Reshoring photos on Flickr

Contract Packagers – Reshoring Opportunities Are on the Rise by Assemblies Unlimited, Inc

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via Assemblies Unlimited Inc bit.ly/1TGExIM

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Another move by the U.S. is the passing of the CHIPS Act in an attempt to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the country. I highly doubt we can succeed on that. The $1.7 million price tag for a single small public toilet in San Francisco clearly shows the high costs and inefficiency on doing just about anything in the U.S.

Besides, it's estimated that we will need 50,000 new engineers in the next 5 years in order to fill our reshoring needs. One university, Perdue, is supposed to increase their engineering graduates from 150 per year to 1,000 per year. As shown in the just released National Education Assessment Report, students math score declined in all 50 states. Where will we find these 50,000 new engineers? Can we really import so many of them?

finance.yahoo.com/news/san-francisco-building-single-publ...

San Francisco building single public toilet that will cost $1.7 million and won't be completed until 2025

finance.yahoo.com/news/why-us-tech-controls-on-china-coul...

Why US tech controls on China could end up hurting American semiconductors

When the US first banned sales of certain tech products to Chinese tech firm Huawei three years ago, it crippled a once-proud national champion and sent ripples across the US semiconductor industry. In the quarters following that export ban in May 2019, top American chipmakers reported a median revenue decline of 4% to 9%.

The Biden administration’s latest tech controls threaten to accelerate those losses, throwing the global semiconductor sector into disarray. And Chinese companies targeted by the new regulations won’t be the only ones feeling the pain.

“If China really wants to be as aggressive as the US and retaliate, there could be a lot of impact for other companies in the US,” said Edith Yeung, Race Capital General Partner, in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “This is beyond impact on revenue for Intel (INTC) or Qualcomm (QCOM) or NVIDIA (NVDA).”

The US has long been a global leader in semiconductors, commanding roughly 45% to 50% market share. However, that leadership has been built on global demand for its products, with China consuming roughly 75% of semiconductors sold globally.

Chinese device makers alone accounted for roughly a quarter of global semiconductor demand in 2018, according to a study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

'More than just a preventative tool'

That innovation cycle is at risk of being picked apart, with the Biden administration’s sweeping tech controls, aimed at freezing China’s semiconductor development and dramatically limiting critical technology exports from the US

“Technology export controls can be more than just a preventative tool,” said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, ahead of the administration’s announcements. “If implemented in a way that is robust, durable, and comprehensive, they can be a new strategic asset in the US and allied toolkit to impose costs on adversaries, and even over time degrade their battlefield capabilities.”

'A sea change' in policy

Specifically, the new measures block sales of semiconductors critical to the development of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and other advanced technologies, unless companies receive exemptions. It also expands an existing ban to sell advanced chip-making equipment to Chinese firms.

In a broad escalation, the Biden administration’s actions also restrict US firms and citizens, including permanent residents, from supporting China’s development of advanced chips.

The restrictions announced earlier this month have already created a chilling effect.

At least 43 senior executives are American citizens working with 16 publicly listed Chinese semiconductor companies, according to the Wall Street Journal. Western firms like Dutch equipment maker ASML Holding NV have suspended American employees from working as a precaution, while they seek further clarity. What's more, Apple temporarily halted plans to use memory chips from China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. in products, according to Nikkei Asia.

“This is really a sea change in policy… the U.S. is imposing a freeze-in-place strategy toward China's indigenous chip development,” said Reva Goujon, Rhodium Group Director. “[The semiconductor sector] is an interdependent, interlocking ecosystem where all the parts kind of have to be in place for things to work to be able to upgrade to more and more advanced levels. So, if you cut the legs out from under that production cycle, you can really cause a lot of disruption, which is exactly what the US intent is.”

Impact on US chipmakers

The disruption may not be limited to Chinese firms. A 2020 study by BCG estimated that US companies could lose 18% of their global market share and 37% of their revenues over the same period if the US completely bans semiconductor companies from selling to Chinese customers.

The measures have already prompted chip equipment maker Applied Materials to cut fourth-quarter estimates for net sales by approximately $400 million. Q4 non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) adjusted diluted EPS (Earnings per Share) is expected to range from $1.54 to $1.78, compared to the prior range of $1.82 to $2.18.

While the restrictions are limited to next-generation chips now, NVIDIA, the largest US chipmaker by market value, warned in August that new licensing requirement on advanced chip shipments to China could cost the firm as much as $400 million in quarterly sales.

“There’s certainly a chance this could have a much bigger waterfall effect but I think these companies have already looked at the situation, they’re assessing it,” said Daniel Newman, Founding Partner and Principal Analyst at Futurum Research. “I’m not overly alarmed that it’s going to be the whole portfolio [of chips]... I think this is about leading the arms race for the next generation of technology in areas like supercomputing, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.”

Containing technology 'where they need to be'

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has reiterated as much, highlighting in a recent address at Stanford University, that only “a small number of countries” are manufacturing or making tools to manufacture the highest-end semiconductors.

“We want to make sure that we keep those where they need to be,” Blinken said, without singling out China.

But Goujon argues that US firms, particularly equipment makers, face the risk of losing market share and revenue to competitors in countries that have historically had friendlier relations with the US, including Japan and South Korea. If companies there find a workaround for the Biden administration’s measures, Goujon said the new controls could end up backfiring on the US

“Foreign competitors to US [equipment makers] have an opportunity here, of course, to try to capture more market share in China if they can displace US persons and US linkages, which is possible in some areas,” she said.

“The US is applying heavy bilateral and plurilateral pressure for partners to follow its lead, and it's sending the signal that look, This package contains extraterritorial measures and we will add more if needed. But here's the window to try to basically align with our controls. So that's really going to be an important question now.”

www.cnn.com/2022/10/18/tech/us-chip-manufacturing-semicon...

The US is spending billions to boost chip manufacturing. Will it be enough?

United States does not currently have the same talent and supply chain pipeline as some Asian markets do to support a robust homegrown industry.

