Covid-19 Policy Update #632
Thursday 2/9
Top Three
Half of Public School Students Began 2022-23 School Year Behind Grade Level in At Least One Academic Subject: IES School Pulse Survey (Washington Post / EdWeek / The 74)
"Public school leaders estimated that 49% of their students began the 2022-23 year behind grade level in at least one academic subject."
"Most public schools have relied on diagnostic (88%) and formative (85%) assessment data to identify individual students’ academic needs, 81% have used remedial instruction techniques and over half (59%) have used tailored accelerated instruction."
"Less than half of the school leaders surveyed said they’ve increased the number of students participating in high-dosage tutoring this school year over 2021-22.”
“Within the schools that offer tutoring, school leaders estimated 30% of students receive high-dosage tutoring, and another 27% participate in regular tutoring, which may involve shorter and fewer sessions in larger groups."
"While 9 out of 10 provided high-dosage tutoring in reading, only 8 out of 10 did so in math, and fewer than a quarter of schools offered struggling students intensive tutoring in science, social studies, or other subjects."
"About 2 out of 5 schools also said they can’t find the time in their regular school schedule to tutor students."
At least 40% of schools said they can’t find qualified staff (or lack the money to pay them) to sustain either regular or high-dosage tutoring programs."
"In December 2022, 36% of public schools reported having to quarantine students (an increase from 30% in November 2022), and 27% reported having to quarantine staff members (an increase from 18% in November 2022)."
Thousands of Kids Are Missing From School. Where Did They Go?: AP / Hechinger / Chalkbeat.
"An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for."
"The true number of missing students is likely much higher. The analysis doesn’t include data from 29 states, including Texas and Illinois, or the unknown numbers of ghost students who are technically enrolled but rarely make it to class."
"These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data."
"The missing kids identified by AP and Stanford represent far more than a number. The analysis highlights thousands of students who may have dropped out of school or missed out on the basics of reading and school routines in kindergarten and first grade."
The Stakes Are Only Getting Higher For Pandemic School Aid Spending: Marguerite Roza in Forbes.
"The pace of spending matters. But not for the reason many seem to think it does. Those who closely watch school finance know that districts would never leave this flexible money unspent."
"Recovery work over the next 20 months will be both harder to pull off and higher stakes. Districts have left themselves little time for onboarding new hires, tweaking programs to ensure they’re working, and changing course when they aren’t. And if the chosen interventions don’t do enough to help students there’s precious little time for a do-over."
"Districts need to plan now so students don’t face chaos at the start of the 2024 school year with classrooms and teachers shuffled, programs abruptly dropped, demoralized staff, and leaders focusing on nothing but budget woes. Past experience tells us that deep cuts are often inequitable and impact our neediest students the hardest."
Federal
White House: Emotional send off for COS Ron Klain with staff lining West Exec.
Estimate of Misspent Covid Unemployment Payments Leaps to $191 Billion: Politico on a new DOL IG report.
NSF: Launches the Accelerating Research Translation Program.
Covid Research
Political Leaning Influences Doctors' Beliefs About COVID Treatments: Study
KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: January 2023
State
California: "New research that tracked high school juniors in Los Angeles Unified found that those who took math as seniors — from algebra to advanced calculus — were better positioned to enroll and stay in college than those who didn’t."
Connecticut: School districts are dealing with two major issues: the loss of federal emergency COVID grants and inflation. In Hamden, school leaders say without help from the state or taxpayers, program cuts are possible.
Florida: Florida camp helping kids cope with losing loved ones to COVID-19.
Michigan: Gov. Whitmer calls for $300 million for tutoring.
New York:
COVID vaccine mandate dropped for city employees, visitors to NYC public schools.
"The nation’s largest school district has hemorrhaged students since the start of the pandemic, with enrollment down about 11% to 813,000 students in grades K-12 since then."
Economic Recovery
Powell Says Further Rate Hikes Needed: Fed Chair Powell says inflation is starting to ease, but interest rates still likely to rise.
