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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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I mean how much of that is the laptops, and how much if it is COVID fucking an entire school year? I am personally amenable to the idea that every school should just be a big faraday cage, but some of this test score decline is only showing up now despite the laptops being in use for a decade or more, which aligns much better with it being a delayed effect from COVID than of being a delayed effect from laptops.
I taught as a substitute during / slightly after covid. These kids had no motivation. They would show up, take a nap, ask if they could leave early. I saw a kid with a 3% in his class.
They were provided with no support, nobody cared about them or how things were at home, no interventions to identify the problem. School districts are too scared to fail children as well, they receive less funding, or risk a parent screaming and threatening lawsuits.
I was subbing these 6th graders once, standing on tables, screaming, not doing any of their work. I gave about an hour for each assignment, but there weren't any markers in the room that would let me teach the lesson plan to the class.
Because Minecraft Education Edition is installed on all their laptops, they would play with each other for ~55 minutes, then I'd tell them to wrap up their work and they'd say they weren't given enough time to do their 15 questions they were assigned. I called them out for playing minecraft and they were so shocked that I knew what the game was, like it didn't come out when I was their age lol.
I really can't blame the kids though, it was the same when I was going to school, plenty of kids who had working or uninvolved parents. Now they're at school and the teachers are uninvolved as well, administration will gladly spend millions they don't have to grift some new AI tool that will never be used.
My mother, thankfully, was involved deeply when we came home from school as a child. I'd get home at 3, had an hour to play outside or watch TV while she cooked, then after dinner it was homework / studying until bedtime.
What parent can be involved in their children this much, now, in the west? I'm not talking 💩 but a lot of my peers are having children only as an accessory, just following the motions of what society is expecting of them. How many people would sacrifice the time to make sure their children are nurtured to the best of their abilities? Schools were good enough to mask that problem, but they've gotten so bad to reveal all the flaws.
It's such a multivariate problem, it's impossible to pinpoint any one thing that would fix it, but it's mostly demoralizing to realize that we have a pretty big laundry list of things that would definitely help but that there's just no political will in our society to do because of how little we value education, teachers, kids, and school support staff.
Most of the country can't even give the kids a fukken meal when they get to school.
And long covid itself may well end up having cognitive effects on people in general. Problem aint just in the US.
Imo the bigger concern for COVID is the brain damage and other lasting symptoms caused by long COVID, which is now the most prevalent chronic illness in children.