Happy Diwali to those that celebrate! And I had a typo in yesterday’s update. The CDC approved the Pfizer vaccine for 5-11 yr olds, not 6-11. Apologies to all the five year olds out there. Lots to cover tonight so let’s get to it.
Top Three
Vaccine Mandate: OSHA ETS
Fact Sheet / Summary / FAQs
Summary:
Employers with 100 or more workers must implement a mandatory vaccination program. The employer must mandate weekly testing and masks for those who are unvaccinated. Programs have to be set up by Jan. 4, 2022.
Two doses of either Pfizer or the Moderna shots or one dose of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine will be acceptable.
Violations are subject to fines starting at $13,653 per violation and go as high as $136,532 per violation
Healthcare systems will not be allowed to have a testing option under a separate CMS rule.
Workers must get paid time off to get vaccinated.
Employers don't need to pay for testing
The OSHA emergency temporary standard can stay in place for six months before it would need to be codified as a permanent standard that requires rule making.
Reuters with the legal challenges awaiting Biden's vaccine mandate
No Home Left Offline: New EducationSuperHighway campaign (Report / Press Release / The 74) with four pillars:
Building awareness that affordability, not infrastructure is now the primary barrier to closing the digital divide;
Creating a recurring data source to identify unconnected households;
Ensuring that a sustainable funding source is available to close the affordability gap; and
Designing and piloting programs to bring free broadband to our target communities.
Parent Awareness and Economic Barriers Shaping the Future of Supplemental Learning Pods: New report from Tyton Partners and the Walton Family Foundation
The number of parents adopting SLPs continued to increase in spring 2021, climbing to 14% from 12% of all parents surveyed during the fall 2020
By late spring of 2021, SLPs incorporated many elements of traditional K-12 education, making it easier for parents to integrate them into their daily routines. More than half were hosted at a school location and facilitated by a certified teacher.
Motivation for parents who adopted SLPs primarily fell into one of three segments, depending on the goal they were trying to achieve for their child: 1) Academic Support, 2) Academic Enrichment and 3) Social Emotional Learning
Federal
Reconciliation:
“Speaker Pelosi said in a closed-door meeting with Democrats that her plan is to hold a vote on President Joe Biden’s economic agenda bill Thursday night, and then hold a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill Friday morning,” CNN reports.
Penn-Wharton model on Macroeconomic Effects of the White House Build Back Better Budget Reconciliation Framework
"PWBM estimates that, as written, the White House’s Build Back Better reconciliation framework would increase spending by $1.87 trillion over the 10-year budget window while increasing revenues by $1.56 trillion over the same period."
"We project that the reconciliation package will increase federal debt by 2.0 percent and decrease GDP by 0.1 percent in 2050, relative to the current law baseline."
COVID-19 Research
UK Approves Merck's Lagevrio (Molnupiravir) Pill: The first pill designed to treat symptomatic Covid has been approved by the UK regulator (Press Release).
The UK has agreed to purchase 480,000 courses with the first deliveries expected in November
“In clinical trials, Lagevrio was found to be effective in reducing the risk of hospitalisation or death for at-risk non-hospitalised adults with mild to moderate COVID-19 by 50%.
Saliva Testing: FDA authorizes sample pooling for SalivaDirect PCR COVID-19 test.
Trump Surgeon General Encourages Vaccinating Kids: Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as U.S. surgeon general under former President Trump, said that he will be getting his 11-year-old daughter vaccinated against COVID-19 as the benefits clearly outweigh the risks.
"It's really just about doing everything we can to protect our children and give them the best possible chance of growing up healthy and strong," Adams told Fox News.
Some Parents Want to Wait to Vaccinate Their Kids. Here's Why Doctors Say Do It Now: Via NPR
It’s Time to Contemplate the End of the Crisis: Monica Gandhi in The Atlantic.
"But within two or three months of introducing vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds, the U.S. should be able to begin winding down most of the formal and informal limits to which Americans have become accustomed—office closures, masking mandates, educational interruptions, six-foot distancing, and more."
Rich Countries Have Given Out More Boosters In Three Months Than Poorer Countries Have Given Total Doses All Year: Via the FT
State
California: 5-year-olds soon have to show vaccine cards in San Francisco.
Connecticut: Gov. Lamont announced a new Screen and Stay initiative where students and staff who are not fully vaccinated would be able to stay in school after close contact with someone who has COVID-19 in certain situations.
Ohio: Hamilton City schools using Co-teaching Collaborative to help bridge COVID learning loss.
Oklahoma: 6 Oklahoma City teachers fired for refusing to wear masks.
Puerto Rico:The governor will require children ages 5 to 11 to be vaccinated to attend school in person.
International
COVID Cases Break Records Across Europe as Winter Takes Hold:
"Europe registered a 55% rise in COVID-19 cases in the last four weeks, despite the availability of vaccines, which should serve as a "warning shot" to other regions, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Thursday."
"Alarm bells were ringing especially in Germany, the European Union's most populous country, where the number of new cases over the past 24 hours soared to almost 34,000 on Thursday -- an all-time high, according to the Robert Koch Institute health agency."
Canada: Quebec to remove mask mandate in high schools, lift ban on dancing, karaoke.
Economic Recovery
Catalyze Challenge Winners: Announced. Fifteen winners — community organizations, entrepreneurs, and cross-sector partnerships from across the country — will pilot, launch and scale solutions designed for the leaders of tomorrow’s workforce.
