“A building boom in Austin, Texas has paid off big for renters.
There, residents’ rents have tumbled 22% from their peak in the summer of 2023, Bloomberg reported. The formerly low-cost city took on a new reputation in 2021 as a prohibitively pricey locale, as companies and young workers flocked to the Lone Star State’s capital. Heavy investment in development and ambitious housing policies, however, have flipped the script between renters and landlords.
Nearly all apartments in Austin are doing some sort of special for move-ins, one agent told Bloomberg.”
“These latest NAEP results looked at achievement for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math. Overall, test scores declined slightly when compared to 2022, the last time students were tested and still remained below pre-pandemic levels. However, the most revealing results came when separating student performance based on percentile. While students performing in the 90th or 75th percentile have mostly rebounded, declines for students performing the worst were much steeper. For example, fourth-grade math scores have returned to pre-pandemic levels for high-achieving students, while the lowest-achieving students have seen an eight-point drop in scores since 2019, declining from 199 to 191 on a 500-point scale.”
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“”If we’re saying that a third of this year’s ninth graders are below NAEP Basic, we’re saying that one-third of these kids likely can’t tell us the main idea of a text,” Julia Rafal-Baer, a National Assessments Governing Board member and former assistant commissioner of the New York State Education Department, told the education-focused news website The 74. “They can’t draw any explicit features from that text. What does that mean for these kids? What’s the plan to re-engage them and improve their outcomes?”
These results show that, while children who were already doing well have managed to rebound from pandemic score declines, the children who are struggling have continued to face further difficulties, even as pandemic lockdowns shift further out of view.”
“In 2019, the average girl scored a 517 on the assessment, which is measured on a 1000-point scale, and boys scored a 514, just a three-point difference. In 2023, boys’ scores had dropped 19 points on average, while girls’ scores dropped an astonishing 36 points on average.
“Since 2019, girls’ test scores have dropped sharply, often to the lowest point in decades. Boys’ scores have also fallen during that time, but the decline among girls has been more severe,” writes education reporter Matt Barnum. “Boys now consistently outperform girls in math, after being roughly even or slightly ahead in the years before 2020. Girls still tend to perform better in reading, but their scores have dropped closer to boys.”
Why is this happening? Researchers aren’t sure. One theory is that girls may have taken on more domestic tasks than boys during pandemic lockdowns (for example, taking care of younger siblings) and thus may have missed out on more learning. Another is that girls tend to have fewer behavioral issues, meaning that struggling girls weren’t called to educators’ attention in the same way many boys were.”
Elon Musk thought there would be less than 35,000 Covid cases in the United States. He told Sam Harris that he would donate a million dollars to a charity if he was wrong. He was totally wrong, but rather than pay up for losing the bet, he started publicly insulting Sam Harris. This event should cause us to question Elon’s judgement and his integrity.
Elon Musk thought Covid would remain under 100 cases in the United States, and was extremely confident about this belief. Disagreements over this ended his relationship with Sam Harris.
Elon would publicly insult Sam over misleading clips of Sam that misrepresented what Sam said. Sam would email Elon explaining the context, and Elon would tell Sam to fuck off.
“The new orders prevent transgender people from openly serving in the military, greenlight the process of developing a missile defense shield to protect the U.S., and reinstate service members that voluntarily left or were forced out of the military over COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Trump also penned an expected executive order that would “abolish” every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) office within the DOD and Department of Homeland Security, the latter of which houses the U.S. Coast Guard.”
We should care about the economy. The economy is people’s lives.
We should think about where markets work best and where the government works better. We should consider the structure and incentives of a particular market.
“Faulkender was the assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the first Trump administration, and it was in that role that he oversaw the PPP, a stimulus program that ultimately distributed more than $800 billion.
That money was supposed to go to businesses that had been shuttered by the pandemic (or by various governmental edicts), and it was supposed to keep furloughed workers on the payroll until reopening. In fairness, at least some of the PPP’s budget was used for that purpose, but we now know that much—maybe even most—of the PPP funds ended up being wasted or stolen.
“Only 23 to 34 percent of the program’s funds went directly to workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs,” a National Bureau of Economic Research study found. Another study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that taxpayers paid roughly $4 for every $1 of wages and benefits to workers.
Some of the PPP’s funds likely ended up in the pockets of business owners rather than funding workers’ paychecks, a New York Times investigation concluded. A lot of it was simply stolen—so much, in fact, that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says a full accounting of the losses “will never be known with certainty.””
“the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic.”
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“Many factors probably contribute to students’ slow recovery, experts say. Some may have missed “foundational pieces” of reading and math in 2020 and 2021, Lewis said. Learning loss can be like a “compounding debt,” she explained, with skills missed in early grades causing bigger and bigger problems as kids get older. Chronic absenteeism also remains a big obstacle to learning. Twenty-six percent of students were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, up from 13 percent in 2019-2020.
Children who are in kindergarten and first grade today were too young to experience the shift to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. But they were more likely to be isolated from other children and adults, Lake said. And like their older counterparts, many also experienced the trauma of deaths in the family, poverty, and parents out of work, all of which could have affected their social and emotional development.
Some have argued that pandemic learning loss shouldn’t be a concern because all students were affected — maybe, the argument goes, learning is just different now.
But that’s not the case, experts say.
Students from wealthier school districts are already well on their way to recovery, while students in lower-income areas continue to struggle. “Not everybody is in the same boat,” Kane said.”