issue: Politics

Let’s Have No More of These

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Donald Trump is a serial vandalizer of America’s democratic ideals and institutions. Last night, his victim was the presidential debate.

Down in the polls and obviously frustrated by events he cannot control – especially the Covid-19 pandemic – Trump was like a disturbed child acting out in school to get attention. He simply could not control himself.  He could not restrain himself even for the two minutes Joe Biden was allotted to answer questions. 

Instead he interrupted constantly, talking over his opponent with a steady fusillade of taunts, insults and bald-faced lies. Biden correctly called him “unpresidential,” but that doesn’t begin to describe Trump’s sickening behavior last night. Bullying, malicious, ranting incoherently, he sabotaged every attempt at rational argument. 

It will be interesting to see how Trump’s legion of apologists and lickspittles try to explain away his deranged performance in Cleveland. If here are any self-respecting conservatives and Republicans left who truly venerate America’s democratic traditions, they must be feeling very queasy this morning.

If Trump lacks the self-discipline to abide by the rules of presidential debates – rules his campaign officials agreed to – there’s no point in inflicting two more of them on the American people. Neither Biden nor the media has any obligation to collude in Trump’s attempts to turn presidential debates into a tawdry theater of demagoguery and abuse. 

U.S. voters already know enough about Donald Trump and Joe Biden to make an informed choice in November. The vote can’t come soon enough.

Battleground Voters Pragmatic on Climate & Energy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Following last night’s debate, Joe Biden will campaign in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where a new poll released today by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) shows him leading President Trump. In addition to their huge importance as presidential battleground states, Pennsylvania and Ohio are energy powerhouses that rank among the top five U.S. states in natural gas production. 

The poll, commissioned by PPI and conducted by ALG Research, finds Biden ahead by six points in Pennsylvania (50%-44%) and two points in Ohio (48%-46%), despite Trump’s attempts to brand Biden falsely as an opponent of “fracking” and natural gas. Biden also is running ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance in the “shale belt” — the gas-producing counties of Southeastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. 

“Unlike the ‘drill, baby drill’ right and the ‘keep it in the ground” left, voters in midwest states like Pennsylvania and Ohio show a deeply pragmatic streak on energy and climate issues,” said PPI President Will Marshall. “They are not climate deniers like Donald Trump, and they view natural gas as a bridge, not a barrier, to America’s clean energy transition.”

Key poll findings:

  • 71% of Pennsylvania and Ohio voters — and 66% in gas-producing counties — say climate change is a “real and very serious problem.”
  • Voters oppose a ban on natural gas by an enormous margin — 53 points (74-21%).
  • Even among liberal leaning groups, there is little appetite for a ban: Democrats, young voters and advanced degree holders oppose a ban by 30, 29 and 55 points respectively.
  • Voters’ biggest worry about banning gas production is job loss, following by higher energy prices. 
  • Voters do not want to use fossil fuels indefinitely, but they see natural gas as playing an important role in supporting U.S. renewable energy growth over the medium term.
  • Voters expect it will take a decade or more to end use of natural gas without disruptions to the economy, electric reliability, and energy bills.

Despite Biden’s lead in this poll, voters split over who they trust more on energy issues. 

“Voters know where Trump stands on energy, but they aren’t as certain about Biden,” said Marshall.  But when it’s described to them, 52% of voters say they support a Biden plan that does not ban fracking, continues to use natural gas and requires the United States to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050.

View the full polling memo here.

Media contact: Carter Christensen, cchristensen@ppionline.org

 

Appendix B: State Breakdowns on Key Findings:

o Pennsylvania: Voters oppose a natural gas extraction ban by 72-23%.o Ohio: Voters oppose a natural gas extraction ban by 76-19%.

o Pennsylvania: Democrats oppose a ban on natural gas extraction by 59%-32%.o Ohio: Democrats oppose a fracking ban by 65-30%.

o Pennsylvania: The biggest worry associated with banning natural gas is job loss (40%), followed by increased energy prices (20%) and energy shortages (15%).

o Ohio: The biggest worry associated with banning natural gas is job loss (26%), followed by increased energy prices (18%) and energy shortages (15%).

o Pennsylvania: 57% of voters see natural gas as playing an important role in supporting U.S. renewable energy growth over the medium-term.

o Ohio: 53% of voters adhere to this view.

o Pennsylvania: 43% of voters say we should be using more natural gas; 34% say we should be using the same amount of natural gas versus; and, 18% say we should use less natural gas.

o Ohio: 41% of voters say we should be using more natural gas; 37% say we should be using the same amount of natural gas; and, 18% say we should use less natural gas.

 

The GOP’s Pivot Away From Fiscal Relief Hurts Millions of Americans

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

At every turn, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have bungled the coronavirus pandemic and shortchanged our recovery. For the first month after most programs created by the CARES Act – the last major stimulus bill passed by Congress back in March – expired, the GOP wasted valuable time on half-measures that could not pass and executive orders that do not help. Washington Republicans have now completely abandoned work on further relief measures so they can focus on a partisan gambit to pack the Supreme Court with yet another right-wing justice before voters have a chance to make their voices heard in just five weeks.

It didn’t have to be this way. Back in May, House Democrats passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act that they intended to be a follow-up to the CARES Act. Although the bill had many flaws, it offered a starting point for negotiations. Their Republican counterparts in the Senate, on the other hand, spent two months doing literally nothing to advance any additional relief legislation. It was only a full month after the major provisions in the CARES Act had expired that the Republican-controlled Senate voted on a partisan $500 billion “skinny” stimulus bill, which then failed to pass the chamber. Negotiations have now stalled due to GOP’s insistence on penny-pinching for a critical stimulus bill that, it should be noted, would almost certainly be less expensive than the wasteful $2 trillion tax cut the party enacted at the height of our most recent economic expansion.

In an attempt to cover for his party’s fecklessness, President Trump issued a series of executive orders ostensibly designed to fill the needs for further relief unmet by Congress. But as is too often the case with Trump, these actions were almost entirely superficial – and in some cases, actively harmful to the people supposedly helped. Rather than playing these pointless partisan games, Republicans need to join Democrats at the negotiating table and deliver a real solution for the millions of Americans struggling to survive amidst a global pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Anyone at Risk of Contracting Coronavirus

The first priority for policymakers must be controlling the pandemic, as our economy cannot fully recover until people feel safe going in public to work or spend money. Adequate testing and tracing are essential to preventing the virus from spreading until a vaccine is found, but delays in test results have already undermined our COVID response. Democrats proposed $75 billion for coronavirus testing and contact tracing as part of their stimulus proposal in the HEROES Act, while Republicans proposed a much-smaller $25 billion investment, including just $16 billion of new funding not reallocated from CARES Act programs. But without a deal, neither side gets any investment – and the virus continues to spread through our communities.

People Who Have Lost Their Jobs

Up to 26 million Americans remain unemployed thanks to the pandemic. In normal times, unemployment benefits typically only cover 34-54 percent of lost wages for a limited period of time. These benefits, however, are woefully insufficient during a prolonged period when few job openings are available to be filled. The CARES Act sought to address this problem by increasing UI benefits by $600/week through the end of July and extending the maximum number of weeks someone could claim unemployment benefits until December.

Democrats proposed to continue the full $600/week until January (or tie the extension of benefits to real economic indicators), while Republicans wanted to replace it with a $300/week supplement through the election). There was a very reasonable middle-ground here, as both sides agreed that supplemental unemployment benefits should not be allowed to expire in their entirety – but because no agreement was reached, that is exactly what happened.

Trump claimed to resolve the problem with an executive order letting states use Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money to establish a supplement for unemployment insurance. But this approach was riddled with problems: it depended on state unemployment offices, which are already burdened with crushing caseloads and obsolete information technology, to set up new administrative structures, delaying the receipt of benefits. The new supplement was worth only half as much as the one authorized by the CARES Act, and was not made available to low-income workers who receive less than $100/week in normal unemployment benefits. Finally, the FEMA fund only had enough money to fund benefits for six weeks – and required drawing upon funds that will likely be needed to fight wildfires out west and repair damage from hurricanes in the south.

Landlords and Lenders

Failure to adequately support unemployed Americans will have cascading effects throughout the economy. Because the unemployed then cannot spend as much money as usual, the businesses that rely on their patronage also lose income, which hurts workers throughout the broader economy and deepens the recession. They are also more likely to fall behind on payments for rents, utilities, or mortgages. The CARES Act included a temporary moratorium on evictions, but now that it is expired, millions of American families are at risk of losing their homes by the end of the year. Democrats  have proposed imposing an even broader moratorium than was included in the CARES Act. The Trump administration, meanwhile, ordered the Centers for Disease Control to enact a limited moratorium on evictions until the end of the year for low- and middle-class renters.

