Variants and Vaccines

BA.2.86 Variant

• This caused quite a bit of buzz a few weeks ago because scientists were concerned Some have dubbed the new variant “Pirola.”
• “ which burst onto the scene in the winter of 2021, resulting in a spike in infections.”
• “Two more lab groups — one from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and the other from Harvard University — have reported results of antibody neutralization lab experiments, which suggest vaccination or previous infection offer some protection against the highly mutated BA.2.86 SARS-CoV-2 variant.”
• Early indications are that the new boosters will work against this variant too:
  • “Moderna, Pfizer say versus BA.2.86.”
  • “These data were published () with Moderna’s XBB.1.5 booster and show very good levels of neutralizing antibodies induced against BA.2.86, in keeping with the response to the target of XBB.1.5. Also note the similar response to 2 of the major current circulating variants of EG.5.1 and FL.1.5.1.” 
  • We’re lucky,” Topol said. “This one could have been really bad.”
  • “Early research data has shown that antibodies produced by prior infection or existing vaccines against the coronavirus .”
    

Reformulated Vaccines

• The updated COVID vaccine is based on variant.
• CDC advisers make universal COVID vaccine recommendation: .
  • “The advisory committee voted 13-1 to recommend updated COVID-19 vaccines for people ages 6 months and older.” It came one day after the for emergency use mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
  • “Shortly after [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] vote, , which allows immunization campaigns to begin.”
  • Epidemiologist summarized the meetings.
• But: (Associated Press/NBC News)

State of Affairs

Another Summer Wave

• and continue to rise.

• : “Recent analysis of the data shows the number of children under age 18 with confirmed COVID-19 at hospital admission increased nearly five-fold from 237 new admissions the week ending June 17 to 1,175 in the week ending Sept. 9.”
• “June had the lowest level of pediatric COVID-19 hospital admissions since data collection began in 2020.”

Variants Fueling the Latest Wave

• The main variants driving cases are and , both XBB variant descendants that share a mutation known as F456L, which appears to be helping them spread more than other virus siblings. 

• “The Biden administration [this week] that it is providing $600 million in funding to produce new at-home COVID-19 tests and is — aiming to prevent possible shortages during a rise in coronavirus cases that has typically come during colder months.”

More Key Insights

• Schools Grapple With COVID Safety Amid Late Summer Surge:

• CDC Director Mandy K. Cohen in the NYT: ““

• Anti-Vaccine Movement on the Rise:
• How Long Should You Wait?: with a good summary about when to get vaccinated after an infection and the latest on mixing-and-matching shots.
  
• Chronic Absenteeism: Via the and
• A Generation at Risk: Published by the Building Bridges Initiative, the is the product of a partnership between


 And on a Lighter Note

• The Best of America: When Jaylan Gray’s mom died, he quit school to care for his brother. Shortly after, their house was in need of repair, that’s when a nonprofit stepped in to fix their home.

• Bear Cubs Getting in a Hammock:

Living the Good Life: A dog making

This Week’s Top Story

• : “Many American parents would be shocked to know where their kids were actually achieving. Nationally, 90% of parents think their children are reading and doing math at or above grade level. In fact, 26% of eighth graders are proficient or above in math and 31% are proficient or above in English, according to Learning Heroes, an organization that collects data and creates resources to improve parent-teacher relationships.”
• “There are two reasons for the staggering mismatch between what teachers know and what parents think. The first is that many report cards do not measure just achievement, or what a child knows, but a basket of items including attendance, effort, homework completion and behavior.”
• “The second reason parents are in the dark about their children’s performance is that teachers are neither trained nor given ample time to have honest conversations with them. They rightly fear that they will be blamed, not believed, or not supported by their principals if they tell parents exactly where their children are performing.”

Key Insights 

• : “What’s troubling about this variant, scientists say, is that it contains more than 30 mutations on the spike protein, which is what helps the virus enter cells and cause an infection. This means it might be able to evade current vaccines and previous infections more easily, and it likely won’t be a great match with the fall booster expected to be approved soon.”
• “What’s unknown is how transmissible the variant is and whether it will spread widely or fizzle out like many other variants. Another important, outstanding question is whether it causes more severe disease.”
• “, the CDC said scientists are evaluating the effectiveness of the fall COVID-19 booster, expected to roll out in September, and the new variant.”
• .

• : “If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy.”
• ” ‘I hate to be so doom and gloom about it,’ said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research and policy analysis organization. ‘But this is very serious. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for kids affected by COVID.’ ”
• “First, school districts did not use all of their funds to address learning loss specifically.”
• “Also, reversing the learning loss is easier said than done. Some school districts are facing a variety of challenges including staff shortages. And many school leaders say that political polarization around LGBTQ+ issues, critical race theory and COVID-19 has disrupted schooling, according to a report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND.”

• on new reports from and .
• The report from Education Resource Strategies identifies risk factors that indicate the likely severity of a district’s post-ESSER fiscal situation:
  • Districts that saw an enormous leap in per-pupil revenue likely faced more hurdles to spending that money quickly and wisely than districts that got only a small sum per student.
  • Districts that invested federal relief funds in recurring expenses like increased teacher salaries or new staff positions will have to find new funding sources to cover those investments or risk needing to cut them.
  • Districts seeing increases in state aid or local tax revenue will have an easier time filling ESSER-shaped budget holes than districts in states that have kept education funding flat amid high inflation.
  • Some states and localities allow districts to maintain funding reserves from state and local sources that they can use for emergency situations, like the sudden loss of federal relief aid. Those districts have a financial cushion that their counterparts in states that restrict how districts can spend excess money won’t have.
  • Districts that have been slow to invest their ESSER allocations could be tempted to hastily allocate funds to recurring or unwise expenses that come back to haunt them.

• : “Policymakers should pursue opportunities to allocate additional funding toward in-school day, high-impact tutoring, in time for the 2025 fiscal year. In tandem, policymakers could streamline policies to provide clarity and guidance for local system and school leaders’ use of federal funding.”
• “State and district system leaders should consider carry-forward dollars in federal funding streams that may have grown with the availability of ESSER. Tutoring programs could be further prioritized by using state and district set-asides across these funding streams.”
• “School leaders should use their Title I allocations to support their students’ learning needs by leveraging tutoring as an evidence-based intervention.”

• reports on a new
• “Teachers are leaving the classroom at higher rates, and the pool of candidates is not big enough to replace them.”
• “Tuan Nguyen, a Kansas State University education professor, last year set out with two colleagues to collect statewide data on teacher shortages. They counted more than 36,500 vacancies in 37 states and D.C. for the 2021-22 school year. Updated data found that teacher shortages had grown 35% among that group, to more than 49,000 vacancies.”

Gen Z’s Declining College Interest Persists — Even Among Middle Schoolers

• ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ on a new
• “Two in five Gen Z students agreed with the statement: ‘The pandemic has made me less interested in pursuing higher education.’ ”
• “That attitude has translated into an 8% decline in college enrollment from 2019 to 2022, showing how attending college is no longer a given for Gen Z.”
• “YPulse found Gen Z students were more likely to choose Google and YouTube over a teacher when asked: ‘If you wanted to learn something new, what resources would you use?’ ”

Fueled by Teacher Shortages, ‘Zoom-in-a-Room’ Makes a Comeback

• Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: “Live, online instruction in school has long linked students to subjects they couldn’t otherwise take, like A.P. Calculus or Latin. But as districts struggle to fill teaching vacancies, they are increasingly turning to companies like Proximity to teach core subjects.”
• “Districts are spending thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars on virtual teachers, according to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s review of purchase orders. 
 The practice — derided at the height of the pandemic as “Zoom-in-a-room” — is raising eyebrows as students return to school and continue to grapple with the lingering effects of remote learning.”

• : “Step 1: Assume all students are going to use the technology.”
• “There is a lot of confusion and panic, but also a fair bit of curiosity and excitement. Mainly, educators want to know: How do we actually use this stuff to help students learn, rather than just try to catch them cheating?”
• “Second, schools should stop relying on A.I. detector programs to catch cheaters.”
• “My third piece of advice 
 is that teachers should focus less on warning students about the shortcomings of generative A.I. than on figuring out what the technology does well.”
• “My last piece of advice for schools that are flummoxed by generative A.I. is this: Treat this year — the first full academic year of the post-ChatGPT era — as a learning experience, and don’t expect to get everything right.”


On a Lighter Note

WIIIII: .

Bear Cubs: .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• Via : “Our analysis shows that nationwide, an estimated 17 million students have more than half a year of pandemic-related learning delay, 16 million students who need mental health support are not receiving it and 15 million students are chronically absent.”
• “Several states and districts have seen accelerated rates of learning recovery after adopting high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and aligned professional development; providing high-quality, high-intensity tutoring; and extending the school year through summer or intensive-learning academies.”
• High-quality materials “paired with high-quality aligned professional development have demonstrated effectiveness in raising students’ state assessment scores.”
• “A more realistic and sustainable approach may be to embed practices into future budgets. Extending the recovery period from one year to two, providing an additional year of HQIM and aligned professional development for teachers, could address 83% of students with pandemic-related learning delays.”

Key Insights 

• Via the and : Over a quarter of students missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year, leading to an estimated 6.5 million more chronically absent students. Absences were more prevalent among Latino, Black and low-income students.
• “In seven states, the rate of chronically absent kids doubled for the 2021-22 school year, from 2018-19, before the pandemic. Absences worsened in every state with available data — notably, the analysis found growth in chronic absenteeism did not correlate strongly with state COVID rates.”

• : “In the realm of education, this technology will influence how students learn, how teachers work and ultimately how we structure our education system.”
• “Prompts can also be constructed to get these AI systems to perform complex and multi-step operations. For example, let’s say a teacher wants to create an adaptive tutoring program — for any subject, any grade, in any language — that customizes the examples for students based on their interests. She wants each lesson to culminate in a short-response or multiple-choice quiz. If the student answers the questions correctly, the AI tutor should move on to the next lesson. If the student responds incorrectly, the AI should explain the concept again, but using simpler language.”
• “AI might tackle some of the administrative tasks that keep teachers from investing more time with their peers or students.”
• “AI’s ability to conduct human-like conversations opens up possibilities for or instructional assistants that can help .”
• “ with both educators and classmates.”
• “While past technologies have not lived up to hyped expectations, AI is not merely a continuation of the past; it is a leap into a new era of machine intelligence that we are only beginning to grasp. While the immediate implementation of these systems is imperfect, the swift pace of improvement holds promising prospects.”

• “A new by the Economic Innovation Group, shared first with Axios, quantifies the reasons some of America’s biggest cities are struggling to rebuild their economies post-pandemic.”
• “It also shows a surge in income that arrived in many rural and exurban places and in popular vacation destinations.”
• “Not only did residents leave the biggest cities, but those who left disproportionately had high incomes, meaning the hit to those local economies was larger than migration numbers alone would imply.”
• “In San Francisco, out-migration caused a 20% drop in adjusted gross income from 2020 to 2021 as a share of the taxable income of those who stayed put. In Manhattan, that drop was 13%, and in Boston, 11%.”
• “Income flows out of urban areas and towards these growth regions appears to have been driven by upper-income households; in growing counties, in-migrants were on average higher earners than out-migrants, while in shrinking counties, out-migrants earned more than newcomers.”

• on a new : “More than a third of the national public school enrollment decline since COVID-19 pandemic cannot be attributed to switches to private school or homeschooling, or to a shrinking population of school-aged children, according to new research.”
• “It’s likely that many of the students who are unaccounted for — generally schools’ youngest learners — opted to skip kindergarten altogether, a move that could have long-term consequences for their academic achievement.”
• “ ‘Because such demographic changes are likely to be durable, districts that lost enrollment due to such factors are unlikely to see their enrollment rebound substantially,’ the report says.”

• : “A 
 from researchers at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers reviews all current literature on athletes, sudden cardiac arrest and myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccines, and finds that athletes engaged in intensive activity are not at increased risk for heart complications following vaccination.”
• “An Australian study of more than 4 million young adults showed no increase in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest for those with recent COVID-19 infections or vaccination.”

• : “This study synthesizes 33 articles on the implementation of tutoring, defined as one-to-one or small-group instruction in which a human tutor supports students grades K-12 in an academic subject, to better understand the facilitators and barriers to program success.” 
• “We find that policies influenced tutoring implementation through the allocation of federal funding and stipulation of program design.”
• “Successful implementation hinged on the support of school leaders with the power to direct school funding, space and time. Tutoring setting and schedule, recruitment and training, and curriculum influenced whether students are able to access quality tutoring and instruction.”

U.S. Department of Education Announces Key K-12 Cybersecurity Resilience Efforts

• and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: The department announced K-12 cybersecurity resilience efforts including the establishment of a Government Coordinating Council, as well as the release of the department’s three K-12 Digital Infrastructure briefs, including , and .

• : “The 
 effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country. It is one reason professional service jobs are going unfilled and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S. Labor Department.”
• “The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.”
• “Army recruits aren’t communicating within their squads as well as they did before the pandemic, instructors say. Scores on recruiting exams fell 9% since the pandemic and prompted the Army to create a new testing boot camp to help recruits pass, a requirement for gaining admission to the military.”

• : “The Playbook is intended to serve as a tool for states to further impactful policy solutions that strengthen youth mental health.” The central topics are:
  • Addressing prevention and building resilience
  • Increasing awareness and reducing stigma
  • Ensuring access and affordability of quality treatment and care
  • Training and supporting caregivers and educators


On a Lighter NoteRun to the Ball:

This Week’s Top Story

• : A research brief on national end-of-school-year reading data for K-3 students revealed that while schools across the country have made progress in reading scores among earlier elementary grades (K-2), gains among third graders remains comparatively slow.
• “ compared to the 2021-22 school years, with the greatest gains among Black and Hispanic students. At the same time, third graders exhibited the least improvement from two years ago and no improvement from the prior year’s third-grade cohort. The slower improvements in grade 3 suggest a persistent impact on the cohort of students most affected by lost instructional time during the pandemic.”

Key Insights

• : “A  of 31 studies published through December 2022 reveals that persistent symptoms three months after confirmed COVID-19 infections, or ‘long COVID,’ affect 16% of children and adolescents.”
• The most common persistent symptoms seen in the studies were sore throat, persistent fever, sleep disturbance, fatigue and muscle weakness.

• on a new
• “For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1% were 34% more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1% were more than twice as likely to get in.”
• “The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.”
• “ ‘What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,’ said Susan Dynarski, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has reviewed the data and was not involved in the study.”

Education’s Long COVID Continues

• Via Lindsay Dworkin in ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: “Researchers Karyn Lewis and Megan Kuhfeld analyzed test score data from approximately 6.7 million students in grades 3 to 8 in 20,000 public schools who took MAP Growth reading and math assessments last academic year.”
• “They found that, in nearly all grades, achievement gains last year fell short of pre-pandemic trends. Because students are behind where they were before the pandemic, they would need to make greater-than-ordinary progress to get back on track. NWEA data show that isn’t happening; over the course of the 2022-23 school year, older students’ movement toward full recovery stalled.”
• “NWEA researchers now estimate that on average, students will require interventions and support equivalent to 4.1 months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-COVID levels in reading and 4.5 months in math.”

• “A University College London-led team finds a very low risk of pediatric intensive care unit admission and death from COVID-19 and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) during the first two years of the pandemic, with the highest risk among children with complex medical problems and neurodisabilities.”
• “We must now look beyond counts of pediatric COVID-19 cases to understand, measure and reduce the deleterious indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children — and at a time when many have declared the COVID-19 pandemic ‘over,’ our efforts to overcome these secondary pandemic effects have only just begun,” they wrote.

• Registered Republicans experienced a “significantly higher” rate of excess deaths than Democrats in Florida and Ohio in the months after COVID-19 vaccines were made widely available, .
• “The study looked at deaths in both Florida and Ohio during the first 22 months of the pandemic and found the overall excess death rate of Republican voters was 15% higher than that of Democrats. “
• .

• : “By 2030, activities that account for up to 30% of hours currently worked across the U.S. economy could be automated — a trend accelerated by generative AI.”
• “An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030. As people leave shrinking occupations, the economy could reweight toward higher-wage jobs. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in highest-wage positions, and most will need additional skills to do so successfully. Women are 1.5 times more likely to need to move into new occupations than men.”
• “By 2030, we further estimate a 23% increase in the demand for STEM jobs.”
• “People in the two lowest-wage quintiles (those earning less than $30,800 a year and those earning $30,800 to $38,200 a year) are up to 10 and 14 times more likely, respectively, to need to change occupations by the end of this decade than the highest earners.”


 And on a Lighter Note 

Two For One:

This Week’s Top Story

• “The story is this. When COVID arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into COVID partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war.”
  
• “This is one of the revelations of ‘,’ by 34 experts, published in April by PublicAffairs.”
  