... the shortcomings are real. "When it comes to foundries, which are the manufacturing side of semiconductors, the U.S. has not really been a major player for many, many years," said Columbia Business School professor Dan Wang. While it very much used to be, manufacturing began migrating to Asia during the 1980s and '90s, Wang said. "One of the big reasons for this is that the cost of labor is lower, and it's just far cheaper to produce at a very massive scale, integrated circuits and chips, in those parts of the world," Wang added. Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, said that it costs 50% more to manufacture chips in the U.S. than in Taiwan.

Now, simply having the facilities already set up to produce or expand chip manufacturing gives Asia a big advantage.

Moreover, the manufacturing of semiconductors requires a range of specialized inputs, including pure chemicals such as fluorinated polyimide, and etching gas, chip etching machines, and more. In places like Taiwan and Fukuoka, Japan, supply chains have developed where the providers of these products are located close to the semiconductor factories. There are also one or two companies that produce vital inputs and that have been trustworthy suppliers to companies in Asia for a long time. This is not yet the case in places like Arizona and Ohio, where plans to build massive chip manufacturing plants are already underway.

You also need a labor force willing and able to do the work.

In the United States, there is both a shortage of new graduates and experienced workers with the technical and engineering knowledge necessary to manufacture semiconductors.

"If we were to today, snap our fingers and have ten new fabs with the world's leading chips, we probably wouldn't have enough people to staff them," Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. "That's the biggest bottleneck to the expansion of America's fab capacity, not capital."

Intel has tried to establish close relations with Arizona State University to recruit engineers, but it is unclear whether it and other companies building fabs in America will be able to hire enough trained engineers and technicians. If not, even the billions of dollars committed by the private and public sector may not be enough to reshore semiconductor manufacturing.

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/23/engineer-sho...

Economic future of U.S. depends on making engineering cool

Purdue University races to expand semiconductor education to fill yawning workforce gap that threatens reshoring effort

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — On a recent afternoon, an unusual group of visitors peered through a window at Purdue University students tinkering in a lab: two dozen executives from the world’s biggest semiconductor companies.

The tech leaders had traveled to the small-town campus on the Wabash River to fix one of the biggest problems that they — and the U.S. economy — face: a desperate shortage of engineers.

Leading the visitors on a tour of the high-tech lab, Engineering Professor Zhihong Chen mentioned that Purdue could really use some donated chip-making equipment as it scrambles to expand semiconductor education.

“Okay, done. We can do that,” Intel manufacturing chief Keyvan Esfarjani quickly replied. Just weeks before, his company broke ground on two massive chip factories in Ohio that aim to employ 3,000 people.

By some estimates, the United States needs at least 50,000 new semiconductor engineers over the next five years to staff all of the new factories and research labs that companies have said they plan to build with subsidies from the Chips and Science Act, a number far exceeding current graduation rates nationwide, according to Purdue.

“This is recurrently one of the top, if not the number one, long-term concerns that [chip companies] have,” Mung Chiang, Purdue’s president-elect and former engineering dean, said in an interview.

Chip companies aren’t alone in worrying about the problem — or in looking to Purdue, one of the country’s biggest engineering schools, for answers. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is overseeing the chip subsidies program, visited campus last month to hear about the courses and labs Purdue is adding to rapidly expand semiconductor education. Several Defense Department officials also have traveled lately to Purdue, located halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis, to discuss workforce training.

Engineer shortages have long plagued the U.S. tech sector, with Google, Apple and others complaining that immigration restrictions made it difficult to find employees. They’ve spent years pushing for an expansion of the H1B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers, to little avail.

As more production migrated to Asia, fewer U.S. students studied semiconductor engineering. At the same time, the rise of social media and other software-focused companies shifted more students to those sectors, where starting salaries were often higher than in the chip business, engineers say.

By rapidly expanding chip education, Purdue is aiming to graduate 1,000 semiconductor engineers annually as soon as possible — up from perhaps 150 a year today

20211007 by Guy M Wong

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/america-is-chok...

America Is Running Out of Everything

The global supply chain is slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that it go into overdrive.

Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything?

I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. “We’re out of those too,” he said. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. “Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall.

This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries. That car part you need? It’ll take an extra week, sorry. The book you were looking for? Come back in November. The baby crib you bought? Make it December. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022.

The U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage.

The Everything Shortage is not the result of one big bottleneck in, say, Vietnamese factories or the American trucking industry. We are running low on supplies of all kinds due to a veritable hydra of bottlenecks.

The coronavirus pandemic has snarled global supply chains in several ways. Pandemic checks sent hundreds of billions of dollars to cabin-fevered Americans during a fallow period in the service sector. A lot of that cash has flowed to hard goods, especially home goods such as furniture and home-improvement materials. Many of these materials have to be imported from or travel through East Asia. But that region is dealing with the Delta variant, which has been considerably more deadly than previous iterations of the virus. Delta has caused several shutdowns at semiconductor factories across Asia just as demand for cars and electronics has started to pick up. As a result, these stops along the supply chain are slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that they work in overdrive.

The most dramatic expression of this snarl is the purgatory of loaded cargo containers stacked on ships bobbing off the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Just as a normal traffic jam consists of too many drivers trying to use too few lanes, the traffic jam at California ports has been exacerbated by extravagant consumer demand slamming into a shortage of trucks, truckers, and port workers. Because ships can’t be unloaded, not enough empty containers are in transit to carry all of the stuff that consumers are trying to buy. So the world is getting a lesson in Econ 101: High demand plus limited supply equals prices spiraling to the moon. Before the pandemic, reserving a container that holds roughly 35,000 books cost $2,500. Now it costs $25,000.