Although a moratorium may give at-risk renters some temporary relief, it fails to resolve the underlying issue: lost income. Trump’s moratorium simply delays the inevitable for any renter who is behind on rent and would otherwise face eviction. Meanwhile, smaller landlords will lose out on income they need to pay for mortgages and property taxes, which puts them at risk of default. Lenders may also face significant losses from landlords and homeowners unable to make their required payments. If Congress were to instead provide adequate income support for people who have lost their incomes in the pandemic, they would ensure people can afford to remain in their homes without creating these new burdens.

Small Businesses and Their Workers

The CARES Act included a Payroll Protection Program (PPP), which gave small- and medium sized-businesses money to retain their workforce. That funding dried up when the program ended on August 8th. Here, Congressional Republicans actually want to be more generous, proposing almost $360 billion in small business support, loans, and employee retention provisions, while Democrats proposed $290 billion. But without a deal, small businesses – many of which are operating in industries, such as dining and hospitality, that have been particularly hurt by the pandemic – have not gotten any more support.

The only support for small businesses in President Trump’s executive orders was a counterproductive payroll tax holiday. Neither party in Congress supported Trump’s previous proposals to temporarily cut the payroll tax, so instead he used his limited authority to defer collection of some payroll taxes until next year. But since workers will still owe that money in 2021, many employers are just withholding the tax anyway. Meanwhile, federal workers – including those in the military – who cannot opt out of deferral are being advised not to spend the money so they aren’t financially flattened by the massive tax bill for back taxes they will receive next year.

State and Local Governments

The coronavirus pandemic has blown a massive hole in the budgets of state and local governments: income and sales taxes are drying up while spending on safety-net programs, such unemployment insurance and Medicaid, have increased dramatically. Because most state and local governments are required to balance their budget, this fiscal squeeze will compel them to cut their budgets right when people and businesses need government support the most.

Although Congress included some aid for state and local governments as part of the CARES Act, it only allowed this money to be spent on new coronavirus-related expenses, not to replace lost revenues. Republicans have proposed to loosen rules on how states could spend this aid, but offered no additional funding. Democrats, meanwhile, included almost $1 trillion in new funding for state and local governments in the HEROES Act.

Many on the right have argued that providing further aid would be a “bailout” for the finances of poorly-managed states, but this criticism is at best deeply misguided. PPI projects that state and local governments will need at least $250 billion in additional support beyond what was already appropriated before the end of 2021 just absorb the pandemic’s financial impacts without making deep cuts to essential services – and this figure could be even higher if the economic impact of this unpredictable crisis is worse than current projections. Rather than argue over an arbitrary dollar amount, Congress can easily address the concerns of both Democrats and Republicans by designing programs that provide aid to state and local governments based on the real pandemic-induced shortfalls realized on their balance sheets.

Parents and Families

The pandemic has taken a particularly brutal toll on parents who are unable to send their children back to school this fall. It is difficult for workers to do their jobs, either remotely or in-person, when they are unable to access child care that they usually could depend on at this time of year. It also poses a special burden on students from low-income families who lack the internet access necessary to participate in online classes.

The good news here is that both parties have proposed about $100 billion in additional support for schools. But they disagree on what it should be used for: the Trump administration would use this money to pressure school districts across the country to return to in-person classes, the even though doing so would be unsafe without the proper public health safeguards in place. The Democrats’ proposal, on the other hand, would also enable schools to stand up high-quality remote learning to keep their students learning while school buildings remain closed.

Unfortunately, these nuances don’t even matter at the moment: because Congress failed to reach a broader agreement, schools have received no additional federal support. Even worse, the looming shortfalls facing state and local budgets are likely to result in deep cuts to education spending (as they did following the 2008 financial crisis), further jeopardizing the long-term opportunities for children and families.

Voters

State and local governments face an unprecedented challenge administering a national election in the midst of a pandemic, made even worse by foreign governments threatening to interfere again like they did in 2016. The HEROES Act included $3.6 billion to support election integrity and vote-by-mail operations to make sure every vote is counted, while the Senate bill included nothing. As we enter the final stretch of what is perhaps the most contentious presidential election in modern history against the backdrop of several overlapping national crises, the failure of federal policymakers to support election infrastructure jeopardizes the bedrock of our democracy.

Conclusion

Although neither party’s proposals have been perfect, only one is making any serious effort to find common ground and support our economy in a time of unprecedented crisis. While House Democrats prepare to vote this week on a new package of proposals that is more moderate than the HEROES Act they passed four months ago, President Trump and Senate Republicans are leaving millions of Americans in the lurch by prioritizing partisan court packing over any further fiscal relief. Democratic candidates for office and all stakeholders, from the worker who is at risk of losing her home along with her unemployment benefits to the parent who cannot save his small business and give his child a decent education at the same time, should pressure Republicans to return to the negotiating table and work in the public interest – or face severe consequences in November.

America’s Remote Learning Imperative

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The coronavirus pandemic is an historic test of the resilience of one of America’s most precious public assets: our public schools. So far, it’s a test we are failing. Tens of millions of children have fallen far behind in their studies. These learning losses will cascade as health fears keep most schools closed this fall – unless schools do a much better job of delivering effective online instruction to all students stranded at home.

As the pandemic continues to spread, it’s hard to imagine a more urgent national imperative than making sure all school districts are equipped to meet this challenge. At stake are the future prospects of 50.8 million public school students—especially those from low-income families, which have been the most severely affected by school closings.  

There is no single cause of this failure and no single cure. Access to computers and high-speed internet is obviously essential and should be a priority. However, the core problem is that most schools are still unprepared to deliver quality remote instruction.  Most of our large, bureaucratic, overly centralized school systems move too slowly, train their teachers inadequately, and fail to engage too many of their students, as well as their parents. 

The U.S. needs a crash program—on a scale equivalent to the 1960s moonshot, but faster—aimed at helping our schools operate virtually, both as a substitute for and an important complement to live instruction. We need a multi-pronged push by elected leaders, school officials, parents and businesses to ensure that every child who needs it has equal access to high-quality remote learning—in 2020 and beyond. We should turn the immediate crisis into an opportunity both to minimize learning loss during the pandemic and to build a strong platform for better teaching and learning for the long term.

Our strategy must be holistic.  If the focus is solely on laptops and internet connections, the effort will fail. It must include:

  • intensive professional development for teachers in online, synchronous teaching and use of available online curricula and resources; 
  • help for teachers and schools in engaging parents — who are, after all, every child’s first teacher; 
  • help for parents whose jobs and other responsibilities make it difficult or impossible to also serve as teachers’ aides at home;
  • development of new assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of different forms of remote education; 
  • support for students’ social-emotional learning and mental health; 
  • reform of school districts to give schools the flexibility they need to innovate rapidly; and 
  • redoubled efforts to improve literacy and digital literacy in students, particularly in low-income communities.

With our decentralized model of public education, this burden will fall on the shoulders of state and local leaders. Since they are financially strapped by the economic shutdown, however, the federal government must provide emergency funding. As Hoff Varner, a PTA President in Alameda, California, told The New York Times, “If we were a country interested in saving schools the same way we’ve saved airlines and banks, then this is a problem we could solve.” 

Instead of problem-solving, President Trump and his party have subjected the country to a needlessly partisan argument over whether or not to physically reopen schools.  

Like wearing masks and reopening the economy, reopening the schools should not be a political question. It must depend on whether parents, public health officials, and K-12 leaders believe it is safe for children and teachers in any particular locale to return to the classroom. A mid-July Axios-Ipsos poll showed that 7 in 10 American parents believed in-person classroom instruction was still too risky. 

Yet Congressional Republicans are treating the question like another partisan political football. While the GOP Senate bill offered $70 billion for K-12 public schools, Republicans proposed withholding two-thirds of funds from any school district until it submits a plan to the governor providing a detailed timeline for in-person instruction.

This made no sense. Apart from the historical irony of Republicans trying to dictate local school policy from Washington, it could jeopardize the health of millions of students, their parents, and educators. Republican lawmakers must drop their foolish threat to withhold money from schools that don’t physically reopen, and join with Democrats to approve the $70 billion as soon as possible, while also supporting effective public health strategies that will ultimately allow schools to reopen safely. 

If that money is distributed by the same formula used last spring for the first $13 billion in federal aid to schools, it would give more money to schools with more low-income students.  That will create an enormous opportunity for our urban schools. Using that formula, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas estimates that Chicago Public Schools, with an operating budget of $6.4 billion a year, will get just over $1 billion in new federal money. That is probably enough to assemble the resources and support across many fronts—if teachers, administrators, school boards, businesses, non-profits, unions, parents, and elected leaders cooperate to dramatically accelerate what to this point has been a slow evolution toward adopting and exploiting the full potential of digitally-enabled remote learning.

