
Tell HN: How USA school closure seems to be working out - novaleaf
I&#x27;m in Northshore school district (Seattle Area) and our school district is the first in the USA to be closed by the CoronaVirus.<p>The district has actually moved pretty fast on this.  They set up an emergency &quot;online teaching&quot; teacher training day tues, e-learning resources, and upon closure on thursday they had the elearning setup for students to try out.  You can see the district emergency e-learning portal page here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nsd.org&#x2F;northshorelearns<p>My 2 kids classes will be taught using Google Classrooms starting Monday, and the last two days were for &quot;testing&quot; the system.  The school choose Google Classrooms I think because the students already had google apps for education accounts.<p>Overall, Google Classrooms is better than nothing, but honestly not much.  It&#x27;s basically a Teacher driven CRM system with ui complexity like all google web tools, and some integration with Google Docs.   I think this might be fine for middle-school or higher, but they workflows are a bit convoluted, and I can see small kids and computer illiterate parents having serious problems navigating.<p>The biggest problem though, is that it&#x27;s all self-directed learning.  Students need to proactively seek out their assignments and course materials and have the focus to read&#x2F;understand it all without any explanation by a teacher.  It&#x27;s &quot;okay&quot; in my case because I can spend the time to hover over them to make sure the work gets done and the content gets read (otherwise it&#x27;s just skimmed over).  Students unable to self learn and parents unable to micromanage their learning are going to be severely hurt by online learning like this.   Also, me micromanaging the kids took a considerable chunk of the day, as I need to check up on them every 10 minutes or so, or they have questions (aprox 5hrs&#x2F;day).<p>I do think the school district made the right decision to close.  Kids are at lowest risk of serious infection but school staff trend older and are at highest risk.
======
matheweis
It’s been interesting to watch the varied responses. In Seattle (Seattle
Public SD) the school districts have adamantly refused to close.

For better or worse this will end up being a wild A/B test (between Northshore
and Seattle) with extremely long term implications.

So far the explanations have mostly centered around these three points:

* Many students’ parents are health care providers or work in the health care industry on the front lines of the COVID-19 response. If schools close, fewer people will be able to provide front-line support.

* Many families rely on the schools and staff for basic needs, including regular meals, health care, and child care.

* Seattle can’t provide online learning because Seattle serves a diverse community with varied access to technology ... including those who do not have access to technology or internet at home.

See:
[https://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_...](https://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_s_new/coronavirus_update)

~~~
amscanne
The explanation that I’ve seen is that closing is not an effective mitigation
anyways, as children often end up congregating elsewhere in even closer
contact: e.g. backup care with groups of kids, older kids getting together
while schools are closed.

Given the well-known downsides that you list, and the fact that it doesn’t
help much, it makes sense to stay open until there are actual cases associated
with the schools.

~~~
trimbo
A coworker asked the other day: what's the end point on WFH and school
closure?

I think it's a good question. In this specific case, for Northshore, have they
specified? Is it some number of weeks, months, years? Is there some inflection
point in the spread they've predetermined it will go back to normal?

~~~
Tagbert
One of the main reasons to do things like close schools and work from home is
to slow the spread of the virus so that it doesn’t spike in large numbers.
This helps prevent the health care and similar support systems from being
overwhelmed. It is likely that many/most people will eventually get the virus
but if that happens over a spread out timeframe there is a better chance of
maintaining adequate health support.

------
bonzini
Northern Italy here, we're entering the third week of school closure. We have
a platform that is usually used by teachers to record marks and other
communications to parents, and they're using it to put homework. But it's
barely an hour of work everyday and only ensuring that the kids do not forget
the last things they did in class. They will not manage to finish all topics
for their grade.

~~~
_red
godspeed to you guys.

Regarding the outbreak in Northern Italy...the fatality rate seems much much
higher than South Korea or Germany. Do you have any theories on why the
fatalities are so much worse?

~~~
marvin
Here's my wild-ass guess: The percentage of lethal cases is actually close to
0.1% when the serious cases get the best care possible (my claim). If this is
true, then Italy had 200*1000 = 20.000 early-stage cases 8 days ago. This
yields on the order of 80.000 cases today, hopefully less as the quarantines
should have an effect by now.

This assumes a median of 8 days from onset to death in the lethal cases, and a
doubling time of # infections of 4 days, which seems to be around the current
level for the world outside of China. The number is very sensitive to average
lethality rate, and hence also to the age & health distribution of the
population.

It's completely implausible that Italy has only 5000 cases, as people who have
visited Italy for their winter holidays have very frequently tested positive
after returning home. They haven't all randomly met the same 5000 Italians.

