Thursday Throughput: Schooling Edition

Photo by Bart Everson, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

[ThTh1] One of the biggest legacies of the pandemic may be in our schools. A bevy of results have emerged that have shown, pretty conclusively, that the last few years saw the biggest drop in learning ever measured:

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

Naturally, this has been blamed on shutting down the schools when COVID-19 emerged and switching to far less effective remote learning. Even those who think the immediate decision to close schools was defensible, given how little we knew about the virus, acknowledge the impact this has had.

But we’ve actually baked an assumption into this. And the recent results of international testing are callign that assumption into question:

Whatever my doubts about PISA’s methodology, it stayed the same from 2018-22. This means the change in scores is probably fairly reliable.

As you can see, the US did surprisingly well. France and Sweden, for example, reported keeping schools open at much higher rates than the US, but even so their test scores declined more than ours.

This fits with data suggesting that school closures had little effect on test score declines within the US. Put everything together and the evidence is pointing ever more strongly to the conclusion that COVID test declines were unrelated to school closures. The real cause of the declines, then, remains a bit of a mystery. Perhaps just overall stress from the pandemic?

One of the points I’ve been hitting lately is that we’ve underestimated just how much of a worldwide trauma the pandemic was. I don’t just mean closures; I mean everything. People getting sick is traumatic. People dying is traumatic. Not knowing what’s going to happen is traumatic. COVID skeptics lying about the whole thing is traumatic. Plagues used to be common all over the world. Now the developed world, at least, has fought them to a draw. But this was the first major plague we’d had in over a century. Is it possible that, and not school closures, is to blame for learning loss?

Looking at the data, I’m struck by the fact that the lowest learning loss was in Australia, which famously contained the pandemic until after the vaccines had come out. Taiwan and Japan, who also did amazing jobs of containing the pandemic in the early going, had learning gains. Singapore and South Korea also did well. This suggests to me that it was the pandemic itself that caused learning loss and the response to it, at most, exacerbated that.

That being said, I’m hesitant to state any firm conclusions. We’re still gathering data and there’s still a lot of work to do to figure out which educational policies minimized learning loss and which made it worse. My prior is that remote schooling was a disaster. But I’m open to the possibility that it was mostly coincident with the bigger disaster of a deadly global pandemic and that we’ve overestimated just how big an impact it had. Sometimes the obvious answer is the obvious answer. But most of the time, it’s more complicated.

All that being said, the cause of the learning loss, while interesting, is less relevant to our current situation than what we do going forward. Because no matter why the learning loss happened, it did happen. And we can’t just go back to the old ways of schooling — agendas set in Washington, unions in firm control and money pouring into Administration — and expect things to magically get better on their own.

ThTh2] Speaking of the COVID vaccines, a new massive study out of India show no association between the vaccines and sudden cardiac death. And another shows that while COVID-19 infection has a big impact on pregnant women’s babies, the vaccine has no such effect.

[ThTh3] Honeybees are known to form clusters to keep warm in cold weather. It turns out, this may be a bad thing.

[ThTh4] Little known facts about the evolution of planetary systems.

This phase of planetary evolution happens because squares are not a gravitationally stable shape. Despite being a dwarf planet, Pluto's gravity is still strong enough to slowly smooth out its early corners into the round shape we see today. Amazing to see happen in real time! 🌠 https://t.co/HlaQ5Vfhht

— Celeste Labedz (@celestelabedz) December 3, 2023

[ThTh5] And speaking of the evolution of planetary systems, did one feed the apocalypse in Mad Max? Check out my latest video to find out.

[ThTh6] While I’m familiar with the phenomenon of stars destroying other stars, I’d never heard them referred to as “spider pulsars” before.

[ThTh7] The FDA may soon approve a drug that could extend the lifespans of dogs. Will this mean drugs to extend human lifespan are far behind? Maybe. Someone should write a book about what that would be look.

Oh, wait.

[ThTh8] The FDA also gave approval to home tests for chlamydia and gonorrhea, which could be a massive help with containing these diseases.

[ThTh9] What do Earthquakes sound like to the Earth?

With modern technology we can increase the frequency of the sound of earthquakes on seismometers so that the human ear can detect it. Here we can see and hear the sound of the earthquakes in Grindavík on November 10th. #grindavik #iceland #earthquakes @RuvEnglish pic.twitter.com/ky5xw3F5RU

— Fréttastofa RÚV (@RUVfrettir) November 22, 2023

[ThTh10] In astronomy, the Sun is our standard by which measure things. The brightness of stars is scaled to the luminosity of the Sun. The heft of black holes is is scaled to the mass of the Sun. Even distances are scaled to the distance between the Earth and the Sun. We do these things because the Sun is one of the few celestial objects we can measure directly.

That scaling includes chemical composition. The Sun is about 75% hydrogen, 24% helium and 1% “metals”. Metals, in astronomy terms, refers to anything heavier than helium. All other objects in the universe are scaled to that (usually logarithmically). So when I saw a galaxy has an abundance of -2, that means it has 1/100th of the heavy elements the Sun does.

Of course, this assumes we know the chemical composition of the Sun. And while there’s a lot we can measure from the surface, the inner depths can only be probed indirectly. And it looks like we may have been underestimating that. It’s not that the previous results were wrong; it’s that we have new results that are even better and allow us to peek below the 5800 degrees fury of the Sun’s surface.