What Happened Last Spring

The decisions last spring to send all children home understandably caught America’s 131,000 public, private, and charter K-12 schools off guard. Some districts and schools rose to the challenge; many more did not. 

Now teachers’ unions are agitating against both opening schools prematurely and against expectations that they prepare to become full-time online instructors. Unions obviously are right to be concerned about their members’ safety. But the unions can’t have it both ways. If schools stay closed while teachers balk at providing synchronous remote instruction, millions of U.S. children will fall even further behind. Primary and middle schoolers won’t be acquiring the foundational skills – in phonics, reading and arithmetic – they need to become lifetime learners and productive workers. 

Data on the spring semester makes it extremely clear that things must change in the fall. 

By April 3, three weeks after school districts began shutting down, 76 percent of the 82 large districts studied by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) still provided no instruction to students. More distressing, by May 22, a third of them still provide no instruction. 

But even that finding was overly optimistic. In a later CPRE study of a statistically representative sample of 477 school districts, “We found just one in three districts expect teachers to provide instruction, track student engagement, or monitor academic progress for all students—fewer districts than our initial study suggested,” CRPE reported. “Far too many districts are leaving learning to chance during the coronavirus closures.” 

The most damning finding: “Only 14.5 percent of school districts with the highest concentration of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch expect teachers to provide live instruction.”

National student surveys reflected the same disappointing reality: 41 percent of teens did not attend any online or virtual classes; 78 percent reported spending only one to four hours per day on online learning; 32 percent reported two hours or less; and nearly one in four said they were connecting with their teachers less than once a week. 

In a survey by YouthTruth, reports CRPE Director Robin Lake, “Only 50 percent of students say they were able to focus on learning and only 41 percent said they were motivated to do schoolwork.”

In sum, about half of U.S. public school students received little or no instruction from March onward.

McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm, estimated how much learning would be lost in the next school year, based on modeling three scenarios for the next school year. In the first, in-class instruction resumes in fall 2020. In the second, school closures and part-time schedules continue intermittently through the 2020–21 school year, with full-time, in-school instruction delayed until January 2021. In the third scenario, the virus is not controlled until vaccines are available, and schools operate remotely for the entire 2020–21 school year.

In the second scenario — the one most likely at this point in many places — students would lose three to four months of learning (beginning in March 2020) if they received “average” remote instruction, seven to 11 months with “lower-quality” remote instruction, and 12 to 14 months if they received no instruction (thanks to a “summer learning loss” that lasted for 17 months).

If districts fail to get their acts together, leaving vulnerable student populations to experience another semester like the one that just ended, millions may never regain their academic footing. Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps would widen because of disparities in access to devices, internet connections, schools with coherent remote learning plans, live instruction from teachers, and parental supervision (especially in single-parent homes).

 This would do lasting damage to students’ personal development and long-term learning prospects, as well as to the US economy as a whole. In 2009, McKinsey estimated the achievement gap between high- and low-income students deprived the U.S. economy of $400 billion to $670 billion a year in productivity.  An inadequate online learning response in the coming year will increase that achievement gap.

The Digital Divide

While America’s digital divide has been closing steadily, significant gaps remain. The digital divide has two primary components: broadband adoption and internet-ready computer equipment (generally laptops). 

According to the Federal Communication Commission’s latest report, 95 percent of the nation had access to mobile (LTE) coverage in 2018, and nearly 94 percent of the population had access to “advanced” fixed (wireline) broadband.  That percentage falls to 77 percent and 72 percent for people living in rural and Tribal areas, respectively. “On average, deployment is highest in census block groups with the highest median household income, the highest population density, and the lowest poverty rate,” the FCC notes. 

Almost all (96 percent) students from households earning more than $150,000 had access to a laptop or desktop computer before the pandemic, compared to only half (51 percent) of students in households earning less than $25,000. A recent study on America’s “homework gap” estimates that nearly 17 million U.S. students, especially students of color, lack fixed (wireline) internet access at home. 

Before the pandemic about a quarter of Black and Latinx households had not adopted residential broadband, compared to 10 percent of white households and 5 percent of Asian households. Among students whose families earned less than $30,000 annually, 35 percent didn’t have a broadband connection at home; in households earning more than $75,000, just 6 percent had not adopted residential broadband. 

According to researchers at the University of Michigan, students who rely mainly on mobile connections lag behind those who have fixed broadband at home:      

We find that students who do not have access to the Internet from home or are dependent on a cell phone alone for access perform lower on a range of metrics, including digital skills, homework completion, and grade point average. They are also less likely to intend on completing a college or university degree. A deficit in digital skills compounds many of the inequalities in access and contributes to students performing lower on standardized test scores, such as the SAT, and being less interested in careers related to science, technology, engineering, and math.

The Federal Communications Commission created a “Keep Americans Connected” challenge to broadband operators last March. To date, more than 800 companies and associations have pledged to (1) refrain from terminating internet service to any residential or small business customers because of their temporary inability to pay bills; (2) waive any late fees that residential or small business customers incur as a result of the pandemic; and (3) open their Wi-Fi hotspots to any American who needs them. 

The nation’s broadband providers developed new programs and expanded existing programs to help low-wage workers and families that didn’t subscribe to internet at home. For example, Cox Cable offered discounted internet to families with children who qualified for subsidized meals, selected veterans, senior citizens, college students, public housing residents, and families that received rental assistance. Comcast, Spectrum, Optimum, Suddenlink, and others offered free broadband and Wi-Fi access for 60 days to certain customers—for example, students and low-income households.

Some schools and districts engaged with community partners to ensure students had access to high-speed internet. Public libraries offered mobile hotspots. Some school districts converted buses into mobile hotspots and parked them in high-need communities.  Alabama has used $10 million in federal relief funds to make every bus in the state a Wi-Fi hotspot. 

In addition to internet access, many schools and districts stepped up in the spring, distributing laptops or tablets and internet-connectivity devices. In Seattle, for example, Amazon donated 8,200 laptops to the public school system, and the nonprofit Partnership for Connecticut distributed 60,000 laptops statewide, which Dell provided at a 62 percent discount. Philanthropists provided support for laptops in many communities.

These efforts need to be continued and expanded, with federal and state support.  However, having broadband and devices is simply not enough, as all the data indicate. Even when provided with both, many students simply were unprepared for virtual learning. Ten weeks into the shutdown, the School District of Philadelphia reported that nearly 40 percent of students failed to attend online school on an average day. In Chicago, where 90 percent of public school students had online access, 41 percent logged into an online classroom fewer than three times a week. 

In Los Angeles, despite an offer of free Wi-Fi service for all disconnected students rolled out in March, daily absenteeism from March through May (measured by daily logins to the district’s online learning platform) averaged 40% of all secondary students on any given day. 

There are too many barriers to successful online education that go well beyond just putting a connected laptop in a child’s hands, and those barriers must be broken down. Students must be engaged in learning by their schools and teachers; parents have to support, encourage, and push them; states and school districts must learn how to measure the effectiveness of different remote learning approaches; and districts need to give their schools the flexibility to change their staffing models, budgets, and teaching strategies.

PPI recommends that states, districts, and charter schools focus on the following areas:

Training Teachers

Despite scant experience or training in virtual education, many teachers were thrust overnight into a wrenching transition from face-to-face instruction to online teaching. And most districts were not prepared to train them. Seven out of ten surveyed teachers reported they had not been properly prepared for virtual learning. The Washington Post reported that a survey found 43 percent of school administrators and 57 percent of teachers feeling “overwhelmed” by distance learning instruction.

In New York City, teachers were only given three days of training in online instruction, which for many of them was a first-time-ever introduction to basic learning platforms such as Google Classroom. But few teachers across the country had ever had to figure out how the keep third graders engaged in a Zoom class all day, how to use online content to excite the curiosity of inner city kids, how to grade fairly when some homes had no parent available to assist, or dozens of other challenges. For thousands of dedicated and conscientious teachers, the learning curve toward a new and different style of pedagogy has been steep. 

A new survey of 800 educators by EdTech Evidence Exchange and the University of Virginia found that only 27 percent of teachers participated in any kind of formal professional learning for online instruction last spring. About a quarter of teachers reported they covered no new material during the school closings, while more than half said they covered less of the curriculum than they normally do. 

Some districts are wisely delaying school openings to allow time to train teachers in remote learning. For instance, Clark County, Nevada’s largest district, delayed the start of school by two weeks to provide teachers 10 full days of professional development.

There are many kinds of educational software already available that schools can use, much of it free. For instance, Summit Public Schools in California has spent the past decade developing and sharing its Summit Learning Program for free with almost 400 other schools around the country. Developed by its teachers and programmed by software engineers provided by Mark Zuckerberg, it is a sophisticated system that uses software and online tools to help kids acquire content knowledge and projects to help them develop their deeper learning skills, such as research, writing, speaking, critical thinking, and teamwork.