~~~
imtringued
Can't you just send out test kits to 10000 random Italians and then use that
to calculate the number of infected people? If its really common then you'd
find 100-1000 infected people and then you can calculate the real mortality
rate simply by monitoring them and recording how many of them have died. Of
course it is possible that proper medical care results in a much lower than
usual mortality rate compared to untreated people but that sounds more like
good news than bad news.

~~~
umeshunni
> Can't you just send out test kits to 10000 random Italians and then use that
> to calculate the number of infected people?

I think at this point, it's still very early in the spread of infection and
the distribution of infection might not be random and might be clustered
around certain locations, social circles etc.

~~~
datingscientist
I would LOVE to see a full population test sample... Would be expensive
(probably need 5 K - 10 K tests for a significant read, most of which will
likely be wasted on "likely healthy" members of the community... but would
decisively settle this outstanding question of asymptomatic infection
frequency.

The closest data point we have is likely that South Korean church, where I
think they hunted down more or less every member and tested them... Doesn't
give you a true view of asymptomatic presence in the general population but
does provide a cue about relative size vs. known infected...

~~~
marvin
The scary part is the WHO mission were adamant that they failed to find a
large number of asymptomatic/mild cases in the population at large, and they
tested 300.000 people. I can't get this to match up with my other hunches, so
I might be very wrong on this.

------
threedots
This is going to be brutal on working low income parents and their children.

It seems no matter what happens there's always some justification for why poor
people end up being the collateral damage.'Prevent the virus no matter what'
is a position that's much easier for a well off software engineer (who can
work from home and pay for childcare) to hold than for a single mother who
gets paid by the hour on a zero hours contract. Many people would prefer to
take their chances on the mortality rate than suffer through the measures
intended to bring it down.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sucks to be poor, almost by definition. This isn't some special harm directed
at the poor; its a normal result of being poor.

Not to say anybody deserves to be poor; save the rhetoric on that. Just that
its not some made-up justification; its an expected result just like physics.

We can be comforted by the fact that the poor are protected by these measures
exactly as much as the wealthy (and everybody in between) - they live.

~~~
threedots
It is a special harm directed at the poor with the justification that it's for
the greater good.

Much like low interest rates /monetary stimulus policies. They're justified on
the basis that they are necessary/for the greater good.

There's no law of physics here that ensures poor people get the short end of
the stick. Interest rates could be higher, schools could be kept open. They
aren't though, maybe for good reasons but it's funny how often 'objectively
good reasons' turn out to be conveniently (relatively) better for the rich.

~~~
bagacrap
I think being poor by definition is the short end of the stick.

~~~
quickthrower2
Yes, but do they need even more of short ends of sticks?

------
TrueGeek
We did some remote learning out here (Gwinnett county - north of Atlanta)
during weather closures. The software was awful and crashed the first day
under high load.

They used it again during a single day closure and the software worked fine
that time. However, many students didn’t do it, opting instead to play in the
snow. Or, some children had to go to day care since their parents weren’t
staying home. When they returned to school the teachers just repeated the same
lesson since not every one was on the same page.

I think remote learning is possible, but we are a far way from having the
kinks worked out.

------
nugget
Have you thought about organizing a small group of 3-5 kids to get together
and work through the material, under the guidance of a parent? I homeschooled
for a couple years and this was pretty effective within that community.

~~~
lostlogin
Don’t that just start to create the same environment that the school closure
was supposed to prevent?

~~~
craftinator
That was my first thought too; but, with smaller numbers like that it is much
more manageable to keep an eye out for symptoms and implement quarantine.
Also, from a simplistic maths point of view, in a classroom with 20-30
children, with each child having an infection vector from each other child, so
a 16-27x higher chance of being infected than in a classroom of 3-4.

------
indymike
Hasn't happened here yet. The issue in the US will be dual income families
where mom or dad HAVE TO GO to their pleace of work. This is going to make a
mess for many, many families.

~~~
electriclove
Yup, it will be a mess and we need to come up with solutions. But we shouldn't
let that influence the decision.

~~~
david-s
Why should we not let it influence the decision? It's seems to me entirely
possible that closing the schools could result in worse outcomes.

