The results come from a survey of African American parents of school-aged children conducted by the research and polling company Morning Consult. Its findings, while capturing only a moment in time, may reflect educational preferences that have shifted significantly away from traditional public schools in the COVID era. 

Morning Consult’s survey was administered to roughly 1,300 respondents across January and February on behalf of EdChoice, an Indianapolis-based advocacy group that backs school choice. During the pandemic, the organization has maintained tracking polls of parents and teachers on general perceptions of K–12 education. Black adults, including parents, have been included both in those ongoing efforts and in separate surveys as districts adjusted to the demands of remote instruction and virus mitigation.

Overall, 57% of respondents said they supported education savings accounts — a financial vehicle that offers families money to spend on educational costs of their choosing — even without being provided a description of their function. Even higher proportions supported school vouchers (62%), open enrollment of public schools (66%), and charter schools (68%).

Paul DiPerna, EdChoice’s vice president of research and innovation, said he found it notable that families’ attitudes toward such policies have remained “fairly stable” even as the circumstances surrounding schools have changed dramatically. In a similar poll conducted in the fall of 2021, for example, two-thirds of African American parents said that COVID had made them more open to the idea of homeschooling; 65% said they were supportive of homeschooling today.

“At the time [of the previous poll], the pandemic looked a lot different for parents and schools,” DiPerna said, invoking the Omicron wave that closed or severely disrupted schools in early 2022. “But some of these levels of support are still high for other modes of learning besides the traditional district school.”

Black respondents in other public opinion research, including a February survey commissioned by the school choice advocacy group Yes. Every Kid., have demonstrated high levels of support for policies like vouchers and education savings accounts. Although such polls can provide substantially different findings depending on how questions are worded, African American parents’ somewhat more favorable attitudes toward school choice could be related to their relative satisfaction with local schools, which has been lower than that of white parents in some previous polls. 

That openness to alternative modes of education could be somewhat greater than for parents of other backgrounds. In all, just 39% of African American parents said their post-pandemic preference would be for their children to spend the entire school week completely outside the home. By comparison, EdChoice’s February tracking poll of all K–12 parents found that a slightly greater figure, 41%, said they favored such an outcome.

Black families have clearly demonstrated a greater willingness to experiment with learning outside traditional schools over the last few years. According to 2021 figures from the U.S. Census, the percentage of African American students classified as homeschoolers leapt from just 3.3% to 16.1% over the first COVID year. That explosive growth was undoubtedly powered by the adaptation to online learning, but updated federal figures are expected to show that participation in homeschooling has remained elevated among American families in the years since. 

Support for other forms of non-traditional schooling were also shown to be high, mostly in line with the attitudes of other demographic groups. Sixty-two percent of Morning Consult’s respondents said they had a favorable opinion of microschools (defined as a public, private, or homeschool learning environment that enrolls 25 or fewer students); somewhat surprisingly, 9% of respondents said their children were presently enrolled in a microschool.

Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at the nonprofit research and consulting group Bellwether Education Partners, said that while it’s difficult to gather real-time enrollment data on just how many families are experimenting with learning opportunities outside of traditional districts, the responses “show greater interest and participation” in programs like microschools.

“I think the openness and interest in some of these different options is one data point showing that there’s pretty strong demand among [African American] families for different kinds of education options than what their kids might be accessing currently.”

Black parents were also likely to say they were more involved in their children’s education than in the pre-COVID era, with 43% saying they felt “much more involved. Among those with annual incomes over $75,000 — more than two-thirds of respondents said they were either somewhat or much more involved than before.

But the direction forward still isn’t clear. Asked whether they wanted their children’s general K–12 experience to either change or stay the same, 62% said they sought some kind of change. While 38% reported that they were looking for something new, however, a sizable minority (24%) said they wanted things to revert back to the pre-COVID status quo. Just under one-quarter of parents said they preferred that schooling stay as it is now.

DiPerna said that the evidence clearly pointed to an openness to new educational experiences — either through school choice policies like vouchers and charters — or initiatives like microschools, pods and tutoring that can be implemented in a variety of settings. That curiosity exists among families of all backgrounds, he argued, and even in spite of the fact that roughly half of parents (including 57% of African American parents) said that their own local schools are on the right track.

“Even with the overall satisfaction levels with schools, you still see that there’s an underlying preference for different types of schools — non-trivial numbers, by any definition, especially if you extrapolate to the full population of students around the country.”

Now, as that restructuring has come under increasing scrutiny from local opponents, researchers say that it led to some of the most significant learning gains ever measured. A paper released in December by scholars at the University of Colorado Denver finds that over a little more than a decade, the city’s schools transformed from one of the worst districts in Colorado to one that outperforms more than half the districts in the state. Four-year high school graduation rates leapt from 43 percent to 71 percent during the same period, and the progress was shared by a diverse array of student demographics.

The results offer powerful evidence in favor of the so-called “portfolio management model,” an educational strategy that began to take hold in major urban school systems in the mid-2000s. Deliberately conceived as an alternative to the traditional methods of American school governance, the approach emphasizes greater autonomy for educators while focusing district authorities on centralized functions like enrollment and transportation.

Denver was among the cities that fully embraced the model, experts have argued, making its successes particularly notable in education policy circles. Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University who has spent years studying reform efforts in New Orleans and elsewhere, said the new study had demonstrated proof of significant growth in Denver schools.

“The effects are clearly large,” Harris said. “Just as a loose approximation, if you leapfrog that many districts, clearly you’ve seen a lot of improvement.”

But that improvement was accompanied by fierce opposition among many Denver families, teachers, and public school advocates, many of whom spent years protesting the course pursued by district leaders. While the closure of dozens of low-performing schools engendered the greatest controversy, the detractors have also claimed that top-down direction from the superintendent and school board generally eroded the community’s faith in the system. Those complaints eventually cascaded into a successful campaign to “flip the board,” replacing reform-friendly members with a new majority that has viewed the portfolio strategy much more skeptically.

Parker Baxter — the study’s lead author and an energetic advocate of the Denver reforms — said that the central finding in his work was “simple and profound”: that learning undeniably increased for the average Denver student over the 11 years he studied, and that no group was harmed.

“The debate is framed in terms of whether these reforms helped or hurt the district overall, and this [study] provides the opportunity to evaluate that,” said Baxter, who worked at Denver Public Schools from 2008 to 2011. “The evidence we have is that students benefited from these reforms, even if they were not personally impacted by them.”

‘Remarkable’ range of positive results

To get at the impact of the portfolio shift, Baxter’s study dives into test score data from 2008 to 2019 — a period that encompasses most of Denver’s reform era.

That phase began a little earlier, under the leadership of Superintendent Michael Bennet. Now a U.S. senator, Bennet spent three and a half years attempting to change a school system that ranked among the worst in the state. Under Bennet and his successor, Tom Boasberg, the portfolio model took shape.

Over 60 new schools were created in the decade that followed, while nearly 40 closed their doors permanently. Parents were presented with a bevy of novel school options, including a quickly expanding sector of charter and “innovation” schools. Those new offerings were integrated into a unified, district-wide application system that allowed students to freely select among different choices. 

Boasberg, who left the district in 2018 after nearly a decade to take on leadership of the Singapore American School, said that each of those alterations was an ingredient in the success of the reforms, but that the indispensable factor was far simpler: a focus on attracting and retaining better instructional talent to schools, whatever their particular type.

Ideological heat around school choice and accountability tends to obscure the single-minded focus on quality during the implementation of the reforms, Boasberg added.

“There’s a lot of political ideology around governance models,” he argued. “We really didn’t care about that. We were about: Are you a good school, and do you serve all kids? The governance model was not important to us.”

To what degree Denver’s improvements were attributable to the portfolio reforms can be debated, but their scale is impressive. Before the 2008–09 school year, Denver was one of the 10 lowest-performing school systems in Colorado on both math and reading tests, performing below the 5th percentile of districts statewide. In 2018–19, it had risen to the 60th percentile in reading and the 63rd percentile in math. In comparison with a group of similarly low-performing districts in the state, Baxter and his coauthors found, the reforms triggered growth equivalent to between 1 and 1.5 extra school years over the period studied.

That general progress spilled over into secondary areas, such as district enrollment, which increased by nearly 20,000 students between 2004 and 2019. While white children saw the largest gains overall, results were also positive for African American students in literacy. Hispanic and low-income students saw positive results in math and English, though they were not large enough to be considered statistically significant.

Baxter called the range of positive results, across both subject areas and racial categories, “remarkable.”

“The fact that we see significant positive results for students with disabilities, or for African American students in math — we would not necessarily expect a reform, even one that had such a positive impact systemwide, to also have these positive impacts for the most vulnerable subgroups.”

Denver Public Schools declined to comment for this story.

Model ‘hasn’t gotten very far’

Whatever the good news from the last decade of school governance, however, the next decade is much in question.