Khan Academy, developed by Salman Kahn, is another widely used and highly respected free resource. It provides more than 6,500 video lessons in math, science, computing, arts and humanities, economics, reading, and life skills. By 2020, it had more than 5.6 million subscribers, and its videos had been viewed more than 1.7 billion times. 

Most teachers need intensive training to learn about their instructional options, confer with school leaders and parents about which option best meet their students’ needs, and become comfortable using them. On top of that, teachers need training in how to engage students and keep them engaged—an entirely different challenge during remote education than with a classroom full of children. 

Hit especially hard by school closures were the 7.1 million students ages 3-21 who required special education services. Not only did many of them lack computers and residential broadband, but many were cut off from occupational, speech, and physical therapy. Because the hallmark of special education is individualized or small-group support for students with a wide array of unique needs, it is impossible to devise a standard “model” for remote learning. Online programs and computers must be tailored to reflect students’ various disabilities. Some experts believe teachers should also offer one-on-one support to acclimate special needs students to learning by computer and to track their progress. 

“Some states allow in-person supports for students with disabilities. In Maryland and California, some providers may visit children’s homes,” reports Beth Hawkins in The 74. “In Washington state, some students can attend meetings and receive services in school buildings with proper social distancing.”

As many parents with pre-schoolers discovered last spring, trying to deliver early learning digitally also can be an exasperating experience for everyone involved. According to education researcher Jesse McNeill:

Distance learning presents a particular challenge to early childhood learners. Remote learning strategies that work for older students (e.g., synchronous, hour-long lectures) do not translate to younger students who rely heavily on adult facilitation and cannot pay attention for long periods. In addition, many early childhood learning activities require one-on-one facilitation or small-group interaction, which is difficult to deliver in a distance learning environment.

To surmount such difficulties, pre-K teachers and parents will have to work closely together to develop routines around remote instruction that respect the multiple pressures on working parents, and that also build in opportunities for the face-to-face interactions that young children need. 

In short, online learning isn’t simply a matter of parking a teacher in front of a camera and rolling the tape. Everyone – students, teachers, parents and administrators – will need training in new ways to teach and learn. 

Engaging and Supporting Parents

The effectiveness of virtual learning often hinges on how engaged parents are in making sure their children participate. In effect, remote learning shifts some of the burden of administering their children’s education from teachers to parents, who also have to navigate their own work responsibilities. One recent study found that 60 percent of teachers say that the lack of parental supervision and support at home is a key reason why students don’t participate in online learning.

Many older and low-income parents lack digital skills (and some lack English language skills) to coach their children on how to learn online. In fact, according to a survey by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, many parents ironically look to their kids to teach them these skills:

Children frequently help their parents use devices that connect to the Internet, such as computers, tablets, and smartphones. Half (53 percent) of all low- and moderate-income parents who use the Internet say that their child helps them, including 63 percent of those whose child is between 10 and 13 years old. Parents with lower educational attainment are more likely to turn to their children for help: 62 percent of those who did not graduate from high school do so, compared with 45 percent of those with a college degree. Hispanic parents are the most likely to say that their child has helped them use Internet-connected devices (63 percent, compared with 45 percent of Whites), but there were no statistically significant differences within the Hispanic community by income, language, or immigrant generation. 

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that in households with minor children, only about 35 percent of parents are able to telework from home. Since someone has to stay home to take care of the kids, single parents who aren’t able to telework are forced to give up their jobs. Only 19.7 percent of Blacks and 16.2 percent of Latinos can telework and support their children’s learning throughout the day.

Remote learning places a special burden on parents who also happen to be teachers. According to the Brookings Institution, nearly half of public school teachers have children living at home. It’s difficult to deliver online instruction to their students while also helping their children get the most from their online courses – especially if both things are happening at the same time. 

Federal funds to help parents afford childcare during the upcoming school year are essential, including support for innovative solutions such as “learning pods” or “pandemic pods.” These are small groups of students who learn together with an in-person teacher or tutor. A Godsend to parents trying to juggle their day jobs while also supervising their childrens’ education, learning pods nonetheless are expensive and families with low and modest incomes should get public help to defray the costs. 

Schools also need to engage parents in helping to teach their children, particularly parents without computer skills. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the school district has created nine Parent Centers throughout the 133,000-student district, where parents can get help with using computers and other challenges. The Centers give parents tips on keeping children engaged, connecting with a Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), and finding the best ways to communicate with teachers and monitor student participation.

A practice of many of the nation’s best charter schools to encourage parental engagement should be widely adopted.  Many charters have long sent teachers to visit their students’ homes and asked parents to sign contracts that commit them to supporting the education of their children. Some of the nation’s more innovative school districts, including those in Denver and Washington, D.C., have begun to emulate this practice. Several studies have found that students perform better when teachers actively reach out to their parents.

But not all “family engagement” is equally effective. As many parents know, involvement in a PTA, a potluck dinner at school, or a back-to-school night doesn’t help their kids learn. Research suggests that parents can best help their children by communicating high expectations and the value of learning, monitoring progress and holding their children accountable, supporting learning at home, advocating for them, and guiding their major decisions to college or career.

Some schools and districts actively help parents develop these skills. The Flamboyan Foundation, a leader in this field, has trained thousands of teachers, particularly in Washington, D.C.  The training has several purposes, according to Flamboyan’s former executive director, Susan Stevenson: 1) to change teacher beliefs and mindsets about parents, so they see parents as assets and engaging them as part of their responsibility; 2) to build trusting, mutually respectful relationships and two-way communication with families; 3) to help teachers work with parents (and their surrogates), so those parents can help their children succeed in school; 4) and to enable teachers to learn from families about their children, so they can better teach them. 

Districts and charter networks should use some of any federal money that arrives to train and pay their teachers to do these things, virtually as well as physically. Funding will also be necessary to provide translators for parents and other caregivers who don’t speak English. 

Finally, each school should have a communication plan to ensure parents have access to timely information about available resources. Schools should also create support groups for parents of multiple children, parents of special needs students, and parents who are essential workers and cannot stay home to make sure their children are keeping up with their studies. 

Assessing Student Progress

As students return to school, whether virtually or in person, using diagnostic tests to assess their current level of content knowledge will be critical to charting a path forward. Without preliminary assessments, schools and parents will lack a yardstick for measuring the gains (or losses) from remote instruction. 

Districts and schools will need an injection of federal and state resources and support to design ways to regularly assess how well different forms of remote learning are working, so teachers can continuously improve their offerings. End-of-year tests do not help with this task: schools will need to assess progress every six weeks or so. While some already do that in some form, all will need to learn which forms of assessment work best in a remote-learning environment. For instance, they will need to incorporate student and parent surveys into their assessments, to measure student engagement. And they will need to measure and emphasize academic growth (how much children learn over time), not just proficiency (whether they are at grade level). 

Most states already require some form of annual growth measurement, although California’s approach is woeful and some other states could strengthen their methods. Tennessee’s Value-Added Assessment System offers a good model, but districts will need a different approach to measure growth more often than once a year. 

Supporting Students’ Social-Emotional Learning and Mental Health

Successful schools help students not just to learn content, but to develop their social-emotional competencies, such as persistence, self-discipline, responsible decision-making, ability to work with others, and ability to set and achieve goals. Like many things, this becomes more challenging in a remote-learning environment. 

One key is establishing close relationships between teachers and students. In most successful charter schools, for instance, all students participate in an “advisory” or “family”—a group of 15 or so students with one teacher. They meet regularly and often focus on activities and discussions meant to build social-emotional competencies. The teacher is expected to get to know each student and their family well and to keep track of how they are doing. Many charter school leaders believe that these close relationships—more than any other factor—helped make their transitions to remote learning effective.  

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has published a guide to enhancing social-emotional learning in this time, which includes many other useful suggestions. 

As the pandemic moves through communities, it leaves behind emotional scars. Particularly in communities of color, students grieve the loss or illness of parents and other relatives, in isolation from their friends. In the coming months, more of them will face economic hardship, including eviction from their homes. For some, mental health issues will become acute. Clearly, districts and schools need federal and state funds to hire additional social workers and psychologists who can reach out and work with students and their families dealing with trauma. 

Modernizing School System Organization 

In addition to delivering emergency aid to schools so that our children keep learning during the pandemic, our leaders need to craft a long-term strategy for making our K-12 system more resilient against future pandemics or other shocks. They should pay heed to a key lesson from school districts’ uneven performance last spring: organization matters.

Most of America’s K-12 public schools are organized under a century-old model, in which school districts own and operate all schools within a defined geography and vest authority to make all key decisions in a superintendent and his or her staff, not in school principals.

