TOP TASKS

Make 2022-23 an uninterrupted school year

It may seem like a foregone conclusion that schools have put the disruptions to learning behind them as we enter our fourth school year since the pandemic first emerged on our shores, but too much is at risk to take that chance. What’s needed, argues Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor and public health scientist, in a powerful op-ed in The New York Times is a firm commitment to break the cycle of interrupted instruction that has left so many students behind.

“The crisis kids face at this point in the pandemic is not the virus, but the cost of so many years of disrupted school,” Allen writes. “The overriding goal for the next school year should be to maximize time in the classroom and make school look and feel much like it did before the pandemic started.”

What will it take to make that commitment real in communities across the country? Allen suggests three key areas where mindsets and policies need to change:

1. 1. “First, schools should be open. They should never have closed and should never close again.”
   2. “Quarantining should end. We shouldn’t have kids miss school because they are close contacts of someone who had Covid. This practice is disruptive, has forced entire classrooms to miss two weeks of school unnecessarily.”
   3. “Most school districts dropped their mask mandates by the end of the 2021-22 school year. This is a good policy choice that should continue into the fall because the value of mandates drops over time, as people become less likely to comply.”

Taken together, these three policies will ensure that students are able to be in the classroom as much as possible and effectively shifts the handling of a Covid infection to be in line with that of other common illnesses. This approach is grounded in the reality of the risk to children today from Covid-19: “The current hospitalization rate for school-age kids in the United States is 0.4 per 100,000. Of all age groups, they have the lowest risk of hospitalization. The highest rate of hospitalization for children was during the January 2022 Omicron surge and topped out at just over one per 100,000.”

There’s some indication that the CDC may be heading Allen and others’ advice, with new guidance expected to be released this week. Plans that were obtained by CNN suggest that the CDC may remove many of the most onerous guidance for schools, including abolishing “test-to-stay” policies, shifting quarantine guidelines for the unvaccinated and removing suggestions that students should keep 6-feet of social distancing.

The new guidance, like previous reports from the CDC, will not be legally binding, meaning that it will still be up to advocates, families and educators to ensure their districts are adopting the new guidelines in the weeks to come–but it’s an important step forward in limiting further learning loss and mental health crises that have negatively impacted far too many children.

Learn from Arizona’s innovations

Perhaps no state in the country has had as successful a summer as Arizona when it comes to ushering in the future of the American education system.

Last month, Governor Doug Ducey signed HB2853 into law, expanding the number of students who have access to an ESA totalling $6,500/year from 11,000 children to over one million. As noted by the Goldwater Institute, this will be of particular benefit to low-income learners: “Arizona’s ESA program has been particularly beneficial to those most in need of additional educational options…the highest concentrations of ESA usage actually occur in the most severely economically disadvantaged communities in Arizona—meaning that the program is providing new opportunity to students who will benefit the most from it.”

At the same time, there is a lot of progress underway to eliminate another barrier to equitable educational access: transportation. Championed in a policy brief and continued advocacy by A for Arizona, the state has already invested $20 million in seed funding for innovative new approaches beyond the big yellow school bus, including vans and rideshare programs.

Finally, the Grand Canyon State is also leading the way forward in expanding opportunities in the summer. AZ OnTrack Summer Camp, led by 50CAN board member Lisa Graham Keegan and funded by the state to the tune of $100 million, has been a success with over 100,000 Arizona students participating. The camp established partnerships with over 250 community and civic organizations to deliver a summer experience that combines fun, field trips and academic recovery–the type of summer experience parents want for their kids but that far too few children, especially from low-income families, have access.

Key Resources

ExcelinEd’s Patricia Levesque writes for Education Next on the need to pair innovative approaches and expanded options with fixes to the current system.

Fordham Institute explores a new study examining the relationship between the growth of charter schools and neighborhood diversity, finding that a 10% increase in a neighborhood’s charter seats increases the racial diversity score by 2.9%.

The American Enterprise Institute’s new report on enrollment shifts in the wake of the pandemic states that the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest one-year enrollment declines for public schools in American history.

RAND hosted a webinar with administrators from Louisiana and California to examine best practices for the public schooling of undocumented students.

EdWeek looks at the popularity of various academic recovery programs, finding that in-school remedial instruction is the most popular–with 72% of schools using the strategy–but high dosage tutoring now at 54% and gaining ground.

The young STEM inventors who are recipients of The 74 Million’s “16 Under 16 in STEM” award are an impressive group, including a student who invented a smart bracelet that detects repetitive movements associated with anxiety.