TUESDAY 8/4
FEDERAL
Phase 4:
- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Senate Republicans that negotiators are no closer to a coronavirus relief deal than they were last week. Politico reported that Republicans have expressed interest in supporting SNAP, USPS money and broadband. There may also be some modest agreement on housing policy -- eviction moratorium and mortgage forbearance.
- A separate Politico story reports the White House is considering three executive orders: delay the collection of federal payroll taxes, reinstitute an expired eviction moratorium, and extend enhanced federal unemployment benefits using unspent money already appropriated by Congress.
Fauci:
STATE
Seven Governors Form Testing Consortium: Governors representing Virginia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio, and Maryland have formed a first-of-its-kind purchasing compact they hope will pressure companies that make rapid-detection tests to quickly ramp up production for 500,000 rapid tests, for a total of 3.5 million. The Rockefeller Foundation is willing to act as the financing entity if needed.
15 Largest Districts: What their plans are for reopening.
Arizona: Superintendent of Public Instruction Hoffman released a statement "As school leaders, we should prepare our families and teachers for the reality that it is unlikely that any school community will be able to reopen safely for traditional in-person or hybrid instructions by August 17th."
California: LA reached a deal with the teachers union with teachers being requires to provide only 3 hours of live instruction per day.
Delaware: Based on a review of COVID-19 data in Delaware, Governor Carney and the Delaware Division of Public Health (DPH) announced that schools may open under a hybrid scenario next month, with a mix of in-person and remote instruction and significant safety precautions to limit transmission of COVID-19.
Idaho: Is the only state skipping the Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program.
Massachusetts: The American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts called for schools to start remotely, even though the community positively rate was only 2.2%.
Michigan: Kalamazoo Public Schools will start the school year Aug. 31 using distance learning.
Tennessee: The Tennessee Education Association is asking the state to delay school reopening and in-person instruction, saying the risk of further spreading COVID-19 is still too high to support in-person classes.
Utah: Article discussing the nursing shortage during COVID.
INTERNATIONAL
Generational Catastrophe: United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday that the world faces a “generational catastrophe” because so many schools have been closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. "“Getting students back into schools and learning institutions as safely as possible must be a top priority.”
Scotland: Thousands of students received worse results than they had been expecting after the country's exam body lowered 125,000 estimated grades - a quarter of the total. "Around a quarter of all entries. 6.9% of those estimates were adjusted up and 93.1% were adjusted down, with 96% of all adjusted grades changed by one grade."
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ECONOMIC RECOVERY
1/3 of NYC Small Businesses: May be gone forever.
How Work Changed During COVID: NBER paper: "Using de- identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, we find, compared to pre- pandemic levels, increases in the number of meetings per person (+12.9 percent) and the number of attendees per meeting (+13.5 percent), but decreases in the average length of meetings (-20.1 percent). Collectively, the net effect is that people spent less time in meetings per day (-11.5 percent) in the post- lockdown period. We also find significant and durable increases in length of the average workday (+8.2 percent, or +48.5 minutes), along with short-term increases in email activity.
Workforce Development Accelerator: Colorado Thrives has partnered with Techstars, ZOMALAB and Strada Education Network to launch the Workforce Development Accelerator designed to address the challenges of the current labor market through innovative technologies, business models and solutions. The accelerator will work with 10 startups and two nonprofit organizations each year to help them accelerate their businesses through focused curriculum and hands-on mentorship. The program will begin accepting applications from nonprofit entrepreneurs interested in participating in the 2020 program. Nonprofits interested in participating in this program are encouraged to learn more by visiting the program page and may apply here. Applications will be received for one month, closing on August 30,2020. An information session will be held on August 11th from 1:30-2:30 MT for nonprofits to learn more about the program, information about key timelines, the types of nonprofits the accelerator is interested in, and an open Q&A.
RESOURCES
Learning Pods:
- The COVID-19 Pod Problem: Desperate Bay Area parents seek imperfect schooling solutions: "The Parks have vowed to open their children’s pods to low-income families in their school community. For the kindergarten pod, for example, they’re working with another family to hire a teacher and subsidize the costs for one or two families to join them. Park realizes this, too, is an imperfect solution. She has heard the criticism about parents playing “savior” and concerns about the arrangement’s potential to make someone feel like a charity case."
- Bay Area parents turning to learning pods.
- Parents and Teachers Starting “Learning Pods” Are Done Waiting for Permission
- Knox County families form groups to make virtual learning less isolating, more manageable
- Tech companies are offering parents additional benefits as COVID-19 threatens schools’ return. "Tutor.com, which provides tutoring for students in K-12 and even college, has seen an “explosion” in interest from companies that may want to offer the company’s services as a perk. Whereas it used to field five to 10 inquiries a year, since April it has received 84 inquiries via a form on its website, said Sandi White, vice president and general manager."
