Several new things out of the Bellwether world. I talked with Kevin Kosar about non-profits, education, and public service.
Chad Aldeman takes a look at learning loss this year:
The projected learning loss for students is staggering. Los Angeles, Clark County, Wake County and New York City all plan to deliver less than half of a normal school year’s worth of instruction for students of all ages. That translates into 433 lost hours for a fifth-grader in New York City and 558 hours in Los Angeles. Depending on the length of a school day, these losses are the equivalent of 60 to 100 days of lost learning time.
Hailly Korman, Bonnie O’Keefe, and Matt Repka take a look at all the kids missing from school since March:
By mid-March 2020, most American schools had shut their doors, and about half remain fully or partially closed to in-person learning today. For approximately 3 million of the most educationally marginalized students in the country, March might have been the last time they experienced any formal education — virtual or in-person. (To see how we estimated 3 million, click here. To see a state-by-state breakdown of these estimates, click here.)
Elsewhere:
We’ve talked about this before, and I know it’s hard to believe in the education sector, but politics might be influencing the school reopen / close conversation:
The latest evidence, released this month as a working paper through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, indicates that partisanship — as exhibited by the share of voters in a given county who supported Donald Trump in 2016, as well as the strength of local teachers’ unions — drove reopening plans “far more” than public health conditions.
