Top Three
Facing Regional Shortages, U.S. Schools Now Employing 160,000 ‘Underqualified’ Teachers: The 74 on a new report.
"U.S. schools currently employ at least 163,650 underqualified educators, teachers working without state certification or outside of their subject area. In 2017, at least 109,000 underqualified teachers were estimated to be in classrooms."
"States with the highest ratios of these hires relative to the student population include Washington, Utah, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Maryland."
"Uncertified teachers make up over 13% of Baltimore City Schools’ educator force, the second-highest rate in the state."
Public Education Missed the Data Revolution. It’s Time to Catch Up: Marguerite Roza and Chad Aldeman in The Hill
"Last month, the U.S. Department of Education launched an effort to address teacher shortages. Secretary Miguel Cardona went on national TV to call attention to the school staffing crisis and announce the initiative. But is there a national staffing crisis? Are vacancies higher than normal? If so, in what subjects and in which schools? The truth is no one knows. There is no useful teacher labor data in U.S. schools."
"The dearth of data in education is reaching four-alarm status. This fall, after three pandemic-affected school years, there is little to no data on which interventions are working to get which students up to speed in what subjects."
"Why has public education missed out on the data revolution that transformed so many other industries over the past few decades? Hours after stores close on Black Friday, news reports blast out the latest sales trends. And yet, during the pandemic, states couldn’t even say which of their schools were closed or open and, if they had remote learning in effect, how many students were attending."
"We need data collection processes that allow schools to gather information — in real time — on how kids are doing. For example, learning platforms such as Zearn could tell us in the early months of the pandemic, without any additional testing, the harmful effect that remote learning was having on kids’ math progress, especially for the poorest students. It took two years for the system to uncover the devastating impacts that the digital tools surfaced nearly immediately."
"Here’s one way to chip away at this data desert: State education agencies can use a share of the nearly $20 billion they got in relief funds to create real-time reporting systems to track daily student attendance, monthly learning, real-time labor trends by role and location, and much more."
COVID State of Affairs: Via Katelyn Jetelina.
"Eyes are on Western Europe, as hospitalizations are uniformly increasing. As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, some are hospitalized “with COVID19,” but it’s important to note that the Germany’s numbers are reported purely as “for COVID19.” In other words, not only are infections increasing, but so is severe disease."
"Currently, we have a “subvariant soup” on the horizon—a mix of many different Omicrons trying to dominate the space. Below is a figure of the Omicron subvariants we are closely tracking. Each subvariant has ~10% growth advantage over BA.5, meaning it has the ability to create a wave, but not a tsunami. (As a comparison, Alpha had a growth advantage of 7%/day; the first Omicron BA.1 had a growth advantage of 25%/day)."
"Given the U.S. has mirrored European trends throughout the pandemic, a wave in the U.S. is likely coming."
Federal
Treasury: Guarantees $355 Million in bond funding for projects in low-income communities.
Charter School Development Corporation will receive a $70 million bond loan to fund charter schools.
Community Reinvestment Fund, USA will issue a $100 million bond on behalf of Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF). LIIF plans to use the bond proceeds to fund charter schools, rental housing, daycare centers, and other uses.
NTIA: Switched Off: Why Are One in Five U.S. Households Not Online?
"While a majority – 58% – of the 24 million offline households express no interest or need to be online, there is also a large proportion who say they can’t afford home Internet service (18%)."
NTIA: Awarded five grants as part of the Connecting Minority Communities Pilot Program (CMC) totaling $10 million to expand community technology hubs, upgrade classroom technology, and increase digital literacy skills at five minority-serving institutions in California, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and the Marshall Islands.
Covid-19 Research
Assessing School District Decision-Making: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic: NBER paper.
"We show that districts respond on the margin to health risks: all else equal, a marginal increase in new cases reduces the probability that a district offers in-person instruction the next week."
"Moreover, this negative response is magnified when the district was in-person the prior week and attenuates in magnitude over the school year."
"These findings are consistent with districts learning from experience about the effect of in-person learning on disease transmission in schools. We also find evidence that districts are influenced by the decisions of their peers."
"Consistent with our model predictions, our results suggest districts respond to health risks. We find that districts are 2.3 percentage points (3.5%) less likely to be in-person the following week after an increase in 1 case per 1,000 students and staff while the district was in-person"
"Furthermore, we find that the effect of lagged cases wanes over time. This is consistent with our learning model, which implies that as districts accumulate experience offering in-person instruction, their uncertainty about the relationship between in-person instruction and subsequent cases falls."
"Finally, we show that districts are influenced by the decisions of their peers via a “pressure” channel, but do not appear to be “learning” from their peers in the way they learn from their own experiences. Together, these results suggest that, on average, school districts acted as boundedly rationale decision-makers during the COVID-19 pandemic"
Omicron BA.4/BA.5 Infection Milder than Delta in South Africa: Study
"A total of 13.5% of Delta patients were hospitalized, compared with 4.0% of those infected with BA.1, 3.3% with BA.2, and 4.8% with BA.4/BA.5."
"Omicron reinfections were more common than those caused by Delta (9.7% for BA.1, 9.3% for BA.2, 11.7% for BA.4/BA.5, and 2.9% for Delta)."
CIDRAP: "After controlling for potential confounding factors, BA.4/BA.5 patients had comparable odds of severe illness and hospitalization as BA.1-infected patients but lower odds than with Delta."
