The Daily Populous Saturday February 20th, 2021 night edition
Authored by nytimes.com and submitted by luuvinglifekg

Michael Green, the C.E.O. of the group that puts out the Social Progress Index, notes that the coronavirus will affect health, longevity and education, with the impact particularly large in both the United States and Brazil. The equity and inclusiveness measured by the index seem to help protect societies from the virus, he said.

“Societies that are inclusive, tolerant and better educated are better able to manage the pandemic,” Green said.

The decline of the United States over the last decade in this index — more than any country in the world — is a reminder that we Americans face structural problems that predate President Trump and that festered under leaders of both parties. Trump is a symptom of this larger malaise, and also a cause of its acceleration.

David G. Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist, has new research showing that the share of Americans reporting in effect that every day is a bad mental health day has doubled over 25 years. “Rising distress and despair are largely American phenomenon not observed in other advanced countries,” Blanchflower told me.

This decline is deeply personal for me: As I’ve written, a quarter of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus in rural Oregon are now dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide — what are called “deaths of despair.” I lost one friend to a heroin overdose this spring and have had more friends incarcerated than I could possibly count; the problems are now self-replicating in the next generation because of the dysfunction in some homes.

You as taxpayers paid huge sums to imprison my old friends; the money would have been far better invested educating them, honing their job skills or treating their addictions.

That’s why this is an election like that of 1932. That was the year American voters decisively rejected Herbert Hoover’s passivity and gave Franklin Roosevelt an electoral mandate — including a flipped Senate — that laid the groundwork for the New Deal and the modern middle class. But first we need to acknowledge the reality that we are on the wrong track.

konkilo on February 19th, 2021 at 14:15 UTC »

As a retired teacher, and at the risk of over-simplifying the problem, my experience has been that good teachers teach and bad teachers become administrators.

Rap_Cat on February 19th, 2021 at 11:38 UTC »

I'm no scientist and this is conjecture but my wife and I went through the same middle and high-school together and had entirely different experiences.

I was straight stem and math and science came easy. Ap classes, extra opportunities to polish skills etc. My wife had dyslexia and got little support or exception for it. She had tutored support from the school at a very young age but it did almost nothing to help her through high school math and reading.

Basically the system works if you require no additional resources as a trouble case

LedParade on February 19th, 2021 at 10:52 UTC »

“...kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia.”

Ouch, that hurt..