One area of the lockdown debate where I’ve seen almost no disagreement from lockdown proponents is the negative effects of school closures. After all, it’s hard to blame these on the pandemic itself: absent the deliberate decision to close schools, students would be legally obliged to attend school.
And given that remote learning is almost certainly inferior to in-person learning, especially for younger children, the only question is: “How large are the negative effects on student outcomes?”
As I noted in a previous post, the Education Endowment Foundation collated studies on the impact of school closures on students’ learning, and observed “a consistent pattern”. Specifically, students have made “less academic progress” than in previous years, and the attainment gap between more and less advantaged students has grown.
A new academic review reaches similar conclusions. Svenja Hammerstein and colleagues searched the literature for studies looking at the impact of school closures on student achievement. They were able to identify 11 relevant studies. Of these, eight showed negative effects, and three – surprisingly – showed positive effects.
The effect for younger children was consistently negative. And children from disadvantaged backgrounds were more negatively affected than children from advantaged backgrounds. This makes sense, given that those from disadvantaged backgrounds rarely have access to private tutors, and may face more distractions at home.
Regarding the studies that showed positive effects, the authors note that these assessed student achievement via some kind of online learning software. Hence, they suggest, the positive effects may be attributable to increased use of software during the time for which schools were closed.
Nonetheless, the authors conclude that “there is clear evidence for a negative effect of COVID-19-related school closures on student achievement”.
Of course, schools haven’t just been closed in advanced countries like the U.K., but also in lower and middle-income countries like Brazil. According to the Oxford Blavatnik School’s Government Response Tracker, the average number of days of mandatory school closures (in at least part of the country) is 315. And 63 countries have had more than 400 days of school closures.
Because children with lower school achievement tend to earn less in adulthood, one can put a rough dollar figure on the learning losses (by calculating the net present value of children’s lost future earnings). In a recent paper, researchers from the World Bank attempted to do this.
They estimate that a global school shutdown of five months “could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion”. Given the size of this figure, it’s almost impossible to believe that school closures would pass a cost-benefit test.
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Garbage in, garbage out!
Who knew?!
The physicist’s dilemma – you can’t observe anything without affecting it.
And yet the amount of money, political capital, power, and reputation that is tied up in the net-zero – climate-change conspiracy is such that a few ‘inconvenient truths’ are not easily going to shift the official line.
I wish this was news. Same story reported by Dr. Roy Spencer and Professor John Christy for years, and by so many other credible people. The list is long. Very long.
Thanks for reporting it anyway.
They can only be ‘top scientists’ if they are the approved for giving right sort of information in support of The Climate Change Narrative™️ – they aren’t.
So nothing they say will make any difference.
The great climate change supertanker is full stream ahead towards our economic ruin with the throttle and rudder superglued in position.
Great choice of image for the post.
I’m just thrilled that Google’s expert climatologists (along with their expert medical scientists, military specialists, geopoliticians and legal eagles etc) are there to keep us all safe from such nefarious information, written by people who only have a measly 40 plus years of experience in their fields of endeavour, only one NASA award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement plus some random Fellowships and Distinguished Professorships. Yes, Google’s crowd can really teach these guys a thing or two about the weather, don’t you think?
Ah, yes, that Global Warming trend that’s been obvious since the Industrial Revolution…
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist, 1970
This is what I was hearing incessantly as I came of age. There are many more of that period warning us about the “settled science” of the coming Ice Age.
“Confessions of a Computer Modeler”
“Any model, including those predicting climate doom, can be tweaked to yield a desired result. I should know.”
After three iterations [of remodeling] I finally blurted out, “What number are you looking for?”
He didn’t miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed.
I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
Was the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] official asking me to lie?
I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program. (Congress ended the grants in 1990.)”
Robert J. Caprara, “Confessions of a Computer Modeler,”
The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2014
https://www.wsj.com/articles/confessions-of-a-computer-modeler-1404861351
.
The climate-change industry is making some people rich and powerful so they try to censor any other informations that differs from their claims.