Centralized, rule-driven, bureaucratic monopolies worked well enough during the Industrial Era, when most graduates would go on to manual labor or stay home and raise kids. But global competition has raised the bar dramatically; today’s graduates must be able to do so much more to earn a decent living. Meanwhile, the pace of change has accelerated and computer technologies have made amazing things possible. 

In response, a new model for school organization and governance has begun to emerge, geared to the knowledge economy. Non-hierarchical and decentralized, the new model is built upon school autonomy, strict public accountability, and the ability to choose among very different schools tailored to the diverse needs of children. In the 21st century, success comes from decentralized networks of mission-driven organizations whose customers have choices, not from top-down bureaucracies.

This explains why public charter schools, which are freed from district bureaucracies, educate urban children far more effectively than district schools in most cities. By their fourth year in a charter, urban charter students learn 50 percent more every year than district students with similar demographics and past test scores, according to a study of 41 urban regions by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

Free from red tape and bureaucracy, charters are also nimbler than district-operated schools. Recent surveys by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington, showed that charter management organizations transitioned to distance learning faster and more thoroughly this spring than districts did, on average. They were already more likely to use educational software, to deliver personalized learning, and to engage parents in their children’s learning. CRPE found that many of them quickly redefined teachers’ roles and responsibilities to fit the new reality—using teacher leaders for each grade to lead the redesign of instruction, record sample lessons, and organize professional development for other teachers, for instance.  

On the other hand, school districts had the resources to purchase and distribute computers and hotspots quickly, a big advantage. To adapt to remote learning effectively, in other words, school systems needed strong central offices capable of marshaling resources but decentralized operation of individual schools, so empowered principals and teachers can quickly implement remote education and the support systems required for success.  

New Orleans, a district in which every public school is chartered, provides a compelling example of how to take advantage of district-level power and school-level adaptability. Within three school days of the sudden closure, more than half the city’s public schools were handing out free meals. Within three weeks of closure, the school district had procured thousands of laptops and hotspots, which it then delivered to schools for distribution to those who needed them.

“By March 23, the beginning of the second week of school building closures, at least 97 percent of New Orleans public schools had begun providing their students with some form of physical and/or digital educational resources to continue learning,” reports New Schools for New Orleans. By mid-April, a Louisiana Department of Education survey showed that teachers at all New Orleans public schools were reaching out to their students at least weekly, teachers at 90 percent were giving students feedback on their work, and teachers at 80 percent were delivering new content across all grade levels. This summer 60 percent of New Orleans’ charters offered virtual summer school to prevent an exacerbated “summer slide” (learning loss) for their students. 

The combination of capable central offices that can steer well and empowered school leaders and teachers who can row effectively is possible in a system of charter schools. But it is also possible in districts that give schools charter-like autonomy. (With this autonomy must come accountability for performance—including potential replacement by a stronger operator—since not all autonomous schools will succeed.) 

More than a dozen school districts across the nation are converting significant numbers of their schools to this model. A good example is Indianapolis Public Schools, which has converted a third of its schools to nonprofit organizations with full autonomy and five-year performance agreements. They are called “innovation network schools,” and they include restarts of failing schools, new startups, conversions of district schools, and conversions of charter schools. Since they were launched five years ago, they have been the fastest improving group of schools in the district.

States should create incentives – both carrots and sticks — for districts to do this. In Texas, for instance, the state can appoint a new school board if a district school is rated failing for five years in a row. But districts that recruit nonprofit organizations to operate “partnership schools” get a two-year reprieve from sanctions, plus an average of $1,000 per student per year in extra funding to help turn around those schools. 

Because such autonomous schools have more leeway to create innovative approaches to distance learning, other states should pass similar legislation, and Congress should include a financial incentive to encourage states to do so. By devoting as little as $2-3 billion to challenge grants for states that empower and encourage their districts to shift toward a more decentralized model, the federal government could speed up a transition that is underway but moving far too slowly.

Conclusion

The various investments proposed above focus on the immediate need to improve remote learning, but they will benefit students when they return to school buildings as well. Educational software and online resources are incredibly valuable, whether as primary or secondary/homework materials, and the more familiar teachers, students and parents are with them, the better. Parental engagement is an area most schools need to improve rather dramatically, so improvements made during a period of exclusively remote learning will benefit their students as more normal conditions return. Assessment of student progress is already rudimentary at too many schools, so efforts to expand it and make it more sophisticated during the pandemic can help for the long term. The same goes for social-emotional learning and mental health supports. And finally, the need to modernize our century-old operating systems for public education was acute before the pandemic and will remain so afterward.

America’s school districts and charter networks will use some of any forthcoming emergency federal money for technology, and some of it to make their school buildings safer when students return to them. But educational leaders should not ignore the “people” side of the equation. More than anything else, we need more involved parents, teachers with more expertise in using educational software and the Internet, students able to learn because they have support in dealing with the trauma in their lives, and school districts in which the central office can steer effectively but leave the rowing—the operational decisions about hiring, firing, budget, curriculum and school day and year—to those hired to run the school.

Amid Trump economic debacle, Biden’s central message must be his plan for American recovery

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Donald Trump is desperate to make this campaign about anything other than the economic disaster his incompetence has largely caused. But Joe Biden can’t let him do it. Biden’s own robust economic recovery plans must become the Biden-Harris ticket’s key election message.

Just in the last two weeks, Trump has desperately invoked law and order, or federal approval of a non-existent vaccine, or the latest QAnon conspiracy theory — in short, anything but the sick economic elephant in the room.

And no wonder. More than 22 million Americans lost their jobs just in March and April as Donald Trump bungled the COVID crisis, but more than half of those jobs have yet to return. Job growth in July was less than half that of June. And the new August numbers out last Friday being touted by the administration in fact barely make a dent in this new structural unemployment. The actual unemployment rate may be closer to 9% due to misclassification, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, andover 29 million people were receiving unemployment benefits as of mid-August.

Read the full piece here.

We should push for more progress in telehealth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the last few months, millions of Americans have used telehealth services — the remote delivery of care and health monitoring using digital telecommunications tools — to get health care. Federal and state policymakers have made it easier to access telehealth during the pandemic to keep people home and safe but there is no reason to slow the momentum after so much progress has been made.

Due to policy changes at the state and federal levels, the use of telehealth has grown faster in the past five months than in the preceding 25 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic:

Most of the current telehealth expansions are temporary and will expire with the end of the current public health emergency declaration. But they don’t need to. In fact, 39 senators from both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation that would make some of those changes permanent.

Read the full op-ed here.

Online Courses Cost Too Much—So Do Onsite Classes

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

After welcoming undergraduates back to campus, Notre Dame, Michigan State, and the University of North Carolina (among others), experienced outbreaks of COVID-19. The result—they switched back to remote learning. With 26,000 cases of coronavirus linked to college campuses, more will soon follow. While some of those schools will offer discounts for online courses, many others won’t. Is this fair?

Students don’t think so. In a recent survey, 93 percent of undergraduates said online tuition should be reduced. This result isn’t a surprise. Most of us equate “online” with “less expensive.” But while other industries have been able to cut prices taking advantage of technology and the Internet—colleges and universities (with the exception of massive online courses or MOOCs) typically charge the same for online and onsite courses. Why?

Read Paul’s full op-ed here.

The Trump Party’s war on reality

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The perverse joke at the heart of so-called reality TV is that it is totally fake — full of cartoonish heroes and villains and contrived dramas. Just like pro wrestling, the Trump presidency, and this week’s Republican National Convention.

It was a slickly produced, flag-bedecked exercise in mass delusion. In the squalid, everyday reality of his presidency, Donald Trump is a fumbling, dissembling, chaotic mess of a “leader” whose MO is denying the nation’s most urgent problems and deflecting blame on others for his failure to manage them effectively.

In the spectacle of the last four nights, however, Trump was anointed America’s only hope for salvation. Speaker after speaker extolled a beaming Trump for his “decisive action” against COVID-19, an inversion of reality that would make George Orwell dizzy. In his acceptance speech last night, Trump lauded himself, with characteristic hyperbole, for having ordered an “unprecedented national mobilization” against the “China virus,” even as the United States leads the world in COVID-19 deaths and infections.

The week featured what you would expect from the Trump Party: a Niagara of lies about the fictitious evils stalking America — socialism, anarchy in the streets, a plot to abolish the suburbs, Chinese leaders who deliberately loosed a deadly disease on the world, the betrayal of U.S. workers and assaults on religion and gun rights, etc. — and about Trump’s supposedly heroic, solitary battles on behalf of embattled Americans who still love their country.

The most overtly bigoted president in modern U.S. history trotted out people of color to pay tribute to his color-blind compassion, and Trump shamelessly repeated his risible claim to have done more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln.

