Monthly Archives: June 2022

What GAO Found

Compared to a typical school year, teachers reported that more of their students started the 2020-21 school year behind and made less academic progress, according to GAO's generalizable survey of K-12 public school teachers. Teachers also reported that many students ended the year behind grade level expectations (see figure). Educators and parents also shared their insights and experiences about student struggles and learning loss during the year.

Academic Progress during School Year 2020-21

Note: The margin of error for all percentages was less than or equal to +/- 8 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. The survey asked teachers how many of their students were behind grade level or made less academic progress. We did not define behind or academic progress as we wanted to obtain teachers overall observations of their students.

GAO estimated that about half of teachers (52 percent) had more of their students start the 2020-21 school year behind compared to a typical school year, and that this affected younger students more than older students. Further, nearly two-thirds of teachers (64 percent) had more students make less academic progress than in a typical school year. These issues occurred across all grades and instructional models, and were more pronounced in some than others. For example, between 68 and 72 percent of teachers of older students or in virtual or hybrid environments had students who made less progress than is typical, compared to other grades and learning models. Finally, 45 percent of teachers had at least half of their students end the year behind grade level.

Educators and parents did note, however, that some students excelled despite the strain of the pandemic. Factors associated with such success included flexibility to work at their own pace, and strong familial support.

The pandemic continues to take a toll on students' and teachers' well-being. The trauma of the last 2 years has profoundly affected many students and teachers, some of whom lost parents or family members. As our teacher survey, educator and parent discussion groups, and other research has shown, this trauma and pandemic-associated schooling disruptions disproportionately harmed vulnerable students and contributed to growing disparities between student populations. Further, after 2 years of challenging working conditions, teachers are confronting burnout and recent surveys indicate that many are thinking of leaving their jobs.

To help address these ongoing challenges as well as inform thinking about managing future learning disruptions, educators and parents identified strategies such as reducing class sizes or student-teacher ratios to provide more individualized attention to students.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted learning for millions of students, educators, and families. Its effects continue to reverberate across the nation and produce challenges for schools that will likely be felt for years to come. In many respects, the 2020-21 school year offers insights and lessons on the struggles and successes that schools, educators, and parents faced.

The CARES Act includes a provision for GAO to report on its ongoing COVID-19 monitoring and oversight efforts. This report, the third in a series of three reports, examines (1) the effect on academic progress, and (2) implications, and strategies and resources identified by educators and parents to address ongoing challenges or future learning disruptions.

To address these objectives, GAO contracted with Gallup to (1) conduct a nationally representative survey of elementary and secondary public school teachers between June 18 and July 9, 2021 and (2) arrange virtual discussion groups with teachers, principals or assistant principals, and parents. The overall response rate was 8.2 percent (using the American Association for Public Opinion Research's response rate 3, which accounts for the estimated eligibility rate of non-respondents). GAO analyzed the resulting survey data and discussion group information. GAO estimated margins of error at the 95 percent confidence level. To view the first two reports, see GAO-22-104487 and GAO-22- 105815.To view the supplement online, click on http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-22-105817.

For more information, contact Jacqueline M. Nowicki at 617-788-0580or nowickij@gao.gov.

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Pandemic Learning: Less Academic Progress Overall, Student and Teacher Strain, and Implications for the Future - Government Accountability Office

A Minneapolis City Council committee heard firsthand Wednesday how an effort to stop violence before it happens has developed over the past year.

Sasha Cotton, director of the Minneapolis Office of Violence Prevention, laid out a progress report on the citys violence interrupter initiative, which consists of 151 people across seven nonprofit groups that patrol crime hot spots.

Through the first six months of our model, from May through December of 2021, our violence interrupters had more than 8,900 contacts with the public, said Cotton. And they mediated more than 1,500 incidents before they became violent.

RELATED: Violence interrupters making a difference, Office of Violence Prevention head says

One of those violence interrupters, Connie Rhodes with Restoration, Inc., told the Public Health and Safety Committee that she has witnessed multiple occasions where violence interrupters have been successful in defusing a bad situation.

He was getting ready to shoot. He had two guns. Two guns. Not one. Two. And he was getting ready to shoot another young man over a dispute, Rhodes said. And our violence interrupters stepped in right then and they talked him down. They were able to deescalate him.

Trahern Pollard, Director at We Push for Peace, told City Council members the rise in violent crime is a very personal issue for him after his son was killed and he urged them to stay the course.