The container situation is even weirder than it looks. With demand surging in the United States, shipping a parcel from Shanghai to Los Angeles is currently six times more expensive than shipping one from L.A. to Shanghai. J.P. Morgan’s Michael Cembalest wrote that this has created strong incentives for container owners to ship containers to China—even if they are mostly empty—to expedite the packing and shipping of freights in Shanghai to travel east. But when containers leave Los Angeles and Long Beach empty, American-made goods that were supposed to be sent across the Pacific Ocean end up sitting around in railcars parked at West Coast ports. Since the packed railcars can’t unload their goods, they can’t go back and collect more stuff from filled warehouses in the American interior.

And what about the truckers who are needed to drive materials between warehouses, ports, stores, and houses? They’re dealing with a multidimensional shortage too. Supply-chain woes have backed up orders for parts, such as resin for roof caps and vinyl for seats. But there’s also a crucial lack of people to actually drive the rigs. The Minnesota Trucking Association estimates that the country has a shortage of about 60,000 drivers, due to longtime recruitment issues, early retirements, and COVID-canceled driving-school classes.

In short, supply chains depend on containers, ports, railroads, warehouses, and trucks. Every stage of this international assembly line is breaking down in its own unique way. When the global supply chain works, it’s like a beautifully invisible system of dominoes clicking forward. Today’s omnishambles is a reminder that dominoes can fall backwards too.

And then there’s the labor market. In the U.S., job openings have hit record highs in restaurants, hotels, and other leisure and hospitality sectors. But companies are struggling to fill these roles—and to keep factories and some other businesses operating at full capacity when Delta infections roll through.

You can see these problems from a variety of angles. From workers’ perspective, unemployment insurance and several rounds of stimulus have allowed laid-off workers to be picky about jobs, instead of desperately lunging for the first paycheck available. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. But from many employers’ perspective, government programs have exacerbated a terrible labor shortage. Staffing up a business has become difficult. The result, from consumers’ perspective, is more of the same Everything Shortage. Since finding, hiring, and training hundreds of thousands of people in new roles at the same time is hard during a pandemic, we should all expect a bit of slowness across the service sector for a while—a bit more time for that cappuccino, a bit longer of a wait for that appetizer, a bit of confusion at the convenience store when you ask where the nail-polish remover is and the new employee who had to Zoom in for her training program needs a moment to remember the aisle numbers.

Finally, as if those slowdowns weren’t enough, there’s the mail. As of this month, the U.S. Postal Service is reducing its use of air transportation to save money. The USPS estimates that deliveries outside your local area will likely be delayed by one or two days. But as we’ve seen, relying on rail and truck means leaning on systems that are dealing with their own mess.

This has not yet added up to a recession. But it portends a massively frustrating holiday-shopping period, especially for households with a habit of buying presents at the last minute. “I’ve been doing this for 43 years and never seen it this bad,” Isaac Larian, the founder and CEO of the toy maker MGA Entertainment, told Bloomberg. “Everything that can go wrong is going wrong at the same time.” USPS has already announced price hikes for the winter holidays. To avoid paying those surcharges and suffering the yuletide wrath of disappointed children, the recommended course of action is clear: If you want it by December 25, start placing those orders soon. Everyone complains when stores start playing carols and advertising holiday sales in October. This year, “Christmas creep” is your best shopping strategy. Either that, or prepare the kids to celebrate Christmas morning some time in January.

How will the everything shortage be resolved? One possibility is that Americans adopt a sustainable, ascetic, and homespun lifestyle that reduces our dependency on goods that activate the global supply chain. If you can seriously envision such a world, I envy your gift of imagination.

The best solution to the Everything Shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything. Containers, which carry more than 90 percent of the world’s traded goods, are overwhelmingly manufactured in China. Why doesn’t America make more? Car parts, semiconductors, and home goods have been offshored, making the U.S. sorely reliant on overseas factories. Why can’t America make more? At-home COVID-19 tests, which could illuminate household infections and prevent community spread, were only just authorized by the FDA, almost two years into this pandemic. Why hasn’t America made more?

For decades, many U.S. companies moved manufacturing overseas, taking advantage of cheaper labor and cheaper materials across the oceans. In normal times, America benefits from global trade, and the price of offshoring is borne by the unlucky few in deindustrialized regions. But the pandemic and the supply-chain breakdowns are a reminder that the decline of manufacturing can be felt more broadly during a crisis when we run out of, well, damn near everything. That’s why Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan includes billions of dollars to reshore manufacturing, invest in basic research, and beef up domestic supply chains.

Our dearth of manufactured parts and containers is part of a broader crisis of manufactured scarcity in America. A protectionist and anti-growth instinct runs through government, yielding not only a flat-footed CDC and a tardy FDA but also sharp restrictions on housing construction, immigration, and the licensing of new professionals and tradespeople. Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue of equality. One lesson of the Everything Shortage is: You cannot redistribute what isn’t created in the first place. The best equality agenda begins with an abundance agenda.

Today’s crisis is an opportunity to emphasize a new philosophy of what The New York Times’ Ezra Klein calls “supply-side progressivism,” which sees value in this across-the-board abundance. This approach might start by prioritizing policies that reduce the cost of housing and health care, and reshoring the production of materials that we deem essential to national security during a pandemic or an unrelated supply-chain calamity. Decades from now, we might look at the legacy of the pandemic, and see that it took a global crisis of choke points to teach us that real progress begins by removing the choke points at home.

20221023 by Guy M Wong

Students in the U.S. have always been behind in math, they do terribly in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test. Now, this Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report card shows we are doing even worse.

The Biden administration wants to reshore semiconductor manufacturing. To do that, we will need 50,000 new engineers in the next 5 years to staff those fabs. With such poor showing in math, how are we going to find these new engineers?

Earlier this month, the Biden administration also banned U.S. high tech firms such as Nvidia, AMD, Lam Research, etc. from selling advanced products to China to suppress China's Artificial Intelligence (AI) development. Well, AI is all about math. Until we clean up our act and raise our students' math capabilities, those bans are just temporary patches, causing more harm than good in the long term.

www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/us/student-test-scores-nations-rep...

‘Nation’s Report Card’ shows new evidence of Covid-19’s devastating impact on US children’s education

Fourth- and eighth-graders fell behind in reading and had the largest ever decline in math, according to a national educational assessment showing the devastating effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on America’s children.

