Top Three
Nation’s Report Card Shows Largest Drops Ever Recorded in 4th and 8th Grade Math: Results. Math Highlights / Reading Highlights.
"Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best."
“Normally for a NAEP assessment … we’re talking about significant differences of two or three points,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics said on a Friday call with reporters. “So an eight-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.”
Emily Oster: “Every state has four numbers, so one can construct quite a lot of different narratives around that. But the general patterns are that the losses are big, they’re much bigger in math than in reading, and they’re much bigger in more vulnerable kids. Those seem like things that are very consistent with every other piece of information that we’ve seen in post-pandemic testing.”
"Delaware’s fourth-grade math scores dropped an astonishing 14 points — nearly three times the national average — while its losses in fourth-grade reading (-9), eighth-grade math (-12), and eighth-grade reading (-7) were also significant. Virginia (-11 points in fourth-grade math), Maryland (-11 in eighth-grade math), and the District of Columbia (-8 in fourth-grade reading) also saw some of the worst declines across various grade/subject combinations."
"Most impressive of all, Department of Defense Education Activity schools — 160 across 11 foreign countries, seven states, and two territories, each serving military families — saw no statistically significant drops in any subject or age group. Eighth graders in DoDEA schools, in fact, made the only statistically significant growth of any student group in this round of NAEP, improving in reading by two points since 2019."
"The amount of ground that students lost does vary across states, but that variation doesn’t fit simple narratives. For example, the figure below shows the relationship between the drop in eighth grade math test scores between 2019 and 2022 and one of the best available measures of the prevalence of remote instruction during the 2021-22 school year."
"Looking more closely at the results for three politically salient states, we see that the vocal efforts of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott to reopen schools early were not enough to keep students from losing roughly the national average decline of eight points in eighth grade math. Texas students did manage to avoid a significant decline in 4th and 8th grade reading, and Florida students held steady in 4th grade reading.”
“We can expect to hear them and others trumpeting those results. But any efforts to claim credit for them will be complicated by the fact that California students lost only six points in 8th grade math—far less than would be expected given the slow return to in-person instruction seen under Governor Gavin Newsom—and also fared well on a relative basis in other grades and subject areas."
"In fourth grade, for both math and reading, students in the bottom 25th percentile lost more ground compared with students at the top of their class, leaving the low-performing students further behind.”
“And Black and Hispanic students, who started out behind white and Asian peers, experienced sharper declines than those groups in fourth-grade math."
"The impact was especially stark for struggling students. In a survey included in the test, only half of fourth graders who were low performing in math said they had access to a computer at all times during the 2020-21 school year, compared with 80 percent of high-performing students. Similarly, 70 percent said they had a quiet place to work at least some of the time, compared with 90 percent for high performers."
Emily Oster thread that looks at the NAEP state results and how they relate to in-person learning. Some surprising finds: Math: more in-person, less loss. Reading: no relationship; overall smaller losses.
FutureEd: Compares NAEP with State Standardized Test Scores.
Jake Tapper Interviews Jeb Bush: On CNN Tonight.
"Using Model 1, 12 points on the NAEP scale roughly correspond to one grade level, assuming a 36- week school year, meaning that a point on NAEP would represent three weeks of learning. Under this model, 4th and 8th graders would need about 9 weeks of instruction, or a quarter (25%) of a school year to make up their losses in reading. In math, where the losses were more stark, 4th grade students would need about 15 weeks of instruction to make up these losses, or about 42% of a school year. Eighth graders would need about 24 weeks, or two-thirds (67%) of a school year."
Schools Got $122 Billion to Reopen Last Year. Most Has Not Been Used: Via the Washington Post.
"But despite having access to the dollars, school systems throughout the country reported spending less than 15 percent of the federal funding, known as ESSER III, the most recent installment of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Washington Post analysis of data collected by Edunomics, an education finance group at Georgetown University."
"About half of the 211 districts the Post examined, where Edunomics estimates students are the furthest behind, spent 5 percent or less of their ESSER III money last school year, the data shows."
"In many cases districts are still spending earlier waves of federal funding, a total of $67.5 billion released during the Trump administration."
"In the nation’s capital, Edunomics estimates that students in the public school system are 20 weeks behind in math and 12 weeks behind in reading, which could cost more than $116 million to reverse. The district has reported spending less than 3 percent of its nearly $195 million allotment."
Biden's COVID Dilemma as Winter Nears: Via Axios.
