Tangle - The pandemic learning losses.

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Today, we're covering the results from the "Nation's Report Card," which showed significant drops in learning for fourth and eighth graders — tied to the pandemic — in both math and reading. We also have a major milestone and a reader question about Steve Bannon's sentence.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about some new data that just came out about learning loss in America. There are some pretty troubling scores that have come through. Before we jump in, though, I do want to start with a good news, encouraging announcement. Yesterday, Tangle broke 50,000 subscribers to our mailing list for the first time ever. This is obviously a huge milestone for us, and it's one I felt the need to acknowledge

today. You know, I know you guys are podcast listeners. Obviously, there's some overlap not just Americans, but folks across the world, because we have a lot of people outside the U.S. who tune in to Tangle to keep up with American politics. So thank you. While I have you, of course, it is a great time as always, but now especially to share Tangle and spread the word about what we're doing. You know, take the podcast, take the newsletter, wherever you usually listen or read us and spread the word, share it with friends. It helps a lot. We rely on people for that grassroots organic growth. All right. So that's it for the fun announcement. And we'll we'll start off with some quick hits. First up, John Fetterman and Dr. Mehmet Oz squared off in Pennsylvania's first and only

Senate debate. We'll be covering the debate in tomorrow's edition of Tangle. Number two, former top Trump aide Hope Hicks was interviewed by the January 6th committee yesterday. Number three, Adidas and The Gap ended their relationship with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, after a string of anti-Semitic comments he made on social media and in various media appearances. 4. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is withdrawing its letter to President Biden calling on him to couple military aid to Ukraine with a diplomatic push. Representative Pramila Jayapal, the Democrat from Washington, blamed the letter's

release on staff sending it without vetting. Number five, more than 500 protesters were indicted in Iran this week, including several who faced potential death sentences. All right, that is it for the Quick Hits, which brings us to today's main topic, which is test scores. On Monday, the National Assessment of Education Progress, also known as NAEP, released the Nation's Report Card, an annual assessment of reading and math scores for American 4th and 8th grade students. The results were discouraging. Math scores for 4th and 8th graders on the nationally representative tests showed the largest decline since NAEP began testing in 1990. Reading scores also declined in both grades. While federal officials often caution against

tying student performance to any outlying factors, this time was unique. Peggy Carr, the National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner, attributed the troubling declines to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on student achievement. According to USA Today, in 2022, average reading scores in 4th and 8th grades decreased by 3 points from 2019, and average math scores in 4th and 8th grade decreased by 5 and 8 points respectively, the test results showed. The test, which involved 446,700 students and 10,970 schools across all states at the beginning of the calendar year, is scored on a scale of 0 to 500. The 2022 results show the lowest performing students performed even worse, and of particular concern, more students scored at what are considered below basic levels. Typically, the NAEP thinks of a one- or two-point decline as a significant impact on student

achievement. Ten-point declines are roughly equivalent to losing a full year of learning. On this assessment, there was an eight-point decline in math. Nearly four in ten eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts while reading scores hit their lowest level since 1992. According to Carr, student scores didn't directly correlate to how long schools were closed or whether in-person classes were happening. That's in part because when schools finally did open, many teachers or students ended up missing class due to COVID-19 outbreaks. Let me be very clear, these results are not acceptable, Miguel Cardona, the new education secretary under President Biden, said. We need to continue to approach the task of catching all of our students up with the urgency that this issue warrants. We must redouble our

efforts to accelerate student recovery. The results of the assessment are another indicator of the pandemic's destructive impact on student learning. Students in the high school class of 2022 also achieved the lowest average score on the ACT test in over three decades. However, ACT scores had already been declining steadily for five years. The average test score in 2022 was 19.8 out of 36. In 2021, it was 20.3. In 2020, it was 20.6. And in 2019, it was 20.3, in 2020 it was 20.6, and in 2019 it was 20.7. The latest report from the NAEP drove a range of new commentary about how we navigated the pandemic and our children's learning. Today, we'll take a look at some opinions from the with what the left is saying. The left is worried about the already underserved students who are falling even further behind. Some emphasize that loss has occurred across the country, regardless of how COVID-19 was handled.

