Saturday, April 30, 2022
Washington Today (4/29/2022): Pentagon: U.S. Has Begun Weapons Training w/ Ukrainian Armed Forces
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Chief Justice Roberts tribute to retiring Justice Breyer
Chief Justice Roberts tribute to retiring Justice Breyer: "The oral argument we have just concluded is the last the Court will hear with Justice Breyer on the bench. For 28 years this has been his arena for remarks profound and moving, questions chal […]
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Friday, April 29, 2022
PROMO: 2022 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
The White House Correspondents Association holds its annual awards dinner in Washington, D.C., with The Daily Show’s host Trevor Noah providing the entertainment along with remarks from President Biden.
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Pentagon Spokesman on Putin: "It's hard to square his -- let's just call it what it is -- his BS."
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby gets emotional talking about Putin: "It's difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious mature leader would do that. I can't talk to his psychology, but I think we can all spea […]
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Student Car Loan Termination Edition
President Biden pivoted sharply on student loan policy when he indicated this week that the administration is “looking at different options” for forgiving student debt entirely. This marks a departure from his campaign promise to forgive no more than $10,000 in student debt per borrower. Biden’s rhetorical shift also seems to contradict some of his previous statements suggesting that he disliked the regressive nature of widespread loan cancellation; in other words, that it’s really more of a giveaway to the already rich than a program intended to help the poor.
With student loan forgiveness potentially on the horizon, it’s a good time to break down some of the myths and questions surrounding the student debt crisis that I’ve encountered while engaging in the policy debate over this issue and making the case against loan cancellation.
Q: Why do you hate poor people?
A: In short, I don’t. This is the most fundamental misunderstanding in this space. Student debt, it turns out, isn’t a “poor people” issue. It’s totally reasonable to think: it’s only the poor or “poorish” people who can’t afford college without loans, so forgiving debt must be a reasonable way to help out this group. Unfortunately, that’s all wrong.
We know that students from the highest income families borrow the most — yes, the most. That’s because they go to expensive colleges and stay in school the longest (often going on to complete graduate and professional studies). And the fact that they borrow doesn’t even indicate a lack of cash-on-hand. Even if a family had the cash on hand to pay for their child to go to school, the subsidized interest rate on student loans is so low that it can make economic sense to borrow to pay for school and invest the cash elsewhere.
It’s also true that people with student debt go on to become the most well-off in our economy. And you don’t have to trust me on that. Research from Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute and Adam Looney of the Brookings Institution shows that much of outstanding student debt is held by the highest income Americans. The top 40 percent of households, in terms of annual income, hold “almost 60 percent of outstanding student debt and make almost three-quarters of the payments.”
It makes sense if you think about it. Borrowing enables investment in education. Investments in education bring about greater earnings. So it should be no surprise that education debt is largely an issue for the rich.
Q: Yeah, but get real. Not everyone with student debt is rich. And there are definitely people who are struggling. Won’t this help them?
A: It would help them. Sort of. It would be like addressing hunger by making groceries free instead of expanding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka “food stamps.”) A poorly targeted approach ignores existing infrastructure that would more efficiently help the truly struggling.
All student borrowers (not parent borrowers) are already eligible for programs that reduce monthly loan payments to affordable levels based on earnings and forgive debts that remain unaffordable in the long run (defined as 10, 20 or 25 years depending on the borrower.) These programs, collectively called Income Driven Repayment, construct a means-tested safety-net for borrowers.
These programs don’t work perfectly and are certainly in need of reform. But they aren’t irrelevant to the conversation. About one in three borrowers are now using these programs to repay their debts. The reason we don’t hear more about them in the discourse about the student loan crisis is because their existence undermines the case for widespread loan cancellation. And “fix IDR,” while smart from a policy perspective, is a more complicated sell politically.
Q: Advocates sometimes argue that student loan cancellation would be a big step toward reducing the racial wealth gap. Isn’t that reason enough to do it?
A: The racial wealth gap in America is an issue that certainly demands attention and perhaps significant interventions, but the fix shouldn’t come through student loan policy. Attempting to fix the racial wealth gap through loan cancellation would be akin to fixing gender pay disparity by giving a tax break to every female CEO. Mathematically this might reduce the measured disparity, but it altogether misses the point.
If we wish to reduce the racial wealth gap, we should address it directly. The idea that we have to give money to millions of rich white Americans in order to modestly reduce the racial wealth gap is nonsensical. We can do better.
Q: Wouldn’t it be good for the economy?
A: This was a question I heard a lot several months ago in the context of stimulating the economy following the pandemic downturn. At the time, the federal government was giving money away to Americans and hoping they’d go out to spend it in order to stoke the economy back to full employment. It seemed obvious to many observers that student loan cancellation could help in the same vein.
The problem with that approach would be twofold. First, loan cancellation would be a poor form of stimulus. It would be expensive relative to its immediate effect because the government would incur the cost of the full balance but only affect current household spending by the amount of their monthly payment. And the fact that benefits would largely accrue to the rich would also dampen the effect. We generally target stimulus to lower income households because they are the most likely to spend the money rather than to save it. And when the economy needs a boost, it’s spending, not saving, that will do the trick.
Q: Okay, but it wouldn’t really hurt anyone. What’s the problem with helping borrowers even if it isn’t the magic pill we’d imagined.
A: Well, it does hurt someone. A lot of people actually. And it hurts the people we probably want to hurt the least; the poor.
As economists annoyingly like to remind people, nothing is free. Student loan cancellation might not look like a spending program since new cash doesn’t go out the door. But it costs all taxpayers because of the tremendous amounts of lost revenues that it generates. That is, money the government was planning on having in its coffers from loan repayment simply won’t be there. That’ll leave us with three options: cut spending, raise taxes, or increase the deficit.