After the successful 2019 effort to flip the school board — replacing members who had largely backed Bennet and Boasberg’s approach with a new group that enjoyed more support from the local teachers’ union — a pronounced change in direction has taken place in the district. Superintendent Susana Cordova, a veteran of the reform regime who stepped in to replace an increasingly controversial Boasberg, soon left town herself after a brief tenure marked by poor performance reviews. The board’s new majority also voted to eliminate a school ratings system that had drawn criticism from educators. 

Nevertheless, three years into what might be deemed the “post-reform” period, many of the hallmarks of the portfolio model remain in place. The pace of school closures has slowed almost to a halt, but schools of choice still enroll a substantial portion of Denver students, and charter and innovation schools maintain wide autonomy in terms of hiring, curriculum, and scheduling. Boasberg said that the interlocking reforms embedded during his time in office would be difficult to do away with — if only because they remain broadly popular.

“The pieces do fit together, and that’s a really important part of it,” Boasberg said. “Why would you want to change the funding system to give less money to poor kids? Why would you want to have charters serve fewer English language learners and kids with special needs? Why would you want to take choices away from families?”

The future for the portfolio approach is perhaps murkier. After reaching a high point in the middle of the 2010s, school reform in major districts has stalled due to both political pressure and internal exhaustion. The model’s exemplars — New Orleans, which largely swept away the pre-reform landscape following Hurricane Katrina, is perhaps the prototypical example — have achieved substantial gains. But a large group of cities that attempted the portfolio pivot, from New York to Chicago to Washington, D.C., never completed the transformation.

Harris observed that, after years of hype and advocacy, the portfolio vision “hasn’t gotten very far.” That said, he added, its central ideas of expanded choice and unified district functions have left their mark in systems enrolling millions of students.

“Making structural changes in the education system is a very slow-moving enterprise, and the fact that we do have this idea — call if portfolio, call it what you will — that has infused a large number of urban districts, even in an impure form, is significant.”

According to a paper released last fall through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, eighth- and ninth-graders who learned from math teachers with relatively higher performance standards earned better test scores in Algebra I. The same students later saw their improved results carry forward to subsequent years of math instruction, and — contradicting fears that high expectations might cause kids to resist or give up — they were less likely to be absent from classes than similar students assigned to more lax graders. 

Seth Gershenson, an economist at American University and one of the paper’s co-authors, said the breadth and longevity of the positive results showed that they were not flowing from a quirk of testing. Rather, high standards “change the way students engage with school,” he argued.

“There really is a persistent, long-lasting sea change that students experience when they have a tougher grader,” Gershenson said. “And it’s not like you have to be super tough; any marginal increase in standards adds a little boost.”

The findings build on earlier work by Gershenson, which showed that pervasive grade inflation in K-12 settings — defined as student course grades that are considerably higher than their corresponding scores on end-of-year exams — is more prevalent in schools serving larger percentages of affluent students. They are also noteworthy in light of the post-COVID academic environment, which has seen many teachers relax their grading policies either through personal initiative or in response to district mandates.

The study is built on grading and testing records for a huge swath of North Carolina students who took Algebra I in either the eighth or ninth grades. In all, the sample included over 365,000 pupils across nearly 27,000 classrooms and 4,415 teachers — a rich enough selection to allow comparisons between thousands of similar students assigned to different Algebra teachers over a 10-year span. 

To assess the impact of different standards, Gershenson and his colleagues used multiple measures of grading severity, again relying on the relationship between course grades (over which teachers have wide, though not total, latitude) and performance on end-of-year exams. For example, an Algebra teacher whose students tend to receive higher course grades than their scores would indicate is considered an “easier” grader, and vice versa. 

The researchers then sorted the teacher sample into four comparison groups, ranging from the easiest graders to the hardest, and charted the trajectories of their respective students before and after they took Algebra I. Disproportionately, the teachers grouped in the “toughest” quarter were likelier to be white, female, and more experienced than the sample as a whole. 

They also tended to achieve more in the classroom.

Across several metrics of academic success, students who were exposed to higher grading standards fared better than their peers. Compared with students who had previously demonstrated similar levels of math performance, those assigned to stricter graders saw larger scoring gains. Notably, those effects were both sizable and linear, meaning that the tighter the grading practices — moving from the easiest-grading quarter to the very hardest — the larger the improvement on test scores.

Students of tougher graders also maintained some of their scoring advantage into the next two classes of North Carolina’s math sequence, geometry and Algebra II. The effects were actually twice as large in Algebra II as they were in geometry, a nuance the authors specifically cited in the paper: Perhaps because of the similarities in content between the two levels of algebra, they theorized, students who were formerly held to higher standards did especially well in the later class, even though the effects should have faded more because of the further passage of time. 

“That suggests this wasn’t a pure grade-chasing effect where students crammed more for the test so that they could do better and get the grade they needed,” Gershenson explained. “Instead, it makes me think that there was some real learning that happened and was retained.”

‘Good for everybody’

Though it sets out to measure the benefits of tougher grading policies, the study jibes somewhat with research investigating the inverse phenomenon of grade inflation. According to the High School Transcript Study, a long-term analysis of student grades conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the average high school GPA rose from 3.00 in 2009 to 3.11 in 2019. But performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, stayed flat over the same period. 

That federal assessment generated some attention when it appeared last spring, but it only covered the years before the pandemic. Another report, released by the testing group ACT, found evidence of significant grade inflation over 2020 and 2021, with self-reported student GPAs climbing even as ACT scores themselves did not.

Not all education policy scholars are concerned about these revelations. Zachary Bleemer, a professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, has argued that some grade inflation — whether at the university or K-12 levels — can correct inequalities in which student groups pursue intellectually rigorous subjects. (Female college students, in particular, have been shown to discontinue studies in economics if their initial grades are poor.) What’s more, ACT’s hypothesis could rightly be viewed with caution, given the organization’s potential interest in casting high school grades as less reliable than scores on college admissions tests. 

But it is also broadly reflected in accounts given by teachers themselves, who have sometimes spoken openly about softening their approach to grading as a response to COVID’s disruption to in-person learning. In big districts like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Clark County, Nevada (home to Las Vegas), new standards have deemphasized deadlines and classroom behavior, giving students more time and chances to complete graded work.

Education authorities have justified those changes as an equity-minded strategy to keep students engaged who might otherwise become frustrated or fall behind in their studies. But Gershenson and his co-authors found no evidence that North Carolina students assigned to harder graders became alienated from school. In fact, those students were slightly less likely than their peers to rack up unexcused absences.

Best of all, whether measured by attendance or test scores, the results of higher standards were broadly similar for a range of different students. While higher-performing math students enjoyed marginally larger gains than their relatively lower-performing classmates, effects were ultimately beneficial across 20 different student categories — each differing by race, sex, class rank, and prior achievement level in math. 

Gershenson, who sees grade inflation as a significant problem that distorts how scholastic performance is interpreted, said the near-uniformity of his team’s findings was a strong signal that high standards are “good for everybody.”

“For none of these outcomes… is the effect negative. Sure, the effects are smaller for some groups than others, and they’re smaller for some outcomes than others. But on no dimension are students being harmed by higher grading standards.”

That’s essentially unchanged from last school year, but significantly worse than before the pandemic, when only 36% of students started school off track, the National Center for Education Statistics has found. 

Additionally, over 80% of the 1,026 schools that responded to the the latest School Pulse Panel survey said they’re providing some form of tutoring to help students catch up. But the latest post-pandemic snapshot reinforces the sense that the pace of academic recovery remains slow. 

“We’ve got a long road ahead of us,” said Rachel Hansen, a project officer at NCES. 

Districts have about a year and a half left to decide the best way to use their share of $189 billion in federal pandemic relief funds. And with the clock ticking, some experts question whether districts will be able to have a measurable impact on learning loss. About half of the administrators who responded to the latest survey said they’re spending relief funds on providing students with extra academic support and training staff to become tutors. But the survey, conducted in December, showed that just 1 in 10 students nationally received high-dosage tutoring.

Students are “not the same level of ready” they were before the pandemic, said Beth Lehr, assistant principal at Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson. “We had a major world event that upended a whole bunch of different things.”

Some students in this year’s junior and senior classes missed entire semesters of a course during their early high school years, when the pandemic was at its peak. The district tweaked its existing credit recovery program to allow those students to learn the material and graduate on time. 

The NCES data found that schools are employing a variety of recovery strategies to get students back on grade level, including using assessments to identify their needs (88%), covering material students missed (81%) and holding longer classes (29%). Schools were least likely to extend the school day (19%) or extend the school year (10%). 

The latest installment also provided a detailed look at schools’ efforts to implement high-dosage tutoring, which Stanford University researcher Susanna Loeb called the “best approach that we know for accelerating students’ learning” because it offers students help from “an adult who knows them, cares about them and has the tools to address their needs.” 

She has been tracking the implementation of large-scale tutoring efforts across the country as part of the National Student Support Accelerator and called the survey results “the most comprehensive information out there” on how schools are addressing learning loss.

