Top Three
Schools Face ‘Urgency Gap’ on Pandemic Recovery: 5 Takeaways from New Study: Via The 74.
"The study, from CALDER, an AIR program working with seven universities, suggests school districts should do more. “We need more kids to get more hours of interventions,” said CALDER’s Dan Goldhaber."
"Researchers found that in many districts, remediation initiatives planned for the fall of the 2021-22 school year were still in the process of starting as late as last spring — and in some cases, they hadn’t even launched."
"And even when remediations were in place, researchers found, unforeseen events like teacher absences during Delta and Omicron surges — and chronic student absences — reduced the planned “frequency and dosage” of interventions."
"The researchers noted that at this pace of recovery, according to recent findings, most students in grades 3 to 8 will need a minimum of three school years to fully get back up to speed, with upper elementary and middle school students potentially needing much longer."
Schools Are Missing Their Chance to Fight Learning Loss: Bloomberg Editorial.
"The size of these programs hid basic flaws. The ARP required that school districts devote 20% of their relief funds to “addressing” learning loss, but didn’t specify benchmarks for measuring student progress or consequences if schools failed to meet them. In the absence of clear rules, districts have used the funds to repair buildings, pay staff salaries and upgrade sports facilities. Some districts have used their pandemic aid to make up for budget shortfalls caused by declining student enrollment in failing schools."
"Even more alarming is schools’ lack of urgency in putting available resources toward combating learning loss — despite evidence that poorly performing students have fallen further behind since returning to the classroom."
"School officials need to recognize that this may be their only chance to reverse the harms imposed by the pandemic."
"First, districts should gather data to determine the scale of learning loss within schools and identify where students are furthest behind."
"Next, they should expand tutoring programs by enlisting parents, college students, retired teachers and others."
"Finally, they should extend the school year and ensure students spend more time in class — through after-school and Saturday academies, mandatory summer school for struggling pupils, and increased outreach to families to reduce chronic absenteeism."
States Ramped Up K-12 Spending in 2022, But Growth Likely to Slow: EdWeek on new NASBO data.
"Overall state spending on K-12 education continued to increase in fiscal year 2022, rising 8% over the previous year to hit $538 billion, as federal aid and state investments continue to fuel growth."
"In 2021, state funding for elementary and secondary education grew by 4%, according to the report, and rose by another 8.9% in 2022."
"In fiscal 2022, state general fund revenues are estimated to have grown 15.9% while revenues increased 16.6% in fiscal 2021."
Federal
ED: "Has concluded after a nearly two-year investigation that Fairfax County Public Schools badly failed students with disabilities during the coronavirus pandemic and is requiring the district to take several steps to repair the damage suffered by these students."
ED: On Monday abruptly disbanded a parent council created to include families in federal decisions about pandemic recovery efforts.
"Keri Rodrigues called the senators’ letter “a last gasp effort” to keep the lawsuit alive, but that was before the department’s announcement that it had abandoned its plans."
IES: Report: Indicators of School Performance in Texas
"Study found that several student behaviors and teacher factors were associated with the likelihood of schools meeting accountability expectations across school levels and could be used to identify whether a school was likely to meet accountability expectations."
"For elementary schools, these indicators included student attendance and chronic absenteeism; for middle school, these indicators included student attendance, chronic absenteeism, and discipline; and for high schools, these indicators included student course taking and teacher turnover."
Covid Research
Long-COVID Symptoms in Teens May Evolve Over Time: A study of nearly 5,100 non-hospitalized 11- to 17-year-olds in the United Kingdom found that symptoms were more common among participants who tested positive than those with a negative result at baseline and 6 and 12 months.
For example, 10.9% of those who tested positive reported fatigue at all three time points, compared with 1.2% among those with a negative result.
The prevalence of shortness of breath and fatigue in those who reported them at 6 or 12 months appeared to increase at both 6 and 12 months in those who tested positive.
The New Covid Wave: Via Eric Topol
"Hospitalizations have jumped by 25% in recent days, along with ICUs, test positivity, wastewater surveillance virus levels, and even cases, which have been grossly under-diagnosed because of home rapid antigen testing or no testing."
"The new CDC genomic data that was released this week showed that BQ.1/BQ.1.1 have shot up to 63% of new cases. The BA.5 wave has faded away (14%) while the worrisome XBB variant is gaining at low levels (now 5.5%) and so is BN.1 (4.6%). The rest of the variant soup is in descent or not gaining traction."
Related: Thanksgiving bump in cases:
Illinois officials reported their highest single-day total since the summer.
Surveys of coronavirus levels in Bay Area wastewater suggest another COVID-19 surge is not only under way but may top last summer’s omicron BA.5 wave in the number of people infected
Boston-area COVID wastewater data spikes 88%, Massachusetts reports 5,068 COVID cases
42% of Adults Likely Have Had COVID, but Almost Half of Them Say They Didn't: CIDRAP on a newMMWR report.
"But 43.7% of those with evidence of infection said they never had COVID-19, suggesting asymptomatic (symptom-free) infection. Of adults with antibodies to the virus, 25.5% said they were unvaccinated against COVID-19, meaning that their antibodies originated from an infection."
