This thread is for parents of teenagers. I have something for you: the first chapter of @ronlieber’s THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR COLLEGE. Because ye gods, here’s what we and our kids are facing.

1) 🚨BREAKING: Parents file lawsuit against Villa Duchesne High School for "intentional racial discrimination" against white students, and using "coercion, intimidation, and threats" to indoctrinate students into Critical Race Theory.

2) Students were told that all white people are racist because they're white, and that black students should "be free from discipline regardless of their behavior."

3) Plaintiff's daughter was subjected to "verbal attacks, and physical threats, social ostracism, false imprisonment, permanent damage to her reputation, and severe and continuing emotional and psychiatric injury."

4) In October a student claimed that the Plaintiff's daughter had stood up in class, pointed to a black student and said "Black Lives Do NOT Matter!"

However, the class where this vent allegedly took place was videotaped, and upon review no such event had occurred.

5) Following the accusations, the plaintiff's daughter was "subject to enormous social ridicule and threats of personal violence."

During a meeting, the principal and a faculty member allowed a black student to aggressively verbally berate the daughter, without intervention.

My thoughts about Covid in schools-
Our studies are crap. We haven't put appropriate resources into studying this. Merging "in-person school" v "remote school" across the country makes little sense since there's so much heterogeneity in what "in-person school" looks like. 🧵

A teacher in Louisiana in an area with high rates of covid & in-person school, has a class with just 2 students in it. The entire school has 37 students and 12 staff, in a building that can hold hundreds.
Should this school's data be merged with a school that's fully open?

How would merging such disparate data, and everything in-between impact our understanding of Covid in schools? What about when we compare it to the rates in children who are in virtual school?

Things often not considered that should be... Are kids in pods? Are kids doing virtual school in community centers/ churches/ other group settings? Are youth sports or other extracurricular school activities (music, etc) happening in-person. Heterogeneity exist in this group too.

What's asymptomatic testing of children in the community like? We know that children are under-tested, how can we say something is safe if we are NOT TESTING children at the same rate as the rest of the population. We can't embrace the "don't ask (test) don't tell" apprach here.

I got the feedback today that my views on schools were too confident

I will die on this hill; hold to me to it

School closure will be the absolute worst public policy decision for the generation to come

The most discriminatory, net neg & cruel

It will be found to have made nearly no dent in the spread of the virus

The risks to teachers and staff will be found to be modest & modifiable

But the damage to kids and the very institution of public schools will be cataclysmic

The stories of undetected child abuse will be so powerful that every person who thinks it is reasonable to close schools, in this irrational way we have done in the US, will change their tune overnight

The damage to upward mobility will fall along class and racial lines, and this country will be more feudal

The fate of the nation itself-- democracy and those who participate in it-- will be made vulnerable.