More than a third of schools (37%) say they offer high-dosage tutoring, defined as at least a half hour of one-on-one or small group instruction three times a week with a trained educator. But less than a third of students in those schools participate, according to NCES.

Schools offering a high-impact model primarily lean on existing staff — teachers and aides — to provide it. And they’re more likely to schedule sessions during the school day, 64%, compared with 51% after school.

“Our teachers are our experts,” said Michael Randolph, principal at Leesburg High School in Leesburg, Florida, where about 150 to 200 students participate in tutoring sessions throughout the week. He said teachers have been willing to put in the extra time because they see the payoff. 

His school combines tutoring with twice-a-week remediation sessions added to the schedule the year COVID hit. He thinks those efforts contributed to the school ending last semester with the lowest number of D’s and F’s since he became principal six years ago. 

But some schools responding to the survey faced ongoing barriers. Forty percent said they can’t find tutors and 49% said that even with relief funds, they lack the funding to hire them.

Lehr said it’s been hard to get teachers to add tutoring to their plate because they are “almost on empty.” If they’re “tapped out,” she added, it doesn’t make sense for them to tack two more hours of work onto their day for another $50.

Schools that are more likely to offer high-dosage tutoring, the data shows, serve elementary students, have high poverty rates and high minority populations and are located in cities. There are also regional differences, with schools in the South offering the most high-dosage tutoring (15%) and those in the Northeast offering the least (5%).

Fifty-nine percent of students receive what the researchers described as “standard” tutoring, which might still be in small groups, but not as frequent. And 22% have access to “self-paced” tutoring from an online provider. 

Those services are “useful supplements” for students who might need a little help in a subject area, Loeb said, but the less-intensive approaches are unlikely to “alter the trajectories of students who have disengaged in school or who have fallen far behind academically.” 

Randolph, at Leesburg High, said he thinks the best decision his district made with relief funds was to add a night school to accommodate students who still work jobs they took during the pandemic. The school has received $250,000 a year to run the program, but when relief funds run out, Randolph said he’ll have to find another way to fund it. About 50 students participate. 

“A lot of our students took entry level jobs and became contributors to their households,” he said. When remote learning ended, he said, many students would have dropped out. “This has maintained students’ ability to stay in school.”

Those conclusions represent the latest and widest-ranging evidence yet of the damage inflicted by the emergence of COVID — both in terms of direct interruptions to schooling and the social and economic turmoil in other spheres of life. They dovetail with the observations of education experts who have also pointed to steep declines in nationwide academic performance, along with the billion-dollar investments made by governments to help schools bounce back.

But they also come as voices in the national media have argued that learning losses may be less harmful than advertised, warning in some cases that a single-minded focus on the pandemic’s toll could hurt teacher morale. With American students now returned to a post-COVID reality in the classroom, a recent speech by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona largely skirted the subject of learning loss.

By contrast, the review, based on 42 research studies from 15 countries, calls for heightened urgency from both leaders and educators in re-setting the trajectory for student outcomes.  

“The persistence of learning deficits two and a half years into the pandemic highlights the need for well-designed, well-resourced and decisive policy initiatives to recover learning deficits,” the authors write. “Policymakers, schools, and families will need to identify and realize opportunities to complement and expand on regular school-based learning.”

Robin Lake, director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, said the findings were consistent with those of her own organization’s distillation of the existing research, released last summer.

“There is no question that learning gaps have become chasms and that while some students are catching up quickly, too many are not,” Lake wrote in an email. “This is a global concern and requires innovative and urgent action. I am deeply concerned that national educational and civic leaders in the U.S. are not taking this learning crisis seriously enough.”

Here are four key takeaways from the study:

1. Inequality in education grew

While the dozens of studies classified socioeconomic status according to different metrics (including parental income, free lunch eligibility, and neighborhood disadvantage, among others), most estimates indicated that achievement gaps between richer and poorer students tended to increase in both math and reading. Most showed widening inequality during the first year of the pandemic, but a sizable number also pointed to the same trend even into its second and third years.

In an email, Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, called the results “depressingly consistent about the pandemic exacerbating learning loss along preexisting lines of inequality.”

2. Poorer countries were hit harder too

No low-income countries were included in the analysis, as little evidence exists to identify the academic impact of COVID in the developing world. But the four middle-income countries under study (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and South Africa) saw larger average learning deficits than their higher-income counterparts, including the three largest overall estimates of learning loss. 

The authors write that the effects of the last three years are likely to worsen the long-term inequality in international learning outcomes and “undo past progress” in closing gaps across borders.

3. Learning loss is stuck in 2020

After first emerging in the early months of the pandemic, the literature suggests that learning deficits have roughly held steady in the time since. That implies that efforts to adjust to ever-changing disruptions in schools were successful in holding off further losses, the authors write, but also that those efforts “have been unable to reverse them” so far. The pattern, which appears throughout all 15 countries, is also consistent within the three (the United States, United Kingdom, and Netherlands) that have cumulatively generated the most research findings.

4. Losses were greater in math than reading

In keeping with one of the most consistent findings in education research, the review shows that academic reversals in math have been significantly greater than those in literacy. Given the greater ability of parents to teach their children reading skills, math has been characterized as a more “school-dependent subject,” and previous data on COVID-era achievement — including results from America’s foremost standardized K–12 exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress — has already shown math scores absorbing a greater blow over the past few years. Across the study’s included in the review, reading losses at the median were only about half the magnitude of math losses.

Teachers said they had to skip over classic texts like To Kill a Mockingbird and avoid historical figures like famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass out of concern for parental complaints and possible legal blowback. One high school science teacher who the study quoted anonymously described an atmosphere of “fear and paranoia” around simply covering the content laid out within state standards.

The report, which was published by the Rand Corporation on Wednesday, surveyed over 8,000 educators from across the country. It asked whether officials had passed policies limiting the teaching of topics related to race and gender and, if so, how those rules had impacted their instructional decisions.

Confusion was so widespread, researchers found, that roughly one-quarter of teachers said they didn’t know whether they were subject to restrictions. Among teachers working in states that had enacted classroom censorship bills, less than a third actually knew that the laws were in place.

“At times there is that confusion about, ‘What am I allowed to say in the classroom, what am I not allowed to say?’ ” lead researcher Ashley Woo explained.

In Florida, where the state’s censorship bill also extends to higher education and the workplace, and where Gov. Ron DeSantis recently blocked a forthcoming Advanced Placement course on African American studies, the state Department of Education rejected the idea that their law might be unclear to teachers.

“If educators are confused about what can and cannot be taught in Florida schools, the blame lies solely on media activists and union clowns who purposefully sow confusion and mislead the public,” spokesperson Alex Lanfranconi wrote in an email to The 74.

Classroom censorship bills began to proliferate in 2021 as right-wing politicians advocated that schools overstepped in the measures they enacted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. As some districts added more books written by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian authors to their curricula and educated staff about how racism operates in society, predominantly white parents in many districts pushed back on the changes, calling them critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic framework used to examine systematic racism and is taught mostly in graduate school rather than K-12 classrooms. The term has become a GOP catch-all for lessons related to race. Americans largely support teachings that address racism, but support wanes drastically when the critical race theory label is applied, research shows.

Since 2021, legislation has been proposed in 42 states to curtail race- and gender-related teachings. In 18 states, the measures have passed into law, according to an Education Week tracker. In at least six states, the rules include penalties for educators or schools that do not comply.

Terrance Anfield teaches English as a second language in Kennesaw, Georgia, where a state law bans teachers from covering “divisive concepts.” 

“The very concepts that will allow the development of our students to become well-rounded, inclusive members of society are being omitted from the classroom for fear of offending the wrong person or committee. This should not be an issue that has involved the districts of Georgia because CRT is typically taught at the collegiate level,” he wrote in an email to The 74.

In the aftermath of those changes, 1 in 4 teachers nationally said their school or district leaders told them to limit discussions of political or social issues in class, a previous Rand study found in August.

The non-partisan think tank’s most recent report now shows that a similar proportion of teachers, 24%, have altered their curricular materials in response to the controversy — regardless of whether or not they live in states that have classroom censorship laws on the books. Even in states with no rules limiting teachings on race and gender, 22% of instructors said the nationwide pushback influenced their selection of books and worksheets. 

“The limitations are not just originating from state policies, they’re also coming from other places,” said Woo, the Rand researcher, explaining that educators frequently reported re-designing their offerings because of complaints from parents or “implicit” and “unspoken” messages from district leaders directing them to sanitize lessons.

Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, emphasized that parents do have a right to transparency over what their students are learning. But at the same time, districts should avoid policies that have a “chilling effect” on educators, which can make schools “not a healthy place for learning,” he said.

In the face of pushback, some teachers still expressed resistance to censorship policies. The survey included a free response section completed by about 1,450 educators. Nearly 1 in 5 said they are continuing to include lessons related to race and gender, and made no mention of efforts to make the teachings less contentious. 

“My students are more important than any board policy. If I get in trouble, then it would be worth it,” one educator wrote.

