Weekly Federal Update 9/19/22

President and Administration

On 9/13, the Department of Education announced an additional $2.5 million investment to centers that serve a critical role for parents and families of students with disabilities across the nation…

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) intends to scrap an unenforced Head Start face mask requirement for children and adults “in the near future,” the agency’s children and families administration announced Friday, 9/16…

The Biden administration on Wednesday, 9/14, announced more than two-thirds of Electric Vehicle (EV) Infrastructure Deployment Plans from states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have been approved ahead of schedule under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program… 

President Joe Biden’s popularity improved substantially from his lowest point this summer, but concerns about his handling of the economy persist, according to a poll…

President Biden gathered with top Democrats at the White House last week to celebrate their inflation fight at an inopportune moment, as a sobering new report showed just how far the economy still has to go to bring soaring consumer prices under control… 

The American Rescue Plan expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) from $2,000 per child to $3,600 for children under age six and $3,000 for children ages six to 17…

Mortgage rates topped six percent this week, their highest level since 2008, giving a jolt to home buyers who last year were paying less than half that…

President Biden said Thursday, 9/15, a tentative railway labor agreement has been reached… 

Congress

In July, the House passed Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) telehealth bill to extend eased pandemic rules for Medicare patients through 2024…

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signaled Wednesday, 9/14, that she could back a side deal between Democratic leaders and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV)... 

In a letter, eight House Democrats urged Biden on Friday, 9/16, to immediately scrap his current plan to halt releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve next month and keep releasing oil from America's emergency stockpile through at least the end of the year…

In a joint opinion piece released in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, 9/18, Congresswomen Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) argued that it is past time to reform the Electoral Count Act to make clear Congress can’t overturn an election result…

Senate Republicans led by Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced federal anti-abortion legislation on Tuesday, 9/13…

Education

The Education Department has released new information about how targeted student debt relief will work…

New polling released today, 9/19, from the Illinois-based EveryLibrary Institute found that 56 percent of voters said they’ve heard “a great deal” about attempts to restrict or remove access to certain books in school and public libraries… 

A new report details the benefits of work-based learning opportunities at community colleges and some of the ways these programs could improve…

Higher education associations generally like Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s new regulations for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 but want more clarity about how the changes would be carried out, as well as more time to put policies in place… 

More higher education employees in their 50s and 60s lack the financial confidence that they have enough money “to live comfortably throughout retirement” than was the case in 2019…

A preprint study on the link between scholarly performance and compensation finds that cumulative research productivity was more strongly related to compensation for men versus women—but only in STEM fields, not in the social and behavioral sciences…

This report draws on data the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has collected and synthesized over the course of the pandemic…

Test scores released Wednesday, 9/14, from almost two million students offer a glimmer of hope for parents anxious about learning loss: The percentage of older elementary and middle school students reading on grade level is nearing what it was before COVID-19…

The Education Department’s charter school funding rule is facing some tough days…

A checklist of nine strategies and guidance for state Medicaid agencies assisting school systems with Medicaid reimbursements for students’ school-based health services is now available from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services…

For all the headlines proclaiming and debunking reports of a national teacher shortage, few have picked up on the issue’s third rail: Educators qualified to teach students with disabilities have been in short supply for half a century — since, essentially, the creation of special education…

Everywhere, it seems, back-to-school has been shadowed by worries of a teacher shortage…

Weekly CA-COVID Update 9/14/2022

California

The leaders of California’s legislature said on Friday, 9/9, that they would make sure that the state does not tax the federal student loan debt forgiven under the Biden administration’s relief program… 

The Supreme Court on Friday, 9/9, approved the Biden administration’s request to present oral arguments in the anti-affirmative action challenges against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… 

Experts say factors to blame for the high cost of gas in California — now more than $5 a gallon — include problems at refineries that supply the state as well as higher taxes, more regulations and the same global issues driving the overall U.S. market… 

The massive blaze fueled by shifting wind patterns and extraordinarily dry brush began during last week’s heat wave, and it continues to create enough smoke to affect air quality up to 100 miles away…

Kern County has one of the highest infant mortality rates in California and mothers die during pregnancy and childbirth in the San Joaquin Valley at a higher rate than in any other region of the state…

Coronavirus

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters this month, after the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) authorization… 

The world has never been in a better position to end the COVID-19 pandemic, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week, urging nations to keep up their efforts against the virus that has killed over six million people…

Senate Republicans are signaling early resistance to attaching billions of dollars for COVID-19 and monkeypox aid in a must-pass government funding bill, a troublesome sign for a White House that says vaccine money is rapidly running out…

Weekly Federal Update 9/12/22

President and Administration

A team of scientists has found a cheap, effective way to destroy so-called forever chemicals, a group of compounds that pose a global threat to human health…

In Head Start preschools and child care centers for low-income families, mandatory masking rules are still on the books for teachers and children as young as 2-years-old…

A record-setting drought crippled economic activity across southwestern China, freezing international supply chains for automobiles, electronics and other goods that have been routinely disrupted over the past three years….

A comprehensive new analysis shows that child poverty has fallen 59 percent since 1993, with need receding on nearly every front….

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said the U.S. will eventually need to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, calling the lack of available workers to fill jobs a “bigger threat” to the economy than inflation

In the weeks since President Biden signed a comprehensive climate bill devised to spur investment in electric cars and clean energy, corporations have announced a series of big-ticket projects to produce the kind of technology the legislation aims to promote…

The Federal Reserve appears to be on a path to raise interest rates by another 0.75 percentage point this month…

Today, 9/12, President Biden is set to give a speech about his “Cancer Moonshot” initiative on Sept. 12 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston…

Education

At a time when affirmative action is under legal attack, students like it, according to a survey by Niche…

The start of the fall semester has brought more than students back to college campuses...