• “Probably the most explosive and long-lasting fight was over school closings, but those fights didn’t take off in earnest until September 2020 at the earliest. According to a database maintained by Education Week, all but nine states ordered their schools closed for the remainder of the academic year in spring 2020. Of the nine that didn’t, three with Democratic governors, including California, and four with Republican governors, including Florida, recommended it. Two controlled by Republicans left the question up to local school districts.”

‘Education’s Long COVID’: Recovery Stalled for Most Students, Data Show

• Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: “​​Pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most of the nation’s students, new data shows, and upper elementary and middle school students actually lost ground this year in reading and math.” 

• “On average, students need four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels, according to the results from NWEA, a K-12 assessment provider. This fall’s ninth graders need far more — roughly a full extra school year.”
  
• .

• : “Efforts to develop the next generation of COVID vaccines are running up against bureaucratic hassles and regulatory uncertainty, scientists say, obstacles that could make it harder to curb the spread of the coronavirus and arm the United States against future pandemics.”
  
• “Project NextGen, conceived with COVID deaths at their lowest level, has neither Warp Speed’s vast money nor the mandate to purchase shots in bulk.”

• : “Dire warnings of teacher shortages are nothing new, especially during the pandemic, and are sometimes overblown. But a confluence of warning signs suggest that the country is at a post-pandemic inflection point.”
  
  • “More teachers left the classroom last year, new data confirms”
    
  • “Teacher morale has dropped sharply since the pandemic”
    
  • “Fewer people want to become teachers”
    
  • “Some schools and subjects have longed faced major shortages — and continue to”

$190 Billion Later, Reason to Worry Relief Funds Won’t Curb COVID’s Academic Crisis

• Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: A “10-month examination by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ shows that many districts haven’t used the funds with the urgency intended. Some have barely tapped monies advocates say are critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic.” 

• “With just over a year left to allocate the funds, the question isn’t only if districts will hit the September 2024 deadline, but whether the unprecedented windfall will leave students better off.”

• The catch: “Districts have not made it easy to answer those questions.” 

• : “Beginning Sept. 30, 2023, states will face a steep dropoff in federal child care investment. Without congressional action, this cliff will have dire consequences. More than 3 million children are projected to lose access to child care nationwide. Seventy-thousand child care programs are likely to close.”
  
• “In addition, we project that millions of parents will be impacted, with many leaving the workforce or reducing their hours, costing families $9 billion each year in lost earnings.”

• : Recently, “The New York Times the pandemic is over. We are in a very different place. And, I understand the desire for a ‘thank goodness that’s done’ mindset. And I hope COVID-19 isn’t always on top of your mind.”
  
• But: “COVID-19 is increasing; don’t be surprised to hear more people getting infected around you. I already am. This isn’t enough reason to change my personal behaviors, but that time may come this fall.”


 And on a Lighter Note

This Week’s Top Story 

How Billions in COVID-19 Relief Aid Was Stolen or Wasted

• : “An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.”
• “How could so much be stolen? 
 In short, [investigators and outside experts] say, the grift was just way too easy.”
• “Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.”

The Big Three

• : “We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020-21 school year on students’ pass rates on standardized tests in grades 3 to 8 across 11 states.”
• : “School districts with in-person learning had smaller declines than those with remote or hybrid learning models.”

• : “In this interim analysis of children aged 5 years and younger, safety surveillance of more than 245 000 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine doses over nine months did not detect a safety signal for any outcome during the 21 days after vaccination. Importantly, no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis occurred after vaccination.” 

• : “Parents of young children have long been among the most susceptible groups for vaccine hesitancy, since most shots are administered to infants who are often vulnerable to deadly diseases. Online anti-vaccine rhetoric often appeals specifically to mothers, calling on them to ‘protect’ their children from the shots.”
• Heather Simpson, a mother in Dallas, started Back to the Vax, an organization that “aims to counter that [anti-vax] narrative by supporting parents, educating doctors and creating online resources. The organization recommends parents call a doctor instead of searching for answers online, and also advises doctors on communicating with parents who are on the fence about vaccines.”

COVID-19 Research

• “An expert panel of the FDA on Thursday , unanimously recommending that they target an Omicron strain known as XBB that’s responsible for nearly every infection in the U.S.”
• and . And more via .
• : “Pfizer said it could distribute reformulated doses as early as the end of July, depending on the strain selected. Moderna said it expects to begin shipping updated doses, pending FDA approval, ‘by the end of the summer.’ Novavax said it could have updated doses available in the fall.”

• on a new : “MIT researchers asked undergraduate students to test whether chatbots ‘could be prompted to assist non-experts in causing a pandemic.’ “
• “Within an hour, the chatbots suggested four potential pandemic pathogens.”
• “Our results demonstrate that artificial intelligence can exacerbate catastrophic biological risks. Highly intelligent students without any relevant technical background in the life sciences can use 
 chatbots to walk them through the process of identifying and acquiring publicly known potential pandemic pathogens. This represents a major international security vulnerability.”

City & State News

California: federal COVID relief despite deep, widespread learning loss.

Kansas: : ‘I have kids that legitimately cannot read.’

Minnesota: to help cover $97 million gap in proposed budget.

Viewpoints

Educators Beware: As Budget Cuts Loom, Now Is NOT the Time to Quit Your Job: Via Katherine Silberstein and Marguerite Roza in ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.”

How COVID Changed High School Seniors’ Plans About College and Their Future Careers: . “Of this year’s graduating class, who were ninth graders when the health crisis began, more than 40% of students changed their thinking about their college major or future career because of COVID, according to new .”

The Pandemic Wiped Out Decades of Progress for Preschoolers. It’s Time to Get Them Back On Track: .

…And on a Lighter Note

Swearing, Dippin Dots and an Economics Lesson in Inflation: .

School’s out for the Summer: .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• , based on a from Harry Patrinos at the World Bank 
• “Patrinos looks at 11 factors potentially increasing or mitigating learning loss, which is defined using test score data via country-specific instruments that were standardized for comparison.”
• “There is a clear link between school closure duration and learning loss. Closures as part of government-imposed lockdowns averaged 21 weeks’ duration and resulted in an average learning loss of 0.23 standard deviations across the countries studied (representing two-thirds of the world’s population). Testing for mitigating factors or other means to explain learning loss produced no significant findings, meaning that school closures appear to be directly responsible for student learning loss.”
• “Patrinos finds that each additional week of school closure increased learning loss by a further 1% of a standard deviation.”
• “In short: The longer schools stayed closed, the less students learned, no matter what else was done to blunt the losses.”

The Big Three

• : “A published [June 1]  in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 U.S. household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.”
• “Of all household transmissions, 70.4% began with a child, with the proportion fluctuating weekly between 36.9% and 87.5%.”
• “Once U.S. schools reopened in fall 2020, children contributed more to inferred within-household transmission when they were in school, and less during summer and winter breaks, a pattern consistent for two consecutive school years.”

• : “While most schools have since deployed various forms of interventions and some have spent more on academic recovery than others, there are ample signs that the money has not been spent in a way that has substantially helped all of the nation’s students lagging behind.”
• “Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said the impact of the funding has been a ‘bit of a black box,’ and she expected to see different recovery rates across districts.”
• “Early reports show that schools have had difficulty setting up academic recovery programs.”

• “Areas high on the list for reduction are much more classroom-focused: summer learning programs (30%), computing devices, such as Chromebooks (29%) and tutoring (26%).”
• “Relatively large districts, meaning those with 10,000 or more students, are relatively likely to scale back tutoring (33% said they would), as were those with enrollments of between 2,500 and 9,999 students (34%), as opposed to those from systems with fewer than 2,500 students (20%).”
• “The survey also reveals that K-12 officials from suburban districts are much less likely to scale back stimulus-funded programs focused on student mental health/wellness resources (9% indicated they would) compared to those from districts in rural areas or towns (20%) and urban areas (28%).”
• “Relatively few of those surveyed see core academic subjects as likely to receive cuts, such as elementary English/language arts (just 17%), science (13%), elementary math (12%) and social-studies (11%).”

Federal Updates

Institute for Education Statistics: Director Mark Schneider on education research and the future of schools.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Dr. Deborah L. Birx: “.”

Debt Ceiling: .

Education Department: New Office of Educational Technology and Digital Promise report:

City & State News

California: . What’s keeping them from the classroom?

Colorado: The state Board of Education voted unanimously to select .

Missouri: .

New Jersey: this year, district says.

Pennsylvania: in Pennsylvania, new study finds.

• .

COVID-19 Research

• : “ of Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine safety among more than 3 million U.S. children aged 5 to 17 years flagged just 2 of 20 health outcomes among 12- to 17-year-olds — myocarditis and pericarditis, which were rare.”
• “ ‘Myocarditis or pericarditis is a rare event, with an average incidence of 39.4 cases per million doses administered in children aged 5 to 17 years within seven days after BNT162b2 [Pfizer] COVID-19 vaccination,’ the authors wrote. Previous studies have noted that the incidence of the two conditions is much higher after COVID-19 infection.”

• : “SARS-CoV-2 is nosediving across all metrics in all regions of the U.S.: hospitalizations, deaths, emergency room departments, and wastewater. Wastewater is still higher than in 2020 and 2021, though.”
• “We’ve been hitting new lows in death counts, too. In fact, excess deaths are hovering at only ~1% above pre-pandemic rates (at the height of the pandemic we were at 47%). In other words, things are looking good right now.”
• “Up until now, the CDC recommended that we ‘improve ventilation’ to reduce transmission. But by how much? Well, for the first time, CDC set minimum ventilation targets for indoor spaces: five air changes per hour. This may sound like boring news, but it’s huge for public health. Not just for viruses but health overall. While this standard isn’t mandatory, you should follow up with your business, school, place of worship, etc., to ensure it’s being met now.”

Viewpoints and Analyses

Moving from “Reform” to “Rethinking”

• : “The COVID-19 pandemic stressed and stretched schooling in unprecedented ways. Routines that had been in place for generations came to a crashing halt.”
• “During the pandemic, new routines took hold. Parents expressed frustration and an appetite for new options. The visibility into the curriculum and students’ work that came with remote learning led many parents to become newly engaged. … The pandemic fueled an explosion in homeschooling, greater familiarity with virtual learning and unprecedented declines in district enrollments.”
• “From my research and work with educators, I’ve learned that leaders who want to 
 meet this moment as open-minded ‘rethinkers’ rather than self-assured reformers, should take to heart five habits.”
  • Ask why 
 a lot!
  • Be precise and specific.
  • Be deliberate.
  • Know that new problems may call for new solutions.
  • Reject change for change’s sake.

5 Steps Districts Can Take to Prepare for a Big Financial Reckoning: 

• , the former chief financial officer for the District of Columbia Public Schools, shares five things districts should consider doing to keep students and their successes at the center of discussions about budget reductions:
  • Inventory district-funded programs, then examine student data.
  • Engage in strategic abandonment discussions.
  • Set your district’s priorities and create (or update) your five-year financial plan.
  • Budget for equity.
  • Innovate and experiment with new school models or staffing approaches.
    

The Pandemic Is Over, But the Education Emergency Continues

• “There is a divide between the reality of student learning loss and parents’ perceptions of learning loss.”
• “Learning loss is related not only to what happened in schools, but also to what happened in communities.”
• “Learning loss will become permanent unless learning time — student time on task — is increased.”
  

…And on a Lighter Note

• The Oscar for Best Drama Goes to: . Make sure to wait until the end.

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• “Babies and toddlers are being diagnosed with speech and language delays in greater numbers, part of developmental and academic setbacks for children of all ages after the pandemic. Children born during or slightly before the pandemic are more likely to have problems communicating compared with those born earlier, studies show. Speech therapists and doctors are struggling to meet the increased need for evaluation and treatment.”
• “In an analysis of nearly 2.5 million children younger than 5 years old, researchers 
 found that for each year of age, first-time speech delay diagnoses increased by an average of 1.6 times between 2018-19 and 2021-22. The highest increase was among 1-year-olds, the researchers said.”
• “Young children with delayed speech should get treatment as early as possible because children with communication problems tend to have more difficulty in school later on, speech and language experts said.”

The Big Three

Detroit Schools Got $1.3 Billion in COVID Relief. It Might Not Be Enough

• “With more than half the money already out the door, less than 1% has gone toward bringing students back to classrooms, according to officials, despite two-thirds of the district’s 53,400 students last year missing school at a threshold researchers say puts them academically at risk.”
• “Detroit is using COVID stimulus money to cover $700 million worth of expenses it typically pays for with its general fund, leaving the saved cash in its reserves with no spending deadline. The size of its general fund has swollen over 500% since stimulus funds began flowing and will be drawn down over the next five years, the district said.”

• “High-poverty school districts (46%) are much more likely to say they plan to spend remaining stimulus aid on addressing learning loss in elementary-grades math than are low-poverty school systems (29%).”
• “District and school leaders from high-poverty school systems will put a greater priority on learning recovery in secondary-grades math (40%) than will their peers in low-poverty systems (25%).”
• “K-12 officials from school districts in the Southern U.S. (46%) and Western states (36%) are significantly more likely to spend remaining stimulus money on learning recovery in elementary math than are those based in the Midwest (24%) and Northeast (21%).”

• “Americans are much more confident in routine childhood vaccines than COVID-19 shots, but support for vaccine requirements in schools has slipped from pre-pandemic levels, according to a new .”
• “What [Pew researchers] found: 88% of Americans believe the benefits of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella outweigh the risks, compared to 62% who have the same views about COVID-19 vaccines.”
• .

Federal Updates

Department of Health and Human Services: Announced “.” Innovative, community-led solutions to advance the mental health of children and youth. 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• to help protect people from respiratory infections, with a goal of at least five air changes each hour and upgraded filters.
• for K-12 Schools and Early Care and Education Programs to Support Safe In-Person Learning”

COVID-19 Research

• “Now entering its fourth year, the COVID-19 pandemic remains one of the most significant threats to global public health, at a cost of more than 6.5 million lives lost and trillions of dollars in lost economic output to date.”
• “In addition to direct effects of the pandemic, resultant economic, human security, political and national security implications of COVID-19 continue to strain recovery efforts, presenting both known and unforeseen challenges that probably will ripple through society and the global economy during the next year and for years to come.”
• “Countries globally remain vulnerable to the emergence or introduction of a novel pathogen that could cause a devastating new pandemic.”
• “The [intelligence community] continues to investigate how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, first infected humans, maintaining a Community of Interest across agencies.”

• “A new nationwide French comparing outcomes for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) for either influenza or COVID-19 due to acute respiratory failure shows that . The study was published yesterday in the Journal of Infection.”

City & State News

Kansas: .

New York: during the first half of the school year.

Rhode Island: “The Barrington School Committee has .”

• “Brittany DiOrio, Stephanie Hines and Kerri Thurber will each receive a payment of $33,333, a spokesperson for the school district announced. 
 Additionally, they will receive back pay: $65,000 for Hines, $128,000 for Thurber and $150,000 for DiOrio. The three teachers’ legal counsel will receive $50,000 in attorney’s fees.”

Utah: .

Viewpoints and Resources

: Via FutureEd with 86 pages of promising solutions. 

With New Grants, 5 States Could Lead the Way to Widespread, Effective Tutoring: Via Kevin Huffman

: Via Chalkbeat

: Via EdChoice and MorningConsult

: NYT essay by the members of Biden-Harris Transition COVID Advisory Board

: Via McKinsey


 And on a Lighter Note

Big Sports Weekend:

• .

• New world record for the : 856 feet.

• .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• Tom Kane and Sean Reardon in
• “Math, reading and history scores from the past three years show that students learned far less during the pandemic than was typical in previous years. By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.”
• “Our detailed geographic data reveals what national tests do not: The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.”
• “The pandemic left students in low-income and predominantly minority communities even further behind their peers in richer, whiter districts than they were.”
• “In the hardest-hit communities — where students fell behind by more than one and a half years in math 
 schools would have had to teach 150% of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row just to catch up.”

The Big Three

• /
• : “The decision was made on the advice of a panel of independent experts, the so-called COVID-19 emergency committee. 
 Though a couple of members of the committee were reportedly hesitant about the move, the majority agreed COVID no longer meets the criteria of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”

• “The WHO Emergency Committee believes three things: COVID-19 is not unusual and unexpected; cross-border transmission can’t (and won’t) be stopped; COVID-19 does not require a coordinated international response.”
• “This doesn’t mean the end of a pandemic.”

• “Reversing [the learning loss] crisis will require a historic investment. The good news is, that’s just what states and school districts have gotten from Congress: approximately $190 billion from coronavirus rescue plans.”
• “High-dosage tutoring, done correctly, could compensate [for COVID learning loss], giving kids as much as an additional year of growth every year it’s implemented.”
• “High-dosage tutoring is essential to make up for the learning loss COVID-19 has wrought. It could also help ensure future students don’t lose so much to begin with.”