The alarming findings are based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math exams, often called the “Nation’s Report Card” and conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department.

“If this is not a wake-up call for us to double down our efforts and improve education, even before it was – before the pandemic, then I don’t know what will,” US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told CNN’s Brianna Keilar during an appearance on “New Day” Monday.

He called on schools to ensure they are using funding from the Covid relief package passed in 2021 to boost student scores.

Cardona suggested widespread teacher shortages are a “symptom of decades of underinvestment” in schools and called on districts to pay teachers more competitively.

The first national assessment of student achievement in three years revealed the largest math score declines among fourth- and eighth-graders since the initial trial assessment in 1990, according to the Center’s Commissioner Peggy Carr. The tests were administered between January and March.

No state or large urban district showed improvements in math, the report said. Eighth-grade math scores sank in the more than 50 states and jurisdictions participating in the assessment. The last report card was issued in 2019, before the start of the pandemic in the US, where schools were shut down and teachers turned to online learning.

“Eighth grade is that gateway to more advanced mathematical course taking,” Carr told reporters before the report’s release. “This is what these students are missing. They’re missing these important skills that will prepare them eventually for (science, technology, engineering and math) level careers.”

The average math score of 236 for the fourth grade was 5 points lower than in 2019, and 8 points below the 2019 mark of 274 for the eighth grade. The reading score of 217 for the fourth grade was down 3 points this year – the same decline as the eighth grade score of 260 – compared to 2019.

The discouraging results come more than a month after the national assessment released results showing math and reading scores for 9-year-olds – typically fourth graders – fell between 2020 and 2022 by a level not seen in decades.

The Nation’s Report Card offers the first detailed look into how health crisis disruptions and virtual learning affected fourth- and eighth-graders across the country.

The report shows the pandemic affected all students but had a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable, who fared the worst.

Scores on the eighth-grade math exams declined across most racial and ethnic groups as well as for lower, middle and high performing students. Fourth-grade math scores dropped for all racial and ethnic groups except native Hawaiian-Pacific Islanders.

The gaps between White students and Black and Hispanic students were larger in 2022 than three years ago, with greater score declines in math for Black and Hispanic students further widening those gaps.

“What we’re seeing is (lower performing) students … dropping even faster and we’re also seeing students who were not showing declines – students at the top, meaning students at the higher performing levels – they were holding steady before the pandemic or even improving,” Carr said. “Now all the students, regardless of their ability, are dropping. That is the point we need to be taking away from this report.”

The math exams reflected the performance of 116,200 fourth-graders in 5,780 schools, and 111,000 eighth-graders in 5,190 schools. The reading tests were given to 108,200 fourth-graders in 5,780 schools and 111,300 eighth-graders in 5,190 schools.

The declines are only partly attributable to the dynamics of schooling during the pandemic, when schools were shuttered and later turned to a mix of online and in-person classes in some cities.

“There’s nothing in this data that tells us that there is a measurable difference in the performance between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed,” Carr said.

“And let’s not forget that remote learning looks very differently all across the United States. The quality – all of the factors that were associated with implementing remote learning – it is extremely complex.”

Declines in average math and reading scores in the fourth and eighth grades spanned the country – in the Northeast, Midwest, South and West, the report said.

“We’re not surprised to see that the math scores were going to take a bigger hit,” Carr said. “Math is just simply more sensitive to schooling. You really need good teachers to teach math. Reading, on the other hand, is something that parents and the community are more comfortable with helping students with.”

Carr said more analysis is needed to understand the role the pandemic played in the declines, along with other factors such as teacher shortages and bullying.

“This must be a wake-up call for the country that we have to make education a priority,” Beverly Perdue, former governor of North Carolina and chair of the National Assessment Governing Board which oversees the test, said in a statement.

www.chalkbeat.org/2022/10/24/23417139/naep-test-scores-pa...

Nation’s report card: Massive drop in math scores, slide in reading linked to COVID disruption

Two and a half years after the pandemic arrived, it’s clearer than ever that COVID’s disruption had punishing consequences for millions of students.

Students in fourth and eighth grade saw unprecedented declines in math and significant dips in reading achievement between 2019 and 2022, according to the results of national exams given last school year and released Monday. The declines were broad-based — affecting students in every state and every region of the country.

“The results point out and confirm that this is a pretty massive hit to student achievement in our country,” said Scott Marion, a testing expert and member of the board that oversees the tests.

Other research has already shown that academic progress was derailed during this period. But the results from the closely watched National Assessment of Educational Progress provide the most detailed and authoritative accounting yet, with data coming from a representative set of students nationwide and allowing for comparisons across states and some cities.

Some more recent data has suggested that students have begun to recover lost ground, but that progress has been modest, inconsistent, and incomplete. Though schools have shed some of the pandemic’s trappings this year, COVID’s effect on students has lingered.

It’s no mystery why, as the pandemic dramatically disrupted education across the country. Officials quickly shuttered schools in the spring of 2020 and the quality of virtual instruction was uneven. In some places, school buildings remained closed for much of the following year or opened on a part-time schedule. Student attendance has been unusually low even into last school year.

Children’s lives outside of school also changed: They spent more time on devices and less time with friends. Many families lost jobs and income, at least temporarily. Some children saw their relatives or caregivers die.

“The pandemic did set students back,” said Matt Prusiecki, the superintendent of Decatur Township schools in Indiana. “Not only academically, but socially, emotionally — really in all facets of their growth.”

Students experienced the largest math declines on record

In eighth grade math, scores fell by 8 points, bringing student performance to a level not seen since 2000. The share of students deemed proficient dropped from 34% to 26%. Fourth grade math scores, meanwhile, fell by 5 points, similar to 2003 levels.

In both grades, math scores fell by the largest amount on record. Still, achievement remains substantially higher now than in 1990, when the exams were first given.