Current high school students are optimistic about their chances of experiencing future life outcomes, including having a well-paying career, owning a home and enjoying good health, according to a new report from ACT...

The American Jewish Committee, an advocacy organization, has released a new guide called “A Call to Action Against Antisemitism” which that calls on lawmakers; diversity, equity and inclusion professionals; and college and university leaders, among others, to increase their knowledge of antisemitism and better address it...

The headlines on the effects of COVID on kids could hardly be gloomier...

Data from the Education Department suggests that U.S. schools now enroll more than twice as many Latino students as they did in 1995 and suggest that, by 2030, Latinos will make up roughly 30% of all public school enrollment...

Schools that closed their doors the longest due to COVID have spent just a fraction of the billions in federal relief funds targeted to students who suffered the most academically, according to an analysis by The 74...

Today, 9/12, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona will launch the Road to Success Back to School Bus Tour alongside First Lady Jill Biden and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff...

While pundits caution that schools are facing catastrophic teacher shortages — the result of substantial exit from the profession during the chaos of COVID — new research indicates that those warnings could be overstated...

Weekly Federal Update 9/6/22

President and Administration

The Commerce Department issued guidelines for companies angling to receive federal funding aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry…

As fire seasons have grown more severe across the West, the federal agencies that battle the blazes are facing another problem: a workforce struggling with stress, anxiety and addiction, and not enough mental-health support to help…

On August 25, college leaders met with the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to discuss how colleges can help stop the spread of monkeypox and COVID-19 as students return to campus…

On Wednesday, 9/28, the Biden administration will host the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health and release a National Strategy with actions the federal government will take to drive solutions to these challenges…

On Wednesday, 8/31, the Biden administration announced new efforts to strengthen the teaching profession and support schools in their effort to address teacher shortages as the new school year begins…

On 8/23, the Education Department (ED) announced that it has approved more than $10 billion in debt relief for over 175,000 borrowers in 10 months through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program…

Congress

The Senate returns today, 9/6, after a month-long recess to vote on an appeals court nominee. Democratic congressional leaders are considering attaching a provision codifying same sex marriage protections onto a must-pass spending bill to keep the federal government open past September 30…

Education

On 8/25, President Biden said he will cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for Americans earning less than $125,000 per year (or $250,000 for couples filing jointly) with additional relief for low-income Pell Grant recipients…

On 8/26, President Biden signed into law the Ensuring the Best Schools for Veterans Act, exempting institutions from the 85/15 rule - which bars students from using Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) funding, such as GI Bill benefits, to pay for academic programs where more than 85 percent of students receive VA aid-if their share of students receiving VA funding is below 35 percent of their institution-wide enrollment…

The Center on Reinventing Public Education released a new “review of evidence,” which found that children whose schools were closed the longest had their learning interrupted the most—and most often, that affected low-income children and children of color in big cities… 

Analyzing data from three million students assigned lessons through a widely used literacy program, the nonprofits ReadWorks and TNTP found that during the 2020-21 school year — the first full year after the start of the pandemic — students were assigned work below their grade level a third of the time…

On 8/25, the Education Department released a back to school checklist for parents and families…

Many school superintendents and district leaders are reluctant to hire full-time teachers with temporary federal pandemic relief funds, even as many schools face shortages, according to new research….

Black, Hispanic and low-income community college students who take up to half their courses online increase their odds of completing degrees, a working paper finds…

New findings on San Antonio public schools reveal that students in charter schools are in many cases outpacing their peers, both statewide and within the city — in a few cases, by as much as half of an entire school year….

In a recently published report by PDK International, a professional organization for teachers, over 1,000 adults expressed higher levels of faith in their community’s public schools than have ever been recorded in the survey’s 48-year history, with 54 percent giving them an A or B… 

Since 2017, every student in grades six through 12 in Wisconsin has been required to participate in an academic career plan in order to help young people see the purpose and meaning of what they’re learning by discovering it on their own…

In a special data collection combining scores from early 2020, just before schools began to close, with additional results from the winter of 2022, the report shows average long-term math performance falling for the first time ever; in reading, scores saw the biggest drop in 30 years…

As the school year gets underway, a national teacher shortage has K-12 districts scrambling and job boards lengthening…

On 8/26, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that fewer than 20 percent of first-time students who enrolled part-time graduated within eight years at the institution where they started, compared to 46 percent of full-time students…

A new report from the Georgetown Center on Poverty & Inequality suggests that higher education contributes to racial and gender segregation in the labor market, because women and students of color are underrepresented in certain fields of study and concentrated in others… 

Public Safety Update 8/5/22

The House passed legislation Friday, 7/29, to revive a ban on certain semi-automatic guns, the first vote of its kind in years and a direct response to the firearms often used in recent mass shootings…

The Senate approved a House-passed bill on Monday, 8/1, that would expand disability benefits to public safety officers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and would provide death benefits to survivors of officers who die by suicide…

Over a dozen major U.S. news organizations are suing the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) for failing to release public records related to the shooting at Robb elementary school in Uvalde that left 19 children and two teachers dead… 

An armed security officer told investigators she thought an active shooting at a Michigan high school was a drill and that one of the bleeding students simply was wearing “really good makeup,” an attorney suing the school district said Wednesday…

A dozen jurors and 10 alternates visited the scene of the Parkland mass shooting Thursday in the sentencing trial of convicted shooter Nikolas Cruz…

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline's shortened number, 988, rolled out on July 16…