Others say we need to smartly use allocated federal funds to close the gap. The Los Angeles Times editorial board said it's no surprise that educational achievement suffered everywhere. But it's still distressing to see the desolate picture of students' academics, an ever-widening gap between low- and high-performing students revealed by the latest national proficiency test scores, the editorial board added. California students fared slightly better than students in most other states, with small declines in math but less significant changes in reading. However, California students are still underperforming compared with national standards. Most troublingly, low-performing student scores declined at much higher rates than

higher-performing students. For example, the average score in 2022 for students at Los Angeles Unified Schools who are eligible for the free lunch program was 35 points lower than students who didn't qualify for that program. In 2002, that difference was only 14 points. It's clear that a multi-pronged approach to boosting student performance will be necessary, but state and local educators and policymakers should ensure that decisions about how to allocate resources are driven by data and other evidence. California schools received $15 billion from the American Rescue Plan, they said. The state created the $4.6 billion Expanded Learning Opportunity Grant in 2021,

issuing a set of guidelines for districts to spend on designated support such as additional staff. But it's up to districts to come up with plans that meet their needs. Now that educators have the funds and the data to help guide them, they should use that money wisely. Our children's future depends on it. In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson argued that it wasn't just blue states who suffered serious learning loss. It turns out that all the bitter back and forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the COVID-19 pandemic was nothing but political

theater as far as the test scores are concerned, Robinson said. Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, for example, made a big show of reopening their state schools in the fall of 2020, with DeSantis going so far as to threaten to withhold funding from school districts that did not comply. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom of California, on the other hand, moved more slowly, conditioning the return to in-person instruction on the level of COVID-19 infection in a given county. But the NAEP report, based on testing this spring, showed that student performance suffered equally despite different approaches. Math scores for fourth graders dropped by four points in California, five points in Florida, and five points in Texas,

Robinson said. For eighth graders, scores dropped six points in California, seven points in Florida, and seven points in Texas. Scores in reading in those three states also moved in lockstep, falling by a point or two. Political posturing may have mattered to governors who liked to be president someday, but it made no difference to the millions of children in the nation's schools. From the student's point of view, there was no right way to blunt the impact of the pandemic. All strategies we now know were equally futile. In The Hill, Javed Siddiqui said we're failing our most vulnerable students. While reviewing the report, some statistics jumped out at me. That black students experience a mathematics score dropped seven points higher than their

white peers. That despite showing steady gains for the last 20 years prior to the pandemic, black and Hispanic student scores have regressed to where they were in 1999. That students who were already struggling before the pandemic showed the most dramatic declines, Siddiqui said. These results, while concerning, are not surprising. They mirror other recent studies that have found that schools attended by predominantly Black and Hispanic

students, which we know tend to have less funding and resources even in the best of times, were more negatively impacted than predominantly white schools. In addition to addressing the immediacy of this pandemic-related learning loss, we must also consider long-term strategies to ensure our systems are built to effectively support all students, Siddiqui wrote. Research has shown unequivocally that educators of color increase the performance of all students, particularly students of color. Similarly, having school leaders of color creates pathways that lead to better outcomes for students of color as well. In fact, we know that having a diverse educator workforce is a benefit to all

students and communities. While these results are alarming and we should be prepared for more of the same when state-level NAEP results are released in November, all is not lost. We have strategies that can close these gaps, as well as time-sensitive federal relief funding to adopt these approaches. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right says that we failed our children with poor policy decisions and blames many democratic politicians. Some emphasize the differences in scores between public and private schools. Others say the data shows how disastrous remote learning really was. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond

Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada,

which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed.

Learn more at FluCcellvax.ca. National Review's editors said we failed the children of the pandemic. The declines were not evenly distributed nationwide, the editors wrote. New York City, which had longer periods of Zoom school and imposed masks on children until very recently, experienced a record drop in math scores. Washington, D.C. and Maryland saw double-digit declines in 4th and 8th grade math. Meanwhile, Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis, an early opponent of school closures, is spiking the football. Florida achieved its highest ever rankings in 4th and 8th grade math and reading. The federal government spent $123 billion last year on public schools in an effort to help children catch up from COVID-era

