MSU scholars examine coronavirus impact on politics, economy, K-12 education, digital divide

<p>In the second part of this conversation, they’re joined by Dr. Keith Hampton and Dr. Johannes Bauer, both of whom are affiliated with MSU's Quello Center, which is focused on research that stimulates and informs public debate on media, communication, and information policy. They'll be discussing their latest report, which investigated the broadband gap and K-12 student performance, a subject made even more timely by the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic and resulting closure of schools for the remainder of the school year.<br> <br> On the economy, says Ballard, “I look for silver linings in any cloud, but this is a very cloudy cloud. Right now this is the sharpest, fastest economic contraction that the United States economy has ever had. Moody's Analytics says that daily output is down by 29 percent nationally, and it's actually a little bit more than that in Michigan. Different states are slightly above or slightly below that national average of a 29 percent fall in economic activity.<br> <br> “There is no question we are in a recession now. The best that we can hope for, and there are good things that we can hope for, is if we can get the virus under control. The sooner that we can do that, the better it'll be for the economy. If we can begin to move back toward more normal activity, we may be able to have a fairly rapid rebound from this extraordinarily sharp downturn. But right now, in early April, this is certainly a very, very difficult patch in terms of our health and in terms of our economy.”<br> <br> And on the impact of Covid-19 on our politics, adds Grossmann, “President Trump has certainly tried to leave it to the governors and not provided as much as he could and not do as much coordination as past presidents have done. Ggovernors are already both fighting and coordinating among themselves, and in the longer-term, they're going to be very reliant on federal resources because right now they have some new expenditures and they have a dramatic drop in revenue coming.”<br> <br> The trio