• Via : “To help crystallize the events of the past three years, a team of 34 experts from public health, global health, science, academia and industry — called the — spent two years examining the nation’s response. [In April] they published a book on their investigation, .”
• “Group members held ‘listening sessions’ with nearly 300 people, and in the absence of a federal commission on the topic, they felt a duty to speak out about what they found.” 
• via USA Today

Federal Updates

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to Step Down June 30. ;

Department of Health and Human Services: fact sheet

• “We know so many people continue to be affected by COVID-19, particularly seniors, people who are immunocompromised and people with disabilities. That is why our response to the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, remains a public health priority. To ensure an orderly transition, we have been working for months so that we can continue to meet the needs of those affected by COVID-19.”
• Related:

Surgeon General: Released a facing our country, the destructive impacts it has on our collective health and the extraordinary healing power of our relationships. ;

National Center for Education Statistics: : 2022 NAEP Civics Assessment. ; ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

Education Department:

COVID-19 Research

Some Messages More Likely to Sway Parents to Vaccinate Kids Against COVID

• on new
• “A survey of 898 parents found that more were very likely to vaccinate their children against COVID-19 after reading messages indicating that other trusted parents have done so or that the vaccine is safe, but not when the messages said the vaccine is well-tolerated.”

How Well Does Masking Work? And Other Pandemic Questions We Need to Answer

• : “We should be systematically studying pandemic mitigation efforts in order to ‌learn which interventions are effective and how best to employ them. ‌Just as important: We should ‌‌do so with the understanding that the absence of evidence of effectiveness is not the same as having evidence of ineffectiveness.”

City & State News 

Ohio: “The state legislature recently expanded its , which provides qualifying families with a $1,000 credit per child for enrichment and educational activities.”

Tennessee: Penny Schwinn, influential state education chief, to step down.

Texas: Burbio analyzed 2022-23 enrollments in Texas. “ that have announced 2022-23 enrollments to date.”

Virginia: to parents of school-age children for tutoring in different subjects.

Viewpoints

Post-Pandemic, It’s Time for a Bold Overhaul of U.S. Public Education

• : “Education leaders must be brave and stand up and admit publicly and repeatedly that this system just isn’t working and discuss what is needed to improve it. Policymakers must revamp our education system’s faulty design and the failed policies that prevent us from trying new approaches.”
• “We believe that this can be achieved by making the future of learning more personalized, focused on the needs of individual learners, with success measured by progress and proficiency instead of point-in-time test scores.”

Teen Survey

• Via EdChoice and Morning Consult. ;
• Teens indicate their lives have improved in many areas since the height of the pandemic. They continue to feel better about their relationships with their close friends and immediate family since the pandemic. Stress and anxiety remain challenges.
• Less than 1 in 3 teens feel their school is handling mental health effectively.

How States Can Support Ongoing Academic Recovery

• Give parents clear, accessible information on their children’s progress and needs.
• Support the development of individualized learning plans for students.
• Provide individualized catch-up opportunities.


 And on a Lighter Note

Thank You Kaya: .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• : “This study extends research evidence to additional student outcomes — absences, course grades and grade retention — and to examine how pandemic effects are distributed across students.”
• “Using a combination of descriptive and regression analyses, we find negative average impacts on all outcomes.” 
• “Effects are also largest in middle school for most outcomes and are typically larger among historically marginalized groups of students.”

Top Three

• “Scent-trained dogs detected COVID-19 infection with 83% sensitivity and 90% specificity in nearly 3,900 screenings at California K-12 schools in spring 2022, according to a .” More via .
• ” ‘While modifications are needed before widespread implementation, and could be used for other pathogens,’ [researchers] concluded.”

• : “[Last week] in Pediatrics the safety data of the Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT-162b2) COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents ages 12 to 17 years. After one year, very few serious adverse events were reported, and instances of myocarditis (inflammation of heart muscle) were lower than initially reported.”
• “The authors conclude that the vaccine is safe for this age group, noting that the risk of cardiac disease after COVID-19 infection may be two- to sixfold higher than after vaccination.”

• : “AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and The Jed Foundation this week announced the initiative, called , that aims to provide school districts across the country with a framework of best practices, expert support and data-driven guidance about how to best support students’ mental health and prevent suicide.”
• “The organization’s guidance for high schools focuses on seven overarching themes: developing life skills, promoting social connectedness, encouraging help-seeking behaviors, improving recognition of signs of distress, access to mental health care, establishing crisis management procedures and promoting the importance of keeping lethal and dangerous items away from children.”
• Related: Despite ‘crisis,’ states and districts slow to spend $1B in mental health funds

Federal Updates

White House: . A potential replacement could be senior adviser Neera Tanden.

Education Department: .

Institute of Education Sciences: Director Mark Schneider shares his priorities.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: . .

City & State News

California: than before pandemic.

Michigan: as COVID funding comes to an end.

New York: “Enrollment in New York City’s public schools, the country’s largest school district, , according to a fiscal watchdog funded by the city.”

North Carolina: “A of North Carolina test results from the 2021-22 school year shows that students made significant strides from the previous year in recovering instructional time lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Ohio: .

COVID-19 Research

• “A of U.S. counties suggests that communities with schools that switched from remote to in-person instruction in fall 2020 four to eight weeks later than those that remained virtual.”
• “The magnitude of school contribution to community transmission found in this study must be interpreted in the context of the potential benefits of in-person instruction models on the academic, social, mental health and physical outcomes of many students.” 
• “The implications for future public health preparedness include consideration of the relatively small and manageable magnitude of school contribution to community transmission that may present a tolerable risk for the resumption of in-person education, with sufficient mitigation measures.”

• “Based on the , the [World Health Organization] on April 20 said it elevated XBB.1.16 from a variant under monitoring to a variant of interest.”
• “. XBB.1.16 doesn’t seem to come with additional health risks compared to XBB.1.5, but it may become dominant in some countries owing to its growth advantage and immune escape properties.”

In-Depth

• : “Thirteen of the nation’s 20 largest districts have added teletherapy since the pandemic began.”
• “ ‘It’s not for everybody, but for those students and parents who want that, it’s been fantastic,’ said JaMaiia Bond, who oversees student mental health services for Compton’s schools in California, which started offering teletherapy through Hazel Health this school year.”

• : “The movement, under the banner of ‘the science of reading,’ is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.”
• “Ohio, California and Georgia are the latest states to push for reform, adding to almost 20 states that have made moves in the last two years. Under pressure, school districts are scrapping their old reading programs.”

Bill Gates Talks Learning Recovery, AI and His Big Bet on Math

• Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: “There is a gigantic upside in improving our public education system, both economically and in terms of equity,” Gates said. “But the country’s not falling apart as much as you might think.”
• “The shortcomings of the U.S. education system are clear in terms of the inequity you end up with: the kind of jobs, salaries, mobility you’d like to see in society. Education is the great enabler of mobility, and we’re falling short on that.”
• “I think the predictions that this is going to hurt us in the long run are true, and we’d be further ahead if we were running our education system as well as we’d like to.”

…And on a Lighter Note

She Literally Did a Cartwheel: .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

New Campaign Tries to Convince Parents Their Kids Have Fallen Behind

• “The advertising campaign will target the six cities — Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, Sacramento County in California and Washington, D.C. — with displays of side-by-side data showing the percentage of students proficient in math or English in that city and the percentage of parents who think their child is at or above grade level in that subject.”
• “A — a nonprofit focused on ensuring parents have accurate information about students’ progress — found that 92% of parents believe their children are at grade level and doing fine in the classroom despite evidence that a majority of students are struggling.”
• More here:

The Big Three

What We Know So Far: Post COVID-19 Test Score Recovery

• : NBER paper from Clare Halloran, Claire Hug, Rebecca Jack and Emily Oster.
• “We use state test score data to analyze patterns of test score recovery over the 2021-22 school year.”
• “On average, we find that 20% of test score losses are recovered in English language arts (ELA) by 2022, compared to 37% in math.” 
• “These recovery rates do not significantly vary across demographic characteristics, baseline achievement rates, in-person schooling rates in the pandemic school year or category-based measures of recovery funding allocations.”
• Related: , led by Oster, is seeking input from education professionals, researchers and journalists who work with state assessment data, via a . The purpose of this is to better understand how the data are being used and to better understand areas for growth. 

Six Budget Considerations for Districts as ESSER Fiscal Cliff Looms

• “With the last federal COVID-19 relief fund deadline approaching in 18 months, district financial teams should prepare for financial stress over the next two years that could be worse than the last recession, according to Marguerite Roza, an education finance researcher and director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.”
• “While most district leaders don’t yet have a game plan, budgeting decisions made by districts later this spring — as well as earlier decision-making, like where they invested ESSER funds — will determine how well they are able to weather the storm.”
• .

National COVID Emergency Ends

• President Joe Biden has .
• However: “The law Biden signed Monday — along with the Trump-era Title 42 border policy.”

COVID-19 Research

School Closures During COVID-19: An Overview of Systematic Reviews

• : “Both school closures and in-school mitigations were associated with reduced COVID-19 transmission, morbidity and mortality in the community. School closures were also associated with reduced learning, increased anxiety and increased obesity in pupils.”

Scientists Continue to Debate COVID-19 Origins

• : “Chinese researchers who isolated three live SARS-CoV-2 viruses and viral DNA from environmental samples at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, say the findings , according to a published today in Nature.”

City & State News

Florida: .

• “An analysis that was the basis of a highly criticized recommendation from Florida’s surgeon general cautioning young men against getting the COVID-19 vaccine omitted information that showed catching the virus could increase the risk of a cardiac-related death much more than getting the mRNA shot, according to drafts of the analysis obtained by the .”

Tennessee: A state law could in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic.

California: during spring break in Los Angeles Unified.

These 15 states could take the biggest hit as ESSER funds expire: on a new .

Viewpoints

America’s Teens Are in Crisis. States Race to Respond

• : “Responding to clamoring from parents, and dreadful stories of youth suicide and hospitalizations, leaders in both parties convey an increasing sense of urgency to address epidemic levels of teenage anxiety, depression, loneliness and lashing out.”
• Related: Teen mental health crisis pushes more school districts to sue social media giants, via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

Rewrite Attendance Laws to Promote Learning, Not Seat Time

• : “Two depressing developments of the past couple years have given birth to a radical idea: Let’s rethink state ‘compulsory attendance’ laws so that they’re phrased in terms of kids learning rather than years in school.”
• First: “Evidence that lots of students are not availing themselves of high-dose tutoring when it’s available, no matter how much they need and would benefit from it, and they’re not signing up for summer school, either.”
• Second: “The growing number of districts and schools that are moving to four-day weeks, ostensibly to deal with budget woes and teacher shortages, ease burn-out and forestall quitting.”
• “Maybe, finally, today we’ve reached an inflection point where, with the help of better assessments, lots of 24/7 technology and much greater concern with ‘readiness,’ we should ease off the focus on time and refocus instead on mastery.”
• Related analysis via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: Students in 4-day-a-week schools can suffer COVID-level learning losses

…And on a Lighter Note

It’s Officially Spring:

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

Awash in Federal Money, State Lawmakers Tackle Worsening Youth Mental Health

• Via Stateline
• New York City: “Mayor Eric Adams announced a broad mental health agenda that includes a youth suicide prevention program.”
• North Carolina: “Gov. Roy Cooper declared that the state would spend $7.7 million to provide suicide prevention training for university and community college personnel, create a mental health hotline for students and develop resiliency training for faculty, staff and students.”
• New Jersey: “Gov. Phil Murphy unveiled a $14 million mental health grant program that targets K-12 schools with the greatest need.”
• Rhode Island: “Gov. Daniel McKee introduced a $7.2 million program to train K-12 school employees to detect mental illness and suicide risk, respond to it and connect students and families to community social services.”
• “Last year, Illinois, Iowa and Maryland launched programs to provide mental health training for school personnel.”
• “And Arizona, California and South Carolina raised Medicaid reimbursement rates to incentivize behavioral health providers to provide services in schools.”
• Related: California .

The Big Three

• “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. 
• Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada: “I feel like I just need to stand on a mountaintop and just yell, ‘Take this seriously! Everything is at stake right now!’ “
• ” ‘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.’ “

COVID Exploited Political Divisions Along With Racial and Health Disparities

• on a new in The Lancet. More via .
• “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, D.C.”
• “Overall, they found that states with higher poverty, lower levels of education, less access to quality health care and less trust in others had disproportionately higher rates of COVID infections and deaths.”

Education Department Approves Extensions for ESSER Spending

• directed to districts, known as the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief I, said James Lane, senior adviser in the Office of the Secretary, in an email to K-12 Dive.”
• “The seven states, along with the District of Columbia, that requested and received approval to extend districts’ ESSER I spending timeline now have until March 30, 2024, or 14 months beyond Jan. 28, 2023, to draw down those funds.”
• The states are Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.

Federal Updates

White House Disbanding Its COVID-19 Team in May: .

Food and Drug Administration Authorizes Pfizer Bivalent COVID Booster for Kids 6 Months Through Age 4: In amending the emergency use authorization, the FDA said the .

City & State News

New Budget Numbers: from New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, plus Seattle, from Burbio.

Connecticut: “Gov. Ned Lamont and Education Commissioner Charlene M. Russell Tucker today that the Connecticut State Department of Education is preparing to launch the — a new statewide program for students in grades 6 to 9 that will provide intensive tutoring in mathematics to accelerate learning and address learning loss resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Illinois: Wednesday but still promised to increase funds for pandemic recovery, migrant students and other needs in the coming school year’s budget.

Michigan:

New Mexico

• Online tutoring company
• In rare move, New Mexico adds weeks’ worth of extra K-12 class time

COVID-19 Research

Do We Need a Spring COVID-19 Booster?

• “If you’re immunocompromised and/or an older adult with a comorbidity (and it’s been six months since an infection or last booster), a spring booster may be a good idea to stay ahead of the virus.”
• “Will it be official U.S. policy? We don’t know. There are rumors of FDA conversations happening behind closed doors. Hopefully, we will have an answer soon. But, as you can tell, it’s not a straightforward call.”

COVID Origins 

• Advisers to the World Health Organization have urged China to after new findings were briefly shared on an international database used to track pathogens.
• New York Times: “An international team of virus experts said 
 that they had , adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade.”
• Vox: “.”

Viewpoints

Most Americans Doubt Their Children Will Be Better Off

• on a new
• The poll shows “shows growing skepticism about the value of a college degree and record-low levels of overall happiness.”

Schools Bought Tech to Accelerate Learning. Is It Working?

• “With federal COVID-relief funding, schools purchased tech tools to help students make up for the unfinished learning that happened during the most critical period of the pandemic. 
• “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 
 is an example many experts pointed to. A 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.”

• “The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and the mobile phone. .”


 And on a Lighter Note

The Look-a-Like Cam: — wait for the end.

Happy National Puppy Day: .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• “ ‘Parents can’t solve a problem that they don’t know they have,’ said Cindi Williams, co-founder of Learning Heroes.”
• “Evena Joseph was unaware how much her 10-year-old son was struggling in school. She found out only with help from somebody who knows the Boston school system better than she does.”
• “The progress report for Tamela Ensrud’s second-grade son in Nashville shows mostly As and a B in English, but she noticed her son was having trouble with reading. She asked to discuss her son’s reading test scores at a fall parent-teacher conference but was only shown samples of her son’s work and told, ‘Your son is doing well.’ ”
• “Opportunities to catch up are plentiful in some places, thanks to federal COVID aid, but won’t last forever. It will take better communication with parents to help students get the support they need, experts say.”

  

  The Big Three

  • “Before the pandemic, about 8 million U.S. students were considered chronically absent, according to the research group Attendance Works. That’s when a student misses 10% or more of the school year. By spring 2022, that number had doubled to around 16 million.”
  • “In a survey of 21 school districts in rural, suburban and urban areas, NPR found most districts 
 still had heightened levels of chronic absenteeism.”
  • Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto Carvalho “describes the same attendance challenges NPR heard from multiple districts around the country: a youth mental health crisis, heightened fear around health concerns, transportation difficulties and poverty and homelessness, which can make it difficult for students to keep a routine around going to school.”
  • “Even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, only a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.”
  • “In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall.”
  • “The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.”

  

  • reports on a new
  • “25.9% said they had lied about their child’s COVID-19 status or failed to adhere to at least one of seven recommended behaviors meant to curtail viral transmission.”
  • “The most common untruth was not telling someone who was going to spend time with their child that they knew or suspected the child had COVID-19, and the most common adherence failure was allowing their child to break quarantine rules. A total of 19.4% of parents didn’t have their child tested for COVID-19 when they suspected infection.”
  • “Just over half of parents who lied (52.4%) said they exposed others to their ill child because they wanted to exercise their parental autonomy, while others said their child didn’t feel very sick (47.6%), they didn’t want to miss a fun event to stay home (44.4%) or they didn’t want their child to miss school (42.9%).”

  Federal Updates

  National Center for Education Statistics:

  • This data challenge invites members of the AI community to develop predictive models for scoring open-ended NAEP mathematics assessment items.
  • The total prize purse for the challenge will be $100,000. The application deadline is April 17, 2023.

