Top Three
Queen Elizabeth II Passes Away at 96 After 70-year Reign:
How news of the Queen's death was revealed on TV.
In pictures: Queen Elizabeth in 70 iconic images after 70-year reign
NPR with the details on Operation London Bridge.
The BBC with a helpful guide on the practical - and traditional - steps which he must go through to be crowned King.
Statements from the former Presidents Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton.
A double rainbow appeared over Buckingham Palace as members of the public gathered outside to pay their respects to the Queen.
Schools Are Back and Confronting Severe Learning Losses: Via the WSJ.
"Learning loss generally is worse in districts that kept classes remote longer, with the effects most pronounced in high-poverty districts, researchers say. Yet reading scores are below 2019 levels for certain grades even in some states that quickly returned to in-person instruction, such as Florida."
"While some students have begun to make up ground, researchers say that, on average, it could take five years or more for today’s fourth-graders to read proficiently unless the pace accelerates."
"These students are at a pivotal stage. Educators pay particular attention to 9-year-olds’ literacy rates because research shows that reading ability by the end of third grade can be predictive of educational success, career earnings and the risk of incarceration. A study released in 2011 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 16% of students who don’t read proficiently in third grade fail to graduate from high school on time, a rate four times that of proficient readers."
“Without any prior experience as a guide, practitioners are sort of winging it—providing tutors to some students, double-dose math and summer school to others—and then just hoping that it all adds up to enough,” said Thomas Kane, an economist and professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education."
"An office that North Carolina formed last year is leading efforts to assess learning-loss initiatives. The state’s Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration has found that a summer-school program that enrolled 250,000 students in 2021 had a small but positive impact on math and reading scores."
"Texas is a rare example of a state where young students’ reading scores have more than bounced back to prepandemic levels. In 2022, half of Texas third-graders met or exceeded expectations, up from 37% in 2021 and 43% in 2019, according to state data.A key part of the learning-loss recovery effort in Texas is a measure passed by the legislature in 2021 that provides 30 hours of tutoring for students on the subject matter of each test where they failed to meet grade level."
America Has a Problem. We, My Fellow Progressives, Must Admit It: Jill Filipovic in CNN.
"As American students return to school, it’s time to admit we have a problem. Thanks to Covid-related school shutdowns, our school children have suffered unprecedented learning losses, with 9-year-olds seeming to have lost some two decades worth of progress on math and reading skills."
"This should make the progressive-minded among us who supported school closures pause and ask ourselves if we got this one right – and what we could learn from this whole debacle."
"The Trump and Biden administrations offered Americans much-needed financial relief, but, overwhelmingly, the backup plan when the nation fell apart was Mom: That’s who was largely in charge of remote schooling and childcare, in addition to working for pay."
"The costs of school closures weren’t just student learning losses. They included a mass exodus of women from the workforce, setting many of those women back financially and consigning many of them to an impoverished future."
"Unfortunately, too many progressives who otherwise espouse the value of education have been quick to brush off learning losses as insignificant, and the dearth of pandemic-era in-school education as simply “different learning experiences.”
"The first step for progressives must be acknowledging that there is indeed a problem, even if some believe it was borne of necessity. And the next step is to seize the narrative from the Republicans who have grasped it, overwhelmingly to their benefit, to argue that liberals are eager to alternately indoctrinate your children or shut their schools down."
Federal
NTIA: NTIA won’t have the broadband map it needs for BEAD until 2023.
"Billions in federal broadband funding is stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to release new coverage maps which will be used to determine how much each state will receive."
"But while the FCC just announced plans to come out with the first version of its new map in mid-November, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) chief Alan Davidson indicated his agency won’t use the first rendering to divvy up broadband support."
"Davidson reiterated the government expects BEAD and related programs to create upwards of 100,000 jobs and said the NTIA has begun encouraging states to use some of their federal funding to fuel workforce development programs."
Covid-19 Research
COVID Treatment Quick Start Consortium: Via the Covid Collaborative
"The COVID Treatment Quick Start Consortium brings together Duke University, Americares, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), and COVID Collaborative as implementing partners, with support from the Open Society Foundations, Pfizer and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation."
"The consortium will support governments to introduce and scale up access to new and effective COVID-19 oral antiviral therapies in high-risk populations. Partner countries include Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe."
Return to School is Driving Up Covid-19 Cases in Kids, but There Are More Tools to Keep Them Safe This Year: Via CNN
"New cases reported among children in the last week of August were 14% higher than they were two weeks earlier."
