, the significant 30% decrease in the pupil-to-[teacher] ratio in public schools and the significant 154% increase in inflation-adjusted spending per pupil attending public schools over that period, there was basically no change in academic achievement. More spending + more teachers + more administrators + no change in education outcomes = a failing public school monopoly that benefits entrenched unionized teachers who vigorously try to squash competition from charter schools and educational choice at the expense of taxpayers, parents, and students.

What he said.

Which puts a premium on two distinct, but each necessary, actions: defanging the teachers unions and expanding parental access to schooling alternatives like voucher schools and charter schools.

Critical to that second item is this: per-student school funding via taxpayer monies needs to stop being school funding and be transformed into student funding: the monies need to accompany the student to the school the parents select for him. If the parents choose home-schooling as their alternative, they should get, in lieu of full-up per-student funding, an allowance to cover teaching material and supply expenses. And, conditioned on performance on State-mandated testing, a serious honorarium for their teacher labor, with the allowance plus honorarium not exceeding the per-student funding rate.

Joe Biden, Black Lives Mattering, and Education

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Daniel Henninger explored the inkblots of the Trump-Biden Presidential contest. One of the blots he mentioned was this:

If Joe Biden wins on the basis of his current policy course, those young black lives will have next to no chance of their schools improving in the next four years.

Indeed. We’ve already seen the Progressive-Democrats’ attitude toward the lives of black children and their education. Eric Holder, the AG under Biden’s heavily touted BFF Barack Obama—and with Biden’s clear knowledge and at least tacit approval—sued Louisiana to block that State’s effort to let black children escape from failing public schools and go to voucher schools for an actual education.

Government and Student Debt

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In an article on the possibility of the Federal government extending its current moratorium on student debt repayment, The Wall Street Journal posed a question to its readers.

How should Congress address the backlog of student-loan payments borrowers will owe after Sept 30?

I say, mostly by leaving it alone. The loans are strictly business arrangements between the borrower and the lender.

In a free market economy, government has no role here, other than to allow student debt to be discharged through bankruptcy like most other debt. Such bankruptcies then must flow with all the ramifications they entail for both the lenders and the borrowers.

Government also should stop guaranteeing student loans. If there needs to be a guarantor in order to have a student debt market at all, let the colleges and universities be the guarantors, either individually or via a consortium. It is, after all, the colleges’ and universities’ high prices and non-marketable or low-income-producing majors that drive the difficulties graduates have with their student debts.

Opening Schools—Two Schools of Thought

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has ordered all schools—private and public—not to open until his Omnipotent State declares it safe to do so. This seems at the behest of California’s teachers unions, which fear competition from private schools—and which are losing that competition, as they’ve been doing for some years.

Catholic school tuition, for instance, costs $1,000-$4,000 per student less than the union public schools, and they provide better education—academic, discipline, moral values. And they’re ready, willing, and anxious to open on schedule.

In contrast, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (D) has sprung some of his discretionary education funds to cover school costs for families whose kids went to private schools last year, but for whom the Wuhan Virus situation has hammered their finances this year.

What’s really at stake? The virus risk to the kids in K-12 is vanishingly small: they’re simply unlikely to get infected, and among those who do, the severity of their infection very usually is slight.

The science is uncertain on how infectious the kids are when they are infected but asymptomatic. They appear not to be mutually infectious; the uncertainty is how infectious they are to the adults around them, the teachers, teacher aides (a relatively recent, and seeming featherbedding, addition to staff), administrators and staff, janitors. The data, though, are leaning increasingly in the direction of not very infectious.

There are occasional moves to stagger in-person schooling with half the students present some days, the other half the other days, at socially distanced desks, and with virtual schooling (a disastrous failure last spring, but maybe practice teaches) for the kids at home on those alternate days.

This is unnecessary. The kids are as safe from each other with the Wuhan Virus as they are with colds and flu. Bring them back.  All of them.

While the risks remain uncertain, it would be cumbersome but easily and straightforwardly doable to socially distance the teachers from the students in their classrooms. They spend a fair amount of their class time on the chalkboards at the front of the rooms, anyway. Or could easily go back to that.

Teachers unions holding out for deus ex cashina (I wish I’d thought of the term, but it’s the WSJ editors’) State and Federal interventions are acting in their petty interests rather than the interests of our children. Easier said than done, but these unions need to be decertified. Their selfish greed borders on child abuse.