“If we continue to get, for example, strong labor market reports or higher inflation reports, it may well be the case that we have do more and raise rates more than is priced in."
“The disinflationary process, the process of getting inflation down, has begun and it’s begun in the goods sector, which is about a quarter of our economy,” the central bank chief said during an event in Washington, D.C. “But it has a long way to go. These are the very early stages."
Half in U.S. Say They Are Worse Off, Highest Since 2009: Via Gallup, the most since 2009 amid the Great Recession.
61% of lower-income Americans said they were worse off — compared to 49% of those in the middle and 43% of high-income earners.
Office Occupancy Dips Back Below 50%: Axios on Kastle data.
Opportunity Zones: Washington, D.C., edged out Los Angeles once more as the city with the most planned investment among Qualified Opportunity Funds tracked by Novogradac through the end of 2022.
"Washington, D.C., has $1.36 billion of investment planned by QOFs tracked by Novogradac, joining Los Angeles ($1.33 billion) and New York City ($1.13 billion) as cities with more than $1 billion in planned investment tracked by Novogradac."
"There are 54 cities (representing 25 states, plus the District of Columbia) with at least $100 million in planned QOF investment. At the end of 2021, there were 39 such cities."
Workforce Development In The IIJA, CHIPS And IRA: Great list from NGA.
New Climate Legislation Could Create 9 Million Jobs. Who Will Fill Them?: Via Anya Kamenetz
"Although huge amounts of public and private investment are thundering toward these greener pastures, education and workforce experts say very little of it is dedicated toward building up the human capital that will be needed to do the work."
"Union apprenticeship programs often have waiting lists, high school career and technical programs have been neglected for decades in favor of the college track, and many community colleges are facing budget cuts."
"Part of pulling more people into “great jobs,” said Steyer, is increasing respect for the trades. This includes targeting idealistic young people who care about the climate but may not have considered working with their hands."
Related: I had a piece in The Hill last month about the apprenticeship mismatch with the IRA.
Resources
How Do Homeowners, Teachers, and Students Respond to a Four-Day School Week?: EdWorking Paper.
"We find 2 to 4% home price declines relative to surrounding school districts, a 5% decrease in teacher retention for experienced teachers, and a 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviation decrease in student test scores."
Teen App Usage: Children ages from 4 through 18 began to watch more TikTok than YouTube on an average daily basis starting in June 2020.
“Kids in 2022 saw their average daily use of TikTok climb to a whopping 107 minutes, or 60% longer than the time they spent watching video content on YouTube (67 minutes).”
TikTok not only topped the average daily usage of other video apps, like Netflix (48 mins.) and Disney+ (40 mins.), it also came out ahead of other social apps, including Snapchat (72 mins.), Instagram (45 mins.), Facebook (20 mins.), Pinterest (16 mins.) and Twitter (10 mins.) among the under-18 crowd.
More via TechCrunch.
Broadband:
The Promise and Peril of New Teaching Technologies: Anthony Salcito in FutureEd.
Launch: Equitable & Accelerated Pathways for All: Announcement.
"Five leading organizations - Advance CTE, Education Strategy Group, ExcelinEd, Jobs for the Future (JFF), and New America - with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation, Joyce Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, proudly announce a new joint college and career pathways initiative - Launch: Equitable & Accelerated Pathways for All."
10 States Consider Cross-border Rules to Tackle Teacher Shortage: Via the AP.
"The idea for an Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact was first proposed by the U.S. Department of Defense and is designed, in part, to support military spouses. It would effectively allow teaching licenses to be viable across members of the compact, cutting through the current 50-state patchwork of disparate requirements."
Five Predictions for the Future of Learning in the Age of AI: Via Andreessen Horowitz's Anne Lee Skates
When You Surprise Yourself: Toddler shocks himself by taking first steps.
Rare Sighting: The elusive land dolphin.
