Month: January 2022

COVID-19 cases peaked in our house last Monday, when our 15-year-old daughter was recovering from her bout with the disease and my wife started feeling the symptoms of hers. As it happens, that was around the same time the seven-day average of newly reported cases peaked in Texas, where we live. According to Worldometer’s numbers, the omicron wave crested in Texas on January 18; according to the New York Times database, the average peaked on January 17.

Both sources show the nationwide average falling sharply since January 14, the day after I published a post headlined “There’s Good Reason To Think the Omicron Wave Will Peak Soon.” I can hardly claim clairvoyance, since many people were saying the same thing at that point, based on local, statewide, and regional trends as well as the experience of other countries where the omicron variant spread earlier.

In South Africa, where omicron was first identified in November, newly reported infections exploded until mid-December and have plummeted since then. Other African countries covered by President Joe Biden’s omicron-inspired travel restrictions saw a similar pattern, and so did the United Kingdom, where the seven-day average of daily new cases more than tripled between mid-December and January 5 but has dropped by 50 percent since then.

According to Worldometer, the U.S. case average fell 29 percent between January 14 and yesterday. The Times database, which includes “probable” COVID-19 cases as well as laboratory-confirmed infections, shows a smaller drop of about 14 percent.

“In the Northeast and New England and Upper Midwest states, [newly reported cases] have peaked and [are] starting to come down rather sharply,” Anthony Fauci, Biden’s top COVID-19 adviser, noted on ABC’s The Week yesterday. “There are still some…Southern states and Western states that continue to go up. But if the pattern follows the trend that we’re seeing in other places, such as the Northeast, I believe that you will start to see a turnaround throughout the entire country….It’s a large country, and [there is] a great deal of variation in the degree of vaccinations that we have in one region compared to another. [But] ultimately, they’re all going to go in the same direction.”

Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, was also cautiously optimistic. “Omicron appears to cause much less severe disease,” Kluge noted today. Thanks to vaccination and naturally acquired immunity, he said, “omicron offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization.” Kluge warned that “with the millions of infections occurring in the world in recent and coming weeks, coupled with waning immunity and winter seasonality, it is almost a given that new COVID-19 variants will emerge and return.” But he added that “a new wave could no longer require the return to pandemic-era population-wide lockdowns or similar measures.”

The Times database shows the seven-day average of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States, a lagging indicator that includes patients who test positive after being admitted for different reasons, continuing to rise until January 20, then dipping slightly in the last few days, which could be the beginning of a downward trend. It shows the seven-day average of daily deaths, including “probable” cases, continuing to rise through yesterday, when it was nearly 2,200. Worldometer, by contrast, put that average at less than 1,900 yesterday, down slightly since January 20.

“There may be a bit more pain and suffering with hospitalizations in those areas of the country that have not been fully vaccinated or have not gotten boosters,” Fauci said. “But we do know that…even with omicron, boosting makes a major, major difference in protecting you from hospitalization and severe outcomes. So things are looking good. We don’t want to get overconfident. But they look like they’re going in the right direction right now.”

As Reason‘s Ron Bailey reported on Friday, a new analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that booster shots reduce the risk of hospitalization among Americans infected with omicron by about 90 percent compared to unvaccinated Americans. According to recent data from Canada, Bailey noted, unvaccinated 60-to-69-year-olds are 58 times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 as people in that age group who have received three vaccine doses. They were 560 times as likely to need intensive care.

Our 15-year-old daughter—who has received two vaccine doses but but was unlikely to experience severe effects from COVID-19 in any case, given her age and health—ran a fever for a few days. Her symptoms included body aches, dizziness, a headache, and a sore throat. Today, after a week or so in her bedroom, she returned to school, where she apparently picked up her infection to begin with, from a fellow student who had tested positive but came to school anyway because he felt fine.

We were more concerned about my triply vaccinated wife, because she is older and takes an immunosuppressive medication. Her symptoms included fever, congestion, sore throat, cough, dizziness, and some loss of smell and taste. She is still dizzy but seems to be fever-free now, a week after the onset of her symptoms.

While that one anecdote does not count as evidence of anything, my wife is grateful that she was vaccinated and glad that she was infected during the omicron wave, since multiple studies suggest that variant, while highly transmissible, is milder than earlier iterations of the coronavirus. Furthermore, infection by omicron seems to provide additional protection against the delta variant, which is more likely to cause severe symptoms.

