California Agrees to $2 Billion Settlement Over Covid Pandemic Learning Loss for Struggling Students; Many Students Have Still Not Regained Pandemic-Era Losses in Reading, Math: Report, and other C-Virus related stories

California agrees to $2 billion settlement over Covid pandemic learning loss for struggling students:

“I’m not getting a fat check!” joked Kelly R as she helped her daughters with homework in the kitchen of their Los Angeles home. “But I’m hoping that the kids will benefit. That’s the biggest thing that I was worried about. All kids benefitting.”

Kelly is among the parents, students and community groups who successfully sued California, demanding more money, time and focus be spent to help underserved students – disproportionately low-income Black and Latino kids – recover from educational losses during the Covid pandemic. These students were already at a disadvantage before the pandemic, according to experts, then suffered more than students in affluent school districts during Covid and are not rebounding as quickly.

The plaintiffs were only identified by first name and last initial in the lawsuit, and Kelly asked CNN to do the same.

Kelly, like so many other parents, does not have fond memories of virtual schooling. She was stuck at home with her daughters who were ages 9, 11 and 14 when the pandemic began.

“The computers were glitchy…We live in the airport flight paths; sometimes we weren’t getting internet connection. Sometimes the school Internet connection … wasn’t working as well,” she told CNN. “We were kind of just thrown into a situation to be teachers for three different kids, you know, at three different schools … with no training at all.”

To settle the lawsuit, California agreed to spend $2 billion to help children impacted the most to recover from lost learning and the mental health impact caused by school closures during the pandemic. The federal government granted public school districts more than $190 billion between March 2020 and March 2021 for that purpose, but the plaintiffs argued that in California the state failed to ensure local districts targeted the money for students who needed the most help. —>READ MORE HERE

Many students have still not regained pandemic-era losses in reading, math: Report:

Elementary and middle school students have only made up some of the losses in math and reading they experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report finds.

For the report, published Wednesday, a collaborative team at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, looked at the first year of regular testing between spring 2022 and spring 2023 for school districts in 30 states.

Overall, students managed to recover about one-third of the original loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. While these gains are historic, students are still not where they should be, the researchers found.

“Both of those gains were large by historical standards, but the gains in average achievement are masking the dramatic widening in achievement that happened between 2019 and 2022, and just the failure of many of the high poverty districts to catch up,” Dr. Thomas Kane, co-author of the report and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research, told ABC News.

When broken down by subject, only students in Alabama returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in math, meaning levels seen in 2019, the report found. However, students in 17 states are still one-third behind 2019 levels in math.

Meanwhile, students in three states — Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi — returned to 2019 reading achievement levels while students in 14 states remain more than one-third of a grade level behind in reading. —>READ MORE HERE

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