- Canadian Learning Pods: “I started this group because I was looking for alternative learning arrangements for my kids in September,” Marmer said. “There are so many unknowns, and I wanted to create stability for my children and their education. But that’s me, personally — everyone has their reasons."
- Parents Unhappy With School Options Assemble Learning ‘Pods'
- Can You Form a School Pod Without Fueling Inequality? These Groups Are Trying
- Coronavirus: How pandemic pods and zutors are changing home-schooling
- Some parents forming ‘pandemic pods’ to teach their kids
VELA Education Fund Launches with $1M Meet the Moment Grant Program: VELA Education Fund announced a $1 million Meet the Moment grant program to support families, educators and innovators building and leading innovative initiatives to support continued student learning. Partners include the Walton Family Foundation, Charles Koch Institute, 4.0 Schools, Camelback Ventures, HSLDA, and NPU. Initial grants include:
- Prenda, a launchpad, tech solution, and network for microschools. Prenda combines flexible learning environments, cutting-edge techniques, human-centered technology, and passionate people to help children develop creativity, problem-solving, and 21st-century skills
- 100 Roads, an incubator for co-learning communities and microschools, which provides workshops, resources, and a knowledge base for innovators starting their own educational models and spaces.
- Hybrid homeschool research, which will study the hundreds of mixed options across the country where students attend formal classes in a brick-and-mortar school for part of the week and are homeschooled for the rest of the week. Researchers are exploring what it takes for hybrid homeschools to grow beyond early adopters and into the mainstream.
Child Transmission: New study published in the Lancet that found schools and nurseries linked to just 45 COVID cases in Australia.
Support for a National Strategy: NPR/Ipsos poll found that two-thirds of respondents said they believe the U.S. is handling the pandemic worse than other countries, and most want the federal government to take extensive action to slow the spread of the coronavirus, favoring a top-down approach to reopening schools and businesses.
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Parents’ Perspectives on the Effects of COVID-19 on K-12 Education: Via USC
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Options Other Than Reopening Schools: Via the Atlantic.
Struggling to Thrive as a Large Team Working Remotely? Great set of tips from FirstRound.
Surge In Private School Enrollments: Private schools offering in-person classes report increased enrollment.
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The Price Students Pay When Schools Are Closed: Via Paul Peterson
- Economists have estimated that each additional year of schooling yields a return over an economic lifetime of somewhere between 8 percent to 13 percent, with consensus estimates hovering around a 10 percent return.
- Teacher strikes are the second most frequent cause of school closures. During the first decade of this century a series of strikes in Ontario, Canada adversely affected growth in elementary-student test performance.
- Virtual learning is very likely better than no education at all, but at its present stage of development, it remains a poor substitute for classroom instruction in elementary and secondary schools.
- Students who have higher-quality teachers are more likely to perform better on standard tests, graduate from college, earn more during their productive years, and avoid incarceration.
What Scientists Are Learning About Kids and COVID-19: Via Vox.
- The CDC says that children under the age of 18 account for less than 7 percent of US Covid-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of the deaths.
- The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that somewhere between 0.6 percent and 9 percent of pediatric Covid-19 cases result in hospitalization. A preprint study that has not yet been peer-reviewed of 31 household clusters in five countries found that 12 percent of children had severe cases.
- One study published in Nature in June with data from six countries suggests kids under the age of 20 are about half as likely to get sick after exposure as adults; other studies in Israel, the Netherlands, and Switzerland consistently report children get infected less easily than adults.
Measuring Student Growth: New report from the Data Quality Campaign, Alliance for Excellent Education and Collaborative for Student Success
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FDA Warning: On 100 hand sanitizers.
NGA is Hiring: Deputy for Center for Best Practices.
New COVID-19 Forecast Model: Harvard Global Health Institute, Google released the COVID-19 Public Forecasts, a set of models that provide projections of COVID-19 cases, deaths, ICU utilization, ventilator availability, and other metrics over the next 14 days for U.S. counties and states. The models are trained on public data such as those from Johns Hopkins University, Descartes Labs, and the United States Census Bureau, and Google says they’ll continue to be updated with guidance from its collaborators at Harvard.
Parents Struggle as Schools Reopen: "We have kept them protected for so long,” said Adamus, who said her aunt died from COVID-19 in Alabama and her husband’s great-uncle succumbed to the virus in a New Jersey nursing home. “They haven’t been to restaurants. We only go to parks if no one else is there. We don’t take them to the grocery store. And now they’re going to be in the classroom with however many kids for an entire day with a teacher.”
OpEds:
Alabama Principal: Can't touch this.
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