  National Telecommunications and Information Administration: Is of two components of the Digital Equity Act of 2021: the $1.44 billion State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program and the $1.25 billion Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program.

  White House: The Office of Science and Technology Policy will host a series of virtual listening sessions to inform the development of the 2023-28 Federal STEM Strategic Plan. . (If you would like to provide information in addition to or in lieu of your participation in the listening session, you may send a brief message to stemstrategy@ostp.eop.gov.)

  COVID-19 Research

  • The Food and Drug Administration and CDC sent a , warning him that his claims about COVID-19 vaccine risks are harmful to the public.
  • “The claim that the increase of [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public.”
  • on a new .
  • “People who tended to report lower trust in public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the pandemic believed those agencies’ health recommendations were politically influenced and inconsistent, according to a study published Monday in Health Affairs.”

  City and State News

  Illinois: “, district officials cautioned principals during a recent meeting, though the district said in a statement the rate ticked up above last year’s February rate, to about 88%.”

  Missouri: Students did worse across the board on the latest round of standardized testing, with 112 districts and charter schools scoring low enough to be classified as provisionally accredited.

  Oregon: As Portland Public Schools prepares to close its at the end of the school year, .

  Virginia: Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that some families would soon be able to .

  Viewpoints and Analyses

  • “What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
  • “At worst, it could signal a new generation with little faith in the value of a college degree. At minimum, it appears those who passed on college during the pandemic are opting out for good.”
  • “Fewer college graduates could worsen labor shortages in fields from health care to information technology. For those who forgo college, it usually means lower lifetime earnings — 75% less compared with those who get bachelor’s degrees.”

  Done Right, Tutoring Can Greatly Boost Student Learning. How Do We Get There?

  • Via Kevin Huffman in ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ
  • “I worry that policymakers will pretend high-dosage tutoring is happening at scale and then, when student outcomes do not measurably improve, declare that it hasn’t worked. “
  • “Early evidence suggests there are multiple ways to effectively deliver tutoring — not just the frequent, in-person, one-to-one or small group models that have been tested in the past. We have grantees using in-person instruction, remote delivery of person-to-person tutoring, artificial intelligence-enabled programs with human facilitation and additional hybrid models.”
  • “States can remove barriers and issue specific guidance on grant and funding opportunities. They can offer models and waivers for implementing tutoring during the school day. And they can set expectations for accountability and reporting student progress.”
  • Related: Researcher Matthew Kraft on How the Right Tutoring Materials & Training Can Help Students Progress
  • “McKinsey surveyed more than 1,800 U.S. educators, school leaders and school mental health professionals at the end of the 2021-22 school year.” 
  • “Approximately one-third of respondents said they planned to leave their role before the next school year began.”
  • “Teachers who are thinking of leaving cite compensation, unreasonable expectations and an inability to protect their well-being as their top motivators 
 while those who plan to stay cite meaningful work, quality colleagues and compensation.”
  • “Though our research shows that compensation is a top driver of both attrition and retention, school districts typically do not have much leeway to alter salary ranges. States and districts are exploring different models of addressing compensation concerns.”
  • “Districts and state education systems could also consider tailoring bonuses to teacher segments that are particularly prone to attrition.”

  …And on a Lighter Note

  A prophet for what was to come: The sixth anniversary of Robert Kelly’s .

  Dogs Ask:

  https://twitter.com/buitengebieden/status/1632660021904384001?s=20

  For even more COVID policy and education news, .

  Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

• “By March 25, every public school building in the country had been closed, taking more than 50 million students out of the classroom.”
• “What this means is that paradoxically, the age group that was most resistant to the virus itself may be the group that pays the biggest price over the longest term. Call it the ‘other long COVID’ — and it’s something the U.S. is only beginning to grapple with.”
• “One survey found that on average, children missed 26 days’ worth of school through the first half of the 2021-22 school year, while a New York Times survey found that in January 2022, in the midst of the Omicron outbreak, a majority of students were at home for at least three days, while almost one in 10 were out for half the month or more.”
• ” ‘Learning loss’ may be the term experts agreed on when describing the effect of pandemic school disruptions, but for the most part, students didn’t suddenly lose what they had already achieved before the pandemic.”
• “Rather, they lost the opportunity and the time to build on what they knew. And while that may have been a temporary hindrance for high-achieving students who had the support at home to catch up, it was nothing short of catastrophic for marginalized students of color who before the pandemic might have had the resources of their school, and little else.”
• “An estimated 1 million students didn’t just experience learning loss; they lost school altogether, dropping out or disappearing, an outcome disproportionately seen among Black and Hispanic students. They were also more likely to be among the growing number of students who postponed or canceled college enrollment during the pandemic, which cuts them off from what is still one of the surest paths to the middle class.”

The Big Three

• “Experts say that purposefully aligning tutoring to curriculum content … helps kids get the support they need to be successful in class.”
• “Even so, accomplishing this kind of alignment is complex and time-consuming. And it can fall low on the priority list for districts that are struggling with more basic challenges, like hiring staff or retooling the master schedule to support tutoring.”
• “Only one in 10 students actually get this [high-impact] tutoring, though, according to recent federal data.”
• “And much of schools’ energy right now is focused on program logistics — even though most district leaders understand that aligning tutoring to classroom instruction should be their ultimate goal,” one expert said.

• “But how much do masks reduce transmission? Studies have attempted to answer this:
  • “Mask wearing corresponded to a 19% decrease in the R(0) in one study. In other words, masks helped reduce transmission.
  • “In Bangladesh, villages were randomized to be provided free masks. Villages that got the intervention had more than double the mask usage than villages that didn’t (13% vs. 42%). This resulted in a 9% reduction in cases in the mask-wearing villages.
  • “In the U.S., a 10% increase in mask wearing was associated with greater control of transmission.
  • “In Germany, mask mandates reduced spread by 45%.”
• “These studies found a huge range (9%-45%) and reflect vastly different settings and cultures. We need more studies.”
• “If we just look at the mask studies, the [recent] included 12 studies. But the details matter,” and the studies have limitations. For example, the review includes studies about influenza, which is less contagious than COVID-19. 
• The bottom line: “The scientific ‘arc’ of mask discovery is ongoing. Science is always evolving. Do not let anyone convince you of a one word answer to the question: Do masks work? It depends.”
• More via The Conversation:

Despite K-2 Reading Gains, Results Flat for 3rd Grade ‘COVID Kids’

• Via the 74
• “The percentage of third graders on track in reading hasn’t budged since this time last year, according to a new .”
• “The test’s administrators are interpreting the flatline at 54% as good news. Paul Gazzerro, director of data analysis at curriculum provider Amplify, said it’s likely that third graders would have fallen even further behind without efforts like tutoring and additional group instruction.”
• “It looks as if nothing happened, but the reality is I would’ve suspected that things could’ve gotten worse,” he said. “These are students in many cases that are missing very tangible skills. They may even be grade levels behind.’

COVID-19 Research

Previous COVID-19 May Slash Severe Illness at Reinfection by 89%

• on a new
• “Our meta-analyses showed that protection from past infection and any symptomatic disease was high for ancestral, Alpha, Beta and Delta variants, but was substantially lower for the Omicron BA.1 variant.”
• ” ‘Vaccination is the safest way to acquire immunity, whereas acquiring natural immunity must be weighed against the risks of severe illness and death associated with the initial infection,’ senior author Stephen Lim, P.h.D, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, said in a .”

Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says

• Via and
• “New intelligence has prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic, though U.S. spy agencies remain divided over the origins of the virus, American officials said on Sunday. Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with ‘low confidence.’ … While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.”
• “ ‘The intelligence community and the rest of the government is still looking at this,’ National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said. ‘, so it’s difficult for me to say — nor should I feel like I should have to defend press reporting about a possible preliminary indication here. What the president wants is facts.’ ”
• : “Underlying all of this is that there is the possibility of a lab leak, and a possibility of a natural spillover, and a possibility of intentional lab leaks. We need to address all of these to ensure a safer future. I’m afraid we’re losing sight of this.”

City & State News

Tennessee:

• 8 out of 10 teachers believed that the tutoring their students had received is associated with improved academic performance in their classroom. 
• Over 20% of teachers reported that they do not have access to training or resources to help students with mental health issues or trauma.
• 53% said adapting to quarantines was a challenge.

Arizona:

California: .

Michigan:

Viewpoints and Analyses

• “Last year, when it became clear that a nationwide expansion of summer school would not be happening, I led a group of philanthropists in creating Summer Boost in New York City.”
• “More than 16,000 students from 224 schools participated. At the end of the summer, we tested students to assess their progress, and the results were encouraging.”
• “The percentage of students who met grade-level standards in math nearly doubled — and in English, it more than doubled. The share of students scoring below the most basic levels of proficiency fell by nearly half. By the end of the summer session, many students had caught up and were back on track for success. But in much of the country, students didn’t spend any of their summer vacations in classrooms.”
• “Because of the strong results
 we have decided to run the program again this summer — and expand it to charter schools in seven other cities: Baltimore; Birmingham, Alabama; Indianapolis; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; San Antonio; and Washington.”

Top Priorities for 39 Governors in 2023

• Analysis by FutureEd via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ
• “The COVID pandemic — the topic that has dominated education conversations for the past three years — is largely missing from the State of the State addresses that governors are delivering to their legislatures this winter.”
• An analysis of 39 State of the State speeches “found that despite the academic gaps exposed in last year’s National Assessment for Educational Progress scores, there was surprisingly little talk of learning loss and efforts to catch students up. There was also little explicit ‘culture war’ rhetoric around teaching racial history or banning books — and more lofty talk about the value of education.”
• Some of the most common education topics were teacher pay, school choice, curriculum and instruction, higher education, workforce development, early education and mental health. 


 And on a Reflective Note

Trey Louis Sings “Stone” by Whiskey Myers: “” suffered a school shooting in May 2018, during which he lost eight of his friends and two of his teachers.

Grin and Bear It: Colorado wildlife camera captures hundreds of adorable “.”

• Boulder’s Open Space and Mountain Parks team set out to track animals that live in the area using motion-capture cameras — but they were surprised to find that .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

Thousands of Kids Are Missing From School. Where Did They Go?

• Coverage from , and .
• “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 homeschool, 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 Big Three

Half of Public School Students Began 2022-23 School Year Behind Grade Level in at Least One Academic Subject

• (; more from , ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and )
• “Public school leaders estimated that about half — 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, and 81% of public schools have used remedial instruction techniques. Over half (59%) of public schools 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.”
• “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.”

CDC Recommends COVID-19 Vaccine in Routine Immunizations for Children

• reports on the released Feb. 10.
• “While the recommendation does not mean vaccines will be required for school attendance — a requirement that is set by states — many states do look to the CDC for guidance on the issue and have routinely depended on the agency to set policy around COVID-19 precautions.”
• “Despite early debate over schools potentially requiring the [COVID] shot, localities have mostly pushed off the decision or dropped it entirely.”

States Are Flush With Cash, Which Could Soften a Possible Recession

• “States will hold an estimated $136.8 billion in rainy-day funds this fiscal year, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, up from $134.5 billion a year earlier, when they represented 0.53% of gross domestic product, the highest in records going back to 1988. This year’s figure would represent roughly 12.4% of their total spending.”
• “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said state and local governments ‘are really flush these days,’ which could support economic growth this year.”
• “Moody’s Analytics estimates 39 states have the reserves necessary to offset all the revenue expected to be lost in a relatively mild recession. Four more are within striking distance.”

COVID-19 Research

Strengthening the U.S. Pandemic Response in a Free Society

• COVID Collaborative, the CSIS Global Health Policy Center and the Brown School of Public Health released .”
• “As a leading democracy, the United States possessed assets, such as highly sophisticated science and technology traditions, which should have enabled the nation to launch a rapid response and deploy interventions with laser-like focus on managing infectious disease outbreaks and biological events. But 
 the pandemic placed excessive stress on its health care system, and the United States had a higher death rate than comparable countries because of leadership failings, because it had insufficient tools in its arsenal of public health measures and because it used those tools too ineffectively.”
• “National crises have historically brought the country together. Yet, the United States was unable to organize cohesive leadership at the national, state, local and tribal levels, and it failed to rapidly unify its citizens to act in solidarity to suppress the emerging pandemic and overcome preexisting health and other social inequities that exacerbated the toll of the pandemic.”
• “More must be done to empower communities by providing a larger menu of options for responding to pandemics that can be tailored to their specific needs and values and that provide feedback loops from the public to adjust the response over time.”

We Still Don’t Know How Best to Slow the Spread of COVID-19

• “When it comes to [non-pharmaceutical interventions, known as NPIs], every angry person online has a strong belief that if only we had spent more time promoting mask wearing, been more like Sweden with its government-sponsored health care and incredibly generous paid sick leave provisions, or done something, anything, better than we did, we could have averted the mass death, disability and orphanhood that COVID-19 caused. However, given the lack of data, it’s remarkably hard to know exactly how we could have used NPIs more effectively.”
• “The most strident critics of government interventions and of public health measures during COVID-19 go so far as to say that the ‘cure was worse than the disease’ — that is, they think NPIs killed more people than COVID-19 itself. Our research found no evidence for this assertion; we found that letting the virus rip through the population in an uncontrolled way was much deadlier, at least in the short term, than the most stringent NPIs, such as shelter-in-place orders.”
• “Nevertheless 
 highly restrictive NPIs clearly caused harms. For example, prolonged shelter-in-place orders were linked with an increase in harmful alcohol use and domestic violence. However, there has been little in the way of research on the trade-offs — that is, on understanding the balance between the harms of uncontrolled viral transmission versus those of NPIs. And it can also be very difficult to distinguish the impacts of the pandemic itself from the harms of NPIs.”
• “There’s no doubt, for example, that prolonged school closures affected children’s mental health, but so did losing a parent or other caregiver to COVID-19.”

To Mask or Not to Mask: That Is (Somehow) Still a Question

• “When faced with this kind of debate, many hope the answer could be found in formal scientific research. Which brings us to the recent , which considered whether physical interventions — including masks — reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Cochrane Reviews are widely considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine.”
• ” ‘Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference,’ the review authors concluded of their work comparing masking with non-masking to prevent influenza or SARS-CoV-2. What’s more, even for health care workers providing routine care, ‘there were no clear differences’ between medical or surgical masks versus N95s.”
• “But as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The review doesn’t show that masks definitely do not reduce the spread of COVID — only that studies to date have not proven that they do.”
• “ ‘The Cochrane Review tells us two important things. First, there have been very few high-quality studies examining the effectiveness of masks during the COVID pandemic, and second, from the little high-quality data we do have, we don’t see large impacts of masking in preventing viral infections on the population level,’ Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the pandemic center at Brown University School of Public Health, told Slate. ‘This doesn’t necessarily mean masks don’t protect individuals. But it could mean that the way they’re used at the population level is not effective. We need more randomized trials to understand why.’ ”

COVID Deaths 5 Times Lower After Bivalent vs. Monovalent Booster

• on a new CDC .
• “Recipients of the bivalent (two-strain) COVID-19 vaccine booster were 14 times less likely to die of Omicron BA.4/BA.5 infections than their unvaccinated peers and 5 times less likely to die than recipients of the monovalent (single-strain) booster, particularly among older people.”

City & State News

California: The Los Angeles County Office of Education, in partnership with L.A. Care Health Plan, Health Net, their plan partners and the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, through Hazel Health.

Colorado: . Are they missing or in private school?

Connecticut: School districts are dealing with two major issues: . In Hamden, school leaders say that without help from the state or taxpayers, program cuts are possible.

Florida: .

Michigan: .

New York:  

• .
• “The nation’s largest school district has hemorrhaged students since the start of the pandemic, in grades K-12 since then.”

Washington: .

Viewpoints and Analyses

Teacher Shortages Continue

• : Most of the U.S. is dealing with a teaching shortage, but the data isn’t so simple.
• “Between October and the end of January, ABC News reached out by phone and email to the overarching education departments in all 50 states as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
• “As of Feb. 9, at least 39 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands — 41 out of 53 surveyed — reported ongoing shortages. Many also reported subject matter vacancies in areas such as physical and special education and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”
• Related:

How Much Faith Should Educators Have in High-Dosage Tutoring?

• : “I think there’s some real value here, but that it depends on how tutoring is designed and employed.”
• One solution: “Research has pointed to the promise of intensive vacation-academy programs in which groups of struggling students devote a week-long break to a single subject. With student-teacher ratios of roughly 10 to 1, these programs are relatively inexpensive, but they’re also more akin to classroom teaching. That means they require experienced teachers. Again, incorporating these is feasible but requires rethinking school calendars, schedules and teacher roles and compensation.”

…And on a Lighter Note

Valentine’s Day: .

National Anthem: .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This is our weekly briefing on the pandemic, vetted by John Bailey. .

This Week’s Top Story

White House to End COVID Public Health Emergency May 11

The White House announced plans to end the public health emergency for COVID-19 on May 11.