Complex State COVID Vaccine Guidelines Tied to Lower Uptake: Study
"The team used survey data to classify respondents as eligible or ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines based on survey completion date and policy effective date and applied state guidelines to self-reports of age, occupation, health conditions, and residence in a long-term care facility. Guidelines were categorized as high complexity if they contained more than 150 words and more than 30 eligibility criteria."
"Participants living in states with more complex vaccine guidelines (ie, California, New York, and Pennsylvania) were less likely than those in states with simpler guidelines (ie, Florida, Georgia, and Texas) to correctly indicate their eligibility (61% vs 78%, respectively."
"Higher guideline complexity was negatively associated with correct identification of COVID-19 vaccine eligibility during vaccine scarcity in the US."
"When developing guidance, health agencies must balance precision and clarity. Increased precision may lead to greater complexity and lower target audience comprehension."
"More complex vaccine guidelines were associated with lower participant comprehension, potentially hindering eligible persons from seeking vaccines during a period of scarcity. To optimize public health communication, brevity and simplicity should not be undervalued."
Another COVID-19 Variant Could Emerge This Winter, Fauci Says: Via Axios.
"We should anticipate that we very well may get another variant that would emerge that would elude the immune response that we've gotten from infection and/or from vaccination," Fauci said during an event with the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. "We are entering into the winter months, where no matter what the respiratory disease is, there's always a risk of an uptick."
He said he should have been “much more careful” in his messaging on COVID-19 early on in the pandemic, including doing a better job of conveying the uncertainty present at that time.
“When I go back in the early months, I probably should have tried to be much, much more careful in getting the message to repeat — the uncertainty of what we’re going through,” Fauci said
Paxlovid Effective for COVID-19, Not Tied to Higher Risk of Rebound: Meta-analysis: "The oral antiviral drug Paxlovid is safe and effective for treating COVID-19 and carries no additional risk of viral rebound beyond other treatments."
A Fall COVID-19 Booster Campaign Could Save Thousands of Lives, Billions of Dollars: A new paper from The Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health.
Around 90,000 lives would be saved and more than 936,000 hospitalizations could be prevented if 80% of Americans eligible for the latest COVID-19 boosters get vaccinated by year's end.
Assuming a Covid vaccination levels match 2020–2021 flu vaccine levels of closer to 50%–55% could save about 75,000 lives and prevent about 745,000 hospitalizations.
State
California: Doctors sue California over law that restricts their COVID-19 advice to patients.
"Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed Assembly Bill 2098 into law on Friday. It authorizes the Medical Board of California to levy professional sanctions against and revoke the licenses of doctors who share with patients “misinformation” that challenges the scientific consensus about COVID-19."
"Filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the lawsuit claims the law violates doctors’ freedom of speech and the spirit of scientific inquiry."
Florida: Son swam half a mile to save mom from Ian. (Axios / Washington Post).
Illinois: WSJ Editorial Board: "Illinois’s Shocking Report Card:"
"Statewide, in 2019, 36% of all third grade students could read at grade level. That’s an F, and that’s the good news. That number drops to 27% for Hispanic students and 22% for black students statewide. In certain public school systems, the numbers plummet to single digits. In Decatur, 2% of black third-graders are reading at grade level and only 1% are doing math at grade level."
"Third grade children are eight years old, full of potential with minds like sponges to absorb what they are taught. Third grade is the year that children need to achieve a level of reading fluency that will prepare them to tackle more complex tasks in upper elementary grades that require comprehension."
"A child who can’t read in third grade can’t do word problems in fourth or science experiments in fifth. Promoting Decatur children to the fourth grade when 99% are below grade level in math condemns them to future failure. By 11th grade, 5% of Decatur’s students are reading at grade level and 4% are on par in math. Why shouldn’t every single adult presiding over the Decatur schools be fired?"
"The 2019 numbers are pre-Covid, so pocket any objections that the failure to educate students was a function of pandemic closures. Covid no doubt made things worse, but the rot is endemic."
North Carolina: NC's school bus driver shortage is real — despite new pay raises, via EdNC.
Economic Recovery
Some Colleges Struggle With Enrollment Declines: Via CNBC. "The number of colleges closing down in the past 10 years has quadrupled compared with the previous decade."
Resources
Grow Your Own Educators: A Toolkit for Program Design and Development: Via New America.
Howard Launches High School Math Class for College Credit: Howard University is launching an algebra course for college credit at high schools in historically underserved communities created in partnership with Khan Academy. (Press Release)
"Students will take the course on the Khan Academy platform with their high school teachers guiding them. They will also meet weekly on Zoom with Howard University teaching fellows. Midterms and finals for the course will be provided by Howard."
School Friendships, Upward Mobility, and Future Incomes: Via Bruno Manno.
NASA's SpaceX Crew-5 Historic Mission: Via CNN:
"The spaceflight marks a historic moment, as Mann not only became the first Native American woman ever to travel to space. She’s also serving as mission commander, making her the first woman ever to take on such a role for a SpaceX mission."
"What’s more, Kikina is the first Russian to join a SpaceX mission as part of a ride-sharing deal NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, inked in July. Her participation in the flight is the latest clear signal that, despite mounting tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the decades-long US-Russia partnership in space will persist — at least for now."
Launch and the First Stage sticking the landing on the drone ship.
History: Aaron Judge broke the American League’s single-season home run record with his 62nd homer.
Great drone video of the Empire State Building is Yankees colors in honor of Aaron Judge’s 62nd home run.
Adjusting to Real Life Meetings Is Difficult: The struggle is real.