When I’ve debated this issue in the past, I’ve often encountered the argument (seemingly based on Modern Monetary Theory) that spending beyond our means is costless; that it doesn’t create inflation as predicted by classical economic theory. Until recently, we’d been growing deficits for decades without any resulting inflation, so that framework seemed to offer a permission slip to spend without bound. But things changed. And as anyone with a pulse knows, inflation has taken hold in our economy, causing prices for everything from food to housing and gas to rise at rates we haven’t seen since the 1980s.
Spending beyond our means isn’t costless and there are real consequences. The spending required to cancel outstanding student debt would not only impose a fiscal cost on taxpayers, many of whom do not have the luxury of a college degree, but would also impose a lasting cost through higher prices across the economy. To add insult to injury, we know that inflation tends to affect lower income Americans more adversely than higher income ones.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, loan cancellation would likely drive rampant tuition inflation, which would exacerbate the challenges we already face. Students off to school next fall would likely anticipate the political inevitability of another round of loan forgiveness and would be willing to spend and borrow more than they would have otherwise. Institutions would almost certainly respond to that willingness by raising prices further.
Beth Akers is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education and Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt.
The post FAQ: Student Loan Cancellation Edition appeared first on Education Next.
By: Beth Akers
Title: FAQ: Student Loan Cancellation Edition
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/faq-student-loan-cancellation-edition/
Published Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 09:00:52 +0000
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President Biden Outline Supplemental for Ukraine
President Biden: "I'm sending Congress a supplemental budget request. It's gonna keep weapons and ammunition flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters and continue delivering economic humanitarian assistance to the Ukrainian people […]
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Washington Today (4-28-22): U.S. economy shrinks 1.4% Jan-Mar, but recession unlikely
GDP 1st Quarter report showing the economy shrank, House & Senate Dem plan to reduce gas prices, FDA to ban menthol cigarettes and President asks for $33B more for Ukraine. Interview with Wall Street Journal's Sarah Chaney Cambon (7).
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Thursday, April 28, 2022
Former President Bill Clinton tribute to Madeleine Albright
Former President Bill Clinton delivers a tribute to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
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President Biden tribute to Madeleine Albright
President Biden delivers a tribute to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
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Washington Today (4-27-22): DHS Sec Mayorkas: "we have effectively managed the border crisis"
Today's program looks at DHS Sec Mayorkas before a House committee on immigration and Title 42 ending, U.S.-Russia prisoner swap and Madeleine Albright funeral. Interview with E&E News' Nick Sobczyk on possible bipartisan energy & climate bill (33).< […]
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Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Hillary Clinton tribute to Madeleine Albright
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers a tribute to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
"So, the angels better be wearing their best pins and putting on their dancing shoes because if, as Madeleine believed, there's a spe […]
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Washington Today (4-26-22): VP Kamala Harris tests positive for COVID-19
VP Kamala Harris tests positive for COVID-19, interview with USA Today's John Fritze on SCOTUS case on "Remain in Mexico" immigration policy (5), latest on Russia's war in Ukraine, and Attorney General Merrick Garland on the Hunter Biden investigatio […]
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New Biden Rules Would Slow Charter Growth
Applying for a federal grant to support the creation of new charter schools is about to get a lot harder. That’s the upshot of draft regulations for the Charter Schools Program that the Biden administration released for public comment in March. It is an unfortunate proposal at a time when new research confirms that charter schools are an asset not only to their students but also to the broader communities in which they operate (see “The Bigger Picture of Charter School Results,” features, this issue).
For nearly three decades, Congress has provided funds to assist charter schools with start-up expenses such as staffing, professional development, facility improvements, and community engagement events. The bulk of the money goes first to state education departments who, in turn, award grants of up to $500,000 to charter schools preparing to open, replicate, or expand. When Congress last renewed the program in 2015, it permitted successful charter management organizations to apply directly to the U.S. Department of Education for comparable support.
The program is modest by federal budget standards—Congress authorized $440 million for it this year—but over time it has been a major driver of the charter sector’s expansion. What’s more, the states, none of which wants to leave federal money on the table, often design and implement their charter school programs according to the criteria Congress uses to select grant applicants.
That’s one reason the administration’s recent proposal is so troubling. Among other new requirements, the regulation would force applicants to submit a detailed “community impact analysis” demonstrating that the number of schools they propose to open or expand “does not exceed the number of public schools needed to accommodate the demand in the community.” The language says nothing about the quality of available schools. It would effectively prevent charter schools from opening with federal support in the growing number of areas with flat or declining enrollment—often places where high-quality options are scarcest.
The regulation would also require applicants to collaborate with a traditional public school or district on “an activity that would be beneficial to all partners in the collaboration”—a nice-sounding concept that would effectively give districts veto power over charter expansion. Applicants would even need to provide “a letter from each partnering traditional public school or school district demonstrating commitment to participate in the proposed charter-traditional collaboration.” Charter entrepreneurs unable to find a willing partner would be out of luck.
The entire proposal seems to reflect the view, heavily promoted by teachers unions and their political allies, that charter schools are a drain on school districts’ resources to be tolerated, if at all, as pockets of innovation within expanding systems. That same perspective has informed key revisions to state charter-school laws in recent years, including California’s 2019 move to allow districts to reject charter school applications based not on the proposal’s quality but on its impact on their finances. The result was a dramatic slowing of charter growth nationally in the years leading up to the pandemic—just as charter opponents intended.
Yet the research case for the charter sector’s expansion continues to strengthen. In this issue, Doug Harris and Feng Chen of Tulane University offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of how charter schools affect the combined outcomes of both charter and traditional public-school students in the school districts in which they are located. Looking nationwide and comparing districts with a substantial charter presence to those without charter schools, they find substantial gains in both test scores and high-school graduation rates. A January 2022 study by David Griffith for the Fordham Institute, “Still Rising: Charter School Enrollment and Student Achievement at the Metropolitan Level,” similarly found greater charter enrollment associated with increased math achievement by Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.