Again, it takes time. And what weve been able to show you in just a matter of six months six months is extraordinary, Pollard said. I dont care how you look at it. Its extraordinary.

Minneapolis has budgeted $3.9 million for the violence interrupter program for 2021 and 2022.

RELATED: City approves millions more for violence interrupters amid questions of transparency, accountability

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Minneapolis violence interrupters report on 1st year of progress - KSTP

Swiss food giant Nestl is targeting net zero emissions by 2050, with the aim of halving its GHG footprint by 2030. To achieve this, it will also need to transition to net zero dairy production.

Milk and dairy ingredients are used in Nestls dairy and infant nutrition products, ice cream, beverages and confectionery. Dairy is the groups largest raw material input and also the biggest source of GHG emissions. Nestl's dairy and livestock supply chains accounted for 34.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) in 2018.

Our actions on dairy are very important to achieve Nestls ambition of reaching net zero emissions, stressed Mayank Trivedi, Head of the Dairy Strategic Business Unit at Nestl.

The group is working with its supply chain to develop net zero reference farms, testing new solutions that could be upscaled globally.

The company currently operates over 100 pilot projects with partners worldwide, including 20 farms it says are already on a path to hitting net zero emissions in the near future. Nestl has committed to sharing its learnings as it scales up these efforts to support wider industry transformation.

"We believe it is possible to step up sustainability in dairy and even go to net zero. We will take a leadership role in advancing positive change with all those working along with us in the dairy supply chain, Trivedi noted.

Nestls pilot projects are scattered around the world, recognising that the geographical and environmental diversity of global milk production means that a centralised research approach has limitations. Across the world, we are implementing full-scale projects and pilots in partnership with farmers and suppliers to help us scale up solutions aiming at lowering our environmental footprint, Trivedi noted.

Key reduction and mitigation efforts range from projects linked to feed and herd management, to re-thinking farm energy sources, boosting efficiency and better manure management.

Nestls pilot farms are also implementing practices that can help sequester carbon in the soils as part of the KitKat-to-Carnation makers regenerative agriculture push.

The firm has committed to investing CHF1.2 billion over the next five years to spark regenerative agriculture adoption across the its supply chain.Regenerative agriculture focuses on soil health, biodiversity and water preservation, with practices typically including efforts like cover cropping, no till methods, crop rotation, mixed farming, and hedgerows to support biodiversity.

In the context of its dairy pilots, Nestl called out acting on soil health and grazing as well as tree planting. Nestl is working in partnership with farmers and suppliers as they adapt their agricultural practices. These include using multi-species pasture, silvopasture and crop rotation, as well as cover crops and minimizing tillage, the company said.

Alongside environmental sustainability, Nestl is focusing on two further pillars: 'families' and communities.

The company stressed that its work in dairy is part of its responsibility to ensure nutrition, quality and traceability remain front and centre for its consumers, the families it supplies.

"We believe in the goodness of milk. It provides essential nutrients, Heike Steiling, Head of Nestl's R&D centre for dairy, stressed.

Dairy also contributes to the economic livelihoods of many farmers, Steiling continued. The Swiss food giant wants to put dairy farming communities at the heart of its carbon reduction initiatives, including training on farm management, empowering women and developing young farmers.

In order to achieve this, Nestl said it will leverage its R&D might, which ranges from agricultural sciences, nutrition, food safety, analytics through to product development. The depth and breadth of the groups expertise give it an inbuilt advantage on discovering solutions that help to achieve dairy sustainability goals, Nestl claimed.

To help reduce dairy emissions, we leverage our scientific expertise and analytical capabilities, in collaboration with external partners to screen new science and technology solutions and assess their impact on the nutritional and sensorial quality of milk, Steiling explained.

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Nestl driving progress on dairy emissions: 'We believe in the goodness of milk' - FoodNavigator-USA.com

For years, the American Society of Clinical Oncologys annual meeting has served as the main forum for advances in cancer immunotherapies like Merck & Co.s Keytruda and Bristol Myers Squibbs Opdivo.

While new data continue to emerge for those drugs and their competitors, this years conference was headlined by dramatic data for another type of cancer medicine from AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo, which put pressure on rival Gilead. And with CAR-T therapies now established, attention has shifted to other emerging approaches for training the immune system to attack tumors.

Read on for updates on Gilead, bispecific antibodies for blood cancer and gamma delta cell therapy.

