When Congress sent tens of billions of dollars to schools — an unprecedented sum — to battle the pandemic, it seemed like reopening campuses was going to be the toughest thing. Or maybe keeping teachers and students covid-free. But it turns out the hardest thing was helping students recover from severe academic losses sustained during the depths of the pandemic.
Washington
Washington Post executive editor attempts to rein in newsroom amid infighting: ‘We will enforce our policies’
Buzbee began the brand new memo by reiterating The Publish’s values towards “racist or sexist habits.” She then, “within the strongest of phrases,” outlined guidelines that each one staffers are anticipated to comply with. “We don’t tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues both nose to nose or on-line,” Buzbee wrote. “Respect for others is vital to any civil society, together with our newsroom.”
Shortly after Buzbee’s memo went out to the newsroom, among the most distinguished reporters at The Publish tweeted a model of this: The paper isn’t good, however they’re proud to work for it. Listed below are just some of these tweets:
The tweets have been designed to ship a transparent message that many staffers have had a optimistic expertise. I am advised that no editors have been concerned within the effort and that it was an natural try amongst workers geared toward regaining management of the narrative in regards to the paper — i.e., to shift the message away from the rabble-rousers…
But extra infighting
I checked in with WaPo spokesperson Kris Coratti to see what The Publish’s management was doing in regards to the matter. Coratti replied, “Whereas we have now not commented publicly, make no mistake, that is being addressed instantly with the people concerned.”
“I by no means anticipated that I might assist set fireplace to The Washington Publish”
In the meantime, Tucker Carlson could not resist weighing in on the subject on Tuesday, utilizing the disarray inside The Publish to assault the newsroom as one filled with “triggered” staff. Carlson chatted with Cam Harless, the YouTuber who made the unique sexist joke that David Weigel retweeted and which set off the chain of occasions that led to the present infighting.
Whereas the 2 did each assault Weigel, additionally they stated they believed he should not have been suspended. Harless stated he might by no means have imagined what his tweet would do: “I by no means anticipated that I might assist set fireplace to the Washington Publish…”
Washington
Differences shouldn’t be feared – Washington Daily News
Differences shouldn’t be feared
Published 2:29 pm Wednesday, June 26, 2024
Including touch-ups and additions, I’ve sat in a tattoo artist’s chair over 20 times. I rarely wear long-sleeved shirts, so you can see some of my collection if we ever meet. I use that word intentionally: collection. As a lover of tattoos, I’m also a lover of art. I thus collect art from artists all over the world. The difference between me and a collector of oil paintings is that I always have my art collection with me and never run out of things to look at.
Not everybody appreciates tattoos, nor does everybody understand why people get them. It’s easy when you see somebody like me, covered in tattoos, to make assumptions about the content of their character. There’s still a bit of a stigma out there that suggests, to some, that only lower-class or rough people get tattoos.
My father used to be one of those people. That’s why I waited to get my first tattoo on the day of my 18th birthday when my parents were in Scotland. There wasn’t much he could do on the other side of the globe! He wasn’t pleased initially, but he eventually came around and has now gone to the shop with me several times. He hasn’t yet got his own tattoo, but I’m working on him.
Over time, that stigma has lessened. 40 years ago, somebody who looked like me would never have been called to be the pastor of St. Peter’s. Actually, no church would have hired me. But here we are, in 2024, and a metalhead, tattooed comic book nerd has been welcomed by a church that is always looking for new ways to welcome everybody into our fold. And we mean that: everybody. This is a place where everybody can have a seat at the table, where all can meet God in an oasis of love.
Difference isn’t something we fear at St. Peter’s. I’m as different as they come, but I have never once felt like folks have used my tattoos as a reason to dislike me. Difference shows up in lots of ways. Skin color. Language. Sexual and gender identity.
At St. Peter’s, we are working to ensure that difference isn’t just welcomed but celebrated. I was astounded when the Episcopal Church Women, a fellowship group at our church, asked me to speak about my tattoos. They listened to the stories of where, when, and why I got each piece. They asked rich questions and made me feel so warmly embraced. My difference wasn’t a barrier to connection but was the very thing that enabled connection. It was beautiful, and I can’t thank them enough.
That’s the kind of church we aspire to be and the kind of world we want to build. As a church, we follow Jesus of Nazareth, who welcomed the outcast and the saint and called them equal. As a church, we strive for a more just world where all feel tolerated, welcomed, and valued. If the world has beaten you up, or you feel overwhelmed by the waves and storms in your life, St. Peter’s can be a haven for you. If you’ve found yourself on the margins of church or life in general, come here and be welcomed into our midst. No tattoos are required!