If Biden administration rule makers are not swayed by these findings, the reality underlying them is persuasive to many of the families who have chosen to enroll their children at charter schools. Despite an oddly short window for public comment, more than 25,800 members of the public, many of them charter parents, weighed in on the proposed rule before the April 18 deadline. A group of 17 Republican governors wrote to education secretary Miguel Cardona to register their objections to the proposed changes. When a similarly tone-deaf draft rule on civics-education grants prompted an uproar last year, the administration backed down and replaced the rule with something more sensible. Here’s hoping that pattern prevails again.
— Martin R. West
The post New Biden Rules Would Slow Charter Growth appeared first on Education Next.
By: Martin R. West
Title: New Biden Rules Would Slow Charter Growth
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/new-biden-rules-would-slow-charter-growth-parents-governors-register-objections/
Published Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2022 09:00:39 +0000
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The Weekly Podcast: Special comedy episode: Joe Biden Dinner Jokes
With President Biden set to appear at the April 30 White House Correspondents' Association dinner (watch/listen LIVE on C-SPAN Networks), the C-SPAN podcast "The Weekly" looks back at past media dinners: Jokes told about Joe Biden, jokes told by Joe […]
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Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Booknotes+ Podcast: Dr. Thomas Fisher, "The Emergency"
For the past twenty years, Dr. Thomas Fisher has worked in the emergency department at the University of Chicago Medical Center, serving the same South Side community in which he was raised. During the past two years of COVID-19, he decided to write […]
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2022 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
The White House Correspondents' Association holds its annual awards dinner in Washington, D.C., with The Daily Show’s host Trevor Noah providing the entertainment along with remarks from President Biden.
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CSU Vet student creates app to combat emerging disease – *
A sometimes fatal equine herpes virus that is cropping up in horses around the world has horse owners and barn managers fearing widespread infection when horses mingle during the show season. Fortunately, a Colorado State University veterinary student has created a mobile-friendly website featuring biosecurity resources for limiting risks of infectious disease at equine facilities.
For Caroline Wollman, a third-year student in CSU’s Doctor of Veterinary Medicine program, the threat of equine herpes virus type 1 got personal when her own horse Cody came up lame with symptoms in spring 2021.
Cody was at a Colorado boarding stable where other horses tested positive for the virus, which can lead to a life-threatening neurologic disease called “equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy.” Her horse was quarantined for a month, but because the symptoms were caught early, Cody recovered after about six months of intense rehabilitation.
It started with an internship
Wollman had already started working on horse biosecurity resources during a CSU Summer Extension Internship with Angela Pelzel-McCluskey, the national epidemiologist for equine diseases at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
“The frequency of equine movements into and out of boarding operations presents a significant ongoing risk of disease introduction and potential spread at these facilities,” Pelzel-McCluskey said of the need for biosecurity resources like Wollman’s. “That makes it extremely important that boarding facilities have solid biosecurity plans in place, not only to reduce the risk of disease incursion, but also to quickly identify and properly respond to infectious diseases should they occur.”
Wollman’s internship with Pelzel-McCluskey began just after the pandemic started, so it ended up being virtual.
“It was a time when many students, many people in general, just kind of curled up and couldn’t get much done, and she made a product that will benefit both her profession and her passion, helping horses,” said Ragan Adams, Wollman’s adviser and a CSU veterinary extension specialist and disaster preparedness and recovery expert.
“I was so impressed that she got the idea started during her summer internship but had the fortitude to keep working on it during her second and third year of vet school,” Adams said.
The CVMBS website created by Wollman provides tips to horse owners who are looking for safe boarding stables — or signs that the one they are using is biosecure. It also has advice for barn managers who want to make their facilities safer.
Online resources
In addition to a biosecurity checklist, there is advice related to arriving/leaving a farm, quarantine procedures, day-to-day management, barn design, cleaning/disinfection and general horse health.
“It’s filling a gap in the biosecurity niche of the horse world,” Wollman said. “There were a lot of resources out there, but none felt fully comprehensive or acceptable. For the horse owner or barn manager, a lot of them were targeted around what veterinarians would say to clients. So our goal was to make this very readable, very understandable and usable on the farm.”
She said the fact that the site is mobile-friendly makes it easy to use during inspections.
“If we’re walking around a farm, we want to be able to look at our phone, look up, and see what things we can change to make this a more biosecure place,” Wollman said, adding that Adams was integral to the success of the project.
Visit Wollman’s website at animalbiosecurity.colostate.edu.
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Tie Precautions to Community Risk Levels
When the Omicron variant of the coronavirus cropped up in the United States in the waning weeks of 2021, public officials warned that it was the most infectious variant they had seen to date. By early January 2022, Omicron had become the dominant form of the virus in this country. And now, not surprisingly, the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron is causing another uptick in Covid cases.
At the same time, evidence was mounting that Omicron was less deadly than previous variants. Risk of hospitalization, for instance, is about 50 percent lower than it was with Delta, and studies indicate that Omicron does less damage to the lungs. Unfortunately, some people heard this news and latched on to a narrative that Covid was on a downward trajectory.
“There’s this story that we’re going to have variants that are progressively less severe,” Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, told NPR in January. “It’s comforting to think there might be some tendency for SARS-CoV-2 to evolve toward a milder form. That’s not what we’re seeing here.”
Dr. Bhattacharyya was articulating a common human foible—confirmation bias—the tendency to find support for beliefs that you want or need to believe, even if the evidence says you’re wrong. The fact is, no one knows for sure where Covid is going, whether it will end (or when), and whether future strains will be more or less severe.
So: Is now the time for schools to “go back to normal”? Can we safely drop some of the precautions we have put in place? No. Covid is still very much with us.