In a profession whose stress levels are paralleled only by doctors and nurses, navigating the supercharged climate has made educators’ jobs “even more difficult and less attractive,” in the words of one survey respondent, who teaches elementary school.

School staff may have their hands tied, caught between what is legal and what they think is right. A middle school science teacher said the school’s LGBTQ students are “knowingly suffering and there is nothing I can do about it without risking my job.”

In some cases, districts now require teachers to search for new classroom materials, go through cumbersome approval processes for new curricula or even run lessons by parents before leading them in the classroom, Woo explained. All those steps represent more work for teachers at a time when staff shortages already plague many states and districts across the country, she said.

“All of these things are potentially adding more to teachers’ plates in a time when we know teachers have already experienced a lot of stress,” she said.

Moms for Liberty, a national organization that supports school board candidates pushing for limitations on race- and gender-related lessons, did not respond to requests for comment on whether these policies could worsen teacher burnout.

To district leaders, Woo said, one clear takeaway from the study should be that educators need additional support to comply with a changing legal and political landscape.

“Teachers cannot and should not have to shoulder these challenges on their own.”

In a new survey released Tuesday by Populace, a Massachusetts-based think tank focused on public engagement, respondents ranked preparation for college or university nearly at the bottom of their priorities for schools: 47th out of 57 overall.

As recently as 2019, prepping for college ranked No. 10 nationwide, just below learning “from exposure to different ideas and beliefs.” That priority also dropped a bit, to No. 27.

Instead, the findings show, Americans now want something very different from K-12 education: a concentrated focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

Top 10 Purpose of Education Rankings

“I think the takeaway is: The American public wants ‘different,’ not just ‘better’ from education,” said Todd Rose, a former Harvard University scholar and Populace’s CEO and co-founder. “It’s pretty clear that there’s a different set of outcomes that they are expecting.”

While college prep should be an option, he said, the data show that “it certainly can’t be the point” of K-12 education going forward. 

Part of that shift comes as Americans realize the diminishing economic value of both a high school diploma and a college degree, Rose said.

A college degree, he said, has always been viewed as a key path to a better, more high-paying career. “It’s not clear that that value is there from college anymore. So then when you pile on the outrageous cost … and the debt you’re incurring, it’s just not true. The value proposition isn’t there anymore.”

So it’s natural for the public to look to K-12 schools for other, more practical priorities, he said.

To be fair, this particular set of skills, with its real-world focus, has sat atop the Populace scale since 2019, along with aspirations that students learn to think critically, “demonstrate character,” and do basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

But the precipitous fall of college prep is significant — and widespread. Actually, respondents with college degrees were nearly as likely as high school graduates or even dropouts to give college prep a low priority score: It ranked 48th for college graduates, vs. 49th for high school graduates and dropouts. The figure was slightly higher — 39th for those with graduate degrees.

To Rose, that finding suggests a “broader zeitgeist shift” about college, one coming even from its graduates, who believe that in its current state, “This thing is untenable. It’s just too expensive.”

The survey of 1,010 adults was conducted Sept. 12-30. Pollsters also surveyed 1,087 parents separately. Researchers asked participants to imagine rebuilding our K-12 education system “entirely from scratch based on the purpose of education as you define it.” Then it set out pairs of priorities that participants ranked.

The data on college preparation suggest that the drop is driven largely by attitudes about higher education among one large group: White respondents, who placed it 46th overall in 2022. By contrast, Black and Hispanic respondents both placed it near the middle of the pack, 22nd out of 57 priorities. Asian respondents placed it relatively high at 9th place.

Even before the pandemic, attitudes about college-going were beginning to fray, research suggests. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that only half of American adults believed colleges and universities “are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.” Nearly 4 in 10, or 38%, said colleges were having a negative impact, up from 26% in 2012.

Rising college costs are, of course, a big factor: At public four-year colleges in 2020, average tuition and fees were 10% higher than in 2010, according to the U.S. Education Department. 

The rise in negative views, Pew said, arose “almost entirely” from Republicans and independents who lean Republican, with 59% saying colleges have a negative effect on the nation.

Overall, undergraduate college enrollment fell between 2009 and 2020, according to the department, from 17.5 million students to 15.9 million. But it’s expected to rise again, to 17.1 million students by 2030.

Rose said even the oft-invoked culture wars over “indoctrination” of college students may actually be a function of higher education’s larger failures. “If college was still delivering on the value proposition, of the kind of careers that make for your little slice of the American dream, I don’t know that anyone cares” about indoctrination, he said.

More Rankings of Note

As for priorities in the Populace survey broken down by race, the results reveal a few interesting details: White respondents’ top priority was for schools to teach “practical, tangible skills” — managing finances, preparing meals and the like. In that sense, they basically track with mainstream priorities.

By contrast, Black respondents’ No. 1 priority was thinking critically, while for Hispanic respondents it was allowing students to advance in school “if they meet minimum grade requirements.”

Asian respondents’ top priority: Giving all students “the option to choose the courses they want to study based on interests and aspirations.” That indicator actually fell in importance overall, from No. 2 in 2019 to No. 9 in 2022.

Another big change since 2019: Americans now ­­largely distrust standardized tests, prioritizing how a student ranks against others on such exams even lower than college prep: 49th out of 57 priorities. They’re much more likely to prioritize teacher-administered exams, projects or “performance in real-world applications,” according to the survey.

And they have a new-found appreciation for mastery learning: The idea that “Students advance once they have demonstrated mastery of a subject” jumped from 30th out of 57 priorities in 2019 to 7th in 2022.

Part of that is doubtless due to the forced homeschooling that millions of families found themselves taking part in during the spring of 2020, Rose said. That changed families’ priorities about the purpose of schooling, almost overnight. 

“The pandemic affected our experience with education,” he said. “It put kids back in the home, with parents who watched their kids learn online, if at all. And like most public shocks to systems, it tends to lead to a rethinking: ‘What is it that matters to us?’”

For these families, the experience taught them, “It’s not simply, ‘How do we get kids better test scores and get them into college?’” Going forward, Rose said, “That is not going to be good enough.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Stand Together Trust provide financial support to Populace and The 74.

The revelations came from the latest release of the School Pulse Panel, an ongoing data collection effort led by the National Center for Education Statistics. And while the results don’t include data on the number or rate of behavioral problems observed by school staff, they illustrate the methods that educators are embracing to address those problems and their sense of their own effectiveness. 

Especially during a period when many teachers say they are dealing with more violence and disorder among their pupils than in the pre-COVID era — last week’s shooting of a Virginia teacher by her six-year-old student stands out as the latest and most extreme example — the findings will likely influence discussions on school discipline at local, state, and federal levels. 

Thurston Domina, a professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina, said that he believed that behavioral struggles have “become more acute in the last few years” both as kids have returned to full-time, in-person instruction and as schools have come to grapple with the effects of controversial disciplinary strategies like student suspensions.

“These data suggest two things: First, that schools are facing substantial behavioral challenges, and second, that they don’t feel confident about the strategies they have to address them,” Domina wrote in an email.

The School Pulse Panel solicits survey responses from school officials (primarily principals) around the country, periodically circulating findings to paint a picture of COVID’s impact on K–12 schools. Thursday’s update presented responses gathered from over 1,000 public schools last November, each relating to school safety, attitudes toward security personnel, and the post-COVID classroom environment. 

Those school responses are of particular interest in that they can be directly compared with answers to similar questions from another authoritative NCES report from before the pandemic: the 2017–18 School Survey on Crime and Safety, which also quizzed school leaders on the disciplinary climate of their institutions and the strategies they employed to improve it. 

Notably, 50 percent or more of all respondents to the panel survey said that they were limited in either major or minor ways by a wide array of hindrances. Nearly three-quarters of participants said they were constrained by a lack of “alternative placements or programs” for disruptive students, while majorities said the same of inadequate funding (61 percent), lack of parental support (60 percent), insufficient teacher training in classroom management (60 percent), and likelihood of complaints from parents (50 percent).

Less numerous, but perhaps more disturbing, were the minorities who said they were held back by lack of support from teachers themselves (40 percent), or by teachers’ own fears of retaliation from students (32 percent). 

In most cases, these factors were cited significantly more than they were in the report from five years ago. For example, while just 6 percent and 33 percent of 2017–18 respondents said that they were limited (in either a major or minor way) by lack of teacher training in classroom management, 12 percent and 48 percent said the same thing last November. 

The apparent desire for increased training stands out particularly given that it was one of the only behavioral and safety strategies listed in the survey that is not offered more frequently by schools than it was five years ago. By contrast, significantly higher percentages of schools now report engaging in “positive behavioral intervention strategies” (93 percent), crisis intervention (84 percent), recognizing self-harm or suicidal tendencies (84 percent), and recognizing bullying (84 percent). 