Our 28-year-old daughter, who lives elsewhere and is triply vaccinated, had COVID-19 a few weeks ago, and her symptoms were likewise pretty mild. Our 18-year-old daughter and I have both received three vaccine doses, and so far we have tested negative. Now that my wife has been infected and has mostly recovered, our uninfected daughter’s main concern is how catching the virus will affect her social and college life, while I am mainly worried about having to cancel Wednesday night poker for another week. This is what “normalization and stabilization” looks like in our house.

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When Christina Laster moved to Palm Springs, California, in 2020, she considered sending her son Daniel to the local elementary school that was right across the street. But at Julius Corsini Elementary School, the students score well below the state average in English and math.

“There’s no way I am sending my son to a failing school,” says Laster.

Instead, Daniel attends Palm Academy, which is part of the Springs Charter Schools network. Like all charters, the school is publicly funded, so there’s no tuition bill. And Laster feels that it’s well-equipped to serve Daniel’s special needs.

The problem is that Palm Academy doesn’t provide transportation. Because it’s a charter, the school accepts students from as far as the next county over. And without access to options like the traditional yellow bus, getting to school can be a major barrier to exercising choice—especially for single-parent households like Laster’s. This is a nationwide problem: Although it varies by district, about two-thirds of states don’t require districts to provide transportation for charter school students.

“Like many things in public education, the orientation that school districts and the public sector tends to have toward school transportation is that the clients of the schools are the school districts rather than the clients are the parents and what they need,” explains Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners, which has been studying how school transportation limits parental choice. “It’s a struggle for parents to get their kids to a charter school [and] in suburbs that are very car-dependent where people may have to go great distances, choices start to become out of reach.”

Often “low-income minority kids end up going the furthest to get to schools,” he explains. “That’s a function of parents being in communities where they may not have a schooling option that they want.”

Laster drives between 35 and 40 minutes each way to get Daniel to school.

“After I drop him off at school,” she says, “I’ll just go to the park. And typically I’ll spend my whole day there in meetings back-to-back or on phone calls.” Her longest days span from 8:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. She doesn’t have reliable WiFi, and when she needs to use the bathroom she uses the public restroom in the park.

“If Daniel was provided with transportation to get to school,” she says, “I could do my work more efficiently.” Laster, who spent nearly 13 years in the San Diego public school system, now works in education reform at the National Parents Union. 

“There’s no funding from the state of California that is offered to charter schools for transportation. It’s not even a line item on their budget,” she explains. “We have a local control funding formula, we have what is called the Local Control and Accountability Plan, and there are no resources granted for public charter schools for transportation.”

Skeptics might ask why districts should be required to transport kids to another neighborhood or another county just because their parents are dissatisfied with local schools. After all, they have the option to walk or take the bus to their zoned school already.

But “it really comes down to what is your vision for the public education system,” argues Rotherham. “If parents want to make a choice, their kids can get there in an equitable and efficient way. The school choice argument is actually that the system should be responsive to the parents. They’re the ultimate stakeholders.”

Having a say over Daniel’s education is very important to Laster. “I would never send Daniel to the district school because I know what that’s like. I’ve been there before with him. We’ve experienced what the data shows.”

Before they relocated to Palm Springs, Daniel was enrolled in a public school in the California town of Lake Elsinore. Laster sued the school for mistreatment and for failing to meet Daniel’s learning needs. Shortly after the case was settled, Laster says she chose to move away due to domestic violence.

“By the time Daniel was in first grade,” Laster says, “the teacher mistreated him. By the second grade, he was emotionally vanquished. Suicidal ideation. He didn’t want to go to school every day.”

So she decided to pull him out and homeschool him, beginning in the third grade. “But after probably about a year and a half, I recognize that that can become very expensive,” and she lacked the time and resources to support Daniel, so she enrolled him in Palm Academy instead.

“If we were to look at what happens with African American or black males in this country if they’re unable to read and write then and if they’re excessively punished, that’s what we call a school to prison pipeline. I don’t want my son on the school to prison pipeline,” says Laster. “I want him to stay on the path he’s on. He’s at grade level. He’s not failing in English language arts or math, which is huge for fifth-grade black boys in the state of California.”

Despite Daniel’s academic progress, Laster is considering homeschooling him again to avoid the commute. The Springs Charter School network offers programs that support homeschool families and study-at-home education.

School transportation is like “the plumbing in your house.” says Bellwether’s Rotherham. “It’s not something you think about much until it doesn’t work. The pandemic has forced that to the fore. Now people are paying attention to school transportation because of these shortages and so forth. But these are long-standing issues of a system that just doesn’t work as well as it could, but kind of is in the background and people aren’t thinking about it. And some of these issues we’re seeing now around choice and parents wanting different things are going to bring that to the surface.”