• Kaiser Family Foundation . 
• Education angle: A Biden administration official told the AP “that ending the health emergencies , saying the COVID-19 pandemic affected millions of student borrowers who might have fallen behind on their loans during the emergency.”
• The COVID-19 emergency’s end will mean new costs and hassles. .
  • Many will have to pay for COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments. People without health insurance will have to pay out of pocket, while those with private plans could see more costs, depending on the terms of their coverage.
  • Employers will no longer be able to offer telehealth access as a premium, tax-free benefit separate from other health plans.
  • Other administrative rules that helped people receive their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits will end.
• White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha posted a .

The Big Three

Students Lost One-Third of a School Year to Pandemic 

• on a new : “Children experienced learning deficits during the COVID pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year’s worth of knowledge and skills, according to a new global analysis, and had not recovered from those losses more than two years later.”
• “Thomas Kane, the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, who has studied school interruptions in the United States, reviewed the global analysis. Without immediate and aggressive intervention, he said, ‘learning loss will be the longest-lasting and most inequitable legacy of the pandemic.’ ”
• “A separate review of test scores from 2.1 million students in the United States highlighted the impacts of economic disparity. Students at schools in communities with high poverty levels spent more of the 2020-2021 school year learning remotely than those at schools in wealthier communities did, and students in poorer schools experienced steeper declines in performance when they were remote.”
• ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ shares 4 top takeaways
  

Engaging Chronically Absent Students

• A shows that the Connecticut Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP) made a significant difference in reducing absenteeism, particularly with secondary school students.
• : “The new research is important for two reasons. First, it showcases a powerful intervention for improving student attendance, which is essential for academic recovery. Second, it highlights a second Connecticut initiative: using federal aid to create a research consortium that can turn around results quickly and guide district-level work.”
• “Fifteen school districts received money for Connecticut’s LEAP program, which they used to pay school staff and community organizers to visit nearly 8,700 chronically absent students and families at their homes or other locations. One district targeted entire neighborhoods rather [than] concentrating on students with the most severe absenteeism problems and saw little change in attendance patterns.”

Schools’ New Normal: Teacher Shortages, Repeat Meals, Late Buses, Canceled Classes

• Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: “This is the new normal in schools across the country: Classes are back in person but day-to-day operations are a far cry from pre-pandemic norms, the lingering effects of the COVID crisis challenging everything from staffing and student mental health to school lunches.”
• “By 5 a.m., a high schooler in a small city between Orlando and Tampa, Florida, is up — sleep deprived but with a sense of urgency: He has to reach the Wesley Chapel bus hub by 5:59 a.m, to get to class by 7:06 a.m. His school now starts earlier to make up for hurricane days and remote learning.”
• “At a Milwaukee Catholic high school, social studies teacher Mary Talsky has noticed lots of empty seats. For every email about a kid out sick, she gets three to four times more about absences because of mental health issues: My kid is struggling with anxiety and can’t come in today; I’m taking my child to an appointment with a psychiatrist.”
  

Federal Updates

Education Department: “$63 Million to Expand Community Schools and Increase Social, Emotional, Mental Health and Academic Support for Students, Educators and Families.” ()

• The White House also released a .

Education Department: Secretary Miguel Cardona highlighted the key focus areas of “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” in a speech ( / )

Institute of Education Sciences: for Individuals with Disabilities.

COVID-19 Research

FDA Advisers Recommend Replacing Original COVID Vaccine With Bivalent Omicron Shots for All Doses

• The Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory group unanimously recommended streamlining COVID-19 vaccine campaigns by offering just the newer bivalent (two-strain) versions of the vaccine for both primary and booster series.
• : “The FDA has proposed moving to a system that resembles how the agency updates and rolls out flu shots every year. The agency would select a COVID vaccine formulation in June to target the variant that is expected to dominate in the fall and winter. That formulation would be used by all manufacturers for all doses.”
• More via and
• Stat shared a of the meeting.

Annual COVID-19 Booster? FDA Cliffs Notes

• : “The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] presented data that is not surprising: Most hospitalizations and deaths occur among older adults. Interestingly, children under 6 months are being hospitalized at about the same rates as those aged 50-64 years. This highlights the importance of maternal vaccination during pregnancy.”
• “The bivalent vaccines are working well. Adults who received a bivalent booster had 3 times lower risk of hospitalization and 2 times lower risk of dying compared to those who were vaccinated but did not get the bivalent booster. Both were more effective than no vaccination.”
• “Moderna surprised us today with new data, though: a randomized trial in the U.K. They randomly gave people the original vaccine or the bivalent vaccine (BA.1 formula) as a booster. The bivalent vaccine did better. This really put the debate to rest.”
• “I was excited to see Novavax data. It’s clear this is a solid vaccine. And their presentation was much more useful than Moderna’s or Pfizer’s. To demonstrate, they included data on mixing Novavax with mRNA vaccines. It looks like no matter how you mix the two, the combinations work about the same way.”

New Study Finds Vaccines Are Safe and Effective for Kids

• on a new : “Two doses of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine among school-aged children safely and effectively reduces COVID-19 infection risk as well as associated risks for developing multisystem inflammatory syndrome and COVID-19 related hospitalizations.”
• “[Researchers] found vaccinated children had lower rates of infection and less severe symptoms if they did end up infected. Severe reactions to the shot were rare, and any local injection irritation went away after several days. The low rates of severe side effects should be reassuring for parents and guardians worried about adverse events following vaccination, according to the study’s authors.”
• “The study also found only a small increase in risk for kids to develop inflammation of the heart (myocarditis) after COVID-19 vaccination. It found that there are 1.8 cases of myocarditis per million children who get two doses of the vaccine, a comparable or slightly higher rate than in children diagnosed with myocarditis before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

City & State News

Arizona: A for Arizona , an initiative to modernize and improve access to reliable and safe transportation for students. The is open until March 29. 

Illinois:

• “Preliminary data released last week by the Illinois State Board of Education shows overall enrollment dropped by about 31,000 students — or 1.7% — between last school year and the current one, according to numbers as of Dec. 14.”
• “Chicago Public Schools accounts for at least a quarter of the decline. The district lost 9,000 students and its place as the third-largest school district in the country.”

Indiana: , but remain far from 2025 goal.

Michigan: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants .

• “Students in Lansing and Saginaw lost the equivalent of a , while students in Birmingham lost about a fifth of a school year, new data shows, according to a .”

North Carolina: A report released by the Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration found that

In-Depth

A Teacher Shortage So Acute That Students Have to Learn Without One

• “In rural Mississippi, the geometry teacher is a recording. The chemistry students often teach themselves. Rural and Southern states face a crisis.”
• “Researchers trying to understand the teacher shortage could find sufficient data for only 37 states, and among those, Mississippi’s was the worst. For every 10,000 students there, 69 teacher positions are unfilled or filled by someone without traditional credentials. That’s 159 times the ratio in Missouri, according to their working paper, published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform.”
• Related: A Practical Toolkit for Leaders to Address Teacher Shortages,

Schools Speed Up COVID-Aid Spending after a Slow Start: .

• “Districts have drawn on about a quarter of the $122 billion in federal money, up from 7% in May.”
• “Illinois has spent about 32% of its $4.8 billion in federal pandemic relief and is on track to meet the deadline for depleting the funds,” said ​​Krish Mohip, deputy chief of operational education for the Illinois State Board of Education. “Salaries are the largest category for schools’ pandemic relief spending in the state, accounting for almost 37% of those expenditures, he said.”
• “New York City’s school system, the largest in the U.S., has used about [a third], spending more than $1.5 billion of the $4.8 billion it received, according to city education officials. New York City is allocating just over 30% of the money for academic recovery efforts such as literacy programs.”

How Parenting Today Is Different, and Harder

• on the recent
• “Today’s parents spend more time and money on their children than previous generations — working mothers spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers of the 1970s — and feel more pressure to be hands-on. Especially for college-educated mothers with careers, the demands have caught them off guard, economists have found.”
• “At the same time, many jobs have become all-consuming, paying people disproportionately more per hour for working long hours and being available anytime — but at a cost.”

At $611 a Day Per Student, Some Question if L.A. Schools’ Extra Learning Days Are Worth It

• : Extra learning days “came at considerable expense — about $611 per day per student for up to two added ‘acceleration days.’ “
• “The bonus schooling on Dec. 19 and 20 cost $36 million. After a heavy promotional push, about 17% of the district’s 422,276 students signed up; however, less than 9%, or 36,486, showed up, according to newly released data.”
• “Other problems emerged. Some teachers complained they were unable to plan effectively because they did not have advance access to rosters and student data. Under the plan, students were divided by groups into those who needed to catch up and those who would receive enrichment.”

…And on a Lighter Note

The Detroit Youth Choir:

“It’s a Lovely, Warm Feeling. I Belong.” .

Thank you for reading to the end! to share what you think of this series.

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story 

Schools Sink Money into Tutoring, but Some Programs Fall Short 

• “Federal data collected in June showed that 56% of schools reported using high-impact — also called ‘high-dosage’ — tutoring and 36% of schools reported using other forms. Some school leaders say they use multiple kinds of tutoring.”
• “Virginia’s Fairfax County is a good example of the drawbacks. Less than 2% of the student body used an opt-in tutoring service — — after it debuted for the final quarter of the previous school year, according to an internal analysis. Most of those who did log in used it for less than an hour — the median was 29 minutes — ‘an amount of time that is unlikely to yield tangible benefits to student achievement, particularly for those with greater academic need,’ the analysis said. A majority of those who accessed the online tutoring were students who did not demonstrate academic need, the report said.”
• “Research 
 showed just 19% of students ever opted into an online tutoring service offered by a California charter school system, according to a published by EdWorking Papers.”
• “Opt-in services often falter because some students lack confidence, motivation or clarity about what they need, so they don’t sign in, said Anthony Salcito, chief institution business officer at Varsity Tutors, a longtime tutoring company.”

The Big Three 

Study Notes Racial Disparities in Kids’ COVID Vaccine Uptake

• on a new
• By Aug. 31, 2022, 33.2% of all children aged 5 to 11 years, 59% of those aged 12 to 15 and 68.6% of 16- to 17-year-olds had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Uptake was highest among Asian children (range, 63.4% of 5- to 11-year-olds to 91.8% of those 16 to 17 years), followed by Hispanic youth (34.5% to 77.3%).
• Vaccination rates among Black and white children aged 12 to 17 were similar, but uptake among Black youth aged 5 to 11 was 4 to 33.6 percentage points lower.
• The highest coverage was seen among children aged 12 to 17 years, those whose mothers had a college degree and had received at least one vaccine dose, and those whose household earned at least $75,000 a year and usually wore a mask in public in the previous week.

CDC Launches New Dashboards

• Two new dashboards to track respiratory virus trends in the U.S. are available
• “The Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network (RESP-NET) comprises three platforms that conduct population-based surveillance for laboratory-confirmed hospitalizations associated with COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) among children and adults.” 

Opinion: Prepare Now for the School Closures That Are Coming

• Tim Daly via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and Fordham Institute
• “Due to enrollment shifts and falling birth rates, many districts nationwide are experiencing a surge in empty seats. For a few years, federal funding tied to pandemic recovery may allow districts to delay difficult consolidation decisions. However, there will come a time when the expense of staffing, maintaining and operating an outsized number of schools becomes untenable — and closures will be the only option.”
• “The numbers tell the same story in city after city: Just 60% of the available placements in Indianapolis are occupied. After shrinking by several hundred thousand students since 2000, Los Angeles expects to lose another 28% of its enrollment over the next eight years. Shifts in Boston have left the district with the equivalent of 16.5 unused school buildings.”
• “My advice to cities grappling with falling enrollment is to begin planning now. Engage in robust processes to take community input on which schools will close and when. But do not drag your feet hoping for a miracle that saves you from the scourge of closures altogether. That miracle is not coming.”

Federal Updates

White House: The Biden administration has extended the COVID Public Health Emergency. .

National Center for Education Statistics:

• 82% of public schools indicated they had a written plan in place to deal with a pandemic disease scenario this school year
• 93% of public schools reported feeling “somewhat” or “very prepared” to handle pandemic disease
• 30% of public schools reported having to quarantine students and 18% reported having to quarantine staff members

Department of Health & Human Services: to support youth mental health and help the health care workforce meet families’ mental health needs.

City & State News

Alabama: : How they did it. 

Colorado: The state Department of Public Health and Environment will between 5 and 11 whose records in the Colorado Immunization Information System indicate they may be due for their COVID-19 vaccine.

New York: .

Washington: Seattle Public Schools is suing social media companies including TikTok and Meta, saying the tech giants’ “misconduct has been a substantial factor in causing a youth mental health crisis.” ( / / )

COVID-19 Research

COVID-19 Vaccines and Sudden Deaths

• . Read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
• “Vaccine rumors continue to swirl, and distrust in vaccines remains. The latest onslaught comes from blogs and social media around heart problems and sudden deaths following COVID-19 vaccination, particularly among young adults.”
• “To be very clear: We have more evidence than for any other vaccine or disease in the history of humans that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines greatly outweigh the risks.”
• “The U.K. Health Security Agency recently released data evaluating all deaths (COVID-19, car accidents, strokes, etc.) in the U.K. by vaccination status, after adjusting for age. This is powerful data because it allows us to remove noise from the debate — it doesn’t matter if the death was ‘with’ or ‘from’ COVID or how the person died. And, the story is clear: Vaccines save lives.”
• “No one denies COVID-19 vaccines can have rare but severe effects. The question is how severe they are and how often they occur compared to infection.”
• “Unfortunately, no vaccine is risk-free. There are rare vaccine tragedies, and they need to be taken seriously. But do not confound these rare tragedies with thinking they are common occurrences. And certainly don’t forget that COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives across the globe and will continue to do so.”

More Evidence that Breastfeeding Moms’ COVID Vaccination Protects Babies

• on a new
• “University of Florida researchers found higher levels of immunoglobulin A and G (IgA and IgG) antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in the stool of infants of breastfeeding mothers compared with those who breastfed from unvaccinated moms. The study involved 34 mothers and 24 infants.”

WHO Questions Severity of XBB.1.5 COVID Subvariant as U.S. Cases Rise

• “New York City health officials said the subvariant now accounts for close to 73% of cases sequenced in New York,” .
• “The World Health Organization said in a earlier this week that the omicron XBB.1.5 variant — which it called one of the ‘the most antibody-resistant variants’ — doesn’t have any mutations that make people sicker compared to previous variants.”
• “But the WHO said it doesn’t have any real-world data on how the variant is actually affecting people, so the full severity of the variant and its symptoms can’t be fully determined, .”

Viewpoints and Resources

COVID-19 Learning Delay and Recovery: Where Do U.S. States Stand?

• New analysis .
• “If student performance improvement follows historical pre-pandemic trends, it could take decades for students to fully catch up. But resources are available to help students recover more quickly.”
• “States can play an important role in supporting districts by ensuring Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds deliver maximum impact for students.”

What Midterm Voters Say about K-12 Education in the New Year

• on new
• Among the takeaways:
  • “Neither party has an advantage on being trusted to handle issues related to K‐12 education.”
  • “While economic concerns and abortion rights clearly led the issue agenda in the 2022 election, voters say improving K‐12 education is a top priority for state lawmakers next year.”
  • “There is relatively high awareness of NAEP test performance, and voters believe children have not recovered from the pandemic.”

Opportunities

• Innovative schools: to teams designing new K-12 schools that center equity, innovation and an expanded definition of student success. This funding opportunity is for public schools — both district and charter — opening in fall 2024. Applications are due Jan. 27 at 5 p.m. Pacific Time.

• VITAL Prize Challenge: supported by a partnership between the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures and the Walton Family Foundation.
  • The $6 million prize challenge will provide funding, resources and capacity-building support for small teams to bring new discoveries to educational and learning contexts to improve the experiences of those who have been historically and systematically excluded from learning and education systems.

• Workforce challenge: to drive partnerships among NY colleges, community organizations and employers

…And on a Reflective Note

Dr. Martin Luther King’s Visit to Iowa’s Cornell College: “. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.”

Paw Patrol: to go for a walk.

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The Heckscher Foundation provides financial support to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to NewSchools Venture Fund and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation.

This is our weekly briefing on the pandemic, vetted by John Bailey. .

This Week’s Top Story 

New Data Reveals XBB.1.5 Variant Surge in Recent Weeks 

• for the week ending Dec. 31. That’s up about 20% from the week ending Dec. 24.
• Good of what is known about the variant.
• Eric Topol: “, especially among seniors, in recent weeks as this variant has been taking hold. Of course, other factors are likely contributing, such as waning of immunity, indoor/holiday gatherings, cold weather, lack of mitigation. But it is noteworthy that New York’s COVID hospital admission rate is the highest since late January [2022] (and also exceeds the summer 2021 Delta wave, but with some ambiguity as to how hospitalizations were categorized then and now).”
• shared what we know and don’t know.