Chris Adams is the Rector at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Washington.
Washington
Washington to Approve Deployment of US Military Contractors to Ukraine
CNN reported on Tuesday, June 25 that White House officials are thrashing out the details of a plan to allow military contractors to deploy to Ukraine to help Kyiv’s military to maintain US-provided weapons systems.
While stressing that the proposal had not yet been submitted to or agreed by President Joe Biden, reported that the change would present yet another major change in the US stance towards its support for Ukraine.
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An official from within the administration told CNN that: “We have not made any decisions and any discussion of this is premature.” The executive also said that the president remained firmly against any suggestion of sending US troops to Ukraine.
The US withdrew all its military personnel that were involved in training or other support to Ukraine’s forces before Russia’s full-scale February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Washington has taken great pains to make it clear that the US military and other official representatives have no direct involvement in combat operations.
The State Department has explicitly warned US citizens against traveling to Ukraine since the war began.
The result of US reticence is that if any of the military equipment that it provided sustains damage, it must be transported to Poland, Romania, or another NATO country for repair.
While US troops can help with routine maintenance procedures online that also comes with inherent limitations. The process in both circumstances takes time and resources and keeps vital weapons systems out of service for longer periods than if the work could be done by US experts onsite in Ukraine.
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With the war in Ukraine raging through a third year, leading power the United States set for a crunch election, and China rising, NATO is grappling with major challenges.
US officials said that positioning US-funded contractors in Ukraine would mean maintenance and repair for high-value equipment would be carried out much faster. The F-16 fighter aircraft, which Ukraine is about to receive will require almost continuous routine work to keep in the air.
According to the CNN report, the catalyst for a change of heart over the last few months has been Russian gains on the battlefield that were partly facilitated by the seven-month block on funding caused by Congress.
The possibility of deploying contracted companies to Ukraine comes after Washington took more recent proactive decisions to support Ukraine. This included Biden’s agreement to allow Kyiv to strike targets inside Russia, close to the border city of Kharkiv – a request the US had turned down in the past. Last week the US seemed to relax the limitations on the use of its weapons further when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that US weapons could be used to hit Moscow’s forces anywhere along the Ukraine-Russia border.
Officials cited by CNN made it clear that the deployment of US contractors would be limited to essential tasks and only when adequate threat mitigation plans were developed. Ukraine would not see the mass contractor presence that occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“This would be a much more focused and thoughtful effort to support Ukraine in country,” according to Alex Vindman, who was the director for European Affairs on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
CNN said Vindman had been pushing the Biden administration to allow contractor deployment for nearly two years and said the White House had been working on the plan since earlier this year.
“Ukraine is an ally,” Vindman told CNN. “The US has keen, critical national security interests in supporting Ukraine, and there are plenty of risk mitigation measures.”
Washington
Burst in covid spending helped students recover, researchers find
Schools reopened. Students and teachers were, for the most part, kept safe from covid. But what about academic recovery? Did the money help kids get back on track?
Two new reports offer the same answer: Yes.
“There were many reasons to think the money wouldn’t have a very big effect on kids learning because it wasn’t targeted and there were lots of other needs,” said Sean Reardon, an education researcher at Stanford University and co-author of the first paper. “But in fact it did have a significant effect on learning.”
Yet it didn’t finish the job. Between 2019 and 2022, the average U.S. student lost about a half grade level in math and a third of a grade level in reading, according to test data from 30 states analyzed by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities in the Education Recovery Scorecard project. Students made up about 30 percent of the loss in math and 20 percent of the loss in reading between spring 2022 and spring 2023. Some — though not all — of that can be traced to the federal funding, the researchers conclude. (Results of spring 2024 testing are not yet available.)
“Despite what is an unprecedented amount of money, kids are still far behind,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research and the University of Washington, who co-authored the second research paper.
Why wasn’t $190 billion — the largest one-time education investment in U.S. history — enough? Among the reasons: Some of the money was spent on covid mitigation and testing, the main focus of the legislation, not academics. Not all of the money for academics was invested in the most effective strategies, because they had other priorities or perhaps were unaware of the research. Not every district got robust funding. And the losses were deep.
Fully catching kids up would require additional spending, the researchers find. The opposite is actually unfolding, with districts running out of the money already allocated. Schools are required to spend the last of the covid relief funding in the coming months, and across the country, districts are cutting staff and programs that were aimed at accelerating academic recovery.
“If the goal is having all students made whole from the pandemic, I do think that states will need to step up,” said Tom Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University and co-author of the first paper, which was produced by a team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth universities.