------
blululu
I recently saw an article where the Education minister of Singapore
articulated some reasons to not close schools. Basically his case is that this
alleviates burden from parents, and the school can provide food + sanitation
for the kids.

[https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/no-plans-to-
cl...](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/no-plans-to-close-
schools-for-now-says-education-minister-ong-ye-kung)

------
jl2718
I took an online class in high school. They told me it was the first ever such
class taken for credit in the US. It was pretty bad, but I didn’t expect much.
It’s easier to learn the answers this way, but much harder to ask the
questions. As an adult looking back on who in my class became a teacher, I
also realize that teachers in general are usually not the people you most want
your kids learning from. Not the worst though. Curriculum is mostly just a
vehicle for inquiry, and should be treated as such. Expect no results from
this online platform. The kids will get the material done just fine, but they
won’t engage with it unless you make it relevant to their imagination. Maybe
it’s not that important though. Maybe they should be interested in other
things.

------
cjbprime
> school staff trend older and are at highest risk.

This part doesn't sound right -- the highest risk groups are 70+ years old.
Hopefully the school staff retires before then. The mortality rate for people
below 60 is only around 1%.

The worry with young kids is that they may still be able to spread it, putting
e.g. their grandparents at huge risk.

~~~
eugeniub
There are plenty of teachers in their 60s, where the death rate is 3.6%. If 30
teachers in their 60s get it, one of them will die on average. Even for people
in their 50s the rate is still 1.3%, huge compared to the flu.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Source on the numbers? I’m having trouble believing that such accurate
statistics could have been produced so quickly, especially when there is no
idea how many people contracted the virus and got better themselves as if it
were just another cold.

~~~
marvin
This looks like the numbers from the WHO-China joint COVID-19 mission. It
likely overestimates the lethality somewhat. But even 1% is a big risk.

------
sschueller
Here in Switzerland they specifically do not want to close schools (yet)
unless the school had a positive test and kids are in self quarantine.

The reason given is that if the kids are home it is likely that the grand
parents will have to care for them as the parents have to work and the elderly
are the high risk group.

------
adolph
I wonder what is the best concise resource on effectively starting a public-
school affiliated home-school program?

Preferably something with how to balance ones own telecommuting while the kids
telelearn.

~~~
eries
If you need support with this, there are lots of resources (both human and
online) like [https://www.modulo.app/](https://www.modulo.app/)

Let me know if you need help, I can only imagine how stressful this would be
for families who aren’t used to it

~~~
adolph
Thanks, that looks fascinating and I’m digging into it.

------
ouid
One major quarantine benefit of closing schools is that it forces parents to
stay home. Bad for the economy, good for R_0.

~~~
tobltobs
Or grandma will help out, bad for the death rate.

------
PopeDotNinja
I wasn't a good self-directed learner until my late 30s :P Good luck with the
remote schooling! Part of the world's biggest remote work experiment.

~~~
imglorp
Maturity and type-A self direction are the keys.

Our district has some full-online charter schools. I have a miraculously self
motivated family member who pulled off full time home self study her last 2
years of high school at one of these: she got up early and finished most of
her homework before lunch.

So it's definitely not for everyone, not even for most adults. I think many
people need to learn as a group. But some children can thrive with self
directed study.

------
tomjen3
In the nineties when I was in second or third grade I spent little less than a
month attending school from home, recovering from surgery. This being the
ninteties we didn’t have this new-fangeled internet at home. One a week a
teacher would come by for a few hours and talk about school and what they were
up to, and hand over some assignments and talk about what I had done so far.

As I recall it I spend a lot less time on the assignments than I would in
school and I learned most of what the other kinds learned (the rest was easily
learned when I was back in school) - but this obviously only worked because
mum was a stay at home mum and it was early enough that she could teach me.

Most of early schooling is about warehousing and training kids to behave so
that adults can be around them and parents can do that in most cases. The real
issues isn’t that the kids don’t learn, it is that they end up staying with
the grandparents and infecting them.

------
WheelsAtLarge
Thanks for the post. It seems that we need a way to set a virtual class
schedule where a teacher teaches and kids can ask questions. Reading lesson is
too hard for kids. Specifically if you're not used to learning that way.

------
ma2rten
_Kids are at lowest risk of serious infection [...]_

Also kids might get infected and infect other members of their household.