For Laster, transportation is an important part of realizing the promise of school choice. “I want my son to be educated. I want my son to have upward mobility,” she says. “So I sacrifice now to make sure that he has the best outcomes possible later in life.

Produced and edited by Qinling Li; interview and narration by Katherine Mangu-Ward; additional editing by Arthur Nazaryan; color correction and graphic by Isaac Reese; audio mixing by Ian Keyser.

The post For Too Many Charter School Families, Getting to School Is a Struggle appeared first on Reason.com.

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This morning, the Supreme Court decided to hear two cases challenging racial preferences in university admissions: Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. These will be the first Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action in higher education since Fisher v. University of Texas II (2016), a ruling I critiqued here.

Obviously, the Court’s composition has gotten more conservative since then, which means the justices are likely to take a tougher line against racial preferences than in previous decisions. It is even possible that the Court will overrule Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the decision in which the justices endorsed the “diversity” rationale for racial preferences in educational institutions (though it’s also possible that the Court will subject such preferences to tighter scrutiny, without categorically forbidding them).

The Harvard case is also notable because it will be the first Supreme Court affirmative action case involving allegations that the school in question has specifically targeted Asian-Americans for discrimination. The plaintiffs in the case presented extensive evidence indicating that the university disfavors Asian applicants not only relative to some other racial minorities, but even as compared to whites. The issue of anti-Asian discrimination by various elite educational institutions has attracted increasing attention in recent years, and is far from limited to Harvard.

I have a forthcoming article about the Harvard case, which will be published on the NBC website later today or tomorrow. In that  piece, I address the issues raised in greater detail. I will link to it here when it is up.

NOTE: My wife, Alison Somin, has coauthored an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the Harvard case, and is also co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a case challenging anti-Asian discrimination at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax, Virginia.

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A defeat for Democratic voting rights legislation could lead to meaningful progress on electoral integrity.

On Wednesday, a Senate effort to amend filibuster rules in a way that would allow Democrats to pass voting rights legislation with fewer than 60 votes was defeated, despite President Joe Biden voicing support for that course of action earlier this month. And without the rule change, the voting bill itself is doomed as well, as Republicans stand fully in opposition.

In a speech in Atlanta, Biden seemed to imply that anybody who did not support his party’s bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, was “on the side of” historical segregationists like George Wallace and Bull Connor. He issued a direct warning to lawmakers: “History has never been kind to those who have sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights. And it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion. So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?”

Under that argument, a failure to pass the bill would seem to be devastating to the cause of voting rights. But in the wake of the bill’s defeat, there is a new and potentially more promising development.

Lawmakers in both the House and the Senate are considering modifications to the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law that details when and how Congress counts and certifies the votes cast by presidential electors. The act dictates that the president of the Senate (the U.S. vice president) reads out the votes from each state, which Congress then counts before certifying the winner. While the vice president’s role seems largely ceremonial, with no ability to alter an election’s outcome, the act does not say so explicitly. Former President Donald Trump and his acolytes seized upon this vagueness when they tried to pressure then–Vice President Mike Pence to either decline to certify the results, or else simply pick a different slate of electors in enough swing states to tip the election to Trump.

Now, lawmakers from both parties are considering reforms to the Electoral Count Act in both the Senate and the House. CNN reports that six Republican senators are planning talks on the law “with the aim of clarifying the process for counting electoral votes.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.), a moderate whose opposition helped sink the filibuster reform, told CNN that reforms to the Electoral Count Act could help reduce the type of confusion that ultimately led, in part, to the false hopes that prompted hundreds of Trump supporters to violently storm the Capitol on the day of the election certification vote.

Meanwhile, the Committee on House Administration released a report detailing potential alterations to the act. The report includes suggestions such as a higher threshold for senators or representatives to register objections to vote counts, and giving states more time to adjudicate disputes before certifying their electoral votes. The Cato Institute’s Andy Craig has previously made many of the suggestions that lawmakers featured in their report and has written extensively on Electoral Count Act reform, which he says is “urgently needed to avoid future constitutional crises.”

Despite Democrats’ urgent messaging about the need for voting rights legislation, their proposed bills are unlikely to achieve meaningful reform. They do not attempt to solve the issues that led rioters to try to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. The most direct way to confront those issues is to address the actual law that was used to attempt to undermine the transfer of power. Hopefully, Republicans and Democrats can at least agree on that much.

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