In reading, scores fell by 3 points in both fourth and eighth grade. Proficiency dipped from 35% to 33% in grade four and 34% to 31% in grade eight. Results from 2022 continued a downward trend, as scores also fell between 2017 and 2019. Overall, reading scores were at the same level as in 1992, the first year of the exams.

In a press briefing, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona described the scores in both subjects as “appalling and unacceptable.”

The declines don’t mean that students failed to learn anything or forgot things they already knew between 2019 and 2022. Rather, students did learn over that period, but progressed at slower rates than their peers had in prior years.

All states see some scores decline and none see gains

No state was completely spared from the pandemic’s academic wreckage. Every state in the country saw declines on at least one exam, and students in most states lost ground on multiple exams. Similarly, among 26 cities that participated in the exam, scores fell on at least one test everywhere.

Not a single state saw clear gains on any test. (Students in schools run by the U.S. Department of Defense improved in eighth grade reading.)

Marion, who was a member of his local school board in New Hampshire, said the widespread declines highlight the far-reaching nature of the pandemic. “We proudly kept our schools open,” he said. “But education wasn’t normal — little kids were learning to read with masks on, and kids were not working collaboratively on science projects.”

Peggy Carr, head of the U.S. Department of Education center that administers the exams, said, “There is nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed.” The center did not provide any specific analysis on this issue, though.

A Chalkbeat analysis of the data found mixed evidence. In fourth grade math, states where schools were fully open for longer tended to see smaller declines in scores. In eighth grade math and fourth grade reading there was also a relationship, but it was very modest. In eighth grade reading, there was no correlation at all.

The inconsistent pattern is reflected in individual state scores. For instance, California — the country’s most populous state, where school buildings were notably slow to fully reopen — saw score declines that were similar or slightly smaller than the country as a whole.

State results come with larger margins of error than the country as a whole, though, and many factors could affect score changes. Chalkbeat’s analysis can’t prove cause and effect. More granular research has shown that students who experienced more virtual learning tended to fall further behind.

Schools are still feeling those consequences. In Decatur Township, a high-poverty district in Southwest Indianapolis, schools were either virtual or hybrid for the entirety of the 2020-21 school year, largely due to local health guidance. That made teaching and learning a difficult challenge.

“There was a lot of disjointed instruction,” said Prusiecki, the superintendent.

Did existing gaps grow? It depends.

The pandemic posed big challenges for all students and schools but particular ones for vulnerable kids. For instance, those from low-income families often had a harder time with virtual instruction because they didn’t have access to reliable internet.

That’s one reason that many feared that the pandemic would disproportionately hurt students who were already behind. The latest NAEP data suggests that happened in some but not all cases.

For instance, in fourth grade math and reading, scores for the highest-performing students changed modestly, if at all. But the lowest-performing students saw particularly large drops. This continues a trend seen even before the pandemic.

Black and Hispanic students also experienced larger-than-average dips on fourth grade tests, widening already yawning test score gaps compared to white and Asian American students. Such disparities did not increase in eighth grade, though.

And unlike some other data, there was no consistent evidence that gaps between low- versus middle- and high-income students grew. Students with disabilities and English language learners also didn’t see especially big changes — remarkably, if anything those groups seemed less harmed academically.

Meanwhile, score changes in large cities roughly tracked the country as a whole, except that scores did not decline in eighth grade reading. Drops in performance were similar in charter versus district schools. Catholic schools, which tended to be quicker to reopen, did not see any declines in fourth grade math or eighth grade reading.

There’s been some — slight — evidence of progress

The latest NAEP scores aren’t a surprise. Other assessments — interim tests given by schools, state exams, a different NAEP test released in September — have also shown declines in learning.

Here’s the one piece of good news: Although the NAEP scores can’t show it, learning loss recovery appears to have begun, according to other research.

John Arthur, a sixth grade teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah, said he’s seen progress because he has been able to pack more content than usual into his lessons. Zoom school forced him to trim the fat off his typical lesson, and he continued to zip through content upon returning to the classroom.

“Everything got faster and tighter and more succinct because it had to be — and that has continued on now,” he said. “I can cover more in a day than I used to be able to.”

But there’s still a long way to go in the typical classroom. One study found that students in elementary grades had recovered roughly one-fifth of what they had lost. In middle school, though, there was little evidence of recovery.

Schools are adding optional time, tutoring, and staff

Nationally, schools received $190 billion in emergency COVID relief, some of which is earmarked specifically for making up for learning loss.

With that money, schools have adopted a variety of catch-up strategies: Chicago, New York City, and Memphis and many others have expanded summer schools. A number of Michigan districts have added more small group instruction. New York City added an after-school program specifically for students with disabilities. Chicago, Arkansas, New Mexico, and elsewhere have hired hundreds of tutors. Houston created a peer tutoring program.

Schools have generally shied away from adding time to the existing school year or day, though, instead opting for optional programming. Among 6,500 students in Decatur, for instance, officials estimate that some 500 participated in summer school each of the last two summers and some 800 were in after-school programs. They’ve also added reading specialists in every elementary school who pull kids out for small group work.

“We definitely haven’t taken the foot off the gas,” said assistant superintendent Stephanie Hofer. “The sense of urgency is probably greater right now.”

The progress last school year suggests that schools’ efforts may be paying off. But there have also been myriad challenges.

Tutoring initiatives have often struggled to reach the “high dosage” threshold — multiple sessions a week of small group, in-person work during the school day — that researchers say is likely to work best. Staffing shortages have meant that schools can’t hire all the new people, including tutors, they expected. In some cases, attendance for optional programming has been less than officials hoped.

Some districts have directed big chunks of money at efforts that likely won’t help students who suffered most from the pandemic, like longer-term building upgrades. And some researchers argue that the COVID relief funding simply isn’t enough.

Tom Kane, a Harvard professor who has studied learning loss, says that he fears that school plans are not ambitious enough for the amount of ground they need to make up.