In cult-like fashion, family members and administration flunkies parroted the Great Leader’s own talking points, such as his easily disproven claim that Trump had built the “greatest economy in world history” before the Chinese bushwacked him with the coronavirus. In the absence of a record of real accomplishments to run on, as Barack Obama said at the Democratic Convention, Trump just “makes stuff up.”

Read the full piece here.

Denier-in-chief: Trump, COVID and climate change

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It is a tale of two worlds. In Real World, the COVID scourge continues to inflict massive human suffering and economic costs on the American people. More than 177,000 Americans have died. More than 5.7 million have been infected. These are by far the largest tolls in the world. No wonder the U.S. economy is now a basket case.

More than 22 million jobs were lost in April alone, and many more in March and May, yet only 42% of those jobs have returned. Even with so many jobless Americans waiting to go back to work, job growth has slowed with July employment less than half that of June, and August looking weaker still.

This is the worst job market since the Great Depression. Yet after more than almost nine months, the Trump administration still does not have a coherent or effective national COVID-19 strategy, and Senate Republicans went on vacation rather than pass unemployment extensions for millions of jobless Americans.

But as his convention continues, the president seems to reside in Trump World, a land of alternative facts where everything appears fine. Late last week, Trump called his presidency the “most successful period of time in the history of our country, from every standard” and said his administration has “demonstrated over the last four years the extraordinary gains that are possible.”

Meanwhile, this week heatwaves, wildfires and hurricanes, all made much worse by climate change, are devastating communities and making life unbearable for tens of millions of Americans across the country.

In California, a massive heatwave scientists say is exacerbated by climate change has led to 600 separate fires, including the second and third largest in state history, which have killed seven people thus far. More than one million acres have burned, three times the annual average, just in the last nine days. More than 100,000 people have been evacuated. Even as the coronavirus pandemic increases respiratory illness, air quality has been fouled for tens of millions across the West.

Read more here.

The Trump Party’s Festival of Fear

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
The 2020 Republican National Convention ostensibly opened last night, but few Republican leaders or ideas traditionally associated with the party were on display. Instead, viewers entered into the fevered world of the GOP’s replacement: the Trump Party.
Much of the show, naturally, featured Trump himself. Often his disembodied voice bellowed familiar slogans and boasts against a backdrop of American flags, syrupy music and canned applause. Especially cringeworthy were several scenes in which “ordinary Americans” gathered, maskless, around the Great Man himself, who beamed benignly as they heaped fulsome praise on his heroic services to America. “I am so in awe of your leadership,” gushed a woman who identified herself as a nurse.
The spectacle was a dreary reminder that the Trump Party inhabits an alternate political universe, constructed by Fox News –its Pravda — and other right-wing media, where life’s discomforting realities and complexities are not allowed to intrude. And despite Trump’s promises of a “positive” and hopeful convention, the dominant notes were fear and anger.
Although she wasn’t billed as such, the real keynoter of the night was Donald Trump, Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle. She glowered and shouted her way through a long harangue against the Trump Party’s stock villains: socialists, the media, cancel culture, cosmopolitan elites, rioters and Democrats who “want to destroy our country.”
Some other takeaways from last night’s festival of fear:
  • Team Trump is deeply worried that voters will hold the president responsible for bungling the nation’s response to coronavirus pandemic. Much of the show was devoted to testimony from nurses and doctors attesting to Trump’s “decisive leadership” in combatting the virus. That was one of the night’s mantras, alongside the equally implausible claim that Trump had built “the greatest economy the world has ever known” before the pandemic.
  • Racially tinged cultural themes, especially law and order, will again be front and center. Speaker after speaker accused Democrats, falsely, of wanting to “defund the police.” Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple charged with pointing a gun at protesters, warned that “your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.” For good measure, they accused Joe Biden and the Democrats of “encouraging anarchy and chaos on our streets,” scheming to deprive people of their gun rights and “abolish the suburbs by ending single family zoning.”
  • In lieu of a governing philosophy and agenda, the Trump Party has a laager mentality. It feels culturally besieged and is held together only by a visceral hatred of the “liberal” media, Democrats and what America is becoming – a multiethnic democracy no longer dominated by descendants of immigrants from northern Europe. It exists not to govern – the party didn’t even bother to produce a platform – but to keep its enemies from governing.
For progressives, the good news in all this is that the Trump Party has little interest in persuasion. It’s aiming its appeals at the dwindling ranks of white, blue collar voters who put Trump over the top – by an excruciatingly thin margin of 77,000 votes – in the Electoral College in 2016. It’s doubling down on intensifying a sense of white grievance to hold back the inexorable tide of America’s changing demography.

New Report Calls on Congress to Make Telehealth Reforms Permanent, Applauded by Bipartisan Pair of U.S. Senators

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Contact: Carter Christensen, cchristensen@ppionline.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has released a new white paper in partnership with Americans for Prosperity (AFP), calling on Congress to make telehealth reforms permanent amid and after the COVID-19 emergency — an unlikely partnership in a time of great need for innovation and leadership.

A bipartisan pair of Senators shared support of the findings of the new report — Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), have worked across party lines to advance telehealth across the country.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) said, “As this paper shows, telehealth is a rare area with strong bipartisan support and it’s here to stay. While we have made some progress in Congress on expanding access to telehealth during this pandemic, we have more work to do to make these changes permanent and allow more patients to continue receiving the critical health care they need wherever they are.”

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “It is refreshing to see two groups with such different perspectives come together to support greater access to telehealth. When Senator Schatz and I started our telehealth working group years ago, we chose to work on bipartisan policy that would improve access to health care and save lives. We will continue to work together to ensure Americans can enjoy the benefits of telehealth for years to come.”

Numerous citizen organizations are urging congressional leaders to make other temporary Medicare telehealth changes permanent, as are a growing number of lawmakers – including a bipartisan group of 29 U.S. senators.15 Meanwhile, numerous lawmakers have introduced legislation, including the bipartisan CONNECT for Health Act, which would grant CMS standing authority to make a number of positive changes on a permanent basis.16

Here are the specific policies that AFP and PPI recommend Congress make permanent:

• Continue allowing patients to use telehealth outside of rural areas and at home.

• Continue allowing providers to deliver care to both established and new patients.

• Continue allowing licensed providers to practice across state lines.

• Continue allowing health care providers to use store-and-forward technologies where medically appropriate.

• Do not impose payment parity for telehealth services versus those provided in person.

The Promise of Telehealth Beyond the Emergency

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the past few months, millions of Americans have experienced a first, tantalizing glimpse of the promise of telehealth.1

The use of telehealth – the remote delivery of care and monitoring of patients’ health using digital telecommunications tools – has surged during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, as policymakers and insurers across the country have eased restrictions on these tools in order to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, for which humans have no immunity. Digital encounters can help people avoid unnecessary in-person contacts and receive care at home instead of a potentially overwhelmed hospital or clinic.

As a result of numerous policy changes at the state and federal levels, the use of telehealth has grown faster in the past five months than in the preceding 25 years. During this time:

• Nationally, nearly one in two consumers have used telehealth to replace a cancelled in-person appointment.2

• More than 11.3 million Medicare enrollees have accessed care from the comfort and safety of their own homes, up from nearly zero the year before.3

• American veterans have availed themselves of 1.1 million telehealth visits through the Veterans Administration.4

Most of the current telehealth expansions are temporary and will expire with the end of the current public health emergency declaration.5 A key question arises: Should the reforms be made permanent?

Although our two organizations differ on many health policy issues, on this question we agree. The current, temporary telehealth reforms are good for patients and should be made permanent.

In this paper, we will explain why we think telehealth is valuable and give a high-level overview of the recent policy changes. We’ll also explain why the adoption of telehealth has been slow until now and identify reforms we believe should be made permanent. Finally, we’ll recommend additional policy changes that could help further promote the promise of telehealth. Our hope is that our writing this paper together will persuade state and federal policymakers to make that promise a reality for patients.

SECTION 01

Why is telehealth valuable?

Telehealth can save time, money, and most importantly lives. Studies show that digitally delivered care typically costs only about half of the cost of services provided in doctors’ offices and urgent care clinics6 and can dramatically reduce unnecessary emergency room trips for patients with chronic conditions.7

On a more personal level, the promise of telehealth takes many forms. To access health care conveniently from the comfort of home, for example, or to have one’s vital signs monitored remotely in real time, to check in with a doctor or nurse with a question without having to take time off work, or to send a photo or email to your doctor for review and go on about your business – these are just some of the ways in which modern telecommunications tools can make life better for people.

Real-time forms of care, such as two-way video, can obviously help slow a contagion by reducing personal contact. But asynchronous forms of care, such as recorded video and so-called store-and-forward systems, can also be very helpful, especially when a matter is non-urgent. For example, in ophthalmology, people may have a question about a prescription lens renewal. Or in dermatology, they might want to have a rash or mole examined at the provider’s convenience.

The real question is not whether telehealth is valuable, but why it isn’t already a standard feature of modern medicine.