The Big Three

Quarantines, Not School Closures, Led to Devastating Losses in Math and Reading

• I have a piece up on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that explores the academic disruptions caused by COVID quarantines and how few districts had plans for live instruction.  
• “Quarantine guidance from the CDC required an entire class of students to be sent home for as long as two weeks if they had close contact with a child who tested positive. The result was massive learning disruptions that occurred throughout the school year, even in states where schools were officially reopened.”
• “A bipartisan poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Impact Research found that on average, children missed five weeks’ worth of school in the first half of the academic year, due in part to quarantines.”
• “Only four of the largest 100 districts promised live instruction for quarantined students, and just 36% of quarantined students reported having live classes with teachers.”  
• “Even more devastating: A review of data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey from March to June 2022 found that on average, a staggering 16% of students said they had no live contact with teachers over the previous seven days.”
• “It’s little wonder then that 7 out of 10 students found quarantine to be disruptive to their learning. And it should not be surprising that so many disrupted school days and so little interaction with teachers would contribute to the academic loss reflected in the NAEP scores.”

Racial Equity Effects of Pandemic Schooling Disruptions in Washington

• The Washington Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee released a new / / .
• Washington Legislative Auditor’s : “Racial disparities in student assessment scores increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in higher-poverty schools. [The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction] does not yet have a process to monitor the effectiveness of federally funded interventions to promote learning recovery.”
• “Student assessment scores [for all groups] declined during the pandemic. School poverty level had the greatest association with assessment scores.”
• The superintendent’s office “has not yet established processes to monitor districts’ efforts to address the pandemic’s academic effects or the outcomes of emergency spending.”

In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide Patterns

• : “We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12- to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August).”
• “Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S., and remained low throughout the summer before rising in fall 2020, when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction.”
• “Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in fall 2020 and spring 2021 — proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic — we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12% to 18% increase teen suicides.”
• “Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.”

Federal Updates

Education Department: Released

• “In FY 2021, roughly 43% of expended funds from subgrants to [local education agencies] were used to meet students’ academic, social, emotional and other needs. This represents the largest category of LEA subgrant expenditures.”
• “Over 2,700 LEAs expended ESSER funds on mental health supports.”
• “For FY 2021, 44% of expended funds from subgrants to LEAs were used for personnel, including salaries and benefits for additional staff and additional staff time to address the impacts of lost instructional time.”
• Related: using the latest Education Department data. 

Federal Spending Package: Congress reached consensus around . Some highlights:

• Total for Education Department: $79.6 billion (+$3.2 billion). Title I: $18.4 billion (+$850 million). The bill also directs the department to target $87 million within the Education Innovation and Research grant program to support SEL grants and an additional $87 million for STEM. The bill also directs the Institute of Education Sciences to “support a new funding opportunity for quick turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions.”
• Mental Health: $5.27 billion (+803 million), including $111 million for school-based mental health grants at the Department of Education.
• The National Science Foundation is in line for $10 billion in funding, the largest dollar increase ever for the agency and the largest percentage increase in two decades.
• Related: Omnibus Bill Includes Substantial New Funds for Education R&D

COVID-19 Research

The Economic Cost of the Pandemic

• Learning loss could shave $70,000 off the lifetime earnings of children who were in school during the pandemic.
• : “If the learning losses aren’t recovered, K-12 students on average will grow into less educated, lower-skilled and less productive adults and will earn 5.6% less over the course of their lives than students educated just before the pandemic 
 the losses could total $28 trillion over the rest of this century.”

COVID’s Winter Surge is Poised to Exceed Summer Peak: .

• “The number of people with COVID-19 is about to surpass the figure reached during this summer’s spike.”
• “Notably, the number of people hospitalized with COVID — roughly 40,000 — is still far below the winter waves of 2020-21 and 2021-22 (the wave driven by the original Omicron variant) as well as the Delta wave in summer and fall 2021.”

More Than 1 in 4 Think Someone They Know Died from COVID-19 Vaccines 

• According to a new .
• “Seventy-seven percent of adults who have not gotten COVID-19 vaccinations believe it’s at least somewhat likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths. Among those who have gotten the vaccine, just 38% consider unexplained deaths from the vaccine at least somewhat likely.”
• “46% of whites, 48% of Blacks and 57% of other minorities believe it is at least somewhat likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.”
• Related: The Inflated Risk of Vaccine-Induced Cardiac Arrest, via : “Damar Hamlin’s collapse on Monday Night Football calls attention to a medical myth that will not die.”

City & State News

Florida:  

• “ at Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s request to investigate any wrongdoing with respect to the COVID-19 vaccines.”
• “DeSantis’s petition for a grand jury investigation into COVID-19 vaccines, in which he decries the ongoing vaccine campaign as ‘propaganda’ by the Biden administration, is drawing fierce criticism from health experts,” .

Louisiana: Louisiana’s education chief from public devices amid concerns about security and the privacy of user data.

Massachusetts: There are nearly for school nurse positions, accounting for more than 10% of all those in the state.

Michigan: with the state to help improve academic outcomes for students, state education officials announced in November — an increase over the previous year that reflects underfunding, a teacher shortage and the ongoing impact of COVID-19.

New Mexico: Students in Title I schools, including those in tribally controlled areas, with Paper through a nearly $3.3 million investment.

Viewpoints and Resources

: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has launched a , seeking creative thinking for the next iteration of federal and/or state K-12 assessment and accountability policy. This design challenge is a part of the foundation’s ongoing partnership with its .

: Windy Lopez-Afilitto in Ms. Magazine

Learning Loss Is Worse than NAEP Showed. Middle School Math Must Be the Priority: David Wakelyn in ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

…And on a Lighter Note

Dance Your Style:

• . It’s fun watching the

Happy New Year: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.” T.S. Eliot

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story 

• “71% of adults say healthy children should be required to get vaccinated for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) in order to attend public schools, down from 82% who said the same in an October 2019 Pew Research Center poll.”
• “Almost three in 10 (28%) now say that parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their school-age children, even if this creates health risks for others, up from 16% in 2019. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, there has been a 24-percentage-point increase in the share who hold this view (from 20% to 44%).”

The Big Three

• “Since the start of the pandemic through March 15 of this year, school districts across the country had spent $1.7 billion, or $199 per student, of their COVID-19 federal relief funding on tutoring, both online and in person, according to data from FutureEd, a Georgetown University research center that has been analyzing COVID-19 relief spending.”
• “In December 2020, the Jefferson County school district in Louisville, Kentucky, entered into a contract with FEV Tutor to offer about five hours of tutoring per week to around 7,000 third through 12th graders.”
• “The Jefferson County district made a point to ensure that its tutoring would follow the Annenberg research [Dena Dossett, the district’s chief of research, said]. That’s why the district went with FEV Tutor for the bulk of its program. The tutoring service helps schools in the district to identify students struggling with core subjects
 Those students then participate in live video tutoring with the same tutor five hours a week during class time.”
• “So far, it has worked for Jefferson County. Students who used FEV Tutor saw their math scores increase 4.5 points and their reading scores increase 4.2 points in a winter-to-spring 2021-22 analysis of NWEA MAP scores. Students who didn’t use FEV Tutor grew, too, but not as much.”

‘Late-in-the-Game’ COVID Relief Fund Guidance Leaves Some Scratching Their Heads

• Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ
• “Earlier this month, more than two years into schools’ attempts to spend an unprecedented $189 billion in COVID relief funds, federal officials released a that ‘strongly encourages’ districts not to spend the windfall on construction.”
• “There’s one hitch: According to , districts are already spending, or planning to spend, almost a quarter of funds from the American Rescue Plan on facilities and operations.”
• “ ‘Getting clarifications and new restrictions this late in the game is tough on [districts],’ said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. ‘What happens if money is already approved and spent before these recent’ guidelines were released?”

• on a new
• “The implementation challenges district leaders recounted suggest that the simple-sounding logic of academic intervention — identify students in need and provide them extra support — belies a host of complex design and implementation decisions.”
• “For example, when it comes to virtual learning tools focused on academic recovery, the study shows that some schools use them during core instruction time while others expect students to use them outside of school.”
• “Virtual learning tools (e.g., iReady, ALEKS, Dreambox) were used in four of the 12 districts to add academic time to students’ days beyond core instruction.”

City & State News

California: 

• Gov. Gavin Newsom announces an unprecedented .

Illinois: .

Virginia: .

Federal Updates

White House: Fact Sheet:

• “The administration is announcing that is open for a limited round of ordering this winter.”
• The Department of Health and Human Services “will work with states to launch teams and 
 partner with their Quality Improvement Organizations, home health agencies and emergency medical technicians to deliver vaccines to residents of long-term care facilities.”

Congress: Lawmakers unveil sprawling spending bill to avoid shutdown. The compromise would keep the government open through next fall. Some highlights include:

• $285 million, an increase of $50 million, to support the apprenticeship program
• $20 billion, an increase of $2.8 billion, for the Child Care and Development Block Grant and Head Start.
• An increase of $850 million for Title I grants and an increase of $850 million for Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grants to states
• $150 million, an increase of $75 million, to support additional Full Service Community Schools
• $5.27 billion, an increase of $803.2 million, for mental health research, treatment and prevention

Federal Communications Commission: To date, the has provided support to approximately 10,000 schools, 1,000 libraries and 100 consortia, and provided more than 12 million connected devices and more than 8 million broadband connections.

COVID-19 Research

• Updated bivalent (two-strain) mRNA booster shots, which target the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 sublineages of COVID-19 and the original strain, cut the risk of contracting severe COVID-19 by up to 57%, according to a . 
• A second showed the bivalent boosters are particularly effective at preventing hospitalizations in elderly Americans.  
• and .

• on a new
• “Vaccinated or previously infected COVID-19 hospital patients had lower rates of severe illness and death than their unvaccinated, COVID-naive peers during both Omicron and Delta variant predominance.”
• “While the unvaccinated had fewer poor outcomes during Omicron than in Delta, their risk was similar to that seen with previous SARS-CoV-2 strains.”

More noteworthy research

• COVID-19 Vaccines Saved $1.15 Trillion, 3 Million Lives: A estimates that, through November 2022, COVID-19 vaccines prevented more than and 3.2 million deaths and saved the country $1.15 trillion. More via .
  
• Autopsies Show COVID-19 Virus in Brain, Elsewhere in Body: “An analysis of tissue samples from the autopsies of 44 people who died with COVID-19 shows that SAR-CoV-2 — including into the brain — and that it lingered for almost eight months. The () was published 
 in Nature.”
  
• Only Half of COVID Preprint Studies Later Published in Journals: : “Slightly more than half of COVID-19-related scientific studies posted on the preprint server medRxiv were published in peer-reviewed journals within the next two years, according to a published [Dec. 8] in JAMA Network Open.” The “unprecedented increase in preprints has been subject to criticism, mainly because of reliability concerns owing to their lack of peer review,” the letter says.

Viewpoints and Analysis

• about the group of volunteers who quickly became Google’s and then the U.S. government’s best source on where to find vaccines during the pandemic. Some highlights:
• “The essential workers list heavily informed the vaccination prioritization schedule. Lobbyists used it as procedural leverage to prioritize their clients for vaccines. The veterinary lobby was unusually candid, in writing, about how it achieved maximum priority (1A) for veterinarians due to them being ‘health care workers.’ “
• “Teachers unions worked tirelessly and landed teachers a 1B. They were ahead of 1C, which included (among others) non-elderly people for whom pre-existing severe disability meant that ‘a CID-19 infection is likely to result in severe life-threatening illness or death.’ “

• “They had to increase their pace — and they did,” said Marguerite Roza 
 who previously questioned whether schools would meet the September 2024 deadline to exhaust the funds. Her new forecast: “I don’t think there will be any money left over.”
• “ ‘You don’t snap a finger and do that in a week,’ said Dennis Roche, co-founder of Burbio, a data service that tracks school spending. ‘It takes time.’ ”
  

• 5 best practices from EdWeek
• Be strategic about who receives tutoring
• Develop relationships with consistent tutors
• Ensure tutoring is high-dosage and done during the school day
• Involve teachers
• Evaluate throughout the school year


 And on a Lighter Note

Breaking News: .

Kindness: In 1999 Ayda Zugay was an 11-year-old refugee fleeing the former Yugoslavia with her older sister when a stranger handed them an envelope on a flight to the United States. Inside — a $100 bill. .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

The Crisis of Student Mental Health is Much Vaster Than We Realize

• “The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] found 45% of high school students were so persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 they were unable to engage in regular activities. Almost 1 in 5 seriously considered suicide and 9% surveyed tried to take their lives during previous 12 months.”
• “ ‘We simply don’t have enough people in our profession to meet the need,’ said Kelsey Theis, president of the Texas Association of School Psychologists.”
• “Hospital emergency room visits spiked for suspected suicide attempts among girls ages 12 to 17, according to the [CDC]. From February to March 2021, the number jumped by 51% compared with the same period during 2019.”
• Related: National student survey finds mental health is top learning obstacle

The Big Three

Signs of Academic Rebounding Emerge, But Concerns Remain 

• ; more from ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ
• Academic rebounding in reading and math continued in fall 2022; however, rebounding is not even across school years and summers, especially in reading.
• The youngest students in the sample (current third graders who were kindergartners when the pandemic began) have the largest reading declines and showed the least rebounding.
• Even with continued rebounding, student achievement remains lower than a typical year, and full recovery is likely still several years away.
• “These young students’ reading improvement was slower than their math improvement, researchers found. And they estimate that it will take them at least five years to fully recover from the pandemic in both reading and math, longer than nearly any other group studied except current eighth graders. Given the five-year time horizon, many of those students may never fully get up to speed in either subject by the time they finish high school, they warn.”
• Related: Schools Face ‘Urgency Gap’ on Pandemic Recovery, via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

45% of Public Schools Don’t Have Full Teaching Staffs

• 45% of public schools are operating without a full teaching staff. 
• More than half of public schools in high-poverty neighborhoods (57%) had at least one teaching vacancy, compared with 41% of public schools in low-poverty neighborhoods.
• 83% of public schools reported having experienced challenges that appeared to be the result of supply chain disruptions during the 2022-23 school year. The most prevalent challenges were in procurement of food services (55%), laptops and other electronic devices (48%), and furniture (30%).

Teen Brains Changed During COVID

• Via and .
• “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 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.”

Federal Updates

Education Department:

• are listed as having made STEM commitments. Other groups/companies/philanthropies can make commitments by Dec. 31 using .

Federal Communications Commission: Released the long awaited ( / / )

• The new maps will serve as a basis for the NTIA to allocate $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment grants to states and territories next summer.
• The public, along with local governments and providers (including schools), are now able to submit :
  • Location (for example, incorrect location address, incorrect location unit count, etc.) 
  • Availability (for example, if the map incorrectly lists a certain provider or broadband technology as available)

City & State News

Washington, D.C.: CityBridge released Establishing Roots: . Key takeaways:

• A robust tutoring strategy requires a large coalition of partners with unique models coordinated around a common goal and set of standards.
• A centralized network that provides multiple types of support across the entire implementation process leads to a significant increase in standards-aligned tutoring. 
• Tutoring quality improves when partners have regularly structured opportunities to share information and collaboratively problem-solve.

Georgia: A from Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education details how school districts are spending $6 billion in federal COVID relief funds. 

• Nearly half of district leaders (48%) report inflation has altered their plans, which increases to 63% among rural districts.
• About 77% of local education agencies hired additional staff to address student mental and physical health needs. 

New York: Schools in the state have been slow to spend federal aid sent to them in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a .

North Carolina: , a high-impact tutoring initiative in partnership with Bertie County Public Schools.

Texas: — 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.

COVID-19 Research

Efficacy, Effectiveness and Safety COVID-19 Vaccines for Children Ages 5-11

• , via Preprints with The Lancet
• “In 5- to 11-year-old children mRNA-vaccines are moderately effective against infections with the Omicron variant, but probably still protect well against COVID-19 hospitalisations. Vaccines were reactogenic but generally safe.”
• “Safety data suggests no increased risk of serious adverse events, with approximately 1 to 2 events per 100,000 administered vaccines reported in real-life observations. Evidence on the risk of myocarditis was uncertain.”
• Related: Pfizer submitted an application to the FDA for its for children ages 6 months through 4 years.

Analysis and Viewpoints

States Ramped Up K-12 Spending in 2022, But Growth Likely to Slow

• on new
• “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 fiscal 2022, state general fund revenues are estimated to have grown 15.9% while revenues increased 16.6% in fiscal 2021.”

Why Are Americans Fleeing Public Schools?

• “The government projects that K-12 public school enrollment — already facing demographic pressures — will drop further to about 46 million students by fall 2030, according to the NCES.”
• Related: Pandemic pushed Head Start enrollment down by 33%,

…And on a Lighter Note

Never Out of the Fight: .

Peek-A-Boo: .