“What most school districts are doing now is the equivalent of shooting bottle rockets at the moon,” he said. “The things they’re trying are directionally correct, but nobody has actually added up the amount of thrust that is going to be needed.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Revitalizing American Manufacturing: A New Industrial Era by Duncan Rawlinson - Duncan.co

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A rusted loading dock and aging brickwork speak to a bygone era of American manufacturing. Once active, this industrial space now sits mothballed—quiet but full of potential. As conversations about reindustrialization gain urgency, sites like this symbolize both the decay of past production power and the possibility of future renewal. Created by Duncan Rawlinson, this image reflects the tension between abandonment and rebirth in America’s manufacturing landscape.

Duncan.co/revitalizing-american-manufacturing-a-new-indus...

DSC_6086 by Guy M Wong

This has the potential of putting the entire China's chip industry out of business and causing an even worse global chip shortage.

www.reuters.com/world/china/top-china-trade-association-c...

China chip industry group 'troubled' by U.S. export curbs

SHANGHAI, Oct 13 (Reuters) - China's top trade group for the chip sector said on Thursday it was "disappointed" by recent U.S. export controls and warned they could put more stress on global supply chains.

Last week, the U.S. Commerce Department passed a sweeping set of regulations aimed at kneecapping advancements in China's semiconductor industry.

If enforced broadly, the regulations could bar research labs and commercial data centres' access to advanced AI chips, prevent Chinese chip fabs from purchasing critical manufacturing equipment, and force U.S. nationals working at advanced Chinese chip companies to resign.

"Not only will such unilateral measure harm the further global supply chain of the semiconductor industry, more importantly it will create an atmosphere of uncertainty, which will negatively affect the trust, goodwill, and spirit of cooperation that the players of the global semiconductor industry have carefully cultivated over the past decades," the China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA) said in a statement.

The CSIA added that it hoped the U.S. government would "adjust the course of action" and "return to the well-established framework of the World Semiconductor Council (WSC) and the Government and Authority Meeting on Semiconductor (GAMS)"

The WSC and GAMS are two global trade forums, established in 1996 and 1999 respectively, where member regions discuss development and policy for the chip sector.

Share prices of Chinese tech giants and chip companies with facilities in China plunged in response to the U.S. curbs. In recent days, the U.S. government has been hurriedly offering some foreign chipmakers extensions to avert supply problems.

www.computerworld.com/article/3676128/will-the-chips-act-...

Will the CHIPS Act really bring back semiconductor production and tech jobs?

Micron Technology is just the latest of a half dozen companies to announce new semiconductor fabrication plants in the US, part of a US government effort to bring chip manufacturing back to American shores. But a lack of tech talent and long-term funding questions could derail the mission.

The US, where semiconductors were invented, was producing 37% of the world's supply of chips as recently as the 1990s. But only about 12% of all computer chips are produced domestically now.

That decline in domestic chip production was exposed by the worldwide supply chain crisis, and that has led to calls for reshoring microprocessor manufacturing in the US. With the federal government spurring them on, the likes of Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have unveiled plans for a flurry of new US fabrication plants. (Qualcomm, in partnership with GlobalFoundries, also said it would invest $4.2 billion to double chip production in its Malta, New York fabrication facility.)

Just last week, chipmaker Micron Technology announced it will spend $20 billion to build what it called the largest-ever US semiconductor factory ever, and may spend up to $100 billion over 20 years to expand it.

In announcing the new fabrication plant projects, the semiconductor manufacturers, at least in part, credited the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 signed into law by President Joe Biden in August. The legislation provides $52.7 billion for manufacturing incentives to boost microchip production in the US. Chip manufacturers can begin seeking to use tax breaks and funds to offset construction and other costs beginning next year.

Essentially, the CHIPS Act is an attempt to increase the percentage of microprocessors produced in the US by closing the cost differential with other countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, and China. In those nations, the governments are already subsidizing semiconductor manufacturers.

The US legislation is also meant to produce high-tech jobs and loosen the supply-chain grip foreign chip manufacturers have on US OEMs.

“The bottom line is that without the CHIPS and Science legislation, Micron would have decided to build its mega-fab overseas,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement.

Gaurav Gupta, Gartner’s vice president for Emerging Technologies and Trends, said the money, tax breaks, and other incentives in the CHIPS Act is pocket change for leading manufacturers. “If you look at the leading chipmakers, like TSMC, Samsung and Intel, they’re spending that much money in one year,” Gupta said.

What the incentives do, however, is demonstrate that the US government is serious about supporting the industry. But more is needed, according to Gupta, who cited the need for a CHIPS Act 2.0, 3.0, and beyond.

“This is the first time this money has been made available," he said. "And, as a result, you’re seeing a lot of chipmakers announcing new fabs and capacity expansions. Let’s see how well they execute. We’ll know by the 2023–2024 time frame when they’re building their fabs. But this has to be a more consistent policy from the US government through the next decade and beyond if they’re really serious about bringing back more chip manufacturing here in the US.”

The lion’s share of the funding in the bill — $39 billion — goes toward incentives to build new chip foundries. There’s also $2 billion for legacy chipmakers who make products critical to automotive and defense systems, $13.2 billion for research and workforce development, and $500 million for supply chain and networking security.

The question is whether that's enough. And once companies break ground on new manufacturing facilities, will they have access to enough tech talent to staff the facilities? Currently, the US is experiencing an unprecedented shortage of tech talent, especially in the semiconductor sector.

"It’s not like there’s a specific type of person or function missing. It’s across the board,” said Mark Granahan, co-founder and CEO of iDEAL Semiconductor, a five-year-old fabless chip start-up in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Because iDEAL is a startup, Granahan needs workers to fill every function in the company, whether sales and marketing, applications and systems, or engineering. “All these things require some technical background to do. We need more two-year degrees, Master’s degrees, and PhDs. Focusing in one area is not a bad thing, but we need a broad brush of things,” he said.

Beyond the fact most jobs in the semiconductor industry are located overseas, chip design and manufacturing has the reputation of being a staid industry compared to software development, so students often shy away from those careers, according to Granahan. Chip development also requires coding and software development, Grahahan noted.