Here are some facts about Covid-19:
The United States leads the world in deaths from Covid-19. More Americans have died from this disease than in any war. In the Civil War, the deadliest in the nation’s history, 498,332 people died over four years, from 1861 to 1865. Covid has killed nearly a million Americans in half that time.
While evidence shows that the Omicron variant is less deadly than the Delta strain that preceded it, Omicron spreads more easily and therefore infects more people. As of March 9, 2022, an average of 1,350 Americans were dying from Covid every day, according to data published by the Washington Post. At the peak of the Omicron surge on February 4, 2022, an average of 2,647 people were dying per day; this is close to the pandemic peak of 3,328 deaths per day on January 29, 2021, prior to widespread vaccination. The Omicron death toll is staggering, given that the great majority of deaths from this variant have occurred among unvaccinated individuals, who comprise only about 23 percent of the population. Although newly reported cases are down to about 37,000 per day, some local regions are still experiencing large surges.
Vaccination provides considerable protection from Covid and especially from contracting a serious case of the disease, but it does not eliminate the hazard, particularly for individuals with other risk factors. Even among vaccinated persons, Omicron remains easily transmitted in all social settings, including schools and homes, and the disease occurs in all age groups. The same will likely be true of any future strains of Covid-19.
The facts are stark, and the risk is great, yet children face serious risks to their learning and social development when they miss time in school. It is imperative that schools be open as much as possible, but keeping them open safely will require effective mitigation and public-awareness strategies for some time to come.
Transmission in Schools
Schools are the ideal environment for spreading Covid-19. Studies have shown children can catch and spread Covid-19 as easily as adults do. Children of all ages can carry high viral loads that they can pass on to their parents, teachers, and others.
Symptom monitoring is not an effective strategy for identifying infected children, because nearly 50 percent of children do not exhibit symptoms. Covid-19 is rarely lethal for children, yet during the peak of the Omicron surge, on January 7, 2022, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that Omicron was causing more than 760 children to be hospitalized per day. The groups most affected were those under the age of 5, who are not eligible for vaccination, and children 5 to 11, of whom only 16 percent are fully vaccinated. Walensky said at the time that “pediatric hospitalizations are at the highest rate compared to any prior point in the pandemic.”
The CDC reported that in May 2021 an unvaccinated California teacher transmitted the Delta variant to her elementary-school students, leading to 26 Covid cases among the students and their contacts. Before getting tested, the teacher had experienced symptoms for two days and had continued to work. During that time the teacher read aloud to her class without wearing a mask, despite the school’s masking requirement. This instance illustrates that when schools are open without enforcing necessary precautions during a Covid surge, it is highly likely that teachers and children will play a role in transmitting the virus. It is therefore critical that we not let our guard down.
Everyone Should Know the Basics
Students, parents, school staff, and anyone in the larger community who is connected to these individuals need to have basic information on Covid-19 transmission and how to reduce it through established procedures. Schools should provide multiple, mandatory information sessions for all the school’s constituents, and basic information about Covid should be posted widely—in schools and throughout the community. Students, staff, and parents should be asked to sign a statement saying they understand and will abide by all the regulations.
Everyone must know how the virus is spread, which situations are the most dangerous, and how to avoid those situations. Covid-19 spreads through human-to-human contact, whether people are in the presence of each other or leave remnants of the virus by touching objects or having talked, eaten, or simply breathed in an area in which others congregate or pass.
For schools, the areas that pose risk include not only school facilities but also the homes of students and staff and anywhere in the community that these people go, including stores, banks, gas stations, cars, buses, bus stops, cafeterias, hallways, classrooms, lockers, gymnasiums, locker rooms, bathrooms, and more. As has long been recommended, everyone should wear a mask outside of a completely safe environment, wash hands frequently, and safely socially distance. People should be reminded that these are effective mitigation strategies, as are disinfecting and ventilating schools and homes.
Tie Precautions to Community Transmission Levels
Increasingly, schools have faced public pressure to remain open even during the worst surges and to drop mask requirements and other precautions. Schools can counter this pressure by strictly tying the extent of their precautions to the level of transmission in the community. Information on these conditions is regularly reported by the CDC on the county level, with this data accompanied by the agency’s recommendations on which precautions schools should take at specific transmission levels. Linking precautions to the level of risk eliminates the guesswork for school officials and provides an objective rationale for the safeguards they put in place.
Given how fast cases surge when a new variant appears, we believe that even in low-transmission communities (labeled as “green” by the CDC) schools should continue to require masking for students and staff, use social distancing, and perform regular sanitizing of classrooms and other school surfaces. Although the most recent CDC recommendations do not require these precautions except in crowded classroom situations, we feel they should remain in place until there is a more reliable way to give advance warning of highly transmissible new variants. At higher levels of community transmission, the school should implement staggered schedules to reduce the number of students who are present at a time. In addition, schools should offer a full online option to all students whose families do not want to take the risks associated with their children attending class in person. This option will also reduce student density in school.
Finally, at the highest levels of transmission (referred to as “orange” or “red”), the school should switch to remote learning to protect students, staff, family members, and the community at large. For students for whom online learning is not an option, such as those who do not have access to reliable Internet connections, accommodations can safely be made at school, since plenty of classroom space will be available. And concomitant with these strategies, there must be adequate testing and availability of vaccinations to all children who are eligible.