SECTION 02

Why has telehealth adoption been slow until now?

Until this year, America has been slow to adopt telehealth. Although private payers have been quicker than public payers to cover telehealth services, overall adoption has been modest. Why? Primarily because of barriers erected by various stakeholders, often in the name of assuring quality and safety for patients. This has been done despite a growing body of evidence that telehealth improves clinical outcomes.8

For example, the substitution of digital tools for in-person care has long faced skepticism from private insurers and Medicare, as well as some state regulators, who fear widespread adoption will lead to overutilization and fraud. Some physician groups, too, have feared it could disrupt existing practice patterns and have a negative effect on their members’ incomes.

At the same time, state professional licensure laws have limited the provision of remote care by health professionals licensed out-of-state.

Admittedly, until this year patients do not seem to have been clamoring for access to telehealth. But with the pandemic, that appears to be changing. While an April 2020 survey found that just 32 percent of Americans had ever used a telehealth service, by May that number had risen to 44 percent, with 80 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement that Covid-19 had made telehealth “an indispensable part” of the healthcare system.9 Sixty-five percent said they believe they will use telehealth services after the pandemic is over.10

SECTION 03

What policy changes have been made in recent months?

Federal Actions:  In non-emergency times, Medicare’s ability to expand coverage to telehealth is quite limited. Services may only originate from inside an officially designated rural health professional shortage area, and from a statutorily allowed setting, which with very limited exceptions does not include the patient’s home. There are rules limiting what types of providers may deliver telehealth services, and requiring that telehealth be delivered by a real-time, two-way, audio-video connection. Other technologies, such as audio-only telephone calls and secure private emails, are not covered. Neither are asynchronous (store-and-forward) tools or remote monitoring of patients’ vital signs. On top of all this, the patient must have a prior existing relationship with the provider before he or she can use telehealth with that provider.11

In late January of this year, after the federal Department of Health and Human Services officially declared the spread of Covid-19 to be a public health emergency and Congress provided authority to waive statutory restrictions on telehealth during the pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) used those emergency powers to dramatically expand the telehealth services covered by Medicare and the digital platforms that may be used to provide care via telehealth. The agency also increased the amounts paid for telehealth visits and allowed providers to bill for services provided across state lines. Medicare officials also doubled the list of telehealth-provided services that Medicare will cover, including therapy services, emergency department visits, initial nursing facility and discharge visits, and home visits outside of rural shortage areas.12

Under the CARES Act, Congress liberalized the statute governing health savings accounts (HSAs) to allow patients to receive first-dollar coverage of telehealth services (meaning without having to first meet a deductible) through the end of 2021.13

State actions: Prior to the pandemic, almost all state Medicaid programs covered some telehealth services provided via live video; otherwise, state laws on telehealth varied dramatically. When the pandemic struck, all states eased at least some restrictions on telehealth, and 48 of them temporarily reduced some or all of their licensing requirements for out-of-state health care providers, making it easier for providers to treat patients across state lines. A couple of noteworthy examples: 1) Maryland expanded the state’s definition of telehealth to include audio-only and store-and-forward technology – affecting all payers in the state, not just the Medicaid program. 2) New Hampshire permanently expanded telehealth benefits to all of its Medicaid recipients, not just underserved communities as had been allowed previously, and removed location limits on providers.

Private payer actions: Many private insurers increased their coverage and reimbursement rates for telehealth services. Humana, for example, is waiving all copays for tele-primary care and tele-behavioral health visits for its Medicare Advantage members. Furthermore, many private health plans are voluntarily mirroring the government’s policies, or even going beyond them. Some states (California, for example) are pressuring private insurers to expand telehealth coverage, while others require them to do so.

Provider actions: Doctors and hospitals that have not previously offered telehealth services have been scrambling to adapt, both to make up for lost revenue as elective procedures have been put on hold and to safely maintain patient care. And some providers are restructuring their business models to make telehealth a permanent option for patients who pay out-ofpocket rather than through insurance.

SECTION 04

Which policy changes should remain in place?

As we’ve said, most of the recent policy changes are temporary. In light of the experience of the past few months, and the benefit to patients, it would be exceedingly odd to go back to the pre-Covid status quo. Happily, a consensus seems to be forming in favor of making those gains permanent. The Medicare agency has recently announced that it will make its newly added telehealth codes permanent, something it has the power to do under existing law, separate and apart from its temporary emergency powers.14 And numerous citizen organizations are urging congressional leaders to make other temporary Medicare telehealth changes permanent, as are a growing number of lawmakers – including a bipartisan group of 29 U.S. senators.15 Meanwhile, numerous lawmakers have introduced legislation, including the bipartisan CONNECT for Health Act, which would grant CMS standing authority to make a number of positive changes on a permanent basis.16

Here are the specific policies that we recommend Congress make permanent.

• Continue allowing patients to use telehealth outside of rural areas and at home.

• Continue allowing providers to deliver care to both established and new patients.

• Continue allowing licensed providers to practice across state lines. Because states typically require that providers must be licensed in the state where the patient is located, current law would require providers keep multiple active licenses in order to serve patients residing in other states. Though CMS has temporarily lifted these licensing rules for Medicare patients, after the Covid crisis passes federal legislation should empower providers to use their own location as the nexus in which care takes place for the purposes of payment – making treating patients across state lines more accessible.

• Continue allowing health care providers to use store-and-forward technologies where medically appropriate.

• Do not impose payment parity for telehealth services versus those provided in person. To encourage telehealth adoption and to ease the financial strain of the pandemic, Medicare is currently reimbursing health care providers for telehealth services as if provided in-person. This makes sense during a public health crisis where the goal is to encourage telehealth use, but at other time there’s little reason to peg remote rates to in-person rates. Part of the promise of telehealth is that it can reduce costs. For example, when care is provided remotely, providers don’t have to clean exam rooms, waiting rooms, and other spaces. Reimbursement should reflect these savings.

SECTION 05

Additional policies that would increase access:

We also recommend the following reforms that go beyond what Medicare has done to-date.

• States, too, should allow health care providers to practice across state lines. Medical protectionism makes no sense in a digital age. Because professional licensure is primarily a state responsibility, states should remove licensing barriers that prevent out-of-state doctors and nurses from delivering care to in-state residents. States can do this unilaterally by automatically recognizing out-of-state licenses or by entering into multistate compacts, the members of which agree to recognize each other’s licenses.

• Expand broadband access. Except for audio-only (telephone) visits, telehealth requires fast and reliable broadband internet access. Though Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have funded such access through the Covid-19 Telehealth Program and the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, broadband connectivity still lags in some parts of the country. Structural changes, like reducing the bureaucratic and regulatory obstacles to getting more providers involved, will help more people realize the potential of telehealth.

• Study the outcomes. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should use the change in health care delivery as an opportunity to analyze the effectiveness of telehealth. It is important to study the effects of recent changes on utilization, access, and costs to inform future policy making. However, Congress should not allow the appropriate desire for further study to stand in the way of quickly implementing reforms that expand patients’ access to telehealth services.

• Remove barriers to affordable care. The ultimate goal of all health reform efforts should be to ensure that everyone has access to the high-quality health care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Telehealth can help with that, to be sure, but policy makers should also adopt sensible reforms that reduce costs and expand access to affordable care and coverage for everyone.

Conclusion

Widespread adoption of telehealth services during the Covid-19 pandemic has given millions of Americans their first real taste of the promise of telehealth. To be sure, there will always be a role for in-person care. And telehealth is not a panacea for the widely acknowledged failings of the U.S. health care system. But it is a very powerful tool, one that holds great promise to make life better for patients and especially for those who are elderly or infirm or who simply find in-person visits a challenge. But for that promise to become a reality, payers and policymakers must act. They must break down the regulatory and legal barriers that stand in the way of affordable, widespread access to telehealth. This is not a left-right issue. Our organizations stand together, ready to help America realize the promise of telehealth beyond the emergency.

 

This paper was written by Arielle Kane Director of Health Care, Progressive Policy Institute and Dean Clancy Senior Health Policy Fellow, Americans for Prosperity. 

The Covid-19 Crisis Shows Why We Need A National Resilience Council

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Progressive Policy Institute, where I serve as chief economic strategist, just put out a report entitled “Building American Resilience: A Roadmap for Recovery After COVID-19.” The report covers a wide range of topics, ranging from manufacturing (discussed below), to education, to health care, to small business, to metro area fiscal policy to the gig economy.

The report makes the argument that resilience—the ability to respond well to disruptive shocks such as pandemics, wars, and climate changes—is a public good that benefits everyone. Left to their own devices, private sector businesses will underinvest in resilience because they can’t capture all the benefits. Just to give an obvious example, no rational company would build an extra production line for N95 mask or mask material that isn’t needed in normal times, just on the off chance of a pandemic. Nor would a rational company invest in developing a process for making N95 masks faster and more cheaply.

