The following blog post presents important information from the online magazine The74 by John Bailey and published March 17, 2023
“ ‘Parents can’t solve a problem that they don’t know they have,’ said Cindi Williams, co-founder of Learning Heroes.”
“Evena Joseph was unaware how much her 10-year-old son was struggling in school. She found out only with help from somebody who knows the Boston school system better than she does.”
“The progress report for Tamela Ensrud’s second-grade son in Nashville shows mostly As and a B in English, but she noticed her son was having trouble with reading. She asked to discuss her son’s reading test scores at a fall parent-teacher conference but was only shown samples of her son’s work and told, ‘Your son is doing well.’ ”
“Opportunities to catch up are plentiful in some places, thanks to federal COVID aid, but won’t last forever. It will take better communication with parents to help students get the support they need, experts say.”
“Before the pandemic, about 8 million U.S. students were considered chronically absent, according to the research group Attendance Works. That’s when a student misses 10% or more of the school year. By spring 2022, that number had doubled to around 16 million.”
“In a survey of 21 school districts in rural, suburban and urban areas, NPR found most districts … still had heightened levels of chronic absenteeism.”
Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto Carvalho “describes the same attendance challenges NPR heard from multiple districts around the country: a youth mental health crisis, heightened fear around health concerns, transportation difficulties and poverty and homelessness, which can make it difficult for students to keep a routine around going to school.”
“Even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, only a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.”
“In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall.”
“The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.”
“25.9% said they had lied about their child’s COVID-19 status or failed to adhere to at least one of seven recommended behaviors meant to curtail viral transmission.”
“The most common untruth was not telling someone who was going to spend time with their child that they knew or suspected the child had COVID-19, and the most common adherence failure was allowing their child to break quarantine rules. A total of 19.4% of parents didn’t have their child tested for COVID-19 when they suspected infection.”
“Just over half of parents who lied (52.4%) said they exposed others to their ill child because they wanted to exercise their parental autonomy, while others said their child didn’t feel very sick (47.6%), they didn’t want to miss a fun event to stay home (44.4%) or they didn’t want their child to miss school (42.9%).” Federal Updates
This data challenge invites members of the AI community to develop predictive models for scoring open-ended NAEP mathematics assessment items.
The total prize purse for the challenge will be $100,000. The application deadline is April 17, 2023.