In a development that reflects the national and local efforts to reduce the use of what some detractors call “exclusionary” disciplinary policies, a significantly lower percentage of schools reported using out-of-school suspensions than did in 2017–18 (69 percent versus 74 percent). The widespread move to curtail the practice has come as federal authorities, including Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, have explicitly urged schools to keep kids in class as much as possible.

Matthew Steinberg, a professor of education at George Mason University who has conducted prior research on the effects of school discipline reforms, noted that Thursday’s release didn’t clearly show that behavioral conditions were deteriorating inside American schools. Still, he added, the documented decrease in exclusionary discipline and the lack of new guidance suggests that schools aren’t “providing the necessary supports for teachers and educators to address student behavioral issues in the classroom.”

“The question is whether or not student behavior and misconduct have gotten worse in the wake of COVID, independent of whether suspension is used as a disciplinary consequence,” Steinberg said. A reduction in suspensions might result in the presence of more students exhibiting COVID-related behavioral problems, he added — which might, in turn, “adversely affect the environment within classrooms, with potentially important implications for student learning.” 

Building upon their earlier blockbuster findings on the link between education and mortality, the researchers said Americans are on two distinct paths based on educational attainment. Angus Deaton, who co-wrote the recently published The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death with Anne Case, calls the current system unfair. 

“The B.A. has become this sort of condition for participation and dignity in the modern economy — and a lot of it is unnecessary,” Deaton, a British American economist and 2015 Nobel Prize winner, told The 74.

There was, however, one positive development, the researchers said. While the gap in mortality rates between those with and without a bachelor’s grew markedly since 1990, Black men with four-year degrees fare better than they ever have since such data became available more than three decades ago. 

“It used to be that Black mortality rates were not very different whether you had a B.A. or not,” Deaton said. “Now, Black men with a B.A. are much closer to white men with a B.A. than they are to Black or white men without a B.A. The same is true for [Black] women. Blacks with a B.A. have made a huge amount of progress.”

But inequity remains: While 42% of white Americans 25 and older earned a bachelor’s degree, just 28% of Black Americans and 20% of Hispanics have this advantage, according to recent census data. 

“The B.A. divide is getting bigger while the race divide is getting smaller — but it still exists,” Deaton said. 

The pandemic worsened academic outcomes, particularly for minority men. While undergraduate college enrollment dropped for all students, for example, the figures are startling for Black men: They fell by 14.8% overall and by 23.5% for those enrolled in two-year schools between 2019 and 2021, research shows. 

Latino men also fared poorly during this time, with their enrollment slipping by 10.3% overall and by 19.7% among those attending community college.

And COVID’s toll expanded well beyond education: Life expectancy itself fell in the U.S. in 2021 for the second year in a row, the first time it dropped for two consecutive years in a century, NPR reported.

​​Deaton’s and Case’s work has focused specifically on how higher education has acted to ward off death from a particular type of suffering, calling it a “talisman” against overdose fatalities. 

The death rate from drugs, alcohol and suicide climbed for all Americans in the most recently studied period, they found, but was concentrated among those without a bachelor’s degree: The alcohol-related mortality rate for whites without a bachelor’s degree increased by 41% between 2013 and 2019 for those ages 25–74. The suicide rate jumped by 17%, and the drug-related mortality rate shot up a whopping 73% for that group, researchers said. 

Results were equally troubling for Blacks and Hispanics who did not hold a bachelor’s degree: Drug-related deaths more than doubled between 2013 and 2019 for these two groups. The suicide rate increased by a third for both. Alcohol-related mortality rates rose 30% for Blacks and by 24% for Hispanics who hadn’t completed college. 

The researchers gleaned data about educational attainment, age, sex, race, ethnicity and cause of death through death certificates. They called out how fentanyl, the drug now dominating headlines, had vastly different impacts in the Black community depending on education.

 “The arrival of street fentanyl in 2013 led to a drug mortality rate among less-educated Blacks that was seven times greater than that among more-educated Blacks in 2019,” they write.

Deaton said results were not much improved for those Americans who completed some college — including those who earned an associate’s degree. Their mortality and disease rates and job placement were just slightly improved but far closer to those with a high school education than those with a bachelor’s degree. 

While the calculations, first published in Annual Reviews in August, were made before data from the pandemic became available, there was no reason, researchers said, to think the rates would decline once COVID-19 was brought under control. 

Deaton’s and Case’s earlier work grabbed so much attention after it identified that mortality rates among middle-aged whites shot up in a relatively short amount of time, between 1999 and 2013, because of suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse. From this finding, they coined the much-quoted term “deaths of despair”.

Back then, the authors linked the deaths of less-educated white Americans to economic and social conditions. Through their later work on their 2020 book, they cited falling real wages, a decline in religious participation, increasing rates of children born to unwed mothers and a drop in marriage rates overall.

A decrease in availability of good jobs for those without a bachelor’s degree, exorbitant health care costs and a lack of a financial safety net for those who were neither children nor elderly also contributed to a “rising tide of despair,” they said. 

“Both the safety net and the financing of health care are radically different in other rich countries where — with a few exceptions — there are few deaths of despair,” they noted. 

Under these circumstances, they wrote, it was not surprising to see a rise in drug and alcohol abuse, unhealthy eating and suicide.

“We do not believe that the opioid epidemic in the United States would have happened to the extent that it did without the ocean of pain and distress among less-educated Americans,” they wrote.

Deaton told The 74 their later research yielded two important findings. 

“These deaths of despair, which were largely confined to whites, later spread to the African- American and Hispanic population, largely to do with drugs, both legal and illegal, including fentanyl,” he said. “The other is that these deaths of despair are not confined to whites currently in middle age, but are even worse among younger people: Each younger-born generation is getting worse than the one before. We know a lot of people who have fallen into addiction traps. Among people without B.A.s, this is much worse.”

First circulated as a working paper before the pandemic, the article was accepted for publication in November at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Its conclusions are difficult to ignore after both schools and the arts world were rocked by COVID-19, with an estimated hit to the creative economy totalling millions of jobs and tens of billions of dollars lost in 2020 alone. Arts education in some states had to be sustained through the infusion of emergency funds from Washington.

The study will also inform public policy decisions as school systems look to get back on their feet. Just a week before its publication, voters in California approved a ballot initiative that will provide nearly $1 billion annually to increase access to arts and music programs in schools. The sizable new appropriation, which isn’t funded by new taxes, passed by a wide margin amid advocacy by celebrities like Dr. Dre and Katy Perry.

Brian Kisida, a professor at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Public Affairs and one of the paper’s co-authors, said that its results showed that the arts are a kind of “secret sauce” in keeping young students interested and involved in school. Particularly as schools try to lead a revival after years of lost, delayed, or incomplete learning, he added, arts instruction shouldn’t be cast aside in favor of core subjects like math and English.

“The key question is, how do you keep students engaged in their own learning in such a way that they are intrinsically motivated to want to go to school — and when you present them with the idea of going to college, it doesn’t sound awful?” said Kisida, who acted as a technical consultant to backers of California’s Proposition 28 campaign.

The study examined the impact of participation in Houston’s Arts Access Initiative, a coalition of more than 50 cultural institutions, philanthropies, and other local organizations dedicated to providing more arts resources in schools that previously lacked them. One of the initiative’s earliest priorities was conducting a comprehensive audit of the Houston Independent School District — one of the largest in the country — that revealed that roughly 30 percent of the city’s 209 elementary and middle schools offered neither a full-time arts specialist nor any arts programming outside of school hours.

Given the widespread gaps in availability, it came as no surprise that demand for the program outstripped its initial resources, with 60 schools applying to fill just 21 slots for the initiative’s initial rollout. Kisida and co-author Daniel Bowen, a professor of educational administration at Texas A&M, worked with the district to follow two groups of schools randomly selected to either participate in the initiative or act as a control group. In all, just over 10,000 children from grades 3–8 participated. 

Among those that took part, results were strong. Compared with the control group, they experienced about five additional “school-community partnerships” (a broad category encompassing everything from a half-day trip to the Houston Ballet or the Museum of Fine Arts to a semester-long collaboration with a full-time artist) each year. The learning opportunities represented a hugely varied sample of workshops, residencies, and excursions: 54 percent related to theater, 12 percent to dance, 18 percent to music, and 16 percent to visual arts.

Those experiences generated significant academic and social-emotional rewards. Participants earned significantly higher scores in writing on Texas’s standardized test, with particular gains in expository writing. They were also 3.6 percentage points less likely to be involved in a behavioral infraction. In accompanying surveys, elementary students also showed higher levels of emotional empathy (as measured by agreement with statements such as, “I want to help people who get treated badly”) and demonstrated more engagement in school and interest in potentially attending college. 

Those effects are broadly similar to those detected in other research on the effects of arts education, much of which has focused on field trips to cultural institutions like museums and theaters. But Bowen said the Houston study offered particular value in emphasizing experiences that predominantly occur within school buildings, the way most K–12 students tend to encounter the arts. 

“Virtually all of these experiences were happening during the regular school day and in their regular school environments,” Bowen said. “We’re hoping this will provide research that tells us more about the impact of the arts in more typical learning environments.”