"Stealthy new COVID-19 variants, low vaccination rates and mixed messaging over the state of the pandemic threaten to thwart the Biden administration's efforts to contain a wintertime surge."
"The pandemic has largely become background noise to a crisis-fatigued public even as new strains show their ability to topple our best defenses. And there's still confusion over such basics as what it means to be "fully vaccinated."
"Biden administration officials are warning there's trouble ahead while touting the progress that's been made to knock down new cases and hospitalizations."
"They're also trying not to trigger voter frustration over the persistent health crisis just weeks before the midterm elections."
Federal
CDC: CDC director tests positive for COVID-19, experiencing mild symptoms.
Covid Research
A Booster is Your Best Shot Now: Eric Topol, "We're heading into a new BQ.1.1 variant led wave."
"Our immunity wall is developing major cracks. We know waning of immunity from vaccines is substantial by 4-5 months, as reflected by a new CDC report during the BA.5 wave."
"You may recall I was very critical of the BA.5 bivalent vaccine rollout, calling it a mistake, without having any human immune response data, relying only on the bivalent Beta variant small clinical trial, some BA.1 bivalent data and neutralizing antibodies from mice. Now, nearly 2 months after the BA.5 bivalent campaign started all we have is a press release from Pfizer, without any data saying there was a “substantial increase”in BA.5 neutralizing antibody response at 1 week."
"We have seen more than ample recent evidence, in the US BA.5 wave that 2 boosters reduces deaths (91%) and hospitalizations for people age 50 and over, and reduces hospitalizations (72%) for people age 18-49. That body of data adds to the marked reduction death for multiple cohorts age 50 and above for a 4th shot as compared with the 3rd shot."
"For now, the best defense we have against the BQ.1.1-led wave is to get a booster. It will markedly raise neutralizing antibodies and our cellular immune response, and just-in-time to broaden our immunity to be ready for BQ.1.1 and related variants with marked immune evasiveness."
Covid Vaccines Shouldn't Be 'Routine' for Kids: Vinay Prasad argues in Common Sense.
New Research Suggests Virus Was Engineered: Via The Economist:
"Their analysis, published on October 20th on bioRxiv, a preprint server, suggests sars-cov-2 has some genomic features that they say would appear if the virus had been stitched together by some form of genetic engineering. By examining how many of these putative stitching sites sars-cov-2 has, and how relatively short these pieces are, they attempt to assess how much the virus resembles others found in nature."
"The paper, which as a preprint has received no formal peer review, and which has not been accepted for publication in a journal, will be picked apart in the coming days—as well it should be, for this is the way that science works."
"Any conclusion that Sars-Cov-2 was engineered will be hotly contested. China denies the virus came from a Chinese lab, and has asked for investigations into whether it may have originated in America. Dr Washburne and his colleagues say their predictions are testable. If a progenitor genome to Sars-Cov-2 is found in the wild with restriction sites that are the same, or intermediate, it would raise the chances that this pattern evolved by chance.”
“Any widely supported conclusion that the virus was genetically engineered would have profound ramifications, both political and scientific. It would put in a new light the behavior of the Chinese government in the early days of the outbreak, particularly its reluctance to share epidemiological data from those days. It would also raise questions about what was known, when, and by whom about the presumably accidental escape of an engineered virus. For now, this is a first draft of science, and needs to be treated as such. But the scrutineers are already at work.”
Ivermectin Doesn't Speed Time To Recovery From Nonsevere COVID: Adding further evidence that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin is ineffective as a COVID-19 treatment, preliminary findings from an ongoing randomized, controlled clinical trial of repurposed drugs today in JAMA finds that it does not speed time to recovery in patients with mild to moderate infections.
Scott Gottlieb on Face the Nation: "I don’t believe criteria to mandate Covid vax are met, we’re in much different place with virus now, and decisions reside with parents; but everyone should consider vaccination, and responsible discussion of mandates should encourage parents to be up to date with vaccines." Video.
State
Virginia: Good presentation of the state's NAEP scores and "Honesty Gap" along with their policy plan.
Resources
States Opting Out of a Federal Program That Tracks Teen Behavior as Youth Mental Health Worsens: Via Chalkbeat.
"Colorado, Florida, and Idaho will not participate in a key part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior surveys that reach more than 80,000 students."
"Each state has its own rationale for opting out, but their withdrawal — when suicides and feelings of hopelessness are up — has caught the attention of school psychologists and federal and state health officials."
"Some questions on the state-level surveys — which can also ask students about their sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual activity, and drug use — clash with laws that have been passed in conservative states."