Still, the gains already recorded were big enough to pay for themselves, based on how increases in academic achievement translate into higher wages in adulthood, Kane said.
Both papers take advantage of a quirk in how the nearly $190 billion in federal covid relief funds, which came over three allotments in 2020 and 2021, were allocated to K-12 school districts. The government relied on a formula that gave more money to districts with higher portions of students living in poverty. Due to oddities in that formula, districts with similar poverty levels got different amounts. Among the districts where at least 90 percent of students are from families poor enough to qualify for free or subsidized school lunches, federal allocations ranged from less than $4,000 to more than $13,000 per student — in some cases, much more.
The differences among district allocations allowed researchers to estimate the relationship between more funding and test scores. One study examined funding from only the third allocation, by far the largest, approved in 2021; the other looked at the second and third tranches. Both studies examined the impact of the money on all districts, rich and poor.
The two teams came to the same conclusion: An additional $1,000 per student in federal funding translated into a gain of about 3 percent of a grade level of learning in math. For reading, the gains were similar in one study and a bit smaller in the other. These results are in line with what pre-pandemic studies found of earlier, more modest increases in education spending.
This implies that giving a school district an extra $8,000 per student would have been enough to make up nearly half of the average math losses. That compares to average per-pupil spending of $13,187 in 2019, before the pandemic and the surge of federal dollars.
Looking at it another way, the Harvard-Stanford team compared achievement levels between high-poverty districts with similar levels of past achievement that received larger grants and smaller grants. Students in the high-grant districts gained about a fifth of a year more in math than the low-grant districts did and almost as much in reading.
The money appears to have made a difference in the School District of Philadelphia, which received more than $1.6 billion in federal funding — more than $14,000 per student. Between spring 2022 and spring 2023, students made up on average a half grade in math — more than 80 percent of the average losses sustained in Philadelphia between 2019 and 2022.
A large share of money in Philadelphia was spent on extra learning time for students — before and after school and over the summer, and to add social services and counselors. The district also spent $325 million on facilities improvements, something meant to make old buildings safer but that did not directly impact student learning.
Superintendent Tony B. Watlington, Sr., in a statement, credited the federal funding with playing a key role in Philadelphia becoming “the fastest improving large, urban district” in the country.
Now the district is hoping that a statewide lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s school funding formula will result in more funding for Philadelphia to replace the lost federal dollars. For now, the schools are using reserve funds to maintain the supports put in place, said Christina Clark, a spokeswoman for the district.
“We’re working on preserving those because we’ve seen the impact it’s had on students,” she said.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District also saw significant federal spending — nearly $427 million in the second and third allotments, or about $12,000 per student. As in Philadelphia, students also gained about a half year of learning in math between spring 2022 and spring 2023, but the losses in Cleveland were deeper, so this erased only about half of the slide since 2019. Early data from spring 2024 testing shows progress continued, though details were not available, officials said.
One of Cleveland’s key investments was a robust summer learning program, which combined engaging and fun activities with academic review. The district also upped funding to each school, and some used the extra for tutoring or other academic supports.
“We would not have been able to do some of this work at scale if we did not have this funding,” said Selena Florence, the district’s chief academic officer.
With the federal money running out, Cleveland this year cut back its summer program, which had served more than 5,000 students in the last few years, by about half. The district cut back other programs too, and eliminated the extra school-based funding.
But Florence said she is optimistic that Cleveland can continue making progress. “Having additional money is always going to help us doing the work we have to do,” she said. “The work can certainly be done without it.”
Researchers did not credit all the academic gains recorded to more federal spending. Many districts that received no money, or very little, saw large gains. These were typically wealthy districts that consistently have other advantages.
And low-income districts saw improvements beyond what the federal funding alone would have predicted, the Harvard-Stanford group found. Among districts with at least 70 percent of low-income students, between one-third and one-half of the improvement in test scores could be attributed to the federal funding. It was not clear what accounted for the rest; possibilities include deeper parental involvement, extra efforts by teachers or extra local funding.
Kane bemoaned that there is scant data to explain how districts spent their money, seeing a missed opportunity to assess which interventions were most effective. Past research has found certain initiatives — such as intense tutoring or small class sizes in the early years — produce greater academic gains than others. The federal rules required that districts spend at least 20 percent of their money addressing learning losses, but there was little guidance beyond that.
“In the absence of being able to say which interventions work, we can ask the next best thing,” he said. “Did the districts that got and received more money go faster in catching up?” The answer, they found, is yes.
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