The findings also contribute to public understanding of school-community partnerships, which are an increasingly common strategy to bring creative opportunities to schools where they have traditionally been in short supply. Over the past decade, such partnerships — which typically enlist a wide range of cultural partners to write grants and provide staff to school art programs — have sprung up in large districts like New Orleans, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. 

A similar study conducted by Kisida and Bowen on behalf of Boston’s EdVestors coalition found that participants in Boston Public Schools’ Arts Expansion Initiative were less likely to be absent from school and more engaged with their studies. Parents also reported higher levels of engagement with their children’s education.

Even for districts located far from major urban centers, resources abound for potential collaborations with local museums and dance troupes. According to the American Alliance for Museums, American museums devote roughly $2 billion each year to educational programming, with roughly three-quarters going to K–12 schools. That funding is like low-hanging fruit for schools and districts that have trouble financing their own arts offerings, Kisida said.

“It’s a policy development that is very rich and may be flying under the radar for a lot of education policy folks,” he argued. “What makes this such a unique opportunity for schools is that they are able to tap into the passion that already exists in these mission-driven nonprofits to supplement their services.”

As U.S. students in August and September began their fourth school year under the shroud of COVID-19, researchers from NWEA, the nonprofit behind the widely used MAP Growth assessment, took an early look at their achievement. The data suggest that gaps between pre- and post-pandemic performance have been slowly shrinking. 

Among the biggest contributors, for reasons researchers don’t quite understand: In 2022, the typical “summer slide” didn’t slide quite as much, giving kids a small advantage as the school year began.

The new findings are “evidence of resiliency on the part of students,” said Karyn Lewis, director of NWEA’s Center for School and Progress. “I think we’re seeing some buoyancy in terms of students’ achievement levels. That’s a testament to simply getting back in the classroom, being reconnected to their peers and their teachers.”

But in a more sobering finding, NWEA found that the youngest students in the study — third-graders who were kindergarteners when the pandemic closed their schools — showed the largest reading achievement gaps and the least “rebounding” from previous tests.

In reading, third-graders reduced their widest achievement gaps by just 10%, far less than other groups. By contrast, sixth-graders’ gaps shrank by 38%. The research found similarly small reductions for third-graders in math.

“That suggests to me it was really detrimental for those kiddos to be doing Zoom school in kindergarten to pick up on some of those foundational reading skills,” said Lewis. “And then for kids that return to the classroom in first grade, imagine trying to learn phonics with your teacher wearing a mask.”

These young students’ reading improvement was slower than their math improvement, researchers found. And they estimate that it will take them at least five years to fully recover from the pandemic in both reading and math, longer than nearly any other group studied except current eighth-graders. Given the five-year time horizon, many of those students may never fully get up to speed in either subject by the time they finish high school, they warn. 

The new findings add to data NWEA released last month that showed achievement losses in the 2021-2022 school year disproportionately affected low-performing students, whose skills have languished since the pandemic, unlike that of high-performing students. At the time, Lewis told The 74, “If we think of the range of test scores, we see that the ceiling has remained stable. But the bottom has dropped out.” 

Meanwhile, the new study found, the highest-performing 10% actually made more progress toward academic mastery than would have been expected absent COVID.

“In study after study we are seeing clear evidence that while some students are getting back on track quickly, far too many are not,” said Robin Lake of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at Arizona State University. “We’re also seeing clear evidence that schools and districts are really struggling to meet student needs.” 

Federal ESSER funds, slated to help schools recover from the pandemic, are due to run out over the next three years — and schools must figure out how they’re going to spend the money by September 2024. 

“I think this is a group we really need to keep our eye on and make sure that elementary teachers that are serving them now actually know how to help them catch up,” NWEA’s Lewis said. “You can imagine the trickle-down effect it has if these kids continue to struggle in reading.”

In addition to hurting students who had just transitioned to kindergarten, the pandemic deeply affected those who were even younger — from newborns to four-year olds, said Michelle Kang, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. As they prepare for elementary school, those students are going to need supportive teachers, she added, who “help them build on their resilience and thrive in academic and social emotional contexts.”

W. Steven Barnett, senior co-director and founder of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said it makes sense that the youngest students have struggled in reading. “If you think about where kids learn math and reading, the home environment has a bigger impact on reading than math. So the extent to which the home environment was also negatively impacted by the pandemic, you’d expect that to have a bigger impact on reading, a bigger impact on younger kids.”

While he’s encouraged by the summer findings, Barnett noted that a lot of federal COVID relief funding remains unspent, so it’s difficult to draw a direct line between federal aid and improvements in achievement. But he said schools should not waste time figuring out how to spend their relief money going forward, whether it’s for summer programs or intensive tutoring. “There are a bunch of tutoring programs that have been proven highly effective that schools could adopt that identify the kids who are behind,” he said.

A number of programs offer one-on-one instruction and don’t require licensed teachers for implementation. Actually, Barnett said, they offer training for volunteer and paraprofessional tutors. He also suggested that student-teachers could step in to fill a tutoring void in a tight teacher labor market. 

CRPE’s Lake said the new data suggests one clear conclusion: “Now is the time to shift course. We must start acting like this is a national emergency and bring new solutions to the table. We cannot continue to ignore the mounting evidence that we are failing to give this generation of students a solid foundation for the future.”

A ‘dampened’ summer slide

NWEA’s Lewis said the overall upward progress among the students studied is in part due to what she called a “less-worse slide” over the summer, compared to typical years.

And while it might seem logical to attribute that progress to intensive, ESSER-supported summer learning efforts, like Barnett, Lewis cautioned against trying to find “a thread of causality” in the findings. 

Actually, she said, other research suggests that many of the available summer remediation efforts “were probably not taken advantage of to the extent that would really lead to the results that we’re seeing here.”

But Lewis said it’s important to put both the progress and challenges in perspective. Those who would call the nation’s third-graders “a lost generation” — as well as those who don’t think the ongoing gaps are a big deal — are both missing the larger point.

“Like most things, I think somewhere in the middle is where we need to find ourselves,” she said. What may be most important is “shining light on which kids have been harmed the most” and serving them in a less standardized, more personalized way — for instance, through a “layered approach” to tutoring, summer programming, and other strategies. 

“There will be no silver bullet,” Lewis said.

New research on post-pandemic student achievement presents a sobering picture, offering a reality check for anyone who might think recovery is proceeding apace.

The study, from CALDER at the American Institutes for Research, NWEA and Harvard University, suggests school districts should do more. “We need more kids to get more hours of interventions,” said CALDER’s Dan Goldhaber.  

Taken together, the dozen mid-to-large sized school districts investigated enroll more than 600,000 students across 10 states in every region in the country. And they serve higher proportions of students of color and students attending high-poverty schools than national averages. The districts range from Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia to Dallas Independent School District, Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, and Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma.

Here are five big takeaways from the research:

1. Districts stopped the bleeding in the 2021-22 school year.

Based on achievement tests administered between fall 2021 and spring 2022, the new data show that districts for the most part put an end to student achievement declines in math and reading relative to pre-pandemic levels. 

2. Beyond that, though, results are mixed.

On average, math and reading test score gains during the 2021-22 school year didn’t move past pre-pandemic levels, with “little evidence of systematic catch-up” to where districts were before COVID hit. Students in a few elementary grades improved substantially in math, but beyond a few areas, researchers didn’t find a lot of compelling evidence of recovery in other subjects or grades.

In most cases, the positive effects were small — certainly less than what one might expect from such a large, national effort. Goldhaber told The 74, “I thought that there would be more clear, standout, home-run initiatives. And maybe naively I thought that.” While he and others envisioned the research showing strong evidence that, for instance, districts’ extended learning time or tutoring initiatives “are really moving the needle,” in reality, he said, “the results are much more mixed than that.”  

3. Two big problems: implementation and scale

Researchers found that in many districts, remediation initiatives planned for the fall of the 2021-22 school year were still in the process of starting as late as last spring — and in some cases, they hadn’t even launched. “We as a country have never tried to do anything like this at scale nationwide,” Goldhaber said. “And so that would be challenging no matter what.” But putting such a comprehensive system in place with a low national unemployment rate may be making it even harder, he said. “Districts may be competing with each other, both for talent and to bring in new programs. But they get much, much harder when you’re doing this for many, many students.”

And even when remediations were in place, researchers found, unforeseen events like teacher absences during Delta and Omicron surges — and chronic student absences — reduced the planned “frequency and dosage” of interventions. In a few schools, administrators said, teachers even told them they feared that sending students to pull-out groups “would increase everyone’s risk of infection.” One district leader said challenging student behavior made it harder to deliver remediation, while another said, “If behavior is the thing that students need to get going [in school], maybe behavior should be the intervention.” 

