Top Three
District Leaders Want More Time to Spend ESSER Funds as Plans Go Astray: Via EdWeek. Districts are taking longer with ESSER III for a number of reasons:
"It’s the largest of the three sets of funds, totaling some $122 billion."
"Some states waited up to a year after Congress approved the funds before allowing districts to start spending them. Some state education departments took longer than others to submit their required ESSER plans to the federal government. In other states, legislators debated for months over whether to impose additional restrictions on how schools spend the funds."
"COVID conditions have changed multiple times since the funds went out, leading to rolling staff outages and scrambling districts’ premature plans for a smooth return to in-person learning."
"States are scrutinizing districts’ spending plans and asking for revisions in anticipation of audits that could eventually affect their bottom line."
"Supply chain issues and turbulence in the labor market have prevented some districts from securing construction projects or technology purchases."
"But in an interview last month with Education Week, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said there’s only so much he can do to offer flexibility without asking Congress to rewrite the law. “This isn’t a set of funds that are going to help address education for the next 10 or 15 years,” he said. “It’s for students now.”
School Districts Facing Shortages Lure Teachers With Four-Day Weeks: Via WSJ.
"At least 800 districts are using four-day school weeks this year, up from around 650 districts before the pandemic, according to Paul Thompson, a professor at Oregon State University who studies the topic."
"The new, pandemic-era wave of districts switching to four day weeks has been driven largely by administrators who view a shortened week as a perk for attracting teachers. Superintendent Chris Heslinga of Maysville, Mo., said he made the decision to switch to a four-day week in his district this year because it has become increasingly difficult to staff schools in small, rural districts such as his."
"Maysville is taking Mondays off and adding a half-hour of instructional time to Tuesdays through Fridays to meet the state requirements for hours, Mr. Heslinga said. In the district’s elementary schools, the extra time is used for longer lessons in core subjects such as reading and math. Students in middle school and high school use the time to catch up in classes in which they have fallen behind, or as a study-hall period, he said."
WHO 'Strongly Advises Against' Use of Two COVID Treatments: Via Reuters.
"The two therapies - which are designed to work by binding to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 to neutralise the virus' ability to infect cells - were some of the first medicines developed early in the pandemic."
"The virus has since evolved, and mounting evidence from lab tests suggests the two therapies - sotrovimab as well as casirivimab-imdevimab - have limited clinical activity against the latest iterations of the virus. As a result, they have also fallen out of favour with the U.S. health regulator."
"On Thursday, WHO experts said they strongly advised against the use of the two therapies in patients with COVID-19, reversing previous conditional recommendations endorsing them, as part of a suite of recommendations published in the British Medical Journal."
Covid-19 Research
A Bivalent Omicron-Containing Booster Vaccine Against Covid-19: Study."The bivalent omicron-containing vaccine mRNA-1273.214 [Moderna] elicited neutralizing antibody responses against omicron that were superior to those with mRNA-1273, without evident safety concerns."
20% of COVID-19 Survivors Report Symptoms 2 Years Later: Study. The most common persistent symptoms were fatigue, chest tightness, anxiety, shortness of breath, and muscle pain, while common new-onset symptoms were fatigue, anxiety, chest tightness, and productive cough. At both time points, fatigue was the most common symptom but decreased from 26.9% at 1 year to 10.3% at 2 years.
Re-analysis on the Statistical Sampling Biases of a Mask Promotion Trial in Bangladesh: Study.
"A recent randomized trial evaluated the impact of mask promotion on COVID-19-related outcomes. We find that staff behavior in both unblinded and supposedly blinded steps caused large and statistically significant imbalances in population sizes. These denominator differences constitute the rate differences observed in the trial, complicating inferences of causality."
"The study in question raises intriguing questions about the role of public health interventions in changing behavioral patterns to decrease COVID case rates in low- and middle-income countries. The mask intervention was highly effective at modifying behaviors (distancing, mask-wearing, symptom reporting). Nonetheless, the data is consistent with mask wearing having modest or no direct effect on COVID-related outcomes in this experimental setting."
State
Illinois: Illinois Tutoring Initiative to scale statewide in partnership with Pearl. The program expects to reach approximately 8,500 students in grades 3-12, over a two-year period, with both in-person and online tutoring.
New York: 41% of NYC students were chronically absent last school year.
Tennessee: "TCAP Family Portal Now Includes Lexile Reader Levels for Students."
"Tennessee parents and families with students who took a TCAP ELA assessment in spring 2022 will now see a Lexile Reader Measure in the TCAP Family Portal. Lexile Reader Measures give parents information about their student’s reading progress and help them select reading materials that are matched to their academic needs. A Lexile measure assesses a student’s reading ability and what level of text a student can read and understand on their own."
Washington: Who is leaving Seattle schools?
"I heard from scores of parents, anxious to fill an information void left by the school district, which doesn’t ask why parents leave. Many echoed what the parent above said: That Zoom school, while everyone was home together, gave parents unprecedented access to what their kids were actually doing in class."
“What happened is there were a lot of wealthy parents (Amazon) who pulled their kids out,” a parent at John Hay Elementary on Queen Anne wrote. “This isn’t really spoken about, but many parents have become frustrated with the SPS curriculum. During online learning they saw what they were focusing on, and many bugged out.”
"John Hay lost 200 students out of 500 — 40% of the school."
"State data by income group shows that Seattle enrollment has dropped among middle- and high-income families at twice the rate (10%) as it did among low-income families (5%)."
Virginia: Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive directive that aims to address teacher shortages in Virginia through strategies that include hiring retired educators and targeting recruitment and retention efforts toward communities most in need.
Economic Recovery
FedEx: CEO says he expects the economy to enter a ‘worldwide recession’ “We’re seeing that volume decline in every segment around the world, and so you know, we’ve just started our second quarter,” he said. “The weekly numbers are not looking so good, so we just assume at this point that the economic conditions are not really good.”
In New York City, Pandemic Job Losses Linger: "Even as the country as a whole has recovered all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic, the city is still missing 176,000 — the slowest recovery of any major metropolitan area."
World Bank Warns of Global Recession Next Year if Central Banks Lift Interest Rates Too High: Via WSJ.
U.S. Retail Sales Rose 0.3% in August, Showing Resilience in Face of Inflation: Via WSJ.
Resources
Dear Parents: Here Are 5 Things We Teens Want You to Know About Our Mental Health: Neha Chaudhary in ABC News.
Pivot Learning Agrees to a Merger:"Pivot Learning, an Oakland-based national nonprofit that works with over 100 California districts on improving classroom instruction in literacy and math, announced this week it is merging with UnboundEd, a national nonprofit that does complementary school improvement work."
An Unbearable Week: Hope this makes it better.