I expect this summary will have more details in the following days.
"The pandemic has left America's students with a learning deficit that's "historic in magnitude," according to Harvard and Stanford researchers. Data from nearly 8,000 school districts reveals that the average third through eighth-grade student missed half a year of math and a quarter of a year in reading.
School closures are only a small part of the deficit, according to NPR's Cory Turner. Researchers said in their brief that living in a community "where more people trust the government" was an asset to children. Experts also warned schools and parents not to assume students will make up the lost ground, as that hasn't happened in the past.Here's a great source from 2022 "6 things we've learned about how the pandemic disrupted learning." also from NPR.
New research finds that pandemic learning loss impacted whole communities, regardless of student race or income from Harvard U's Center for Education Policy Research.
From Writer's Almanac 2017, dated May 17.
The Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment on this date in 1954. An eight-year-old girl named Linda Brown in Topeka, Kansas, had to travel 21 blocks every day to an all-black elementary school, even though she lived just seven blocks from another elementary school for white children. Her father, Oliver Brown, asked that his daughter be allowed to attend the nearby white school, and when the white school's principal refused, Brown sued. The court had five school segregation cases from different states on its docket, so the justices combined them under one name: Oliver Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka. The Supreme Court justices decided to list Brown's case first because it originated in Kansas, and they didn't want to give the impression that segregation was purely a Southern problem.
The legal basis for segregation came from the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which had established that separate facilities for black and white students were constitutional as long as those separate facilities were equal. When Brown v. Board of Education first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, most of the justices were personally opposed to segregation, but only four of them openly supported overturning such a long-established precedent.
The tide shifted in September of 1953 when Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died of a sudden heart attack, and President Eisenhower chose Earl Warren as the new chief justice. As governor of California, Earl Warren had overseen the internment of many Japanese Americans during World War II, and regretted it. Since the war, he had devoted himself to the cause of civil rights.
Warren's vote alone made the decision 5 to 4 in favor of overturning segregation, but Warren wanted a unanimous decision for such a controversial case. Once he had all the votes, Warren announced the decision to a crowd at the court on this day in 1954. Justice Stanley Reed, a justice from Kentucky who had been the final holdout, wept as the decision was read.
Even though the nation's highest court had weighed in, it took many more years and several more Supreme Court cases before most Southern schools were fully integrated, and de facto segregation still exists in some communities.
