📢NEW RESEARCH - Absences and Achievement After the Pandemic: Evidence from Maryland and North Carolina by @david_blazar, @SethGershenson & @ehutt1.

Huge credit to @natmalkus for his leadership in bringing such a talented group of scholars together to study this issue. We need intellectual and organizational leadership like this now more than ever in education policy. Thank you, Nat!

This is the first of a slew of briefs about to be released by @AEIeducation on the critically important issue of chronic absenteeism. 4/

As @david_blazar, @SethGershenson and I show, the harmful effect of being absent on student test scores has declined about 10% in the post-pandemic school. But it is still significant. And, I think most importantly, the effect is linear--so every absence matters. 3/

Most of the concern about spiking chronic absenteeism rates is predicated on the assumption that absences matter and that they matter in the same way they did before the pandemic. While this seems intuitive, intuition often leads us astray in education, so we had to find out! 2/

We have a new research brief out today (the first of two!) looking at the effect of absences on achievement in post-pandemic schools in MD and NC. 1/

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For sure there will be another case on this question in the future. But the relevant history will be the same

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1/ Some quick thoughts on the St. Isidore oral arguments yesterday, about whether Oklahoma must permit the operation of a Catholic charter school. In no particular order… 🧵 #education #SupremeCourt #law https://t.co/WlVCwA8imR

https://t.co/OxGlHhau7l #education #SupremeCourt

Also, I do wish liberals would drop the argument that schools can or should be in the business of hiding or not informing parents about what goes on in schools. It might not be unconstitutional but it’s a bad look.

I think @ScribnerUMCP’s hope that the case might led to a narrower reading of Yoder is…unlikely to be fulfilled.

Curious what @ScribnerUMCP @AaronTangLaw @NDhingra4 made of the argument. As is often the case, I thought Kagan and Barrett were the most effective questioners. The number of other available curricular opt outs in the county is a real bad fact for the county…

One very reasonable (and historical) theory for what ED shd do to facilitate public education in the states, is to provide access to info that leads to developing better schools and good choices. So why kill off ERIC? There’s no theory or plan at all.

Quite the opposite. The one thing they’ve articulated consistently is a desire to pass off ED tasks to *other* agencies, which seems like a sure fire way to make those agencies less efficient. What’s the merits argument for HHS doing special ed better? I haven’t heard it 2/x

I also love Office Space (and not just bc it prefigured Severance) and agree w/ a lot of this take. But “accountability” “efficiency” are outcome terms. And this administration has not even remotely articulated a view of what ED shd do efficiently & w/ greater accountability. 1/

For those interested in the longer form of the argument:

SCOTUS will soon hear 2 major edu cases. One of them concerns whether states must provide funds for religious charter schools. Today in the LAT, @AaronTangLaw and I explain why the history and tradition of school funding say the answer is clearly: no. https://t.co/gm6zmY89zM