The skills gap is exacerbating a chip supply shortage that predated supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — but the pandemic made matters worse. Older semiconductor fabrication plants were already running at maximum capacity, according to Alan Priestley, a vice president analyst at Gartner Research. “COVID exacerbated the problem because all the demand forecasting for the industry was thrown into the air,” he said in an earlier interview.

Given the high costs and complexity of chip manufacturing, many US semiconductor firms transitioned to a “fabless” model, where the chips are designed here but fabricated abroad — mostly in East Asia. That region is now home to nearly 80% of global chip fabrication, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS).

“Some of America’s largest tech firms, including Google, Apple, and Amazon, rely on Taiwan’s TSMC alone for nearly 90% of their chip production,” Gregory Arcuri, a CSIS research assistant wrote in a January blog.

Support for reshoring chip manufacturing was driven in large part by import shortages during the pandemic and by the dramatic increases in freight costs and delivery times. Other factors included increased recognition of the total cost of offshoring and rising concern over US dependency on China, according to Gupta.

"Even for critical infrastructure in the US, like aerospace, communications, defense, and the military, you are relying on chips made outside the country," Gupta said.

The potential for a Taiwan-China conflict and the danger of China interfering in the global chip supply chain have brought new focus to those concerns, according to the Reshoring Initiative, a Sarasota, FL.-based manufacturing industry advocacy group.

"Destabilizing geopolitical and climate forces have brought to light our vulnerabilities and the need to address them," the Reshoring Initiative said in a report. "Subsequently, great opportunities have arisen for a continued meaningful rebound of US manufacturing. Continuing the current trajectory will reduce the deficit, add jobs, and make the US safer, more self-reliant and resilient."

Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and others have been lobbying the US government to increase domestic chip production, citing problems overseas that have hampered hardware production. In fact, a US Commerce Department report released in January said the chip shortage is so bad that at one point in 2021 there was just a five-day supply worldwide — with no sign the situation would improve anytime soon.

In contrast to the US, the governments of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China all subsidize semiconductor manufacturing and research facilities, according to the Semiconductors in America Coalition (SIAC). "As a result, it is 20%-40% more expensive to build and operate a fabrication facility in the US compared to overseas,” SIAC said in a letter to US Congressional leaders.

“The government’s investments to reshore chip production “will create hundreds of thousands of American jobs,” David Isaacs, vice president of Government Affairs for the Semiconductor Industry Association, said in a blog post. The efforts will also encourage hundreds of billions of dollars in chip company investments in the US and ensure more resilient chip supply chains for key manufacturing industries and for the national security community, Isaacs said.

Recent initiatives to bring tech manufacturing back to America are working, according to the Reshoring Initiative. In its report, the group predicted 2022 will see a record 350,000 new jobs directly related to domestic companies bringing work back stateside and offshore companies committing foreign direct investment (FDI) to their US-based divisions and facilities. That's up from 260,000 new jobs in 2021.

If that jobs prediction holds true, 2022 will bring the total number of jobs announced since 2010 to more than 1.6 million, the Reshoring Initiative report said. The group also noted that for the third year in a row, reshoring outpaced FDI.

The high rate of reshoring indicates that US-headquartered companies are starting to understand the same benefit to localized production that many foreign companies have understood for years, according to the Reshoring Initiative.

“With five million manufacturing jobs still offshore, [and] as measured by (the US) a $1.1 trillion-per-year goods trade deficit, there is potential for much more growth,” said Harry Moser, founder and president of the Reshoring Initiative.

Along with state incentives, Micron said it chose upstate New York for its new plant because it provides partnership opportunities with local K-12 education programs, community colleges and institutions for top engineering and technical talent.

“The state has a long history of semiconductor development and manufacturing, providing promising opportunities to collaborate on R&D initiatives with organizations such as the Albany NanoTech Complex and the US Air Force Research Laboratory,” Micron said in a statement.

The important point here is that over recent decades, the foundry model enabled companies that need semiconductors to design them in-house then ship the design to foundries that are increasingly overseas for manufacturing.

Martin Schmidt, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, said one consequence of the US lagging behind other nations in chip production has been how it affects student career choices.

“When students in the United States are considering career choices, the recognition that if you are interested in production of semiconductors, the ways in which they are manufactured and the advanced technologies to develop them those opportunities are largely offshore today,” said Schmidt. “And that means we are not producing a generation of innovators in this country that are advancing the leading edge of semiconductor production and design.”

ReShore: Preview by Detroit Regional Chamber

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Governor Wolf Tours All Sports America, Touts Collaboration in Reshoring and New Jobs Creation by Governor Tom Wolf

January 09, 2018

Northumberland, PA

Budget debate by Dudley South Conservatives

‪Chris Kelly (Dudley South) (Con):

The Secretary of State is talking about energy-intensive industry and there is still a great deal of that in my constituency. Does he agree we do not want these industries going offshore where environmental legislation may not be as stringently enforced as it is in the UK? We need to keep those industries here in the UK, and yesterday’s Budget helps us to achieve that. [Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing):

Order. Before the Secretary of State answers the intervention, I should say that there are far too many conversations on the Back Benches. The House is getting restless. If the House does not calm down and let the Secretary of State get on with it, he will never come to the end of his speech.

Vince Cable:

I am trying very hard, Madam Deputy Speaker, to take as many interventions as Members wish to throw at me.

In relation to Dudley and manufacturing, my hon. Friend is right that it is not sensible to lose manufacturing overseas as we will get carbon leakage and lose the production and the jobs. It is very much in our interests to stop that happening and we are doing so. There is a lot of evidence of the reshoring of production, including to the industries in the west midlands to which my hon. Friend refers.

...

3.13 pm

Chris Kelly (Dudley South) (Con):

I welcome the Budget statement. It is a Budget that will help us build a resilient economy and is part of the Government’s long-term economic plan to put this country back on the path to sustained growth, a path that was deviated from by the Labour party with the debt-fuelled politics of the final decade of its time in office.