Testing and Vaccination
We strongly recommend that federal, state, and local authorities provide the resources for schools to regularly test students at all levels of community transmission. Regular testing can help reduce transmission of the virus, even in environments as crowded as college dormitories, according to a study done at 18 Connecticut colleges and universities during the 2020–21 school year. Study authors Olivia Schultes and colleagues concluded that “twice-weekly Covid-19 testing of residential students may serve as an effective infection mitigation strategy at colleges and universities.” These results suggest that in K–12 schools that remain open in times of higher community transmission, frequent testing of students and staff is critical, and, even under green conditions, regular testing is a must. As the test shortage during the Omicron surge has shown us, schools should plan to have on hand sufficient test kits to last several weeks. Although testing and other mitigation strategies can be costly, the federal government has provided funding for this purpose, as have some states and municipalities. Because the virus spreads so rapidly, a community can quickly go from conditions of minimal transmission to high levels; it is critical, therefore, that schools be proactive in securing funds for testing.
Schools should have plans for dealing with outbreaks. When someone in the school community does test positive for Covid-19, the individual should go into isolation for a minimum of five days and then be retested. Furthermore, schools should do contact tracing and encourage CDC-recommended testing and quarantine measures for those who were exposed to a Covid-positive person.
Of greatest importance is that schools work with their local and state health agencies to make vaccinations widely available to students and to educate students and parents about the facts regarding vaccination safety and efficacy. As experience during the Delta and Omicron surges has shown, vaccinations prevent severe illness and save lives, with an almost tenfold reduction in deaths and a similar or greater reduction in hospitalizations. As of March 10, 2022, according to the CDC, about 76.6 percent of the U.S. population had been fully vaccinated, although there remain communities with much lower rates, and eligible children continue to lag behind adults). Covid may always be with us, but the more we can increase immunity through vaccines, the less opportunity the virus will have to spread.
In Sum
In this essay we have outlined the steps that schools can take to minimize transmission and keep students and staff safe. School officials can turn to the CDC’s website for specific information and advice on preventative measures, including how to educate the school community about Covid, how to implement mitigation procedures, safety practices for transportation to and from school, and recommended procedures for testing, quarantining, and tracing.
Ours is an extraordinary time—an era that demands that we educate ourselves about Covid and respect the facts. With unity of purpose, a commitment to clear communication, and proper precautions, we can protect students and teachers while providing the in-person learning that children need and deserve.
This is part of the forum, “Covid-19 Precautions in Schools“. For alternate takes, see “Time for a New Normal,” by Paymon Rouhanifard and Dr. Shira Doron, and “Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future,” by Jon Bailey.
The post Tie Precautions to Community Risk Levels appeared first on Education Next.
By: Gerard Bossard
Title: Tie Precautions to Community Risk Levels
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/tie-precautions-to-community-risk-levels-forum-covid-19-precautions-in-schools/
Published Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2022 08:58:58 +0000
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Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future
The rapidly receding Omicron wave of Covid-19 presents a moment to pause and reflect on our pandemic strategy and make needed and, in some cases, long overdue adjustments. This is also the time to prepare for future pandemic risks. As we move forward, it is important for policymakers and health authorities to review which measures have worked, which policies have fallen short, and which actions have produced too little public-health benefit relative to the costs they have imposed on families and, too often, on children.
The end of a wave may not necessarily be the end of a pandemic. Omicron was generally milder than other variants, but its transmissibility made it far deadlier than many assume. More than 150,000 deaths were reported during this surge, compared to 132,000 during the Delta wave, and four times as many children were hospitalized for Omicron than for Delta. The BA.2 subvariant is also disrupting school in the United Kingdom, with one in five schools reporting that 15 percent of their teachers were absent, and student absences tripled in less than two weeks to 202,000, trends which might foreshadow similar disruptions in the United States. One research study suggested that, during the Omicron surge, the effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine against Covid infection in children ages 5–11 plummeted to 12 percent from 68 percent, and protection against hospitalization dropped to 48 percent from 100 percent during the same period. There remains a risk that a new variant could emerge that evades all or most of the vaccines’ protections.
On the other hand, communities now have greater protection against severe disease as a result of immunity gained through infection or vaccinations. Vaccines have generally proven to be highly effective, particularly with boosters. For those who are hospitalized, new antiviral pills and therapeutic treatments help further reduce the risk of death. The nation’s testing system, while far from where it needs to be, has vastly improved since even a few months ago. All of this has led to Covid becoming less deadly over time and quickly approaching the same fatality rate as the seasonal flu.
It is worth emphasizing that children continue to be at much lower risk than adults. An unvaccinated child is at less risk of contracting a serious case of Covid than a vaccinated 70-year-old. A March 2021 review of more than 130 studies showed that schools were not super-spreader settings and that it was possible to reopen schools in a way that protected both teachers and students. In July 2021, former CDC director Tom Frieden reviewed the scientific literature and concluded, “Evidence from around the world suggests that children spread Covid-19 less than adults; that children with Covid-19 are less likely than adults to become severely ill; and that in-person education has not meaningfully increased community transmission when schools have mitigation measures in place.” No research has emerged that fundamentally alters this evaluation.
Children have thankfully been spared the worst of Covid, but our policy response still treats them as if they were most at risk. Schools were first to close and last to open, and now students, who were first to be masked, are the last to be unmasked. We face a very different set of risks moving forward than we did in the early weeks of the pandemic. Our strategies, particularly as they relate to schools, need to reflect this new reality.
Clearer Triggers
The waning Omicron surge provides the opportunity to reset the mitigation measures that have long been in place, including masking and quarantine policies. Two principles should guide the reintroduction of restrictions and protective measures.
First, mitigation practices should depend on community context. Masks may not be needed for children in a community with high vaccination rates and low case incidence, but they may be an important first line of defense in areas with low vaccination rates, high case incidence, and higher hospitalization rates. These decisions are best made locally. State mandates requiring or prohibiting mitigation measures too often rob communities of their agency and make it difficult for local entities to respond nimbly to changing conditions on the ground.