Mental Health of Teachers, Teens Takes Big COVID-19 Hit

• Via
• “ within the previous seven days than were health care workers, 20% more likely than office workers and 30% more likely than workers in other occupations, such as military, farming and legal professions. 
• “Teachers with a remote role were 60% more likely to report feeling isolated than their in-person counterparts, and female teachers had 70% higher odds of anxiety than their male peers.”
• “In the on pandemic teen mental health, researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) mined data on 9,720 U.S. adolescents who responded to at least one survey fielded by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a sample of more than 10,000 U.S. children 11 to 14 years old, from May 2020 to May 2021.”
• “Over 70% of adolescents said their families lost wages during the pandemic. Teens in families that sustained lost income were more likely to be Black (19.5% vs. 12.2%), Hispanic (22% vs. 12.9%), and living below the poverty line (15.2% vs. 4.2%) than those without financial losses. These populations also reported higher levels of stress about the financial toll.”
• Related: Teachers felt more COVID anxiety than health care workers, study finds (ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ)

The Big Three

‘The Bottom Has Dropped Out’: Study Confirms Fears of Growing Learning Gaps

• ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ on a new
• “Before the pandemic, the average fifth-grade class had students whose learning spanned seven grade levels. But in May 2020, NWEA, the nonprofit behind the widely used MAP Growth assessment, predicted that this variation would grow as the lowest-scoring students would fall two years behind. Because the exams are not given before third grade, the researchers warned then that their findings might not reflect students whose levels of understanding are even lower.”
• “New NWEA research finds this range has increased by 5% to 10%, with the losses disproportionately affecting low-performing students. While all pupils made less progress than they would have without COVID-19’s interruptions to instruction, children who were already struggling academically have fallen much further behind.”
• : “Students who were already struggling were hit harder by the initial COVID disruptions and are now rebounding at a slower rate than their highest-achieving peers, according to findings from testing group NWEA.”
• “ ‘The ceiling stayed pretty consistent to where it was before, but the floor has dropped substantially, and I worry that we’re starting to push teachers beyond their capacity to meet that diversity of needs,’ said Karyn Lewis, an NWEA researcher. ‘So I think this has less implications for what teachers should be doing, but more for what we should be doing as supporters of teachers.’ “

• A survey of district leaders found that more than 90% have faced challenges deploying stimulus funds effectively. 
• “By the end of the 2021-22 school year — halfway through the available funding window — districts had spent an estimated $45 billion of total available funds. That leaves $140 billion to allocate over the next three budget cycles, increasing districts’ near-term annual budgets by approximately 5% to 6%.” 
• “Based on these findings, McKinsey projects that nearly $20 billion in ESSER funds may not be obligated by the deadline because of a variety of factors, including administrative hurdles, limited internal planning capacity, and talent and vendor shortages.”
• “Nearly three-quarters of district administrators said they had struggled to overcome administrative hurdles to receiving funds, navigating compliance and finalizing procurement.”

• via National Center for Education Statistics 
• “56% of public schools are offering afterschool programs for students who need academic assistance during the 2022-23 school year.”
• “48% of public schools offering this type of programming incorporate high-dosage tutoring into the programming, while 42% incorporate some other type of tutoring.”
• “As of September 2022, 85% of public schools had no COVID-19 vaccination requirements for staff to be in the school building for the 2022-23 school year.”
• “99% percent of public schools had no COVID-19 vaccination requirements for students to be in the school building for the 2022-23 school year.”
• “12% of public schools required that students wear masks inside the school building in September 2022, compared to 15% at the end of the 2021-22 school year.”
• “The percentage of public schools that reported having to quarantine students in September was 47%, an increase from the 34% that required students to quarantine at the end of the 2021-22 school year.”

Federal Updates

White House:

Senate:

• “The Senate voted 62-36 to end the emergency declaration nearly three years after it was invoked. It’s unclear if the House will take up the measure.”
• “President Biden threatened to veto any congressional efforts to end the national emergency declaration’s status, ” in a statement.

Federal Communications Commission:

City & State News

California:

Iowa: Gov. Kim Reynolds will appeal a federal court ruling that enables school districts to impose universal mask mandates on students and staff

Nebraska:

New Hampshire:

New Jersey:

COVID-19 Research

• : “Our findings support the notion that in-person schooling during the pandemic may serve as an equalizer for lower-achieving students, particularly from historically marginalized or vulnerable student populations.”
• “A led by a North Carolina State University researcher found that although there were steep learning losses in reading for elementary school students during the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person learning opportunities helped some of those students mitigate learning loss and accelerate gains in reading compared to online learners.”
• “Younger elementary students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, English learners and students with disabilities were particularly affected by the pandemic school closures.”

• Via : “A of U.S. patients aged 0 to 20 years hospitalized for COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) in 2020 and 2021 shows that 22% had a neurologic condition, including 9% with life-threatening illness.”
• “Life-threatening neurologic disorders were more common during the Delta variant surge than in previous waves (64% vs. 36%). Ten of 42 (24%) of patients with neurologic involvement were released from the hospital with new-onset neurologic conditions, and 8 (19%) died. Among patients with non–life-threatening neurologic involvement, 4% were released from the hospital with neurologic deficits, 90% had no neurologic disorders and 5% died.”
• “COVID-19 vaccination is effective at preventing hospitalization for acute COVID-19 and MIS-C and may decrease associated neurologic complications.”

More noteworthy research:

The COVID-19 School Data Hub that allow users to explore each state’s learning model and assessment data.

(Study)

(A look at the research from Nature)

(Study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

Virtual School Enrollment Kept Climbing Even as COVID Receded (Center on Reinventing Public Education via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ)

Viewpoints

Closing Schools in the Pandemic Was Bad. Keeping Them All Open Would Have Been Worse

• “The consequences of extended school closures were brought home, vividly, with the release late last month of reading and math scores for fourth- and eighth-graders, documenting a sharp slide in proficiency since the pre-pandemic year of 2019.”
• “Yet there’s much more to consider. The question that never gets raised, much less answered, when the conversation turns to how bad the school closures were, is: ‘Compared to what?’ ”
• “The number of deaths among children younger than 18, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pegs at 1,853, ‘would have been higher had 60-70 million unvaccinated children contracted the virus over several months’ time in 2020. It’s reasonable to assume that several thousand children would have died.’ ”
• “Those findings might explain what happened when Florida opened its schools in August 2021 and banned remote teaching: Child COVID deaths in the state by the first week of September. One month into the reopenings, districts across the state were being forced to shut down schools and impose quarantines affecting thousands of pupils.”
• “More than 1 in 5 children hospitalized with acute COVID infections suffered lasting neurological conditions, according to a . Thousands may have suffered severe neurological conditions, even including stroke.”

Lifting Universal Masking in Schools — COVID-19 Incidence Among Students and Staff

• “Before the statewide masking policy was rescinded, trends in the incidence of COVID-19 were similar across school districts.”
• “During the 15 weeks after the statewide masking policy was rescinded, the lifting of masking requirements was associated with an additional 44.9 cases per 1,000 students and staff (95% confidence interval, 32.6 to 57.1), which corresponded to an estimated 11,901 cases and to 29.4% of the cases in all districts during that time.”
• “Our results support universal masking as an important strategy for reducing COVID-19 incidence in schools and loss of in-person school days. As such, we believe that universal masking may be especially useful for mitigating effects of structural racism in schools, including potential deepening of educational inequities.”
• But: NEJM’s Disappointing Decision to Publish the Boston School Mask Study:

…And on a Lighter Note

When Your Friend:

This is our weekly briefing on the pandemic, vetted by John Bailey. .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

• Via AP: — and nearly a quarter of a school year in reading — during the pandemic.
• “When you have a massive crisis, the worst effects end up being felt by the people with the least resources,’ said Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, who compiled and analyzed the data along with Harvard economist Thomas Kane.”
• “Together, Reardon and Kane created a map showing how many years of learning the average student in each district has lost since 2019. Their project, the , compared results from a test known as the “nation’s report card” with local standardized test scores from 29 states and Washington, D.C.”
• Related: ‘Scorecard’ of 4,000 Schools Shows Rural Districts Fared Better in Math, Worse in Reading Than Urban, Suburban Peers, via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

The Big Three — November 4, 2022

NAEP Results: What We Know So Far

• The results from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, were released in October. Scores show the largest drops ever recorded in 4th and 8th grade math.
• Strong link in big city districts’ 4th-grade math scores and school closures 
• Damage from NAEP math losses could total nearly $1 trillion
• Amid the pandemic, progress in Catholic schools: .
  • “In the fall of 2020
 more than 92% of Catholic schools across the country re-opened for in-person learning, compared with 43% of traditional public schools and 34% of charters.”
  • The NAEP data “show how important reopening was for learning. Today, the divergence between Catholic schools and public ones is so great that if all U.S. Catholic schools were a state, their 1.6 million students would rank first in the nation across the NAEP reading and math tests for fourth and eighth graders.”
• Reactions: 
  • Andrew Rotherham: Parents Are Owed the Truth About Learning Loss. NAEP Proves It
  • Robin Lake: “ (and vary greatly in confidence level) in addressing skills gaps. From NAEP survey.”
  • U.S. Institute of Education Sciences:

CDC Presents Updated Info on COVID-19, Vaccine Safety for Kids and Pregnancy

• “The biggest piece of news was that [the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] voted unanimously to add COVID-19 to the pediatric vaccine schedule. What does this mean? CDC adds the COVID-19 vaccine to the Vaccines for Children program. This means that when the federal government stops purchasing vaccines (funds are all but exhausted), kids without health insurance can still get them for free. This is incredibly important for health equity.”
• “No evidence of an increased risk for myocarditis following mRNA vaccination in children ages 6 months–5 years.”
• “Risk of myocarditis is rare in adolescent and young adult males within the first week after receiving the mRNA vaccine. 
 The risk of adverse cardiac outcomes were 1.8 – 5.6 times higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination among males ages 12 – 17 years.”

• “Jazeba Ahmad was a junior in high school when COVID-19 hit and her math education faltered. Ms. Ahmad was enrolled in an international baccalaureate math class intended to provide a strong foundation in areas like algebra, geometry, statistics and calculus.”
• “But her high school in Columbus, Ohio, made a rocky transition to remote learning, she said, and soon, math classes passed with little to show for them. By her first year at Columbus State Community College, Ms. Ahmad, 19, found herself floundering in something that should have been mastered — algebra.”
• “ ‘I missed out a lot in those two years,’ Ms. Ahmad said. ‘If I had learned those skills in high school, I feel like I would have been better equipped to do well in that class.’ ”

Federal Updates

Education Department: Secretary “, the Education Department said in a .”

White House: Fact Sheet: “.”

Education Department: Released a new report, “” which highlights six strategies including learning acceleration opportunities, high-quality tutoring and high-quality assessments. 

City & State News

California: “ amid the spike in absenteeism?”

• “Chronic absenteeism in the San Francisco Unified School District has more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels, rising from 14% to 28%, according to preliminary data for 2021-22. A student is considered chronically absent when they miss 10% of the 180-day school year.”

Washington, D.C.: The D.C. Council voted to , despite reservations from some members.

Illinois: found that “a slew of high-poverty districts across the state have spent small fractions of their relief funds, despite serving students who were especially hard hit by the pandemic.”

Iowa: , federal court rules.

Kentucky: Gov. Andy Beshear announces to address poor COVID-era test scores. “The plan includes funding for a 5% pay raise for school staff, universal pre-K, textbooks, technology and training programs,” Spectrum reports.

Maryland: In Montgomery County, .

COVID-19 Research

• on a new . 
• “COVID-19 at any level of severity is linked to an increased risk of dangerous blood clots that start in patients’ veins and travel to the heart, lungs and other parts of the body.”
• “Non-hospitalized COVID patients were 2.7 times more likely to develop dangerous clots called venous thromboembolisms and were more than 10 times more likely to die than individuals who avoided the disease, scientists at Queen Mary University of London found in a study of almost 54,000 people.”

• in this great post. She answers three questions:
  • “First: bivalent boosters. Assuming you’re fully vaccinated already, what is the value of getting the bivalent booster?”
  • “Second: vaccines in pregnancy. Is there a best time to get boosted?”
  • “Third: vaccines for the under-5 set. We’re now a few months out. Have we learned anything more?”

• suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.2 subvariant carries a significantly lower risk of death than that of Delta and the original Omicron strain, B.1.1.529.

Viewpoints

• “Several mainstream news organizations took pains to say that the latest NAEP study offered only murky evidence that school closures were the biggest culprit. For example, Texas opened its schools relatively early but still saw declines in math scores in line with the national average. California opened its schools relatively late, and its students’ scores declined less than the national average.”
• “But other studies have established a clearer connection between school closures and learning loss.”
• “A forthcoming paper from several economists, including the Atlantic contributor Emily Oster, that in-person learning softened the blow of the pandemic on achievement scores.”
• “Democrats’ disproportionate support for school closures was very likely an unforced error that has contributed to worse achievement gaps between rich kids and poor kids, and that has set children back several years in math classes in which they were already struggling to demonstrate proficiency.”
• “With little evidence that school closures saved lives and ample evidence that they hurt kids, this is a policy that failed.”
• Related: , via The AP

• “The U.S. has a choice: Give up on a generation or confront this challenge head-on. Some adults find it easier to give up. They won’t say it out loud; they’ll simply lower expectations. Or they’ll explain away the drop in scores, blaming the pandemic when scores had already begun to decline before COVID hit. Rather than raise the bar, they’ll dodge accountability, allowing today’s low math and reading scores to become tomorrow’s ceiling. That is unacceptable.”
• “Lawmakers must step up, too. One way to help parents is eliminating the barriers students face in accessing a better education. This year, Arizona became a national model by creating a universal education savings account program with flexible, portable and customizable funding. That kind of legislation is transformative for student learning.”
• “Early literacy is the foundation for long-term reading success. To ensure every child can read by the third grade and be ready to succeed in life, policy makers must ensure that all educators are trained in phonics and the science of reading — an evidence-based approach to teach the understanding of sounds, decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.”
• “The same is true for math instruction. States should ensure that students have access to trained, effective math teachers. That may mean not all elementary teachers should teach math, only those who specialize in it.”

• “The need was so urgent that two-thirds of the money — $81 billion — was released less than two weeks after the plan was signed into law and before the Education Department could approve each state’s spending plan.”
• “But despite having access to the dollars, school systems throughout the country reported spending less than 15% 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% 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.”

…And on a Lighter Note

Things Got A Little Rowdy: At last weekend’s Tennessee vs. Kentucky football game. 

• At first, I thought this was from ‘Stranger Things’ 
• of the scene.

When the blue shirt man won’t get out of the way

For even more COVID policy and education news, .
Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This is our weekly briefing on the pandemic, vetted by John Bailey. .

• “Low-income children should be able to receive COVID-19 vaccinations at no cost under the federal Vaccines for Children Program, according to a panel of U.S. health advisers.”
• “The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted unanimously to recommend COVID-19 shots from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc.’s shot for children 6 months to 18 years old.”
• “While there is concern spreading online that adding COVID-19 vaccines to the immunization schedule would make them mandatory, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf said that won’t be the case.”
• .

The Big Three

States to ‘Likely See a Doubling’ of Pre-Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism

• An analysis in ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ
• “Compared to pre-pandemic rates in 2018-19, ‘we will likely see a doubling in chronic absence,’ said Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, which teamed with researchers at Johns Hopkins University to analyze the federal data. Those numbers showed that 10.1 million students missed at least 10% of the 2020-21 school year.”
• “One reason Chang suspects the federal count to be too low is because of the leap in chronic absenteeism in those four states. For example, the federal count shows 15.3% of California students were chronically absent in 2020-21. But according to School Innovation and Achievement, a company that works with districts to improve attendance, 27.4% of students were in the chronic to severe range last year — a time when schools were mostly open.”

• “The groundwork was laid before the pandemic, when [Benjamin Franklin Elementary in Meriden, Connecticut] overhauled how math was taught.”
• “It added as much as 30 minutes of math instruction a day. Students in second grade and above now have more than an hour, and fourth and fifth graders have a full 90 minutes, longer than is typical for many schools. Students no longer have lessons dominated by a teacher writing problems on a whiteboard in front of the class. Instead, they spend more time wrestling with problems in small groups. And, for the first time, children who are behind receive math tutoring during the school day.”
• “Any one of the changes may seem small. But pulling them off required an almost herculean effort and cultural shifts at every level. District officials needed to shake up teaching methods and the school day to maximize instruction time; principals needed to enforce the changes and teachers had to accept having less autonomy.”

• ; . More via .
• “The revised shot developed by Pfizer-BioNTech previously had been cleared for those 12 and older, while Moderna’s updated booster was available only to those 18 and older. The action by the Food and Drug Administration will expand access to Pfizer’s shot to children as young as 5, and to Moderna’s shot to children 6 and older.”

City & State News

ARKANSAS: Rural teacher prep program delivers ‘job-embedded’ degrees — for $75 a month.

CALIFORNIA: The Los Angeles Unified School District’s student .

INDIANA: State will offer 15,000 elementary school students up to $1,000 to pay for the tutor of their parents’ choice.

