COVID-19 Policy Update #170
COVID-19 Policy Update
FRIDAY 12/18
TOP THREE
Economic Relief Package: The House and Senate will attempt to pass a two-day spending bill this evening, in order to avert a government shutdown over the weekend and give time to address areas of disagreement on the economic relief package. Some snags in the negotiations:
Broadband: Still no agreement on the $10 billion for broadband which puts it at risk of being on the chopping block. Depending on the staff you talk with, they're either optimistic that a deal will be reached or that it will get punted to a 2021 package. A Democratic committee staffer said they are still trying to work out a compromise. Another Republican staffer indicated that the Democrats introduced a proposal today to give the FCC much greater authority to change aspects of the E-rate program - something that has been a deal breaker for Republicans since April. Much of this has nothing to do about the need but instead disagreements around (1) the mechanism through which to get the funds out to schools/communities and (2) if this deal should set the table for bigger E-rate changes in 2021.
Education Funding: Republicans have sought separate funding for private and catholic schools to help them with reopening, but Democrats have resisted.
SNAP: Democrats have pushed for a 15% increase while unemployment is high. It looks as if an increase could be in this final package but it's still among the issues being ironed out.
Federal Reserve Facilities: Democrats accused Republicans of "hamstringing the incoming Biden administration" by cutting off Federal Reserve emergency lending facilities created by the CARES Act. Democrats want to extend that authority into 2021. Biden's new NEC Director, Brian Deese, weighed in today supporting the extension of the authority. FT has more here.
PPP: More than 700 business groups wrote to congressional leadership warning lawmakers against potential deductibility limits for the PPP. They argue that effect would be to transform tax-free loan forgiveness into taxable income, raising a surprise tax increase of up to 37% on small businesses. More on this in letters sent Dec 3 and Dec 17.
How the School Reopening Debate Is Tearing One of America’s Most Elite Suburbs Apart: Via Slate. Add this to your must read for the weekend. It's long but worth it. Some excerpts:
"The holdup was largely due, it seemed, to teacher concerns about safety. Meanwhile, local parents—the expert on indoor ventilation from Harvard, the infectious disease epidemiologist from Boston University—wrote public reports and op-eds loudly making the case for school reopenings. Brookline’s School Committee, which is a nine-person group of elected volunteers who oversee the budget, strategy, union negotiations, and superintendent hiring for the district, had arranged for several volunteer COVID expert advisory panels."
"But the Brookline Educators Union refused to let its members participate. Crucially, the reopening debate was happening alongside a contentious union contract negotiation that had already been simmering for years."
"Teachers do not need to be sitting on a panel with a scientist, getting convinced to shut up and go with their position,” said longtime union president and former Brookline High teacher Jessica Wender-Shubow"
"And yet for all that credentialing, when the 1,000 or so Brookline educators went on strike in November, it appeared to be an implicit response to Panel 4’s expert advice"
Many Things Are True: Emily Freitag is up with a new post exploring the tensions and opportunities created by “Team Recovery” and “Team Redesign.” "We can meet both the challenge and the opportunity by giving every student more of what works, in a way that has never been done before." #TeamEmily
FEDERAL
SCOTUS: The Supreme Court denied a request from a religious school in Kentucky to block regulations that temporarily restrict in-person instruction in elementary, middle and upper schools in the state due to COVID-19. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented, saying that the executive order from Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear "resulted in unconstitutional discrimination against religion." The best analysis is over at the SCOTUS Blog.
ED: Launched a new open data portal today.
HHS/CDC: Began publishing open data through the COVID-19 Community Profile Report. Why it took ten months to do this is beyond me. This should have been done day one.
Main site here. Here is an example of the report in PDF format and Excel.
Transition:
The president-elect's transition team has privately started laying the groundwork to strike a bipartisan infrastructure deal during the first year of his term.
This could have implications for education with funding for school modernization and building out broadband networks.
Yes but... "It's Infrastructure Week" has become a running joke in DC.
COVID-19 RESEARCH
1 or 2 Doses of a Vaccine? Pfizer's vaccine is administered through two doses. a prime and a booster, 21 days apart for Pfizer and 28 days for Moderna. But there's an emerging debate suggesting that the first dose might provide enough protection, allowing limited supplies to be stretched and serve more people faster.
CNBC's Meg Tirrell with the data.
Alex Tabarrok has been pitching this for a while now.
Today, epidemiologist Michael Mina and writer Zeynep Tufekci make the case in the NYT.
Pennsylvania Study Finds Fewer Children Hospitalized with COVID: Study from UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh. Between March and August 2020, there were 955 confirmed pediatric SARS-CoV-2 cases between 0 and 19 in Allegheny County. Around 65% of the cases had exposure to the virus, while 79% developed symptoms. Of all the patients,4.5% required hospitalization. About 19 patients developed acute COVID-19 disease, and three had MIS-C. The team also found that Black/Hispanic patients were 5.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than White patients.
CommuniVax: Johns Hopkins leads coalition for equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. It will conduct ethnographic research related to COVID-19 vaccination among historically underserved communities of color.
Pay People To Take the Vaccine: Brookings says yes. But the UpShot says it would be counterproductive.
Partisanship and Vaccine Uptake Strategies: Gallup surveys and suggestions.
Teachers Vie for COVID-19 Vaccine Priority: WSJ covering where states are with their decisions.
STATE
California:
Teachers' unions want to see significant changes to AB 10 that would force schools in California to reopen in March.
School districts balk at Cal/OSHA's new COVID worker safety regulations.