The CDC’s recently updated method of determining county risk levels now considers hospitalization rates and the number of hospital beds being used, not just the number of new cases reported. This change is long overdue: as far back as July 2021, case numbers began to decouple from hospitalization rates and deaths. The model could be further strengthened by incorporating community vaccination rates to help assess the risk. British Columbia has done just that with an easy-to-understand chart that estimates the risk of hospitalization based on vaccination status, age, and other risk factors.
Second, the CDC and state health authorities must establish clear, simple-to-understand metrics that trigger the introduction of Covid-mitigation measures and, just as importantly, trigger the lifting of those measures. These metrics should automatically expire after a period of time, perhaps 30 days, to force authorities to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures, consider any new research that has emerged, and adjust strategies based on changing circumstances. This would allow extending mitigation measures but would force authorities to make the case for why the continuation is warranted.
Strengthen Community Preparedness
As experience with Omicron and Delta has taught us, Covid-19 variants can emerge suddenly and spread rapidly. Both waves caught schools off guard, with student learning disrupted by extended quarantines. A recent bipartisan poll found that children have missed an average of 21 days of school this academic year because of quarantines. Instead of receiving live, online instruction, many students found themselves sent home with paper packets.
There is no guarantee that we will not see another wave of the virus this year or that another more problematic variant will not appear. Leaders need to make the most of this time to bolster their preparations and ensure that schools aren’t caught off guard again.
Consider the way coastal communities prepare for hurricanes. Before hurricane season, no one knows how many serious storms will occur, how intense they might be, or where they will make landfall. So, communities use layered preparedness measures that include strengthening building codes, developing plans for students who may miss school, and preparing mandatory evacuation plans should they be required.
Similarly, we have little ability to forecast Covid-19 waves and their intensity. Over the next few months, schools should shore up their defenses—by improving ventilation systems, for instance, and developing more robust Covid-testing plans to support test-to-stay programs. Leaders cannot estimate the number of students who will require isolation or quarantine, but they can prepare now to ensure that any students who do have to stay home are guaranteed to receive live, online instruction within 24 hours of leaving school. And perhaps most important, community leaders can work to increase student vaccination rates by encouraging parents to talk with their pediatricians.
Strengthening the Nation’s Policy Response
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, our policy response has consistently been too slow in adapting to changing circumstances and emerging research. Two years into the pandemic, the federal government still cannot supply reliable counts of how many schools are open or how many students have been quarantined. Out of the 56,000 grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health in 2020, two were given to studies of the efficacy of masks and two were for studies of Covid transmission in schools. It took the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Transportation seven months to address regulatory issues related to the shortage of school-bus drivers. And CDC guidance still consistently lags behind emerging research on Covid-19, the risks the virus has presented for children, and the mitigation measures necessary to contain it.
There are three steps policymakers can take to strengthen our policy response. First, they can acknowledge that better data is the foundation for a better response and act accordingly. Policymakers should require schools to report positive cases, the number of students in quarantine or remote learning, and the mitigation measures in effect in the school. Such data will help better track future waves of the virus and will contribute to research into the efficacy of masks, social distancing, test-to-stay programs, and other protective measures. One reason there is such intense debate about the efficacy of masks in schools right now is that we have not collected the data needed to know how well masks worked in school settings. The financial burden of collecting and reporting this information is more than offset by the $280 billion in federal Covid funding that has already been allocated. Organizations such as Code for America and U.S. Digital Services can also help states build capacity through data-system improvements.
Second, our nation needs a better system to help leaders make sense of the growing body of research studies on Covid-19 and related mitigation strategies. Many studies have limitations in how their findings should be interpreted. Preprints are easily accessible, and they can be confusing or misleading without the appropriate context and interpretation, especially since people can usually find a handful of studies to back whatever position they already hold. We need better summarization of studies and the emerging picture they collectively paint. This could be accomplished through an interagency task force composed of researchers from the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Third, policymakers should make more Covid-related decisions through a deliberative policy process that can evaluate the tradeoffs of different courses of action. This is how government manages nearly every other policy issue, ranging from economic matters to foreign relations. Decisions are rarely left to a single agency but are debated among cabinet members who have different perspectives on evaluating the costs and benefits of various solutions. We need more of these debates, not just federally but also among state leaders, to help craft pandemic policy strategies that better weigh the public-health benefits against other social, economic, and educational costs.
The end of the Omicron surge is an opportunity. It presents us with a chance to reevaluate our pandemic-response strategies and prepare for the future. And it offers the opportunity to return to some degree of normalcy. Beyond all else, the moment challenges us with renewed urgency to commit to building a system that serves all students with their academic recovery. How will our leaders rise to the challenge of the moment? Students are counting on us, and we must not fail them.
This is part of the forum, “Covid-19 Precautions in Schools“. For alternate takes, see “Time for a New Normal,” by Paymon Rouhanifard and Dr. Shira Doron, and “Tie Precautions to Community Risk Levels,” by Gerard Bossard and Dr. Douglas Rothman.
The post Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future appeared first on Education Next.
By: John Bailey
Title: Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/reset-strategies-now-prepare-for-the-future-forum-covid-19-precautions-in-schools/
Published Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2022 08:57:00 +0000
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Washington Today (4/22/2022): Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44B and will privatize company
Today's program includes the latest on Ukraine with Sec. of State Antony Blinken and Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin. Plus, Republicans visit the border, Congress returns from recess, and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) discusses long covid.
Downlo […]
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Monday, April 25, 2022
White House Press Secretary on Elon Musk Purchasing Twitter
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responds to question on news reports that Elon Musk is purchasing Twitter: "I'm not going to comment on a specific transaction, what I can tell you as a general matter, no matter who owns or runs Twitter, the pre […]
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Democrats Have Lost Public Confidence on Education, but Republicans Haven’t Gained It
Going back a half century or more, Democrats have generally enjoyed a substantial lead on education. The party’s broad support for more education spending, outspoken embrace of public education, and close ties to teachers unions and the education establishment have usually added up to a hefty advantage, one that became more significant in recent decades as education assumed a more visible, national profile.