NORTH CAROLINA: “The N.C. Department of Public Instruction and North Carolina Collaboratory are leading on the impact of COVID-19 on student learning in the state, with the goal of helping educators and students recover.”

HAWAII: that will expand access to mental health services for K-12 public school students. The statewide partnership will serve over 170,000 students across 295 schools.

COVID-19 Research

• on a new
• “Around 89% of the infants studied who were born between 2008 and 2011 could articulate a full word like ‘bowl’ or ‘cup’ at 12 months old, compared to around 77% of infants born during the early months of the pandemic. The share of infants who could point at objects fell from 93% to 84%, and the portion who could wave goodbye fell from 94% to 88%.”
• “The results were based on a questionnaire given to parents of 309 babies in Ireland during the pandemic.”
• “Pandemic-associated social isolation may have impacted on the social communication skills in babies born during the pandemic compared with a historical cohort. Babies are resilient and inquisitive by nature, and it is hoped that with societal re-emergence and increase in social circles, their social communication skills will improve.”

• Via
• “Biden administration officials are raising concerns that the slow pace of developing a nasal vaccine for COVID-19 in the U.S. could pose a security risk as China, Iran and Russia approve their own vaccines taken through the nose or mouth.”
• “Though nasal and oral vaccines are being studied in the U.S., none are close to coming on the market because Congress hasn’t approved more money to support research and development. Big pharmaceutical companies are also not investing in these next-generation vaccines because they don’t see much profit potential.”
• “ ‘Intranasal vaccines — vaccines that are variant-resistant — those are critical tools to have in the toolbox for protecting Americans, not just for COVID but also for future pandemics and also for future biosecurity threats,’ Ashish Jha, the administration’s COVID-19 response coordinator, told .”

• “Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo ignited a furor this month when, based on a state analysis purporting to show COVID-19 vaccines were linked to cardiac deaths in young men, he men ages 18 to 39 to steer clear of the shots. Scientists slammed his warning and decried the eight-page analysis, which was anonymous and not peer reviewed, for its lack of transparency and flawed statistics.”
• “Still, COVID-19 vaccines do have a rare but worrisome cardiac side effect. Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can cause chest pain and shortness of breath, has disproportionately struck older boys and young men who received the shots. Only one out of several thousand in those age groups is affected, and most quickly feel better.”
• “FDA is requiring six myocarditis studies each from Pfizer and Moderna, the makers of the two mRNA vaccines.”
• “The big question is whether any risk, however minimal, to the heart is outweighed by the benefits of a booster. Young people are rarely hospitalized for COVID-19, but the virus is not risk-free for them either.”
• Related:
  • cited by the Florida surgeon general.
  • .

Viewpoints and Reports

• “What should come next is an examination of how schools can more deeply and deliberately harness technology to make high-quality learning accessible to every learner, even in the wake of a crisis. That means a digital transformation, with three key levers for change: in the classroom, in schools and at the systems level.”
• “A digital transformation will also enable more dynamic ways of monitoring and supporting student progress. AI, for example, can support enhanced early warning systems that allow teachers and administrators to accurately identify needed interventions for individual learners.”
  

No Home Left Offline

• EducationSuperHighway’s second highlights the critical steps needed to accelerate adoption and close the broadband affordability gap.
• “The provides states and cities with the most up-to-date data on the number of ACP-eligible, enrolled and unconnected households in their area.”
• “ is a virtual mobile assistant that simplifies the ACP enrollment process by helping applicants to check their eligibility, determine the easiest way to qualify, identify the documents needed when applying and find ‘free with ACP’ broadband plans available at their address.”
• “The is a step-by-step guide that contains outreach templates, training materials and best practices to help leaders get the word out to eligible households.”


 And on a Reflective Note

The Crisis of Men and Boys: 

• reviews Richard Reeves’ new book, .
• “If you’ve been paying attention to the social trends, you probably have some inkling that boys and men are struggling, in the U.S. and across the globe.”
• “They are struggling in the classroom. American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be ‘school ready’ than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics. By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10% of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys.”
• “Men are struggling in the workplace. One in three American men with only a high school diploma — 10 million men — is now out of the labor force. The biggest drop in employment is among young men aged 25 to 34. “
• “Richard V. Reeves’s new book, Of Boys and Men, is a landmark, one of the most important books of the year, not only because it is a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.”
• Related: 74 Interview with Richard Reeves

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• The latest Kaiser Family Foundation COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor survey finds , with about half of adults saying they’ve heard “a lot” (17%) or “some” (33%) about the new shots.
• “About one in five (19%) parents of children ages 6 months through 4 years old say their child has gotten vaccinated for COVID-19, up from 7% in July.”
• The September survey finds about half (53%) of parents of children in this age range say they will “definitely not” get their child vaccinated for COVID-19.

The Big Three — October 7, 2022

U.S. Schools Now Employing 160,000 ‘Underqualified’ Teachers

• ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ on a new
• “U.S. schools currently employ at least 163,650 underqualified educators, teachers working without state certification or outside their subject area. In 2017, at least 109,000 underqualified teachers were estimated to be in classrooms.”
• “States with the highest ratios of these hires relative to the student population include Washington, Utah, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Maryland.”

• “At least 10.1 million students were chronically absent during 2020-21, the first full academic year of the pandemic, according to federal data. 
 That’s 25% more than the typical 8 million chronically absent students each year.”
• “Already, four states — , , and a subset of — have posted figures for 2021-22 that show the doubling that [experts] predict.”
• “Researchers also created a , showing a wide range of chronic absenteeism. The highest rates, of more than 30 percent statewide, were reported in Kentucky, Arizona, Nevada, Rhode Island, Oregon and New Mexico.”

• “Last month, the U.S. Department of Education launched an effort to address teacher shortages. Secretary Miguel Cardona went on national TV to call attention to the school staffing crisis and announce the initiative. But is there a national staffing crisis? Are vacancies higher than normal? If so, in what subjects and in which schools? The truth is no one knows. There is no useful teacher labor data in U.S. schools.”
• “The dearth of data in education is reaching four-alarm status. This fall, after three pandemic-affected school years, there is little to no data on which interventions are working to get which students up to speed in what subjects.”
• “We need data collection processes that allow schools to gather information — in real time — on how kids are doing.”
• “Here’s one way to chip away at this data desert: State education agencies can use a share of the nearly $20 billion they got in relief funds to create real-time reporting systems to track daily student attendance, monthly learning, real-time labor trends by role and location, and much more.”

Federal Updates

Department of Health and Human Services + Department of Education: Through the Health Resources and Services Administration, the departments are for health professionals in schools and in emergency departments.

City & State News

ARIZONA: State returns for its second year

ILLINOIS:

MARYLAND: Baltimore City Public School staff hope

NORTH CAROLINA:

OHIO: , nearly double the pre-pandemic rate

COVID-19 Research

• “The team used survey data to classify respondents as eligible or ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines based on survey completion date and policy effective date and applied state guidelines to self-reports of age, occupation, health conditions and residence in a long-term care facility. .”
• “Participants living in states with more complex vaccine guidelines (i.e., California, New York and Pennsylvania) were less likely than those in states with simpler guidelines (i.e., Florida, Georgia and Texas) to correctly indicate their eligibility (61% vs. 78%, respectively).”
• “More complex vaccine guidelines were associated with lower participant comprehension, potentially hindering eligible persons from seeking vaccines during a period of scarcity. To optimize public health communication, brevity and simplicity should not be undervalued.”

• published in JAMA Pediatrics.
• “COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy was not associated with increased risks of peripartum adverse outcomes, including preterm birth, small size for gestational age, low Apgar score at 5 minutes, cesarean delivery, postpartum hemorrhage and chorioamnionitis.”
• “Furthermore, COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy was associated with lower risks of neonatal intensive care unit admission, intrauterine fetal death and maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
• “Our data support the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, facilitating the vaccination rates among pregnant individuals even if they do not get vaccinated before pregnancy.”

• “We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states.” 
• “Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points, or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post-vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 percentage points (22% of the Democratic excess death rate) to 10.4 percentage points (153% of the Democratic excess death rate).”

In COVID-19 Health Messaging, Focus on Risks Increases Anxiety with Little to No Benefit

• “Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in terms of potential losses (e.g., ‘If you do not practice these steps, you can endanger yourself and others’) or potential gains (e.g., ‘If you practice these steps, you can protect yourself and others’)?”
• “Loss- (vs. gain-) framed messages increased self-reported anxiety among participants cross-nationally with little-to-no impact on policy attitudes, behavioral intentions or information seeking relevant to pandemic risks.”
• “These results were consistent across 84 countries, three variations of the message framing wording and 560 data processing and analytic choices.”

Viewpoints

Future of Data in K-12 Education Initiative Can Help Inform a Critical Impasse 

• “In response to the dire need for more data and information
 the U.S. Chamber Foundation has launched an initiative on the Future of Data in K-12 Education.”
• “‘Historic learning loss has occurred across the board, and we need to find a way to get kids caught up,’ Caitlin Codella Low, vice president of policy and programs at the U.S. Chamber Foundation, said. ‘It takes time. It’s not even a problem that money can solve alone. And so right now is the time to make sure that the federal and state and local policies that are in place are serving the kids in a way that ends up giving them what they need to be successful in the future.’”

• Via Rick Hess
• Tune out the noise
• Catch kids up
• Maintain transparency
• Expand options
• Rewrite the pandemic playbook

…And on a Lighter Note

I Have Questions: A  in Worcester cathedral during animal blessing service.

• The BBC 

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• “We have all been questioning, ‘When does COVID look like influenza?’ ” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco . “And, I would say, ‘Yes, we are there.’
• “So unless a more virulent variant emerges, COVID’s menace has diminished considerably for most people, which means that they can go about their daily lives,” says Gandhi, “in a way that you used to live with endemic seasonal flu.”
• “We are now seeing consistently that more than 70% of our COVID hospitalizations are in that category,” says Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease specialist at the Tufts Medical Center and a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. “If you’re counting them all as hospitalizations, and then those people die and you count them all as COVID deaths, you are pretty dramatically overcounting.”
• “If deaths were classified more accurately, then the daily death toll would be closer to the toll the flu takes during a typical season,” Doron says. “If this is true, the odds of a person dying if they get a COVID infection — what’s called the case fatality rate — would be about the same as the flu now, which is estimated to be around 0.1%, or perhaps even lower.”
• “I’ll probably feel more comfortable saying something like, ‘Oh, COVID is similar to the flu’ when we actually see a pattern that resembles that,” says Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in the division of health policy and public health. “We’re sort of just starting to see that, and I haven’t really seen that in a sustained way.”

The Big Three — September 23, 2022

• “Doughty’s injunction applied to the 24 state governments that acted as plaintiffs in this case,” .
• “These states were: Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.”

• “The pandemic is over,” . “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
• “Biden’s insistence on Sunday night that the pandemic is over . The declaration was not part of his planned remarks ahead of the 60 Minutes Ÿ±ČÔłÙ±đ°ù±čŸ±±đ·É.”
• ” ‘It is unlikely the U.S. will eradicate the coronavirus, and ,’ President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said Monday during a fireside chat with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.”
• “The White House , dismissing it as the president’s attempt to highlight the administration’s success in beating back the virus. Widely available vaccines and treatments are capable of blunting the worst of COVID’s effects, businesses and schools are open, and emergency health measures have largely evaporated.”
• “Even if the U.S. is technically still in a pandemic, aides argue, Biden was trying to express that .”

‘Wake-up Calls’: New Parent Survey Shows 9% Enrollment Drop in District Schools

• “Districts faced persistent annual enrollment challenges due to a set of factors we call the “Three Ds”: dropouts, demographics and deferments.” As ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ reports, from spring 2021 to spring 2022, a new survey estimates a decline of roughly 300,000 students in district public school enrollment due to these three factors.
• “Parents report their top reasons for changing schools .”
• “In addition, our analysis determined that parents’ political beliefs had little to no impact on their reasons for changing their child’s school. Conservative, liberal and moderate parents alike ranked academic quality and safety as their top motivations.”

City & State News

CALIFORNIA: Via ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: “California Poll Finds Parents Leaving Traditional Public for Charter Schools.“

• “The poll found a higher percentage of school switches among Democrats, white parents, families with English as a primary language and households earning more than $150,000 per year.”
• “Among parents surveyed that switched their child’s school, the 52% that originally attended traditional public schools dropped to 41% — an 11 percentage point decline. In contrast, the 15% that attended charter schools grew to 23% — an 8 percentage point increase.”
• “38% of parents decided to switch schools because they wanted a different educational experience for their children. The poll also found 31% of parents dissatisfied with COVID-related safety measures at their childrens’ school and 30% dissatisfied with mental health support or one-on-one learning help.”

COLORADO:

• “The curriculum grants come at a time when many Colorado districts are adopting new K-3 reading curriculum to comply with a 2019 state law that requires them to use programs backed by research on how children learn to read,” . “While there’s no similar law covering math curriculum, education department rules say the grants can only be used for certain math programs — specifically, those that earned top ‘green’ ratings from EdReports, a national curriculum reviewer.”

ILLINOIS: 

NEW YORK:  

NORTH CAROLINA: as of Sept. 1, which represents about 3% of the district total. The number is higher for child nutrition workers, where the vacancy rate is 13%.The highest vacancy rate is for school bus drivers, with 30% of positions, or 267 drivers, still unfilled.

OKLAHOMA: 

TENNESSEE: ““

VIRGINIA: Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive directive that aims to address teacher shortages through strategies that include hiring retired educators and targeting recruitment and retention efforts toward communities most in need

WASHINGTON:  Shifting Students: A Look at Washington State School Enrollment from 2020 to 2022: Via

• “There were 16,371 fewer students enrolled in all Washington schools in the 2021-22 school year than in 2019-20.”
• “Enrollment in Washington’s district-run public schools declined 2% per year on average from September 2019 to September 2021.”
• “During the same period, private school enrollment increased by 10% per year on average, enrollment in homeschool increased by 27% per year on average and enrollment in charter schools increased by 28% per year on average.”

Federal Updates

ED: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona sent a clarifying how states should distribute funds from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Priority for funding should go to districts with high rates of poverty and one of the following:

• A high student-to-mental health professional ratio
• High rates of chronic absenteeism, exclusionary discipline, and/or referrals to the juvenile justice system, bullying/harassment, community and school violence, or substance abuse
• Students who recently experienced a natural disaster or traumatic event

Supreme Court to Consider Taking Up Challenge to New York’s Vaccine Mandate:

Resources to Support Governors’ Advisers With Tracking Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Programs: 

COVID-19 Research

CDC Expects Omicron COVID Boosters for Kids by Mid-October: Via .

• “The CDC said in a released on Tuesday that it expects to make a recommendation in early to mid-October on the use of the new bivalent vaccines in the group, if they are authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”
• “The CDC said it expects Pfizer-BioNTech’s, bivalent vaccine to be available for children aged 5-11 years, and Moderna’s vaccine for those aged 6-17 years, pending FDA authorization.”

U.S. Delivers Over 25 Million COVID Boosters: 

• “According to the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, retail pharmacies will be receiving millions more doses of Moderna this week and that production is ramping up.”

Omicron Sublineage BA.2.75.2 Exhibits Extensive Escape from Neutralising Antibodies: on the variant we highlighted back on and

• “In recent serum samples from blood donors in Stockholm, Sweden, BA.2.75.2 was neutralised, on average, fivefold less potently than BA.5, representing the most neutralisation resistant variant evaluated to date. These data raise concerns that BA.2.75.2 may effectively evade humoral immunity in the population.”

Viewpoints

The Case for Curriculum: Why Some States Are Prioritizing It With COVID Relief Funds:

• “A new CCSSO brief details the ESSER spending decisions of those states that are part of the group’s High-Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development (IMPD) Network. The collective, formed several years before the pandemic, aims to encourage schools to use curricula aligned to state standards and get students engaged in grade-level work.”
• “Advocates for a more standardized, district-led approach say that using the same curriculum across schools can ensure that all students are receiving grade-level work and that lessons progress in a clear sequence, building knowledge and skills as students move through the grades. As some states have urged districts to adopt high-quality materials, they’ve also offered aligned professional development and coaching to support teachers.”
• “Several IMPD network states, including Massachusetts and Tennessee, are using these funds to adopt new curricula or support schools in purchasing core reading and math materials. In some cases, states have introduced a quality-control element: In Nebraska, districts have to pick curricula that are high-quality, which is defined as meeting expectations on the nonprofit reviewer EdReports’ evaluations.”

Confronting COVID’s Lost Generation: Very long and important piece in

New Directory of Innovative School Models Aims to Encourage Experimentation: on the


 And on a Reflective Note

Remembering Queen Elizabeth: as she signs off the BBC’s 11 days of coverage. 

• “She made history, she was history. Queen Elizabeth II has gone, but she will surely never be forgotten.”

Queen Elizabeth II Has Completed Her Final Journey to St. George’s Chapel: Where she will be laid to rest alongside her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. 

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .