Friday News Roundup

It’s Friday. Time for the News Roundup!

Interactive: See How Student Achievement Gaps Are Growing in Your State (The 74)

National NAEP 8^th grade math scores have fallen 8 points since 2019.

Those same math scores fell 12 points since 2013.

These decreases have infected all students – including high-performing and low-performing groups.

According to The 74 online this week,

“A primary factor [behind the decline] is the softening of No Child Left Behind. The law may not have been especially popular, but at least part of the gains from that era [2003-2013] were attributable to its school and district accountability systems. When researchers evaluated the effects of NCLB, they found the law led to noticeable gains in math, especially for the lowest-performing students. When schools felt pressure from state accountability systems, they increased their academic standards and boosted achievement in ways that had long-term benefits for students.”

A Reckoning in Cleveland: COVID Cuts Slash Laptops, Summer School, After-School (The 74)

Here’s another school district suffering financially.

According to The 74 online this week,

“The Cleveland school district, one of the poorest and largest recipients of federal COVID relief cash in the country, may soon slash summer school, after-school, and a program providing laptops for every student as the flow of aid ends this summer.”

“Those initiatives, created to help the high-poverty district’s students after schools closed during the pandemic, are among the highest-profile cuts out of $91 million proposed by new district CEO Warren Morgan.”

“Other proposals to cover the loss of an additional $12,000 per students in COVID aid also include ending a decade-long experiment of year-around classes in some schools.”

School Boards Face Their Most Difficult Budget Season Ever. Many Are Unprepared (The 74)

According to The 74 online this week,

“All around the country, districts are drafting budgets that will bring cuts to schools starting this fall. As those budgets come before school boards this spring, board members will undoubtedly hear from staff and families. Communities will push back against decisions that include layoffs; cuts to gifted programs, athletics and college advising; and reductions to tutoring, summer or afterschool offerings. The most upset will be those affected by decisions to close schools.”

…

“The challenge is that most school boards have no experience with deep budget cuts. The typical district has seen a decade of solid budget growth, capped off with a hefty infusion of federal relief funds. But this fall brings a perfect storm, when relief funds dry up as enrollments continue to fall and districts must sort through commitments they made to new staff and inflation-era pay hikes.”

“As this budget season gets underway, that inexperience has been evident in many of the 200 school board budget meetings our team has observed as part of a federally funded research project.”

Sounds like the traditional system is in for a bumpy ride. When will it learn that these cycles of budget expansion/restriction end up hurting kids?

Lost Learning = Lost Earning, an Equation that Could Cost the U.S. $31 Trillion (The 74)

According to The 74 online this week,

“American students are lagging behind their international peers in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to a new analysis unveiled by Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek. The ultimate costs of the last few years of incomplete learning will total $31 trillion over the course of the 21^st century, the scholar finds – greater than the country’s Gross Domestic Product over an entire year.”

…

“In an interview with The 74, Hanushek [pointed] to K-12 students’ persistently mediocre performance in math over the last few decades. After overlaying the National Assessment of Academic Progress math scores of individual U.S. states onto PISA’s (Programme for International Student Assessment) international scoring system, he found that even test takers in the top-scoring state, Massachusetts, ranked below their counterparts in 15 other countries…”

We’ve got work to do.

Enjoy your weekend. Til Monday. SVB