Today, though, Democratic stances on education may be playing differently. Fierce debates over school closures, school masking policies, critical race theory, gender policy, and student-loan forgiveness appear to be producing headwinds for Democrats on an issue they’ve long owned. Polling by Morning Consult found that the Democratic lead on education shrank to seven points in November 2021 from 20 points in January 2021. The Washington Post–ABC News poll put the Democratic lead on education at just three points in the fall of 2021. And a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that lead had declined to just five points in March 2022 from nine points in November 2021.
There’s also anecdotal evidence that Democrats are facing challenges on education. In uber-progressive San Francisco, over 70 percent of voters supported a recall effort that ousted three school-board members who were seen as unduly focused on social justice and insufficiently concerned with managing the budget and reopening schools. Likewise, the Virginia gubernatorial contest in fall 2021 was ultimately—fairly or not—treated by many pundits as something of a referendum on current fights in education. In that contest, of course, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin defeated former Governor Terry McAuliffe in a state that President Joe Biden won by double digits in 2020.
Ruy Teixeira, political scientist at the Center for American Progress and coauthor of The Emerging Democratic Majority, argues that Democrats are facing a “common sense problem” whereby they are “losing the plot relative to the median voter.” Regarding education, Teixeira has suggested that too many influential voices on the left have grown uncomfortable with broadly supported notions of merit, high standards, and personal responsibility. For example, he notes that even in deep-blue Massachusetts, voters—including Black voters—overwhelmingly believe that racial achievement gaps “are not due just to racism” and that “standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.”
All of this raises timely questions: How does the public feel about Democrats and Republicans when it comes to education? Has the Democratic Party actually lost voter confidence on education in recent years? And, if so, has the Republican Party been able to capitalize on this change?
The Data
To answer these questions, we can turn to the polling. From 2003 to 2022, New Models and Winning the Issues used the Winston Group to phone poll 1,000 registered voters on the following question 78 different times: “Which party do you have more confidence in to handle the issue of education, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” Respondents were able to select from one of three response options: “Republican,” “Democrat,” or “Don’t Know/Refused.” (These response options could differ slightly, but these differences are minor. For example, “Democrat” was sometimes replaced with “Democratic” or “Democratic Party.” More significantly, through the end of 2015, the third response option was “Don’t Know/Refuse”; after 2015, the third response option was simply “Don’t Know.” Interestingly, the third response option became more popular after 2015.) While the question was not asked every single year, the extended time horizon, consistent wording, and consistent polling method offer an exceptional opportunity to track the trend of relative confidence in Republicans and Democrats on education over the long term.
Figure 1 shows the overall results of these polls. For those years when the question was polled many times, only the average results of the poll in that year were graphed.
Figure 1. Voter Confidence on Education, 2003–22
Source: New Models Poll 2003-2015; Winning the Issues National Poll 2017-2022
Figure 1 paints a pretty clear picture. During every one of the past 20 years, the Democratic Party led the GOP in voter confidence on education. For the whole of that period, the average Democratic lead was 15 points (51–36). All averages, unless otherwise noted, are the yearly averages, not averages of all the polls weighted equally. Between 2003 and 2019, confidence in the Democratic Party on education never dipped below 47 percent, and only in 2014 did the Democratic lead fall into the single digits.
In the past few years, however, there has been a noticeable shift. Confidence in the Democratic Party in 2022 has fallen below 45 percent, its lowest point in the past 20 years. This decline is more easily seen in Figure 2, which uses the same data as Figure 1 but plots how each party performed in a given year relative to the year in which it posted its best performance. Figure 2 shows that confidence in the Democratic Party on education in 2021 and 2022 had fallen to more than 15 points below its 2009 peak. It also highlights that the five best years for Democrats on education between 2003 and 2022 all came before 2014, while the five worst years have all come since.
Figure 2. Yearly Party Performance on Education Relative to Best Party Performance
Source: New Models Poll 2003-2015; Winning the Issues National Poll 2017-2022
The Democratic Party’s lead on the Republican Party on the issue of education has also diminished since 2003. Figure 3, which maps the size of the Democratic lead on education, illustrates this trend. As noted, between 2003 and 2022, the GOP trailed Democrats by an average of 15 percentage points among registered voters. That lead dipped into single digits just once between 2003 and 2019, in 2014 (at the height of the Common Core backlash). During the past two years, however—as debates over school closures, school masking, critical race theory, and gender policy have come to the fore—the Democratic lead has fallen into the single digits once again.
Figure 3. The Democratic Party Lead over the GOP on Education
Source: New Models Poll 2003-2015; Winning the Issues National Poll 2017-2022
Taken as a whole, the data suggest that Democrats are struggling more on education than at any other time in the past two decades. Crucially, however, that has not yet translated into substantial gains by the Republican Party. Confidence in the Republican Party on education hovered between 32 and 40 percent in all but two years between 2003 and 2019, and it has remained firmly planted in that same range even in 2021 and 2022. Indeed, neither 2021 nor 2022 ranks in the top five years for the GOP on education—despite the waning public confidence in Democrats on this issue.
In short, Democrats are bleeding on the issue of education, and Republicans are making only modest gains. Meanwhile, there’s been a substantial jump since 2017 in the number of voters who say they don’t know which party they trust on education. After hovering between 10 and 15 percent between 2003 and 2015, the share of voters responding “Don’t Know” has jumped closer to 20 percent in recent years.
Takeaways
There’s less confidence in Democrats on education than there has been at any time in two decades, with support now sitting at about 45 percent—down from a Barack Obama–era peak of 61 percent. Democrats have been losing voters’ confidence for a half decade, and that decline has become noticeably steeper over the past two years.
