Despite the fact that children face practically no risk from COVID-19, many countries closed schools in an attempt to suppress the epidemic. What effect did this have on children’s learning? According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it may have had a sizeable negative effect.
The study was based on data from the Netherlands, where national examinations take place twice a year: first in January and then again in June. Because last year’s lockdown happened to take place between the two examinations, the authors were able to compare students’ progress in 2020 to their progress in previous years.
This is a more robust method than simply comparing students’ post-lockdown performance to their performance in previous years, since it controls for any changes that may have occurred within the school system between 2019 and 2020. For example, the students enrolled in 2020 might be slightly different from those enrolled in 2019.
The authors looked at math, spelling and reading scores, as well as a composite measure of all three, for students aged 8 to 11. Comparing scores between January and June, they found that students made considerably less progress in 2020 than in each of the three preceding years. Here’s one of their charts:
The learning loss was equivalent to one-fifth of a school year (roughly eight weeks), which means that students made essentially no progress under lockdown. In addition, the effect was 60% larger among students from less-educated homes, confirming that the costs of lockdown have fallen disproportionately on the working class.
As the authors note, their findings arguably reflect a “best-case scenario”, given that the Netherlands combines equitable school funding with high levels of broadband access, and the country’s lockdown only lasted eight weeks. Learning losses in other countries were probably even greater.
Stop Press: The authors of the study say their conclusions are applicable to English primary school children too.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
A more in depth moral is “don’t do things on the cheap”, if you consider the history of the East Coast electrification, back in the 1990s!
Very true.
I daily drove the 30 minute journey from E. Yorks to Doncaster railway station to catch the 0700 to Kings cross and thence onto a no 77 bus to Whitehall. Did that for 18 months in 1983/4. Diesel days with virtually no delays. Home journey after a day’s work dragged a bit. One guy on the platform at Donny for the King’s X train commuted from Hull every day.
From the level of spiritual science it is important to remember that the earth is past its most vtal and abundant point and has been decaying for a very long time. There are times when you have to burn some wood to stay alive. There was a time where we used to loll about naked and bask in the purple haze of the Saturn dawn. Food was plentiful and just picked ripe off the trees. Our times will require more and more burning and excavation on many levels. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Just like eating insects is nothing to be ashamed of when you’re starving to death.
WTF?
Actually we have only used about one tenth of the fossil fuels in the ground. —–Those utopian times you speak off where we lay around naked and picked abundant fruit from trees was not so utopian at all as we all died young of preventable diseases and after a very short life of back breaking labour. Then along came fossil fuels to give us prosperity ,good health and much longer lifespans. We can still pluck the fruit, but we are much more organised these days and pluck it from the supermarket instead of the tree, where a pack of hyena’s were lying in wait to pluck us.
Fossil fuel, or more specifically oil, interests are what decimated the railways in Britain in the first place: oil, car manufacture and road construction interests (who had also been key supporters of Nazi Germany) ensured that large swathes of the country were left without a rail connection whilst the rest was doomed to suffer unreliable services in perpetuity as diversionary routes were removed and motorways cut through historic town centres and beautiful countryside with an every-obliging Imperial College academic in the person of Dr Beeching (also not a fan of electrification) gave a ‘scientific’ veneer to the wanton destruction and flagrant corruption as ordinary people were told that the small fortune they handed over in taxes and to buy their, now desperately needed, new cars was ‘freedom.’
There seems to be an irresolvable issue in the British mythos that persisted from classical times into the medieval and then was just mindlessly transmitted ever since and that is the distinction in Greek terms between art, science and technology.The historian Richard Starkey has a lecture on Youtube on this subject. The rarefied mind, the mind made to measure things were extolled this way and that and the real art which is the art of producing things was relegated. If this country could get over this neurosis it could easily become very strong. Obvious natural advantages like English being the international language of business. If you could combine that with the intelligence and energy of the natives it would be a potent force but it is very stifled at the moment.
Moderator: might that be David Starkey, as opposed to Richard?
Sounds more like Richard – musing in his Hashish days on an Ashram,
“The rarefied mind, the mind made to measure things were extolled this way and that and the real art which is the art of producing things was relegated.”
Eh?
It is all a distectionary conversation anyway in terms of the sort of civic infrastructure that we might have. I speak to Scottish people all day and English people and there is definitely a yearning for something else. Nobody likes being skanked by some foreign electricity company. I don’t care I float all boats I would just tell you that when things go down big time internationally then England and Scotlane will take on a more life and death situation.I wish it didn’t have to come to that but it will. You will have all sorts of needy people wanting your help. And it could all have been avoided.
Are you getting enough sleep? What on earth does “distectionary” mean?
Would those by the Scottish people who keep voting in an SNP Govt because Braveheart and the evil Thatcher?
A very light hearted look at a good example of why fossil fuels are essential and will be around for a very long time. Because they do what it says on the tin, and Renewables do NOT.
Back when Private Eye was good, the Rev Tawdry would have done a piece on this, illustrated by a Ken Pyne cartoon of Thomas the Electrified Tank Engine looking glum as a smirking diesel train chugs past.
I think I’d have given up and hired a large car ….. a petrol one, natch.
Or a taxi – would have been cheaper than £600 overnight stay.
“Last week I caught a glimpse of a future without fossil fuels…”
Those of us old enough experienced it in the early 1970s – rolling power cuts, three day week, reduced food in shops, petrol ration coupons printed by the ‘crisis’ coming to an end. (Grocer Heath given the electoral elbow by the Nation preferring electricity to him. Sunak & Starmer Comedy Duo should note.)
The diesel would be a diesel-electric as electric motors are more efficient and don’t need mechanical gears. And don’t need power lines and are less weather affected.
Whilst there are some battery trains, travelling short distances with relatively light loads, main-line trains aren’t. I wonder why not?