Top Three
The Science on Remote Schooling is Now Clear. Here’s Who It Hurt Most: The Washington Post which summarizes more than a half-dozen studies published in recent months examining the pandemic’s toll on academic achievement. Across-the-board, they find big drops between spring 2019, before the pandemic hit, and spring 2021, one year in.
"The Education Recovery data shows that students in the school districts with the highest poverty rates lost the equivalent of two-thirds-of-a-grade in math, compared with the lowest-poverty districts, who lost just under half-a-grade. The same was true for reading, though the gap was smaller. High-poverty districts lost 31% of a grade, vs. 25% in low-poverty schools."
"A study of state test scores in 11 states by Brown economist Emily Oster and others found districts with full in-person learning saw smaller declines than those that operated remotely, with hybrid systems in-between. This research, based in part on data Oster collected during the pandemic, also found in-person school was more common in districts that had higher test scores to start with and that had fewer Black and Hispanic students.”
Disparate Impacts on Online Information Access During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Study in Nature.
"The intensification of unemployment search queries in ZIP codes with higher proportions of Black residents is almost three times the increase corresponding to ZIP codes with lower proportions of Black residents."
"When we examined search queries that result in visits to free online learning resources (e.g., coursera.org, khanacademy.org), during the first four weeks of the pandemic, there was an overall increase in the proportion of queries that led to online learning sites compared to before."
"Even though these free online learning resources are designed to be accessible and flexible, helping students to go at their own pace, we find that ZIP codes with low-income or high proportions of Black or Hispanic residents did not leverage them at the same level as their counterpart ZIP code groups during the pandemic."
"Our findings suggest that there exists unintended consequences of the public health policies that perpetuate a myriad of disadvantages, as education is such a crucial factor in digital literacy, income, and health."
How Georgia Schools Are Spending Covid Funds: Report from Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education detailing how school districts are spending $6 billion in federal covid relief funds.
Approximately 31% of LEAs report using ESSER funds to help cover student transportation costs.
Nearly half of district leaders (48%) report inflation has altered their ESSER plans, which increases to 63% among rural districts.
More than 87% of LEAs have added instructional staff to respond to students’ academic needs.
About 77% of LEAs hired additional staff to address student mental and physical health needs.
74% of responding LEAs are providing tutoring.
Federal
White House: Latest COVID vaccine will help people 'move on' from the pandemic, White House's Jha says. Video.
Fauci: Interviewed on Face the Nation (Transcript / Video)
Margaret Brennan: "More than 100,000 parents last month had to stay home from work to care for kids, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And we've seen schools in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee cancel classes because of these large numbers.... So, coming out of the holidays, should parents expect schools to shut down?"
Anthony Fauci: "I don't know, Margaret. I'm not sure. When -- when you talk about shutting down schools, there's always the collateral effects."
Margaret Brennan: "That's also radioactive to talk about."
Anthony Fauci: "Yes, exactly. There's always the collateral issue. So, you have to balance. And you do it in real time, depending upon the viral load of disease in your region... It's a local issue. That's the thing that gets lost in the discussion."
Covid Research
Study Ties Paxlovid to Lower COVID-19 Hospitalization Rate: Adult US COVID-19 patients who received the antiviral drug Paxlovid within 5 days after diagnosis had a 51% lower hospitalization rate than nonrecipients, according to an observational study in MMWR.
Imaging Spotlights Brain Changes 6 Months After COVID-19: "The MRI results showed significant changes in the brain linked with fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, headaches, and cognitive problems in the COVID-19 patients compared with controls."
State
DC: DCPS requires students, staff to take COVID-19 test to return to school from Thanksgiving break.
Michigan: Michigan Department of Education seeks $10K fee for access to data on districts’ COVID aid spending plans.
Texas: The percentage of Texas families that home-school their children went up in 2020— from 4.5% at the end of the 2019-20 school year to 12% at the start of the 2020-21 school year. The increase was particularly notable among Black families.
International
China:
Protests break out as Covid cases surge and lockdowns persist.
A blank sheet of paper has become a worldwide symbol, Axios World author Dave Lawler reports. Why it matters: "The white paper represents everything we want to say but cannot say," one protester told Reuters.
Allen Wan: “While people do push back, largely on issues of local importance — the building of a contentious road, say, or concerns about pollution near a village — never could I have imagined thousands of Shanghai residents, young and old, converging along Wulumuqi Road in the famous French Concession on a Sunday night, demanding an end to Covid Zero, among other grievances.”
Supply chains are likely to be disrupted, causing prices to rise in an already rocky global economy.
Resources
Public School Instructional Offerings and Enrollment Changes: Evidence from Two Years After the Pandemic: Via AEI, "Our results suggest that the most-remote districts lost over 500,000 more students than they might have if their in-person instructional offerings matched those of the most-in-person districts."
To Combat Learning Loss, Schools Need to Overhaul the Industrial-Age Paradigm: Via Joel Rose in EdNext.
"If meaningful improvement in our overall educational system could be achieved without tinkering with the industrial paradigm itself, we probably would have seen it by now."
"If national pre-pandemic proficiency gains of 2 percentage points per decade is the best one could hope for, it will take at least a century before the vast majority of students graduate college- and career-ready."
"Our experience has helped us understand the conditions required for schools to transition to a student-centered paradigm. It also illuminated the acute barriers that make it harder for more schools to get there. These include underinvestment in educational research and development, inertia within schools and districts that limits innovation, and education policies—most notably around assessment and accountability—that incentivize keeping the industrial paradigm intact."
Direct Education Grants Can Give Families And Children Choices For Getting Extra Help: Craig Hulse and Derrell Bradford in Hechinger.
"We know that many federal education dollars are still unused; we believe families should have direct access to educational resources so they can find the right fit for their children’s unique learning styles."
"Most recently, Virginia agreed to distribute $30 million in recovery grants to families for resources such as tutoring in direct response to disappointing NAEP scores."
$10 Million For 31 Groups Working to Make Tutoring More Available & Affordable: Kevin Huffman in The 74.
Americans Are Choosing to be Alone. Here’s Why We Should Reverse That: Bryce Ward in the Washington Post.
"By 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends (a sharp, 37% decline from five years before)... During the pandemic, time with friends fell further — in 2021, the average American spent only two hours and 45 minutes a week with close friends (a 58% decline relative to 2010-2013)."
"Similar declines can be seen even when the definition of “friends” is expanded to include neighbors, co-workers and clients. The average American spent 15 hours per week with this broader group of friends a decade ago, 12 hours per week in 2019 and only 10 hours a week in 2021."
"On average, Americans did not transfer that lost time to spouses, partners or children. Instead, they chose to be alone."
The percentage decline is also similar for the young and old; however, given how much time young people spend with friends, the absolute decline among Americans age 15 to 19 is staggering. Relative to 2010-2013, the average American teenager spent approximately 11 fewer hours with friends each week in 2021 (a 64% decline) and 12 additional hours alone (a 48% increase)."
Related via the FT: Are we ready for the approaching loneliness epidemic?
Thankful: “In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
The Hovercraft Project: Helps schools with STEM lessons by teaching students how to build a hovercraft.