That said, while Republicans have bounced back from exceptional lows in 2017 and 2019, they’ve not so far made gains commensurate with the Democratic losses. Even as confidence in the Democratic Party on education has fallen to 45 percent, the GOP has not been able to break the 40 percent mark.
Meanwhile, a substantial share of voters (nearly one in five) currently trust neither party when it comes to education. The percentage of voters rejecting both parties has jumped in recent years, after remaining fairly consistent between 2003 and 2015.
What does this all mean?
It seems clear that Democrats are losing the confidence of some number of swing voters but that those voters don’t yet trust the Republicans on education. For Democrats, this suggests a chance to win back these voters’ confidence if the party can identify and is willing to address its problems.
For Republicans, it suggests an enormous opportunity. If the GOP could win over the voters whom Democrats have pushed away, it could draw even on education—or even turn a perennial weakness into a strength.
There’s also the question of how permanent any shifts will be. To the extent that they’re driven by heated culture clashes, the closest analog to the current situation may be the Common Core fights of the Obama years. Those fights yielded big Republican gains on education, but those gains dissipated as the Common Core faded from prominence. It’s an open question if shifts driven by frustration with school closures or critical race theory will prove longer-lasting.
Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.
This report is also available at AEI.org.
The post Democrats Have Lost Public Confidence on Education, but Republicans Haven’t Gained It appeared first on Education Next.
By: Frederick Hess
Title: Democrats Have Lost Public Confidence on Education, but Republicans Haven’t Gained It
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/democrats-have-lost-public-confidence-education-but-republicans-havent-gained-it/
Published Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2022 09:02:09 +0000
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The Education Exchange: “The biggest gut punch of all”
The Executive Director of the Office of Learning Recovery & Acceleration at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Michael Maher, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss North Carolina’s preliminary report on student learning loss in the state during the pandemic.
“Report to the North Carolina General Assembly: An Impact Analysis of Student Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” is available now.
Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or here on Education Next.
— Education Next
The post The Education Exchange: “The biggest gut punch of all” appeared first on Education Next.
By: Education Next
Title: The Education Exchange: “The biggest gut punch of all”
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-the-biggest-gut-punch-of-all/
Published Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2022 08:59:22 +0000
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Friday, April 22, 2022
Washington Today (4/22/2022): Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) Testifies at Administrative Hearing
Today's program includes the latest on the hearing on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and audio released from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Both deal with the fallout from the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. We speak with Ma […]
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President Biden on Republican Party: "This is a MAGA party now."
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Families May Like Their School But Want More Options. That’s Where Course Choice Comes In
The debate over school choice has long featured strident rhetoric about union lackeys and privatizers. But now, after millions of students spent a year or more in off-and-on home schooling and makeshift arrangements like learning pods and virtual camps, many once-stark distinctions have blurred. Yet, that has helped make other things clear. For one, it’s illustrated how the familiar school choice debate can miss much of what’s important to families.
While there are plenty of families who want to move to a different school, for a variety of reasons, polling also consistently shows that over 70 percent of parents are satisfied with their child’s school. Of course, this doesn’t mean they like everything about their school. They may want choices that amount to something less than moving from school A to school B.
Even pre-pandemic, parents who liked their school might have still grumbled about its reading program, math classes, or lack of Advanced Placement options. Now, with so many students forcibly acclimated to remote learning—which frequently involved a mélange of academic options, providers, and supports—many parents have asked: Why can’t a student choose to take advantage of such opportunities without changing schools?
Well, they should be able to and they increasingly can. One tool for extending such incremental choice is “course choice,” state-level legislation that allows families to choose to stay put—while also tapping into instructional options that aren’t available at a student’s school.
Course choice (also sometimes termed “course access”) permits students to take courses in addition to those offered by their local school district. These courses can be offered by neighboring districts, state higher education institutions, through virtual learning platforms, or specialized tutoring services. In most cases, a portion of the per-pupil outlay is used to pay for requisite transportation, materials, or online enrollment.
Course choice can make it possible to meet the needs of more students while reducing the pressure on educators to meet every one of these demands inside the building or with their existing staff. This is especially pressing in those cases where it’s hard to find a skilled instructor or where only a handful of students seek a particular offering. Indeed, my colleague Michael Brickman recently wrote a report arguing that course choice should appeal to public educators as much as to families.
While course choice made great strides a decade ago, with 10 states adopting such policies by 2014, things have slowed mightily since then amid our hardening partisan divides. Yet, as Brickman points out, there appears to be resurgent interest in this kind of choice in the aftermath of COVID-19, especially as school leaders cope with staffing shortages, recognize the new comfort of high-quality remote instruction, and see the need to provide extra opportunities and supports to learners upended by two years of disruption.
In particular, observes Brickman, post-pandemic classrooms are likely to feature “an even greater distribution of students’ ability levels in each classroom”—posing heightened challenges to teachers and schools seeking to meet each student’s learning needs. Course choice can be one tool for addressing the challenge.
For those seeking detail on how all this can work, it’s worth checking out Brickman’s report, which offers sensible guidelines on specific program elements like rules for adding “outside” courses, when and how to notify parents of course options, how to handle student applications, funding mechanisms, and how to ensure courses are consistent with state graduation requirements.
The larger point is that, especially post-pandemic, the world of educational choice is much bigger, richer, and more interesting than just whether families should have th
e right to move from this school to that school. In fact, even as we debate things like opportunity scholarships and education savings accounts, we may be able to find copious common ground on more incremental ways to expand options and promote educational choice.
Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.
This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.
The post Families May Like Their School But Want More Options. That’s Where Course Choice Comes In appeared first on Education Next.
By: Frederick Hess
Title: Families May Like Their School But Want More Options. That’s Where Course Choice Comes In
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/families-may-like-their-school-but-want-more-options-thats-where-course-choice-comes-in/
Published Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2022 08:59:46 +0000
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