ASCO is an important conference for any biotech developing a cancer drug. But this years meeting was particularly so for Gilead, which has spent a decade and billions of dollars trying to build its oncology business. Analysts and investors were eagerly awaiting the details of a key study of the breast cancer drug Trodelvy, for which it paid $21 billion to acquire last year. Updates were also expected for magrolimab, another cancer medicine Gilead recently bought in a large deal.

The drugs either underwhelmed or were upstaged by others, however. Trodelvy led to a 1.5-month improvement over chemotherapy on a measure of tumor progression in a late-stage study of patients with a common form of metastatic breast cancer. The result fell short of the 2-month target doctors surveyed by analyst firm RBC Capital Markets felt would warrant meaningful use, according to a research note.

Trodelvy was also overshadowed by AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyos rival breast cancer drug, Enhertu, whose data in so-called HER2 low tumors were so striking they received a standing ovation at the meeting.

All the enthusiasm for Trodelvy has evaporated after those results, wrote Baird analyst Brian Skorney in a note on Sunday, adding that Enhertus likely approval in HER2 low breast cancer could limit Trodelvys revenue potential.

Analysts were similarly unimpressed by the latest data for magrolimab, a blood cancer drug that was slowed by safety concerns this year. Initial data showed a response rate of 50% for a combination of magrolimab and the chemotherapy azacitidine in an early-stage trial in myelodysplastic syndrome. That rate has fallen to 33% with additional data, barely surpassing whats been observed in tests of chemotherapy alone, Skorney wrote.

Complete response rates slipped in a Phase 1 acute myeloid leukemia study as well. The updates show Gileads drug has sufficient activity, though its perhaps not the home run it was initially hoped to be, wrote RBC analyst Brian Abrahams in a note to clients.

Gilead will likely need to show more before investors view the cancer portfolio as a major growth driver, Abrahams added. Shares ticked down 2% in early Monday trading.

The biotech did get a reprieve on Friday, however, announcing that regulators had lifted their last remaining hold on studies of magrolimab in lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

Cell therapy has become a powerful new treatment option for blood cancers like lymphoma and multiple myeloma. Approved drugs from Gilead, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson use souped-up immune cells genetically modified and infused back into patients to attack cancers.

But the approach, while potent, involves a painstaking manufacturing process that requires physicians to carefully time treatment. In multiple myeloma, Bristol Myers and J&J have struggled to keep up with demand, Stat News has reported, further complicating cell therapy's use.

While drugmakers expect to overcome those hurdles with time, they are busy advancing other ways to redirect immune cells to target cancer. One alternative uses an antibody to latch onto protein flags found on the surface of immune cells and their cancerous targets, bringing them into tumor-killing contact.

These so-called bispecific antibodies have already shown promise in some of the same blood cancers addressed by CAR-T cell therapies. At ASCO, Roche and J&J revealed updated clinical trial data supporting their respective medicines for lymphoma and multiple myeloma. AbbVie and partner Genmab, meanwhile, will present data on their lymphoma bispecific antibody at the European Hematology Association's meeting next weekend.

Scott Gottlieb, formerly Food and Drug Administration commissioner and currently a member of Pfizers board, pointed to bispecific antibody data as some of the most exciting to come out of ASCO this year.

"That data looks very promising," he said on CNBCs Squawkbox program Monday, noting the therapies from Roche and partners AbbVie and Genmab specifically.

Specifically, Roche's data showed treatment led to responses in half of patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma who were treated in the study. Nearly 40% went into remission.

Notably, about a third of the 154 participants had previously received CAR-T therapies, which have recently been approved in the U.S. for earlier use in treating advanced lymphoma.

"We still need longer follow-up for the bispecific antibodies," said Kerry Savage, a medical oncologist at The University of British Columbia, who discussed Roche's abstract at ASCO on Friday. "We don't know the curative potential yet, but it's certainly encouraging so far."

AbbVie and Genmab's results, which will be presented on Saturday at EHA, showed a slightly higher overall response rate of 63% and a similar remission rate of 39% among adults with several variations of relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma.

J&J, meanwhile, brought updated data to ASCO for its multiple myeloma bispecific teclistamab, which were also published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data showed treatment could beat back cancer and, in about 40% of patients, lead to remission.

"The high rate of deep and durable responses in this population indicates the potential for teclistamab to provide substantial clinical benefit to a broader population of patients," researchers wrote in NEJM.