11% of COVID-19 Survivors Have Residual Lung Damage: CIDRAP on a new study.
State
DC: "D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education has made a three-year, $40 million investment in the tutoring campaign. More than 2,200 students have received the small group tutoring to date, with the city on track to reach 4,000 students this year. By the end of the initiative the city hopes to reach 10,000 of its 96,000 students."
New Jersey: Star-Ledger Editorial Board: "We won’t fix learning loss by hiding test results."
"We are now almost halfway through the school year, and we still don’t have them for the entire state – which is “extraordinarily delayed,” in the words of Ruiz, one of the panelists. “DOE should be the think tank for innovation for the state,” she said. “They should not be a level of bureaucracy.”
Related: Gov. Murphy announces new tutoring initiative:
The New Jersey Partnership for Student Success (NJPSS) is slated to recruit individuals to improve student learning, community partnerships within schools and the educator experience."
"Up to 5,000 individuals — including but not limited to tutors, postsecondary transition coaches and student success coaches — will be involved in the partnership, according to the release."
New York: Schools in New York have been slow to spend federal aid sent to them in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic"
"The report released by the New York Equity Coalition found school districts as of August 2022 have spent less than 10% of funding meant to boost learning after the pandemic disrupted classroom instruction."
North Carolina: Teach For America North Carolina announced the launch of the Ignite Fellowship, a high-impact tutoring initiative in partnership with Bertie County Public Schools that provides customized small group learning opportunities for students designed to accelerate learning and foster belonging.
Ohio: Aaron Churchill: "How Governor DeWine can make learning recovery his second term legacy."
Pennsylvania: Philadelphia student scores on state reading and math exams down from pre-COVID levels.
International
China:
Via Axios, "Chinese officials are scaling back some of the strictest COVID restrictions after rare nationwide protests erupted in late November."
China's Xi unwilling to accept western vaccines, U.S. official says.
Economic Recovery
Jobs Report: BLS reported Friday that employers added 263,000 jobs in November—above the 200,000 forecast but below October’s 284,000.
September was revised down by 46,000, from +315,000 to +269,000, and the change for October was revised up by 23,000, from +261,000 to +284,000. With these revisions, employment gains in September and October combined were 23,000 lower than previously reported.
K-12 public education added 33,000 jobs in November, but still has 27K jobs left to recover to return to pre-pandemic levels.
CEO Optimism Down: BRT’s CEO Economic Outlook Index fell to a two-year low.
Remote Work Mismatch: Demand for remote work is outpacing supply as companies start to call workers back to offices.
Apprenticeships Multiply the Pathways to Education, Jobs, or Both: Harvard study.
Resources
SUNY Board of Trustees Appoints John King, Jr. as the System’s 15th Chancellor: Congrats John!
Teen Brain Change Due to Covid Stress: Via Axios.
"The stress of living through the pandemic physically changed teen brains — with accelerated signs of aging commonly seen in children experiencing violence and neglect"
The study compared 163 teenage MRI scans — half taken before the pandemic and half after. A 16-year-old girl’s brain might be the equivalent of a 19 or 20-year-old’s before COVID."
Stalling College Completion Rates: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s Completing College report found:
62.3% of students who began their first year in college in 2016 graduated within six years, showing a stall in completion rates.
Completion rates fell the most for Black students (-1.1 percentage points to 50.2%) and LatinX students (-3.2 percentage points to 57.1%).
Broadband:
Treasury authorizes Capital Projects Fund broadband funding for Florida ($248M), Georgia ($250M), Iowa ($152M), Minnesota ($44M), Missouri ($196M) and Utah ($10M)
NYC kills ‘Internet Master Plan’ for $157 million universal, municipal network.
In a study of subscribers who are enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and/or Cox’s Connect2Compete (C2C) program, about half have home internet for the first time and 70% credit home Internet for finding a new or a better job.
ChatGPT: OpenAI launched ChatGPT and it's already amassed 1 million users in less than four days. It's honestly incredible.
The essay generating prompts are astonishingly good - so too are some of the summarization capabilities.
Folks kept finding other creative uses for it over the weekend: writing computer code, drafting legislation, problem-solving code, writing advocacy plans, creating draft agendas, taking the SAT (and scoring a 1020), and explaining Covid Learning Loss but in the style of a guy who won’t stop going on tangents to talk about Taylor Swift.
I also found with the right prompts it could generate a lesson plan based on a specific state standard, create an assessment for that plan, and even develop a grading rubric - all in about four mins.
But some of the answers are just plain wrong. The problem is that they sound plausible. And even the good answers aren't always the best, but this offers a glimpse of what is to come.
Box's CEO Aaron Levie: “There’s a certain feeling that happens when a new technology adjusts your thinking about computing. Google did it. Firefox did it. AWS did it. iPhone did it. OpenAI is doing it with ChatGPT."
Remembering: Bob McGrath. For the pilot episode of Sesame Street, the opening theme was sung by Bob.
Never Out of the Fight: This is incredible.