4. Schools share the blame with parents, who may have an inaccurate picture of their children’s post-Covid achievement.

Researchers interviewed district leaders, who said they faced several challenges, including staffing and capacity, as well as scheduling headaches. But a major problem was their ability to consistently engage targeted students and their parents, which will be critical going forward. Goldhaber said “hold-harmless” post-Covid grading policies may give parents a too-rosy picture of their children’s achievement. 

The researchers recommended that districts and states do more to inform families “about how students are doing now, whether they are on track for recovery, and what can be done if recovery does not look like it is happening at an adequate pace.” Goldhaber said grades “are probably the best direct signal that parents get about how their kids are doing. And so if the grades don’t end up lining up well with some objective measures, and parents are taking the grade as the signal, then they might be right to think things are O.K.”

5. Time is running out on closing gaps. 

The researchers noted that at this pace of recovery, according to recent findings, most students in grades 3 to 8 will need a minimum of three school years to fully get back up to speed, with upper elementary and middle school students potentially needing much longer. While a few of the districts studied are on pace to make up for lost progress, researchers said, others “will not reach pre-pandemic levels without significant acceleration” of their efforts.

“It’s not that the programs aren’t working, for the most part,” Goldhaber said. “I think it is that the scale and intensity of the treatments are less than what was planned — and less than what would be needed to see large gains.” Given that federal ESSER aid must be committed by 2024 and spent by 2025, schools are running out of time to offer effective interventions.

More broadly, Goldhaber cautioned that the study shouldn’t leave readers with the impression that “districts are just sort of fumbling the ball. I don’t think that’s the case.”

But he said districts and communities need to step up their game, with more tutoring and parent outreach, among other things.

For their part, parents need to understand that more needs to be done. “There are these national surveys that are suggesting that parents think things are more or less back on track,” Goldhaber said. “And I think there’s good evidence that kids are not yet back on track. So we’ve got what I would say is an ‘urgency gap.’” 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York  provided financial support to this paper from CALDER and The 74.

The paper, circulated Thursday through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, uses a combination of survey responses and statewide administrative records from Tennessee to create a framework for identifying how and where teacher shortages emerge. 

Those data principally come from school years leading up to 2019–20, anchoring the results in the pre-COVID era. But they will inevitably resound in debates over the pandemic’s effects on the education workforce, which have come to revolve around the central paradox of teacher shortages: Even as countless school and district officials say they’re struggling to fill positions, national labor statistics show only slight movement in teacher turnover rates the last few years. 

Matthew Kraft, a Brown economist and one of the paper’s authors, said that ambiguity around shortages arises from the decentralized nature of K-12 employment, which can bely the realities experienced by many teachers and administrators.

“Teacher shortages are real, period,” Kraft said. “Teacher shortages, however, are not universal. We’re trying to help people understand that it’s actually accurate for people to disagree about this because they’re answering from different perspectives.”

To conduct a comprehensive examination of K-12 employment, Kraft and his collaborators gathered response data from the Tennessee Educator Survey, an annual poll administered to thousands of teachers and school administrators by the state department of education. Tennessee offers a fairly representative setting, including several major urban districts along with substantial suburban and rural populations. 

Specifically, the study leveraged a survey item asking administrators if their school had a vacant teaching position at the beginning of the 2019–20 school year. Respondents at roughly 1,100 of Tennessee’s 1,740 schools answered that question, which provides a reasonable proxy for teacher shortages; while virtually all schools occasionally have to deal with unfilled jobs, classrooms that begin the academic year with insufficient or uncertain staffing may struggle to accelerate learning and establish relationships between students and teachers.

The responses, along with a decade’s worth of state information on student and teacher demographics, paint a picture of shortages that are both widely distributed throughout the state and narrowly experienced among schools themselves. To begin with, just 609 of the sample’s more than 40,000 teaching positions were vacant in the fall of 2019, with secondary schools accounting for 73 percent of all vacancies. But while three-quarters of all schools reported no vacancies, and just 6 percent of schools said that more than two positions were vacant, schools in virtually all of Tennessee’s commuting zones  — common units measuring discrete economic areas — reported at least one teaching vacancy.

Secondary schools in a handful of areas, including Memphis and Nashville, stand out as sites of acute shortage, but vacancies were seen throughout Tennessee rather than concentrating within specific regions or counties. About 80 percent of the variation in vacancy levels, in fact, was accounted for by particular schools within districts, rather than across school district borders. 

What’s more, the existence of vacant positions was significantly associated with certain features of schools and school communities. In keeping with earlier research showing that K-12 teachers — to a greater degree than other professionals with a similar level of educational attainment — prefer to find jobs near where they grew up, the authors discovered that schools employing a higher proportion of early-career educators who themselves attended a nearby high school (another question included on the statewide survey) reported fewer vacancies.

Teacher compensation also played an important role. A 0.5 percentage point increase in teachers’ scheduled salary bumps was correlated with a 36 percent drop in vacancy rates, while increases in a combined measure of self-reported working conditions (e.g., better school culture, more administrative support, strong relationships among faculty members) also drove down teaching shortfalls at the beginning of the year.

But perhaps the strongest indicators of unfilled teaching jobs were school-level turnover rates. This result may seem intuitive — more vacancies are naturally seen in workplaces where more people regularly leave — but Kraft and his colleagues highlight the finding as a validation of earlier work on “revolving-door” schools; for state and district leaders hoping to identify and support schools that struggle to staff classrooms, it is an important observation that past turnover tends to predict future turnover, especially when real-time data on teacher quit rates are typically hard to come by. In all, turnover rates were found to be 39 percent higher in schools with fall teacher vacancies than those without.

“For 20 years, we’ve been seeing that revolving doors predict shortages,” observed coauthor Danielle Edwards, a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute. “There’s something important about that measure, [which] doesn’t include the past year’s turnover. It’s the idea that a particular school might always be losing teachers, and we need to identify those schools because it’s also going to make it hard for them to get teachers in the future.”

Certain academic specialities are also harder to find than others. While about 20 percent of school districts said they didn’t receive enough applications for open social studies positions, nearly two-thirds reported insufficient interest in math, science, foreign language, and special education roles. That unevenness suggests that standard salary schedules may be “ill-equipped to address the wide variability in…subject-specific needs,” Kraft said.

He concluded by arguing that the frequency with which teaching jobs sit open across different communities, and the commonalities between schools that see higher vacancy levels, shows that teacher shortages both before and after COVID are the downstream effect of policies that can be altered — whether by differentiating teacher pay to attract applicants with especially valuable expertise, or improving working conditions so that all school employees feel more valued.

“Shortages don’t just appear out of nowhere by some miraculous force; they are a function of decisions we make, and they can be influenced by macroeconomic patterns…like a global pandemic. But underlying them is an infrastructure that we’ve designed and have agency to change.”

Outcomes were significantly worse for minority groups, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which released the findings earlier this week. 

While 40.7% of white students who experienced an abrupt closure completed their studies at other locations, only 25.3% of Black students and 26.4% of Hispanic students did the same. Just 32.9% of American Indian and 36.4% of Asian students also met that goal. 

The findings were based on the records of 143,215 students at 467 institutions across the country, nearly half of which were in the private, for-profit, two-year sector. Nearly 55% were female, 25% were white and 34% were 30 or older at the time. Almost 83% experienced closures at for-profit institutions. 

“Less than half of those students — 47% — ever re-enrolled at another post-secondary institution,” said Doug Shapiro, the Research Center’s executive director, speaking of the students as a whole. “So, their school’s closing effectively closed the doors on the student’s educational dreams.”

Of those who did re-enroll only 36.8% earned a postsecondary credential: More than half left their new school without earning any credential, Shapiro said. 

Roughly 100,000 of the students in the study attended campuses that closed abruptly, leaving them to scramble for transcripts that were often unavailable, making it even more difficult for them to pursue their degrees. 

Researchers say states can play a greater role in preventing abrupt closures by enacting more stringent initial authorization practices for these colleges and by providing oversight in the years that follow, in part by monitoring student complaints and implementing a regular, more rigorous renewal process. 

Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst with the State Higher Education group, acknowledged that it can be difficult for students to take a more proactive role around the issue. While private for-profit schools have long been criticized for predatory practices, ensnaring thousands, including minorities and military veterans, into expensive, worthless programs, many of these schools still have appeal. 

“There are already reasons to be skeptical of some of those institutions but sometimes those are the best options for students that need flexible schedules,” Burns noted, adding students would be wise to keep current copies of their transcripts and educate themselves about the transfer process. 

Not only did closures disrupt or end students’ education, but it left them in debt. The federal Department of Education allows for the discharge of federal student loans for eligible students when their schools close, the report states, but not everyone qualifies or successfully completes the process.  

A Government Accountability Office report from 2021, researchers said, shows that of 246,000 borrowers who weathered school closures between 2010 and 2020, only 80,000, or 32.5%, had their loans forgiven. These students, the GAO reported, collectively owed $4 billion, with the median debt hovering around $9,500 per student. 

The study found, too, that private for-profit, two- and four-year institutions enroll a disproportionately large number of students of color: in 2018, 12% of all students of color enrolled in postsecondary institutions eligible for federal student aid attended for-profit institutions.