learning loss. These test results show the effort failed. Democrat-led areas had longer school closures, they said. The reckoning for this failure has been system-wide. The CDC allowed its own recommendations on in-person education to be shaped by lobbyists from the American Federation of Teachers. Experts acting in concert with Democratic state officials, were so anxious to flatter teachers as an extension of the white-collar Zoom class that they have surrendered their reputation as defenders of public education to Republicans such as DeSantis, Georgia's Brian Kemp, and Virginia's Glenn Youngkin. Parents are already making their own choices. In 2022, two million fewer students enrolled in public schools in America. A decades-long decline in

parochial school enrollment has been reversed. Private schools that stayed open and provided parents with free choices about masks and vaccines are thriving. The Washington Examiner said the test scores illustrate the disaster of distance learning. Chalk this up once again to Democrats' obsession with rewarding political allies at the expense of the public, the Examiner said. Although there are surely other culprits, in Virginia, for example, Democratic appointees watered down educational standards starting in 2015, followed by precipitous declines in proficiency, the obvious culprit for most of the national decline is distance learning during COVID. And there's no question that the closures contributed significantly to the decline in learning. There are two proofs of this. First,

Catholic schools almost everywhere were open full-time by the fall of 2020, and on aggregate, the data showed that they avoided the worst of the learning loss, avoiding declines in proficiency in 4th grade math and 8th grade reading. Moreover, states that kept more schools open experienced smaller declines in proficiency than their peers, a statistically significant result. Once it was clear that COVID was not a major threat to children, that they were neither likely to suffer severe symptoms nor pass the disease on to others, every schoolhouse in America should have reopened immediately for in-person instruction. Unfortunately, special interests run by many state educational bureaucracies

and, of course, special interests positively own the Biden administration. Government emails obtained by journalists damningly demonstrate that President Joe Biden's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even reversed its scientific judgments about school closures based on pressure from the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union. In Deseret News, Bethany Mandel said it is bad policy from the privilege, not COVID-19, that hurts students. How did those at the head of federal agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in addition to those working in education policy nationally and on a state level, not to mention their media defenders, get our COVID-19 response so wrong? The answer can be explained in one word. Privilege, Mandel wrote.

Many students were in single-parent homes with robust support systems. There was no mom or dad sitting at the dining room table trying to help them log onto Zoom or work through a math worksheet. Many of these parents were essential workers out delivering packages and food to those who had the privilege of working from home. When these kids had problems, there was no one around to help them, so they just didn't log in, she wrote. Of course, these kids have fallen even further behind. It wasn't that Zoom learning, an already inadequate solution, wasn't happening in these homes. There was no learning at all taking place. Those in positions of power and privilege who set education policy were completely disconnected from this existence. If they even had school-age children, they were using their privilege to

make sure their children didn't fall behind by sending them to private schools, hiring tutors, or doing the tutoring themselves. They simply couldn't fathom that there were parents who could not do the same. Alright, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. This is a difficult report to see. Throughout the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about the long-term impact of remote learning and school closures. And as worried as some of the most ardent critics were, I think these test scores actually paint a more troubling picture than many imagined. A math decline equivalent to nearly an entire year of learning will put tens of millions of K-12 students behind for the rest of their time in school.

Some, of course, will catch up, but it will take several years, if not more, to do that. Hindsight, of course, is 20-20. I wrote regularly about my belief that students should have gone back to school sooner, and that by the summer of 2021, even masking them was a questionable policy. In July of 2021, I wrote this. The highest end estimate for COVID-19 deaths among children is about 500, though the official tally is 335. The CDC estimates that 600 kids died of the flu during the 2017-2018 season. But recent studies, including the latest in England, indicate that unlike deaths in adult, we could be over-counting COVID-19 deaths in children.

