Covid-19 Policy Update #644
Covid-19 Policy Update #644
Monday 3/27
Top Three
“Little Blessing”: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla welcome to the world their third daughter, Aurelia Chan Zuckerberg. Congrats Mark and Priscilla!
COVID's Education Crisis: A Lost Generation?: Via CBS Morning.
"It may look like the pandemic is over; stadiums are open again, crowds are everywhere, and hardly a mask in sight. But COVID hurt a lot of things you can't easily see, especially in schools. "I feel like I just need to stand on a mountaintop and just yell, 'Take this seriously! Everything is at stake right now!'" said Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone in Manhattan."
"There's a whole cohort of young people who are not going to get the kind of education that's going to allow them to get the best jobs," Canada said. "It's going to cost lots of kids tens of thousands of dollars over their earnings, or some hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Most Americans Doubt Their Children Will Be Better Off: The WSJ on a new WSJ-NORC Poll.
For more than three decades, NORC has asked Americans whether life for their children’s generation will be better than it has been for their own using its General Social Survey. This year 78% said they don’t feel confident that is the case, the highest share since the survey began asking the question every few years in 1990.
White respondents were more likely to say they are not confident than Black and Hispanic respondents.
COVID Exploited Political Divisions Along With Racial and Health Disparities: CIDRAP on a new study in the Lancet. More via Axios.
"For deaths, they found a fourfold difference in rates across states, with fatalities lowest in Hawaii and New Hampshire and highest in Arizona and Washington, DC."
"Overall, they found that states with higher poverty, lower levels of education, less access to quality healthcare, and less trust in others had disproportionately higher rates of COVID infections and deaths."
"These factors were common denominators in states with the highest Black populations and those that voted for the Republican candidate in the 2020 election."
"Five of 10 states with the lowest death rates had Republican governors: Vermont, New Hampshire, Maryland, Ohio, and Nebraska. And though the five best-performing states were led by Democrat governors, the key predictor of infections and deaths was the share of the state that voted Republican in the 2020 election."
"For schools, closures didn't reduce test scores in most US states, though the group did find a link between lower fourth-grade math scores and policy mandates, such as increased mask use and vaccine mandates for employees."
Federal
ED: Sec. Cardona speaks to Politico:
"I was hired to improve education in the country. I’m not a politician. I’m an educator. I’m a dad, and I want to talk about raising the bar in education,” Cardona said in an interview with POLITICO last week. “But I won’t sit idly when some try to attack our schools or privatize education.”
"Cardona’s newly public exasperation with the conservative political furor around education comes as the Republican-controlled House approved sweeping “Parents Bill of Rights” legislation and a growing wave of school choice expansion laws takes hold in Republican-led states, including a measure now primed for the signature of Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis."
"There are efforts to take dollars, the limited dollars that exist for public education, and provide vouchers to private institutions — weakening the local public school,” Cardona said of recent school choice expansion initiatives. — “I’m not against choice, I went to a technical high school that wasn’t my local neighborhood high school. … But I don’t want privatization at the expense of the local school. The neighborhood school should be fully funded; it should have great resources so that students who go there have a top-tier education.”
Commerce: New resources for CHIPS applicants.
Covid Research
Should You Get Another Covid Booster?: Via the NYT.
"I think it’s reasonable to boost immunocompromised people and people in nursing homes every six months,” Dr. Gounder said. “I do not think that annual boosters for everyone makes sense.”
"It’s unclear whether the Food and Drug Administration will follow suit. In a bid to simplify what had become a bewildering array of guidelines on vaccination, the agency said in January that it would move to a single shot offered each fall to all Americans, as is the case for flu."
“Given the lack of data, I don’t think it’s fair to say to people, ‘Inject yourself with a biological agent,’” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adviser to the F.D.A. “It’s incumbent upon them when they make recommendations to show the data on which that recommendation is based,” Dr. Offit said of federal health officials. “Otherwise, they’re just saying, ‘Trust us.’”
Nirmatrelvir Tied to 26% Lower Risk of Long COVID, 47% Lower Risk of Death: The antiviral drug nirmatrelvir (one of the components of Paxlovid) lowered the risk of long COVIDin patients who had at least one risk factor for severe illness, finds a study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine.
State
New York: NYC parent coordinators are essential school workers. Many feel undervalued and underpaid.
Pennsylvania: "The Philadelphia Board of Education approved a nearly $4.5 billion preliminary budget on Thursday that officials said isn’t enough to properly fund the district. They also got an earful from frustrated students and teachers."
Economic Recovery
Governors Prioritize Postsecondary Education Pathways In 2023 State Of The State Addresses: Via NGA.
Work-From-Home Era Ends for Millions of Americans: "Some 72.5% of business establishments said their employees teleworked rarely or not at all last year, according to a Labor Department report. That figure climbed from 60.1% in 2021."
Resources
Schools Bought Tech to Accelerate Learning. Is It Working?: Via EdWeek.
"While there are digital tools that are pushing the envelope on learning acceleration, there are other ed-tech tools that claim to accelerate learning but aren’t actually aligned with the principles of learning acceleration, said Bailey Cato Czupryk, the senior vice president of learning, impact, and design for TNTP, a nonprofit that consults with districts on teacher training, instructional strategy, and other education issues."
"Zearn, the math learning platform that Nebraska schools are using, is an example many experts pointed to. A study analyzing the impact of the Nebraska education department’s statewide partnership with Zearn found that elementary and middle school students who consistently used Zearn had 2.5 times the growth in their state assessment scores than students who did not use Zearn."
New Budget Numbers: FY 204 preliminary budgets from New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, plus Seattle from Burbio.
Viewing ARPA Aid for States and Localities Through a Great Recession Lens: Via the Tax Policy Center.
Good Schools (Still) Matter For Low-Income Kids: Chad Aldeman takes over the Substack over at Slow Boring.
How Have State Ed Leaders Prioritized Academics and Mental Health in ESSER Initiatives?: Via K12 Dive.
Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley Pioneer Who Co-founded Intel, Dies At 94: Announcement / good piece over at the Washington Post
"Dr. Moore famously predicted in 1965 that computer power would double each year for a decade, a forecast he modified in the mid-1970s to every two years."
"His prophecy that computing capacity would grow exponentially — and with decreasing costs — was dubbed Moore’s Law and became the standard that scientists for decades raced successfully to meet."
Dog Plays Catch: A very good dog caught a home run ball at a Dodgers spring training game.
He Was Taken Out of His Classroom: Cam Amen spent his childhood in and out of foster care, then at age 18 he took in his brother and sister and put them through high school all on his own.