Aecern – At the Cutting Edge of Emerging Career Fields (Florida)
BUILD – BUILDing Generation Entrepreneur through Digital A (California)
Building 21 – Launchpad (Pennsylvania)
CodeSpeak Labs – The Next Step (California)
Collegiate Academies – Next Level NOLA: Bridging High School and Beyond (Louisiana)
Collegiate EduNation – Collegiate Edu-Nation Rural HOPE Project (Texas)
Crowder College – Digital Pathways in the Rural Heartland (Missouri)
Cultivate – Cultivate Pathways (Nationwide)
Education Design Lab – Propel Polk! Credentialing 21st Century Skills (Florida)
Hack the Hood – Designing a High School to Tech Career Pathway
nXu – Career Exploration: Purpose & Identity Development (Nationwide)
Propel America – Accelerate America (Louisiana)
Rural Community Alliance – Just and Thriving Rural & Remote Futures (Arkansas)
Trio New College Network – 3-D Learning: A New High School to Career Pathway (New Jersey)
WeThrive – EducationWeThrive (Nationwide)
Resources
Heartland Forward and League of United Latin American Citizens Announce Partnership to Increase Latino Enrollment in EBB: Announcement.
Code for America Launches New Initiative to Expand Its Work with State Governments: Goal is to rebuild America’s safety net so that government services are equitable, easy-to-use, and built for the digital age.
Adaptive Learning: Helpful to the Flipped Classroom in the Online Environment of COVID?: New study.
"Emerging literature has suggested that the remote, online learning environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic may be beneficial for flipped instruction going forward."
"The present study also suggests the desirability of adaptive learning, particularly enhanced student perceptions across multiple items when adaptive lessons were used in an online flipped classroom."
What New Data Reveal About Students’ Math and Reading Performance Right Now: EdWeek on a new report from Curriculum Associates.
What to Expect When You’re Electing
Biden Voters Actually Gave Youngkin The Win: Via Slate.
“But these people were outnumbered by the 54% of respondents who expressed an unfavorable view of Trump. If that majority had voted for McAuliffe with anywhere near the same degree of unanimity, Youngkin would have lost. Instead, the Republican won by peeling away one of every six anti-Trump voters.”
“On average, in these polls, Youngkin got more than 7% of Biden voters, while McAuliffe got only 2% of Trump voters. Biden voters, not Trump voters, were decisive.”
Biden May Have Mattered More Than Trump in Youngkin's Victory: Via Politico
"According to exit polls, Biden was about as unpopular as Trump in Virginia."
"There’s an incentive by the progressive left and the Trumpist right to exaggerate the importance of Trumpism to Youngkin’s win. The left would like to think that Fox News-inflamed culture war issues like critical race theory were a silver bullet. Trump would like us to believe that he is somehow responsible for shifting the state from a 10-point loss last year to a 2-point win Tuesday night."
"Youngkin had to overcome Trumpism more than he had to rely on it. He ran a campaign that was a throwback to pre-Trump Republicanism: racial appeals to working-class white voters, combined with technocratic conservatism focused on education, low taxes and government efficiency via TV ads and rallies (having a human answer the phone at the DMV was a big applause line).
Exit Polls: AP VoteCast
"McAuliffe voters had concerns about schools, too — but they were more likely to be focused on COVID-19 precautions. Roughly a quarter of all voters identified the debate over handling COVID-19 in schools as the most important factor in their vote, and 63% of them backed McAuliffe."
"About 6 in 10 Virginia voters support mask mandates for both teachers and students in K-12 schools and COVID-19 vaccine mandates for teachers. Those voters were more likely to be McAuliffe supporters. Only about a third of Youngkin backers supported each policy."
Breaking Down Education: The Dispatch's The Sweep
"So let’s take Fairfax County, which holds 13 percent of the state’s voting population—the largest by far and heavily Democratic. In 2017, Democrat Ralph Northam won by 37 points. In 2020, Biden won by 41 points. This time around, McAuliffe won only by 30. Breaking it down even more, the 2021 vote was 73 percent of the 2020 vote total in this county. But for Youngkin to win with only Trump voters, he would have needed to get 90 percent of the Trump vote from 2020 to reach his vote totals in Fairfax County. Is it mathematically possible for that to happen? Yes. Is it likely that Youngkin closed the gap in Fairfax County without Biden-Youngkin voters? No."
"There’s no question that a lot of parents would tell you they are concerned about CRT being taught in schools. But this is a little like the “defund the police” slogan. They don’t literally mean that their second graders are being taught “to view race and white supremacy as an intersectional social construct.” They mean that their kids are being taught things about race, racism, and it’s role in American history that they don’t like."
"It meant a lot of parents—mostly mothers—in the state couldn’t go back to work…. In the meantime, school boards were meeting to rename schools named after George Mason and Thomas Jefferson but not working to reopen the schools. And because it was so contrary to the science we knew at the time, a lot of folks were just angry about it. This also is what some meant by education."
"That leaves a lot of homes that are down to one income while food prices are going up precipitously, and a ton of moms who just finished a year overseeing their kid’s Zoom learning only to find that they aren’t comfortable with what their child is being taught. And what does Terry McAuliffe say? “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Former President Obama dismissed their concerns, saying “we don't have time to waste on phony culture wars or fake outrage.” And Joe Biden implied that anyone concerned is just using racist “dog whistles.” Then the night before the election, McAuliffe’s chosen speaker for his closing argument? Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers."
Youngkin Outperformed Trump in Every Single Virginia: And won 12 counties that had voted for President Biden just a year ago.
Dad's Doing Hair: Bonus points for the creative approach.