The search for more convenient alternatives to personalized cell therapies has led to other off-the-shelf strategies besides bispecific antibodies. One emerging approach involves gamma delta T cells, rare white blood cells that can recognize a range of targets.

Adicet Bio, In8Bio, Immatics, among others, are developing treatments and multiple large companies have shown interest in their work. Bristol Myers Squibb just last week expanded an existing deal with Immatics, while Takeda and Johnson & Johnson have recently made investments, too.

Adicets program, a potential treatment for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, is the most advanced of the group, making its trial results an important proof point for the field.

Prior to the meeting, Adicet said four of six treated patients with a low or medium dose went into remission, with two of the three patients treated still cancer free after three months. Importantly, there were no serious immune or neurological side effects reported.

At ASCO, Adicet disclosed results from two additional patients as well as longer follow-up from others. While early, the findings are in the range with CAR-T therapy. As of May 31, six of eight patients including two at the highest tested dose had responded to treatment. All six initially went into remission.

Notably, these were heavily pretreated patients, three of whom whose disease had progressed after CAR-T. Adicet hasnt reported any cases of severe cytokine release syndrome, a common side effect of CAR-T.

Yet the treatments durability remains in question. Though four of the complete responses are ongoing, only one has lasted longer than six months. One patient previously in remission died from COVID-19, while another relapsed.

Adicet plans to pick a dose to advance into further testing. The company amended its trial to include a higher dose as well as potentially evaluate a multiple-dose regimen, a strategy other off-the-shelf cell therapy developers are testing as well.

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ASCO 2022: Gilead's tough weekend, bispecific progress and 'gamma delta' cell therapy - BioPharma Dive

GREEN BAY For the first time in its history, the city of Green Bay raised theProgress Prideflag Tuesday to celebrate June as Pride Month.

Rainbow lights have illuminated the Ray NitschkeBridge every June for the last three years, so it came as something of a surprise for at least one attendee, Amy DeBraske, 42, to learn this was the first year the city raised the Pride flag.

It's been a long time coming, she said, and the symbolism behind the flag is personalfor DeBraske, who brought her daughter Piper to the ceremony.

"Our family has always embraced diversity within our community.One of the reasons to share this moment with Piper is she is a member with the LGBTQAI+ community," DeBraske said."I also have two children who aremembers of the community. I thought it was very significant to raise the flag."

Mayor Eric Genrich and members of the city's Equal Rights Commission raised the Progress flagat noon in front of City Hall beforea few dozen attendees. The Progress flagincludes colors associated with the originalrainbow flag,transgender community members,marginalized LGBTQ communities of color, community members lost to AIDS and those currently living with AIDS.

Waving the flagsymbolizes a fight for liberation in the queer community, and Green Bay's gesturecomes as politicianshave introduced over 200 anti-LGBTQ bills across the country.

"When I talk about compassion, it means standing with people… especially in times of trial," Genrich told the crowd."If anybody's paying attention to what's going on with the world right now, it's more vital than ever to stand with those who are vulnerable, who are under attack, and that's certainly true of the LGBTQ community."

This year, the citytripled its scorein an annualreportby the Human Rights Campaign's Municipal Equality Index, which tracks municipalresources forthe LGBTQ community.

With a score of 84, Green Bay is a single point shy of being considered an "All-Star" status.

It's something that Eliza Cussen, a Wisconsin organizer with the Human Rights Campaign, sees as a major success for the city.

"The Municipal Equality Index is not just an indicator of LGBTQ+ inclusion, it's a liveability index showing how cities invest in community," Cussen said. "We can say unequivocally that Green Bay is a good place for LGBTQ+ people to live, work and raise a family."

In his speech Tuesday, Michael Vinson, a member of the Equal Rights Commission, told the crowd he and his husband were among the first men to marry in the city of Green Bay.

"Personally this moment means so much to so many people in our community," Vinson told the crowd. "It speaks to the visibility and inclusion that the city continues to embrace under the leadership of our fantastic mayor."

And DeBraske, who was born and raised in Green Bay, said the city is a safe place to raise children who belong to the LGBTQ community.

"They do feel safe. They feel included in the community, not just the LGBTQ community, but the community as a whole," DeBraske said.

Natalie Eilbert isthe mental health reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Central Wisconsin You canreach her atneilbert@gannett.comor view her Twitter profile at@natalie_eilbert.

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For the first time in the city's history, Green Bay raises the Progress flag for Pride Month - Green Bay Press Gazette