Resilience rightly needs to be an explicit goal of public policy. That’s why the report advocates setting up a high-level National Resilience Council, tasked with identifying those industries and capabilities that are strategic, in the sense of improving the ability of the U.S. economy to deal with disruptive shocks. The National Resilience Council would certainly not be anti-trade, because globalization is often a good way to distribute risk. But it would follow a rigorous process of scrutinizing the reliance of the U.S. on foreign suppliers who might not be available in a crisis.

Read more here.

How to build American resilience

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For Americans and much of the world, 2020 has been an annus horribilis. To contain the coronavirus pandemic, nations have been forced to order mass quarantines, freezing economic activity and social life. It likely will take decades to calculate the full human, economic and psychic costs of this still-unfolding global calamity.

Few countries have been spared the ravages of COVID-19, but no country has been hit harder than the United States. A quarter of the 20 million people the virus has infected globally are American, and at 165,000, our death toll is by far the world’s largest.

The plague has put the world’s biggest economy on life support. After shrinking by 5 percent in the first quarter of 2020, U.S. output plunged by nearly 10 percent in the second quarter. Since March, more than 42 million Americans have filed for unemployment, and as many as one in six (about 25 million) remain out of full-time work.

Amid this unprecedented public health and economic crisis an old American dilemma – racial injustice – has reared its head. The senseless killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans by police has triggered widespread public outrage and sometimes violent protests.

Intensifying all three of these shocks is a catastrophic failure of national leadership. In America’s past tribulations, extraordinary leaders have arisen to steer our republic through the storm. Not this time. President Trump has run the ship of state aground.

His incompetent handling of COVID-19 has prolonged the pandemic and pushed our economy to the brink of collapse. As demonstrations against police brutality and racial discrimination tear at the nation’s social fabric, Trump has displayed a perverse talent for inciting social rancor and pitting Americans against each other.

Now, with a crucial national election approaching this fall, Trump is trying to deny Americans the right to vote safely at home. He’s falsely crying fraud to undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of our electoral system.

No wonder Americans’ nerves are frayed. The impression grows, here and abroad, that our country is becoming a failed state.

But that’s wrong. The United States remains a resourceful and dynamic country capable of swift course corrections. Time and again, we’ve showed that a free people can bounce back from adversity stronger than before. Now it’s time to reinvent ourselves again.

Read the full piece here.

Statement on Joe Biden’s Selection of Kamala Harris as Running Mate

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Progressive Policy Institute released the following statement on the selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s vice president.

“Joe Biden composed a strong field of candidates for the job, and in Sen. Kamala Harris, he has made a characteristically solid choice. In doing so, the presumptive nominee has balanced his ticket as Barack Obama balanced his, which is important given the Democratic Party’s mosaic of diversity. He has kept faith with the African American voters who turned his primary campaign around in South Carolina, and with women voters whose growing dissatisfaction with President Trump has propelled Biden into leads in national polling. And in the California Senator he has picked an experienced leader who could step into his shoes if necessary – and someone infinitely more fit to serve in the White House than its current occupant.

“Biden-Harris: it’s a formidable ticket that faithfully reflects the broad, Big Church coalition Democrats will need to evict Donald Trump and Mike Pence from the White House in November.”

Create Two Million New Businesses

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Millions of America’s smallest businesses have been severely affected by the COVID-19 crisis. They’ve seen revenue evaporate and have been forced to lay off millions of workers. Over two million small businesses had simply disappeared by June 2020. The U.S. economy now finds itself in a deep hole, with millions of small businesses gone for good—and a dried-up pipeline of new business creation.

By the end of June, the American economy also was without tens of thousands of new “employer” businesses (those with employees) that normally would have been started. The pandemic and economic crisis have wreaked havoc on existing small businesses and the new start-ups that the economy depends on for job creation and innovation.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s implementation of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), authorized by Congress to provide billions in loan guarantees through the Small Business Administration (SBA), has been flawed. The Treasury department has provided insufficient, and constantly changing, guidance to lenders and businesses. The SBA’s own Inspector General found that the administration did not adhere to Congressional intent in deploying PPP funds.

Even before COVID-19, the Trump administration had proven itself incapable of inspiring entrepreneurial confidence. Business formation had trended steadily downward over the previous two years. According to a PPI analysis of Census Bureau data earlier this year, new business applications fell steadily from the middle of 2018, after rising more or less interrupted since 2012. Business applications that have a “high propensity” of turning into employer businesses had also fallen since the middle of 2018.

The picture gets worse the deeper you dig. The pandemic recession has disproportionately affected female, Black, and Latinx business owners. By April, the number of female-owned businesses had fallen by 25 percent (compared to 20 percent for male-owned businesses). The number of Black- and Latinx-owned businesses had shrunk by, respectively, 41 and 32 percent (compared to 17 percent for white-owned businesses).

These are astonishingly high losses and they come on top of a small business landscape already tilted against minorities and women. According to Census data, going into the crisis, Blacks owned just two percent of employer businesses in this country, despite comprising 13 percent of the population. Latinos and Latinas, making up 18 percent of the population, owned six percent of businesses. Male-owned businesses were larger and with higher revenues than female-owned businesses.

What’s needed now is a major national push to reinvigorate business creation and address underlying demographic disparities in business ownership. For women and minorities, when it comes to entrepreneurship, returning to the pre-crisis status quo is simply not an option. It shouldn’t be an option for the country, either. Greater business creation and ownership among women, Blacks, Latinx, and others will accelerate recovery and strengthen resilience.

Over the last 40 years, new businesses have, on average, created about six jobs per year, per company. If one million new Black and Latinx businesses opened (replacing the ones that have closed permanently) and were joined by half a million additional new businesses, we could see about nine million new jobs created. Not all these companies would survive—in the “normal” course of economic activity—but a significant subset of them would not only survive but also thrive. Young companies that survive and grow drive the lion’s share of net new job creation each year.

Public policy should seek to help stimulate new business creation and support the survival and growth of young businesses. The focus of this effort should be on women- and minority-owned businesses. Vice-President Joe Biden has proposed renewing the State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI), an Obama-era program, to focus on these businesses. Evaluations of the SSBCI found positive effects in terms of investment and job creation, but a much larger effort is likely needed. The federal government has many tools at its disposal to be leveraged in support of new business formation and to aid specific types of entrepreneurs.

PPI believes the federal government should launch a National Start-Up Initiative that aims to spur creation of at least two million new businesses as our country recovers from the pandemic recession. It would include the following key actions:

  • Create a startup visa for founders of new companies. These would include foreign students graduating from a U.S. university, those transitioning out of Optional Practical Training, or any H1B visa-holder after three years. The foreign-born start companies at disproportionately high rates; encouraging them to do so would give a significant boost to overall business creation. This could be accompanied by incentives for business creation in specific geographic areas or neighborhoods.
  • Leverage federal research funding to reform technology commercialization processes at universities. America’s research universities are the best in the world at knowledge creation, yet their ability to turn knowledge into innovation and new companies has been declining. Many promising entrepreneurial ventures get stuck in bureaucratic processes. The federal government, which provides billions of dollars to support university research, should create new incentives for those institutions that devise more effective commercialization practices and generate new businesses for their communities.
  • Create a new “Start-Up Tax Credit” to encourage new businesses to grow into large businesses. Modeled on the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Startup Credit is designed to help these businesses avoid the scale-up trap unintentionally posed by tax breaks and regulatory exemptions for new enterprises. For example, businesses with fewer than 50 employees are exempt from the employer shared responsibility payment of the Affordable Care Act and providing unpaid leave. While these “carveouts” certainly help small businesses get off the ground, they impose an implicit tax when those companies grow past a certain threshold. The Startup Tax Credit would mitigate that tax.

As proposed by PPI economist Elliott Long, the Startup Tax Credit would be tied to the number of employees and payroll at a small business. Firms that have been operating for fewer than five years would be eligible for a credit equal to half the employer-side payroll tax they pay on their first 100 employees, up to a maximum credit of $1,200 per employee in 2020 (indexed to inflation). The proportion of payroll taxes offset by the credit and the maximum credit per employee would then gradually phase down as businesses grow until phasing out entirely once the business reaches 500 employees. PPI estimates this proposal would cost roughly $150 billion over 10 years.

  • PPI has also supported the New Business Preservation Act, introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). This would allocate $2 billion in federal funding to match private investments in areas of the country bereft of startup equity investments.

These steps would help seed the ground for new business creation, just as our country needs to create millions of them to provide jobs to U.S. workers whose previous jobs vanished in the pandemic shutdown. They would also create conditions that would make America’s entrepreneurial culture more vibrant and resilient against future public emergencies of all kinds.