educational progress shows that just 33% of fourth grade students performed act or above the proficient level on the reading assessment in 2022. that s 2% points lower than it was in 2019. more significantly , 37% of fourth grade students performed below the basic level in 2022 has been reporting on education in this post pandemic era. it s so interesting because you know, there s all these culture wars going on in the schools. while kids can t read right. they were talking about banning books. but let s make sure the kids can read the books that they are allowed to read, and there s a lot of focus on the learning loss during the pandemic. there s an a p article today out of georgia, talking, focusing on that state on one school in and outside atlanta that s trying to help third graders catch up. these are exactly kind of the age that lost out so much on some of the beginning. fundamentals these are children who may have missed class over zoom. i mean, try teaching as six or seven year
way you should be the first thing that you should be doing, and so now we re seeing a lot of focus on what s called the science of reading, which sounds all fancy, but it s really just focusing more on phonics a lot more on phonics. and so that s what we re seeing. in this atlanta school, the ap wrote about and in some states that are really emphasizing that this way of sounding out letters and words and phrases, they re seeing better scores and even the school we visited pennsylvania, you know they were trying to balance the receipt for about 18 months. it was not even a full two school years. this principle, said it was my idea i had to swallow, swallow my pride and admit that it wasn t working. they were finding under their previous assessment, maybe, like a quarter of the students were at grade level now, bringing back a lot more phonics. they actually spend extra 40 minutes doing helping children understand their individual, you know, syllables that they need to work on all of tha
meteorologist alison in atlanta. what are you most concerned about now? pretty much concerned about most of the people along the eastern 4568 of the country. the reason for that is you have power outage numbers, those are increasing by the minute but the temperatures inable places have yet to bottom out. so if you lose the power and temperatures continue to drop, the big concern becomes those people without access to heat for prolonged periods of time. in atlanta, the temperature is 19 degrees right now but it s expected to get colder into the weekend. atlanta could have its coldest christmas eve on record. we re not the only location. look at this. well, at one point was a towel. it is now frozen solid, a rock of ice right there but, again, as we mentioned we re not the only place cold. you have roughly 60% of the u.s. population under some type of winter alert. mostly windchill alerts at this point in time. all of that air, however, is
Kate Bolduan goes behind the headlines to bring viewers critical live events as they happen with smart analysis of hot topics and news-making interviews with.
coming from the north. this arctic air really starting to surge down, bringing us the polar plunge we are expecting across much of the country. the thing is it s also not just cold temperatures it s also wind too. a lot of the wind is not only making that temperature feel colder. you ll often hear the windchill we use to describe it but also any of these areas where you re getting snow that is taking that snow and blowing it across the roads bringing visibility down even more. some places as low as a quarter of a mile visibility. so the concern there, too, is reducing visibility and making it even more treacherous to be out on the roads. we also talked about the fact that it s really cold out here. but here s the thing, for some cities say, for example, denver, dallas or new orleans, they will start to rebound as early as saturday. but for much of the eastern u.s., say, new york, d.c., atlanta, we really wasn t see