"They jumped even more in the South, where classes have been in session for weeks. In contrast, overall cases for all ages were down about 17% in the same timeframe."
"We have to really take a life course approach with children,” Lee said, thinking about both the short- and long-term effects. In the short term, a Covid-19 infection “completely disrupts your family life and your school life and your personal life,” she said. “Every time someone gets sick – whether it’s Covid or flu or anything else – they’re getting further and further behind,” she said. And “the burden of infection is not equitable,” causing disparities to grow."
New Omicron Subvariant Mutation Tied to Kids' Neurologic Complications: CIDRAP reports,"Researchers in Taiwan have discovered a new mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.2.3.7 subvariant that they suggest may be responsible for severe neurologic complications observed in young children on the island."
Important caveat - this is very small study: "The team analyzed the medical records of five pediatric COVID-19 patients hospitalized with severe neurologic complications such as seizures, symptoms indicating involvement of the meningeal layer of the brain, and encephalopathy in May 2022, about a month after Omicron began circulating in Taiwan."
"The patients were 1 to 5 years old and experienced neurologic symptoms within 1 or 2 days after the onset of respiratory symptoms and fever. All patients had elevated levels of several inflammatory biomarkers, but none of their cerebrospinal fluid samples tested positive for COVID-19."
"Whole-genome sequencing revealed that all viruses were Omicron BA.2.3.7 and that they had a previously unidentified K97E mutation on the spike protein that differed from other BA.2.3.7 strains. Genome mapping of the mutation showed similar sequences in patients in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States at roughly the same time."
"The K97E mutation, which has not been observed in Taiwan previously, potentially explains the sudden increase in incidence of severe neurological symptoms in pediatric patients due to its possible effect on immune regulation," the researchers concluded.”
State
Arizona: A for Arizona launched the second round of the Arizona Transportation Modernization Grants Program, “a first-in-the-nation $20 million initiative to modernize transportation options and improve access to reliable and safe transportation for K-12 students.”
Iowa: Des Moines students recovering from pandemic learning loss.
Maryland: Gov. Hogan announced a new $1.6 million grant program to provide additional support for non-public schools.
New Jersey: "Over the past decade, access to in-school mental health services has decreased for Black and Latino students while slightly increasing for white and Asian students, according to a new analysis of state data."
New York: Via the NYT: "NYC Schools Reopen With Focus on Recovery From Pandemic Losses."
"The Department of Education announced in August that it would end many pandemic rules for the 2022-23 school year. Masks are strongly recommended but not required, except for students who are returning to school after testing positive for Covid. Families no longer have to fill out a daily health screening form, and schools will no longer offer PCR testing."
"For many families and educators, one of those top concerns has been whether schools will be equipped to address learning loss and student well-being after the coronavirus pandemic threw schooling into turmoil."
"What I’ve seen is astonishing,” said Aaron Worley, a social worker at P.S. 243 and P.S. 262 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Kids in fifth grade that are struggling with their reading, their writing, their sentence comprehension — it’s alarming."
"The city will begin leaning into “a really different approach to teaching reading,” he said, moving away from so-called balanced literacy methods — and emphasizing a phonetic approach."
Resources
The Impact of Female Teachers on Female Students: NBER paper.
"It is widely believed that female students benefit from being taught by female teachers, particularly when those teachers serve as counter-stereotypical role models."
"We study education in rural areas of the US circa 1940--a setting in which there were few professional female exemplars other than teachers--and find that female students were more successful when their primary-school teachers were disproportionately female."
"Impacts are lifelong: female students taught by female teachers were more likely to move up the educational ladder by completing high school and attending college, and had higher lifetime family income and increased longevity."
Gen Z’s Battle Against Depression: WFF's Caryl M. Stern in The 74 on a new poll with Murmuration.
"Gen Z (42%) is about twice as likely as Americans over 25 (23%) to battle depression and feelings of hopelessness."
Can America’s Schoolchildren Recover From the Pandemic?: Via the NYT.
Emily Oster: Shares three lessons she learned from her mother.
Parent Poll: From EdChoice/Morning Consult: Report / K-12 Parents Crosstabs / Adults 18+ Crosstabs.
The Queen's Sense of Humor: Former Royal protection officer Richard Griffin reminisces about a picnic he went on with the Queen at Balmoral and an encounter they had with two American tourists who didn't realize they were in the company of the Monarch.