DC: DCPS reached an agreement with teachers to reopen schools by Feb. 1.
Georgia: The Cobb County School District will spend up to $12 million for two products to fight COVID:
Iggy, a hand-rinsing device, incorporates a low concentration of aqueous ozone in the stream of water it sprays onto a user’s hands.
Cleanz, can sterilize classrooms during overnight hours. Created by ProTek Life, it runs for an hour each night to clean surfaces of bacteria, viruses and other germs
Maryland: Howard County parents file lawsuit challenging student school board member’s voting rights.
New York: NYT on one NYC school that reopened. 15 min documentary here.
Ohio: More than 8,000 kids are missing from Cleveland's online classes.
Pennsylvania: PDE announced $500,000 in funding through a new Open Educational Resources Grant Program (OER) funded by the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER). The grant program will provide mini-grants and stipends to support faculty in creating, adapting, and adopting Open Educational Resources.
ECONOMIC RECOVERY
40% of Parents with Young Children Have Experienced Economic Fallout: Research from the Urban Institute:
40.3% of parents living with a child under age 6 reported they or their family experienced a loss of employment or work-related income during the first six months of the pandemic.
Parents who experienced a job loss or a loss in job-related income reported using a variety of coping strategies, including cutting household spending on food (34.4%), using all or most of their savings (26%) and increasing credit card debt (25.5%).
Helping Workers Displaced By the Covid-19 Economy: Op-Ed from Tamar Jacoby.
"But many jobs—perhaps even occupations—may be lost forever. Countless industries will change dramatically in the years ahead as automation and business restructuring reshape the economy. Even workers who keep their jobs may need retraining to stay abreast of a changing workplace. And many who have been displaced from a failing sector will need to reboot entirely, learning new skills for new jobs, often in unfamiliar industries."
"It’s much harder to serve dislocated workers than other adults, including hard-to-hire, disadvantaged adults with poor work histories—people from low-income households, recipients of public assistance and those lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills."
"Among the most important innovations are using labor market information to predict regional demand, close collaboration with employers to ensure that trainees are learning up-to-date skills, assessing the abilities learners bring to the table, and designing training to close the gap between what they already know and the new skills they need for “adjacent” jobs—training, say, a home health aide to be a nursing assistant."
"Some programs, like the state of South Dakota’s fledgling Upskill initiative, are funded with existing government job training dollars. Other efforts rely on philanthropy, like the Reskilling and Recovery Network, run jointly by the National Governors Association and the American Association of Community Colleges."
Sidenote: My TechEnabled podcast this week touched on the very issue raised by Tamar, namely how government agencies and workforce providers are using EMSI for realtime insights with their regional labor markets.
Education and Employment Promise: Brookings proposal with four components:
Strong bridges between school and work that provide a smooth transition to the job market.
Affordable postsecondary education and training options that focus on completion, not only enrollment.
Paid work experiences that build skills and social capital and ensure young peoples’ basic needs are met.
Evidence-based supports and protections that help young people stay on track
RESOURCES
How Teachers Are Sacrificing Student Privacy to Stop Cheating: Via Vox:
"In December, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) accused five online test proctoring services, including Proctorio, of unfair and deceptive trade practices in a complaint filed with the Office of the Attorney General of the District of Columbia. EPIC also informed the five companies that it is preparing to file a lawsuit unless they change their practices."
"The US Education Department hasn’t issued guidance for online proctoring, but students’ complaints have been taken up by lawmakers. On December 3, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, along with other senators, wrote to several online proctoring services asking specifically about how the companies handle privacy in their software, and also about accessibility and racial bias issues in the products."
States Renew Efforts to Track Student Attendance as Pandemic Stretches On: Via EdWeek.
The Pandemic is a Chance to Rethink Education, Not Settle for Online Lectures: Over the pond in the Guardian:
"First, any non-interactive learning magnifies an existing problem: students often don’t listen or engage when they are seated in big lecture rooms."
"We envision a future in which big lecture rooms with several hundred seats are progressively replaced by a more flexible educational system, which takes the best of online learning but focuses on interaction tailored to individual students’ needs rather than recorded lectures."
Evidence of COVID-19’s Impact on K-12 Education Points to Critical Areas of Intervention: Latest USC research and findings.
Here’s What Students Value Most: It’s not production quality that counts in educational videos.
"Our perceptions of how easy a technology is to use and its usefulness determine whether we will engage. If we think a video is too hard to use or unhelpful, we won’t bother with it! This is known as the “Technology Acceptance Model”.
"Videos enable students to personalise and self-pace their learning through content selection and video controls"
"When educators use a conversational delivery style it creates a social partnership, which encourages learners to try harder to understand their educator. This improves learning through videos. As this personal approach aligns well with an informal environment, it can explain why students embrace simple production styles."
The FCC’s Program to Discount Educational Internet Connections Needs an Upgrade: Long piece at Slate.
Using Data to Strengthen Afterschool Planning, Management, and Strategy: Report from the Wallace Foundation.
Is It Time to Reopen Schools? Video from Bellwether's webinar of a conversation with Janice K. Jackson, EdD, Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Schools; Emily Oster, Professor of Economics, Brown University; Andy Rotherham, Co-Founder & Partner, Bellwether Education Partners.
Microsoft Unleashes ‘Death Star’ on SolarWinds Hackers in Extraordinary Response to Breach: Has nothing to do with COVID or education but a fascinating account of Microsoft's response.
It's Friday: Hope you're as excited as this bird (make sure the sound is on by clicking the video)