------
polishdude20
I think your concerns with having to check up on your kids because they have
tons of questions stems from the teacher not being prepared for this.

I'm sure their teacher has materials based on the fact that they will be in
class in person and can answer any questions and explain things better. If
this teacher had more time, I'm sure they could structure their coursework to
fit the online format much better

------
actfrench
It sounds a bit more like self-directed study than self-directed learning. If
you want a resource that can help them reinforce their learning in a totally
self-directed way, I'd try Khan Academy or Khan App Kids. It will help them
learn, but might not be as useful for specific information they are supposed
to retain for a test or a specific method of doing math or reading or writing
an essay the teacher wants everyone to learn. Here's a bit more I've written
on Khan and Khan App Kids. It's a fantastic resource.
[https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/khan-app-
kids](https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/khan-app-kids)

------
matty22
I'm honestly surprised that the Northshore school district doesn't have a
lawsuit on its hands from the WA teachers' union. Requiring teachers to do
something they aren't trained for, aren't qualified for, and aren't
contractually required to do seems like a pretty good recipe for a lawsuit.
Not to mention any privacy issues when/if online teaching requires video
recordings of the teacher to be posted online.

I know a few people in the school systems here in Washington, and from what I
can gather, there would be riots in the streets if this was required state
wide.

~~~
baumandm
Right or wrong, the school district is taking preventative measures in an
attempt to protect public health. Suing them over that would not look
particularly good for the union.

------
datingscientist
Kids can catch and transmit the virus to other household members; this was the
main path through the community in a few flu models a while back (spread
through daycare and the elementary schools first, then families, then everyone
else).

Household transmission rate was about 15% in china. (so a 15% chance of
infecting another member of your household).

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v1)

------
gdubs
Santa Clara county hasn’t closed schools yet, but are preparing for remote-
learning should closures happen. If you’re a parent in Silicon Valley, then
you’re probably aware from the district emails. From what I’ve parsed, it
sounds like they’re going to make a decision based on recommendations of the
County health board (though I’d think the school has autonomy on making the
decision on their own if they chose to, but I don’t know).

~~~
nerdface
From Santa Clara county's official statement:

“The reason we are not recommending school closures at this time is because
children have not been shown to be a high-risk group for serious illness from
this virus.”

[https://files.constantcontact.com/82fe691f001/dc8c682d-3257-...](https://files.constantcontact.com/82fe691f001/dc8c682d-3257-4ee1-90eb-4b322b30a445.pdf)

~~~
electriclove
And the same statement says those 50 and over should basically stay home. I'm
sure that a significant % of school staff fall into that grouping.

In regards to the quote, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

------
sys_64738
I doubt very much that these online days will count towards the minimum
allocation of school attendance days. That means lots of children might need
to repeat a year due to the gaps. Online courses are no substitute for real
schooling as they are all lousy. Interaction is woeful and teenage children
certainly don't have self-direction as a majority.

~~~
closeparen
As a teenager I always found it suspicious that when I would miss a 7-hour
school day, it would take 3 hours at most to do the make up work. If we did
that all the time, we could learn twice as much!

~~~
imtringued
That's just a pragmatic decision. If you have to make up the whole 7 hour
school day then you could be in a situation where you are so far behind that
you could never catch up.

There is this game called Warframe that has a daily login bonus. There is no
mechanism to partially skip days if you missed them. New rewards are always
added as a new milestone. The end result is that there are rewards that are
only available after getting the login bonus for 1000 days. If you stop
playing for a year and then come back you will never catch up to the latest
rewards.

~~~
closeparen
I can find 2.25 clearly accountable hours without losing any academic content:

\- Lunch and recess (45-60 minutes).

\- Passing periods (27-28 minutes).

\- Lifestyle activities: art, health, gym, music, etc. (45 minutes).

Now some fluffier ones:

\- Suppose, like a typical Coursera user, I can understand the content at 1.2x
classroom speed. There's 60 minutes.

\- The door-to-door transition period is four minutes. But settling in,
packing up, pleasantries, and administrivia probably put the lecture-content-
to-lecture-content time at closer to 10 minutes. So there's another 42
minutes.

There. I just found 4 hours with losing a drop of college-relevant material.

------
eldavido
Funny, when I first read this, I thought of school closures in public
districts where budget concerns are forcing long-term, permanent closures, not
temporary ones due to CoVID-19. Maybe I live in a bubble?