I commend my right hon. Friend the Chancellor who, since coming to office, has been proved right on all the big calls of the past four years. He correctly identified the problems and was right to set out a clear plan to address and then overcome them and equally right continually to stress that there was no alternative to plan A if Britain were to turn the corner. The deficit is down by a third, and in the coming year it will be down by a half. But it is still one of the highest in the world, so the Government are right to be taking action to bring it down further.

I will now deal with some of the detail of the Budget, but in the light of the number of Members who wish to speak, I will limit my remarks to three or four main areas. First, this was a Budget for savers. Social media has been awash with the hashtag ‪#‎savingsupported‬, and with good reason. The reforms to individual savings accounts and raising the limit to £15,000 could benefit up to 513,000 ISA holders in the west midlands alone. Cutting the savings income tax to zero on up to £5,000 could benefit up to 131,000 savers in my region.

The Budget will help more of my constituents to save for a home, save for their retirement and save for their family. I welcome the additional support for savers, so that more people can provide a secure future for themselves and their families. Although we are getting on top of our debts as a nation, for many decades Britain has borrowed too much and saved too little. It is therefore right that hard-working people keep more of what they earn, and of what they save. Support for savers is, rightly, at the centre of the Budget.

The personal tax changes will also be widely welcomed in my area. The increase in the personal allowance in 2015-16 will lift 27,000 people out of income tax altogether, and 2,120,000 people will see an average real terms gain of £62. Again, these are west midlands numbers and the national figures are, of course, even more impressive.

The next area I want to deal with, after help for savers and cutting taxes, is the welcome news on pension flexibility, particularly with the fundamental reform of the taxation of defined contribution pensions. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) has just said, from April 2015, the Government will legislate to remove all remaining tax restrictions on how to access defined contribution pension pots, which means that no one will have buy an annuity if they do not want to. Those who still want the certainty of an annuity, as many will, will be able to shop around for the best deal. There will be no punitive 55% tax rate for those who take more than their tax-free lump sum. It will still be possible to take 25% of the pension pot tax free on retirement, but what is taken above the tax-free lump sum will be taxed at normal marginal rates, not 55%, as at the moment. We will have a new guarantee, enforced in law, that everyone who retires on a DC scheme will be offered free, impartial, face-to-face advice. As economist Ros Altmann summarised:

“No more annuity will be required. No 55% tax charge, only marginal rates. Everyone will get access to face-to-face advice to make the right choice for themselves and their family.”

As the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills said earlier, we now know that manufacturing halved under Labour, with all bets effectively being on the City of London, and look where that got us. Now manufacturing is growing again, and jobs are being created in Dudley and the black country, and across the country. Week in, week out, I visit businesses, often in manufacturing or engineering, or connected to those industries, and the optimism I am finding is reflected in the figures, with 1.7 million new private sector jobs having been created since May 2010. Investment and exports are also up. But we have 20 years of catching up to do, so the Government are right to be backing businesses that invest and export. With the help of the British people, the Government are turning the economy around. The reward is economic security for the families of Britain. The Budget is part of the long-term economic plan—a plan that is delivering economic security for families in my constituency and throughout the country.

dudleysouth.com‬

dudleyconservatives.com

Consumer Rights Bill second reading debate by Dudley South Conservatives

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Contributions to the Consumer Rights Bill second reading debate.

(Speech at 15:40:00: www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=14656)

Chris Kelly (Dudley South) (Con):

Does the hon. Lady agree that Members should encourage their constituents simply to use the Government’s own website at gov.uk, and not to google other alternatives that can lead to scam sites?

Stella Creasy:

The hon. Gentleman’s question reveals one challenge that we face. I would love to sit at a computer with him, google those websites and see whether he could tell the difference. Making that difficult is one thing that the companies in question do. It is fair to ask how we can empower consumers, but it is also fair to ask what we can do to ensure that someone knows precisely what they are buying. That does not need to be an unreasonable requirement on terms and conditions, but the Bill does not address that challenge.

Chris Kelly:

My hon. Friend talks about empowering health consumers to gain greater transparency. Does he welcome the improvements in the past several years to the nhs.uk website, which now provides a great deal of very useful information on all manner of health issues to our constituents?

George Freeman:

Yes, I do. My hon. Friend makes an excellent point and I think this is a subject that we will debate more in the House. I am struck that some in the media are beginning to suggest that it is dangerous to release health care data because it challenges how health care is delivered and will create all sorts of unfortunate misunderstandings. It seems to me that those are prices worth paying to drive the revolution of transparency and accountability that the Government’s reforms are beginning to deliver with such benefit. We have seen in health care in the past two or three years a very difficult, at times, but powerful transparency revolution in which failings in the system have been exposed and those responsible for them held to account on behalf of the patients who ultimately paid for the service and have the right to expect that that service is delivered. That genie is out of the bottle and it is not in anyone’s interest to try to put it back. In fact, quite the opposite: at the heart of modern democracy and a modern economy, the notion of empowered citizens who are able to exercise choice in their supply chain—in public services, every bit as much as in private commerce—is an important idea that, although I appreciate the limits of the Bill, we ought to embrace in the rest of this Parliament and the next.

Chris Kelly:

Will my hon. Friend join me in welcoming the many examples in the west midlands of reshoring, including in the automotive sector, where businesses are coming back to the UK for processes that they took away from the UK over the past 10 or 20 years?

George Freeman:

My hon. Friend makes another excellent point. In fact, no industry is more symptomatic of the post-war British economy, culminating in the crisis of productivity in ’79 and the collapse of that model of growth under, it gives me no pleasure to say, a Labour Government, than the British automotive sector and its restoration over recent years—longer than just the past two or three years, I would grant; over the past 10 years—so that Britain is now a net exporter of vehicles. That has been brought about through a combination of enlightened supply chain work, fostering and supporting the UK’s extraordinarily strong world-class components sector with the bigger manufacturers at the top.

dudleysouth.com