99.995% of the 469,982 kids in England who got COVID-19 survived. Of the 61 deaths linked to a positive COVID-19 test, the study found only 25 were actually caused by the illness. Furthermore, of those 25 children, 15 had underlying serious illnesses. Study after study has shown kids' risk of serious COVID-19 illness is extremely low. The tricky part about keeping schools open, though, was never really about the kids. Even if students have been mostly safe from serious COVID-19, teachers, administrators, janitors, and other staff weren't. And of course, a lot of kids live

in homes with elderly or otherwise high-risk family members, making the risk of them bringing the virus home very high. Still, the learning loss is a stark reminder that nearly all policy upsides come with downsides too. In a crude manner, policymakers had to weigh how many potential deaths or serious illnesses among staff and family were worth a certain level of learning loss for students. Anyone who confidently opines on where that line should be should probably check their ego. I certainly do not envy the position policymakers and administrators were put in. If we could go back and have a redo, though, there are plenty of things I think we could have done differently. The most obvious is that we should have emphasized

in-person learning and put most of our COVID-19 testing resources into getting kids back into schools. Rather than default to distance learning and set bars for returning to the classroom, a more holistic policy may have been defaulting to in-person learning and using testing to decide when to send kids home. The strain that distance learning put not just on students but on low-income parents who relied on school for child care and lunches is hard to overstate. Other things that were obvious then have been borne out now. Higher performing students were more likely to have a computer or tablet at home, high-speed internet, and a quiet room to participate in class from. In a COVID-19 redo, federal and state funding could have prioritized either closing those gaps or simply

keeping kids in school for in-person learning who didn't have the space and resources to reasonably participate in classes at home. Again, none of this is simple, but the results, a wave of learning loss on top of two years of parents being strained by child care, were obvious to parents, teachers, and critics of remote learning at the time. parents, teachers, and critics of remote learning at the time. Alright, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from John in Oberlin, Ohio. John said, Steve Bannon just got slapped on the wrist by a judge, but I was surprised that the judgment didn't include forcing him to submit to the congressional subpoena. Why not? Well, in simple terms,

you can't force anyone to testify. The forcing is the punishment Bannon got, the threat of jail time and a fine. If he's willing to serve jail time and pay the fine, he's served the punishment for refusing to comply with the subpoena, and that is basically as far as the court can go. For whatever it's worth, I think part of Bannon's case was a bit more complicated than was often made out to be. Obviously, he was in contempt of Congress and refused to comply with the subpoena. And as I've said before, I think his defense that all his conversations with the president were privileged is rather farcical. But Bannon did hire a legal team, engage the committee in dialogue, and say he'd be willing to testify if the issues about privileged conversations were resolved. His lawyers also benefited from a huge

mistake by the government prosecutors who, while trying to retrieve emails and phone logs of Bannon's lawyer Robert Costello, accidentally filed the records on a different man by the same name. It's also worth noting that the January 6th committee opted against the civil lawsuit to enforce its subpoena, and that Bannon, as the judge put it, seemed to be relying on his lawyer's advice rather than acting on his own defiance of the committee. For now, though, Bannon is free, pending appeal, and has suffered few consequences for his actions except a $6,500 fine. I would love to see him testify, and I agree that unless he serves actual time, it's a slap on the wrist. But if he is willing to eat the punishment, there is really no other plausible legal recourse.

Next up is our under-the-radar story. The number of disabled people in the workforce has surged, according to new research by the New York Fed. Likely because of long COVID, some 900,000 disabled people have entered the workforce since 2020. Right now, with a hot labor market, employers are more likely to accommodate their needs. But some people worry that as the economy cools, those employers may become less accommodating. There were 1.05 million more disabled working-age Americans in August 2022 compared to January 2020, according to the data, which was compiled by economist Richard Deitz. Axios has the story, and there's a link to it in today's newsletter.

All right, next up is our Have a Nice Day story. An injured hiker in Colorado was rescued after a train passenger spotted her from his window. The hiker, a woman from New Mexico in her 20s, had been missing for two days after taking a fall down a cliff face. The rider alerted the crew of the Durango and Silverton narrow-gauge diesel engine and then notified the train inspector in a motor car behind them. The inspector, Delton Henry, was able to stop and communicate with the woman. She had spent the previous two days trying to flag down trains before being noticed. The care flight helicopter evacuated her and she is now recovering in the hospital. NPR has the amazing story and there's a link to it in today's episode description.

All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. Like I said at the top, we are super grateful for the 50,000 landmark on email signups. Please, please, please help us spread the word about the podcast as well. Anything you can do to spread the word about Tangle and this community we're growing is super appreciated. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow

with the Fetterman Oz debate tomorrow. I think a pretty interesting topic. See you then. Have a good one. Peace. and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who designed our logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our website at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported

across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.