I live in the Bay Area now and reading this thread makes me miss Seattle
(lived there 2009-2011). It's one of the better cities in a pretty well-run
state, with funded pensions, responsive politics that seem more resistant to
special-interest capture (unions, ultra-rich), and a well-informed populace
and leaders capable of doing the right thing.

Oakland, by way of comparison (where I live now) regularly has school board
meetings that get shouted down by angry mobs
([https://www.kqed.org/news/11781890/parent-protests-
against-s...](https://www.kqed.org/news/11781890/parent-protests-against-
school-closures-turn-violent-at-oakland-school-board-meeting)), a school
district with a chronic major deficits
([https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/budget-deficit-
forces-...](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/budget-deficit-forces-
oakland-unified-school-district-to-consider-closing-some-campuses/6628/)) and
accounting scandals ([https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-
schools-...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-schools-in-
new-mess-over-financial-13012105.php)), and unsurprisingly, striking teachers
are demanding even higher pay in the face of all this. With such gross
mismanagement and leadership without the backbone to address it, it feels
almost unconscionable that I'd let my kids attend this school.

I'm not sure what to make of this other than that, if you live in an area with
a healthy political culture, be thankful for it. And if you don't, pay
attention, and get involved.

~~~
selimthegrim
Oakland has overseen a substantial reduction in gun violence over the last
decade to 13 years but you don’t see fit to mention that

------
jedberg
My friend is an English teacher in China. He's been "teaching from home" for a
few weeks now. His comment was this: "If this has shown me one thing, teaching
from home has a long way to go before it's feasible".

------
craftinator
It will be interesting to see what the outcome of this is. I had a really hard
time with the "forced education" programs in primary school; some subjects
were interesting, thus felt easy and fun. I would excel in these, but grow
bored when the pace didn't keep up with my learning speed. Other subjects I
found boring, thus were hard, and I would actively try to procrastinate. The
pressure was a huge motivation killer, and the lack of freedom to explore
seriously stunted my learning. Only later on, when I was doing self-directed
learning, did I really start to flourish. Maybe this will be a chance for kids
like me!

------
gorbachev
It's going to work differently in each school district. Some will have
capabilities to do online learning like yours, and some won't.

------
mxuribe
Thanks so much for sharing; very helpful!!

------
Haga
Augment with discord?

------
Aeolun
I honestly think ‘closing the schools’ is a huge overreaction for what
essentially amounts to a bad flu season.

~~~
frosted-flakes
> a bad flu season

It's not though, that's the point. A bad flu season never even reaches a 1%
case-fatality ratio (CFR). Even the 1968 flu pandemic had a CFR below 0.5%.
COVID-19 has a CFR of 2–3%.

------
carapace
The underlying assumption that there's some crucial process "education"
happening at these buildings that mustn't be interrupted is daft.

The damned things close every summer and nobody loses their minds.

Keep your kids home. They won't turn into mindless thralls from missing a few
weeks of "education".

------
giantg2
The schools have curriculums for each grade which are usually mandated or
approved by the state. The teachers create lesson plans based on that
curriculum.

In theory, the lesson plans could be distributed to parents (or whoever is
supervising) and they can teach it. For older students home alone or students
who's parents are not able to teach the subject, there are many great teaching
videos just an internet search away. The discipline to self-learn is something
that would need to have been instilled by the parents.

It seems to me that as a society we have forgotten that the primary
responsibility for teaching (let alone raising) our children is our own.
Instead we pass it off to 'the system' and make a big deal about having to
raise our own kids.

~~~
waholleyiv
TLDR: opportunity cost

It is the primarily responsibility in some domains. For others, the system is
designed to allocate responsibility to the education system in order to
balance with the time demands of fully employed parent(s) (to support the
family) and the cost that would be otherwise incurred.

~~~
giantg2
So the system goes to jail if it doesn't enroll all school aged children? So
the system decides which children go to public schools, charter schools,
private schools, or homeschool? Of course not. At it's very core the
responsibility for a child's education falls to the parents. Even if you send
your kids off to school, you still need to be involved to motivate them, help
them with assignments, etc. You can even see that the most influential factor
in a child's success is whether or not the child has 2 parents (Harvard
study).

Yes, you can take into account opportunity cost. However, that won't shift the
responsibility, it's just the outsourcing of the labor. You can see this in
any power structure (corporate, military, etc).