Re-enrollment rates overall were highest among women at 49%, white students  at 62.5%, and traditional college-age students with the youngest, those 18-20, fairing the best at 54%.  

Those who re-enrolled within one to four months were the most likely to earn a credential, coming in at 47.6%:  Those who waited a year or more were the least likely at 18.7%. 

In several ways, the long-term findings on college closures mirror the nearer-term impact of the pandemic when college enrollment plummeted, particularly at community colleges which serve many low-income students of color. 

Nearly 12,000 campuses of institutions of higher education closed during the years examined by the study — often because of loss of accreditation related to financial challenges — and more have been added to the list since then, including Lincoln College of Illinois. 

The 157-year-old school survived a major campus fire in 1912, the Spanish flu of 1918, the Great Depression, World War II, the 2008 global financial crisis, according to its announcement, but it could not overcome the economic devastation of the pandemic and the impact of a crippling cyberattack.

 The school, which served 756 students in 2019, many of them first-generation college-goers, shuttered in May. Roughly 44% of the student body was Black. 

Student Jaylah Bolden, who has since transferred to another school, told The Washington Post earlier this month that many of her friends were not able to make that leap and now are not enrolled anywhere.

“They lost their faith,” she said. “We didn’t give up on school. School gave up on us.”

Researchers said abrupt closures in the private, for-profit four-year sector had the worst and most profound impact on re-enrollment rates.

This marks the first of three reports. The second, expected in early 2023, will quantify closures’ impact on students by comparing them to those whose schools did not shutter. The last will examine how state policies affect student outcomes, comparing students who experienced closures in states with stringent protections against those attending schools without such safeguards. No release date has been set for the final report.

The study, which leverages a massive survey sample collected online throughout the pandemic, was published Tuesday morning in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. Its findings highlight the mental and emotional toll exacted by COVID, while also offering new insights into how different employment sectors coped with its hardships.

Polling has consistently shown teachers and other school employees reporting signs of elevated stress over the last two years, with education experts worrying that higher levels of burnout might cause more educators to leave the profession. Joseph Kush, a professor of psychology at James Madison University and one of the paper’s authors, said that he and his collaborators were “kind of shocked” at the results.

“Our thought was that healthcare workers battling this virus on the front lines would clearly have the highest levels of distress,” Kush said. “And they were very high, but we found that teachers were actually quite a bit higher.”

The study relies on data from the COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey, an ongoing measure of public opinion developed by Facebook and Carnegie Mellon’s epidemiology-focused Delphi Research Group. The poll solicits daily responses from a random sample of Facebook users about their physical and mental health.

Kush and his co-authors, a trio of researchers from Johns Hopkins University, gathered data from between September 2020 and March 2021 — in many ways the nadir of COVID, when deaths often exceeded 3,000 per day and vaccines were still not widely administered. They focused on information from over 2.7 million employed adults, including nearly 135,000 teachers. Demographic identifiers related to age, gender, educational attainment, household size, and level of economic worry were also included.

Finally, they compared self-reported instances of anxiety, depression, and isolation among four different areas of the American workforce: education (from preschool through high school), healthcare workers, office workers, and a broad category of “other” occupations, including military personnel and agricultural workers. 

The results were striking. By far, teachers had the highest odds of reporting anxiety — 40 percent higher than healthcare workers, 20 percent higher than office workers, and 30 percent higher than members of the “other” category.” They were also likelier than healthcare workers, though by smaller increments, to report feeling isolated or depressed; office workers and “others” were notably more likely than teachers to say they were feeling isolated.

The spectrum of mental health ailments interacts somewhat unexpectedly with the frequency of remote vs. in-person work. While the healthcare category is broad — encompassing nurses and doctors, but also dentists, home health aides, and therapists — it is taken to represent the group that incurred the greatest risk of contracting COVID. White-collar employees, by contrast, were perhaps the demographic most shielded from the pandemic’s effects, with a huge proportion of offices operating remotely through the early months of 2021.

In the middle sat teachers, who fluctuated between in-person and remote instruction depending on timing and geography. School employees often received little clear guidance from state or federal authorities on how best to mitigate health risks to themselves and their students, and most were also navigating a chaotic transition to virtual teaching. 

Kush said that while the degree of remote work was perhaps the single factor most correlated with worsening mental health, the education profession sat particularly uneasily atop the pandemic’s ambiguities.

“Education was unique in that it grappled, even within districts, about whether teachers were going to work in-person from week to week,” said Kush. “That change, and the uncertainty in that, clearly brings this spike in anxiety.”

Notably, the remote-vs.-in-person dynamic was also present within the teaching workforce itself. Teachers conducting their lessons in Zoom classrooms were substantially more likely to experience symptoms of depression and (somewhat predictably) isolation than their colleagues working in school buildings. 

Whether the study’s findings can be boiled down to a simple mechanism — that working away from customers, colleagues, and students simply led to lower emotional well-being — will depend on the findings of further research, including an investigation of which workers reported relatively worse mental health before COVID emerged and after its most severe disruptions were allayed. 

One demographic caveat worthy of further examination pertains to gender: Female teachers were 70 percent more likely than male teachers to say that they felt anxiety during the period covered by the study. The teaching field is predominantly female, though the same could be said of healthcare workers.

“The makeup of the education and healthcare workforces is relatively similar, and we see gender differences both across all occupations and when we examine teachers exclusively,” Kush said. “So not only is this finding generalizable across all occupations, but even within teachers.”

But that academic slippage isn’t measured only in scale points and proficiency standards. In a new study timed to coincide with the NAEP release, researchers found that the erosion of math skills experienced by America’s eighth graders may lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings over the coming decades. Other important life trends, including high school graduation, college enrollment, and criminal arrests, are also likely to be adversely affected by years of thwarted schooling. 

The research offers a perspective on the immediate damage wrought by the pandemic, but also a penetrating observation about the relationship between students’ performance on standardized tests and their chances of future success. Douglas O. Staiger, an economics professor at Dartmouth and one of the paper’s co-authors, said that part of the motivation for the work was to explore whether progress on indicators like NAEP is connected to the authentic development of intellectual ability or simply the product of “teaching to the test.” 

“We interpret this evidence as saying that NAEP means something,” Staiger said. “When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life. And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

Experts have attempted to quantify the long-run costs of the pandemic since its early months. A model created in 2020 by economists for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that each additional quarter of disrupted learning could result in tens of trillions of dollars in vanished economic activity. 

The latest study used 2022 scores, available only for a matter of days, to project the potential consequences of COVID-era learning loss. But its analysis was principally based on decades of data from prior NAEP releases, which the research team used to generate a picture of how eighth-grade achievement in math correlates with students’ subsequent prospects in life. 

Staiger and co-author Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and faculty director of the university’s Center for Education Policy Research, collected testing records for about 125,000 students attending nearly 4,800 schools over multiple decades. Test-takers sat for the eighth-grade math exam multiple times in the 1990s and biannually since 2003. (Before 2003, participation in NAEP was not mandatory, though at least 38 states administered the test each year.) The average scores were used as a metric for general math performance among students born in each state 13 years prior. 

Next, they combined that information with representative responses from both the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey — which provided state- and year-specific data on income, educational attainment and teen motherhood — as well as FBI estimates of both violent and property crime arrests by age, year, and state. 

An assessment focusing solely on NAEP trends shows that eighth graders experienced substantial growth in math from 1990 to 2019, but that growth was highly variable across state lines. Students in North Carolina, where scores increased the most over that time, saw improvements roughly nine times the magnitude of those in comparative stragglers. And dishearteningly, the 2022 results show that achievement has shrunk in every state, including five (Oregon, North Dakota, Maine, Iowa, and Montana) in which eighth-grade math scores are now lower than they were 32 years ago.  

Still, Staiger argued, even with the persistence of achievement gaps across race and socioeconomic status, the scale of progress in the last three decades has been “astounding.” While the pandemic has, at least for the moment, lowered the baseline for average math proficiency, some of the benefits of past growth are still with us, he added. 

“We’re still way ahead of where we were in the 1990s, even though some states have slipped back,” said Staiger. “This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking about helping these cohorts, because we’ve now reset the norm. But we really should be celebrating the incredible things that schools and teachers have done over the last 30 years.”

But the apparent influence of those gains on later-life outcomes was even more striking. After controlling for the possible effects of race, gender and educational attainment of parents (all of which could exert a powerful sway on young lives independently of their classroom learning) Staiger and Kane found that growth in eighth-grade math was positively correlated with high school graduation, college enrollment, and life earnings from age 28. Girls born in states with relatively higher scoring jumps were also less likely to become teen mothers, while boys were less likely to be arrested for violent crimes or institutionalized.

Across the country, the average NAEP math achievement for eighth graders rose by 18 points between 1990 and 2007 (the year when today’s 28-year-olds were enrolled in eighth grade); that rise was associated with an annual boost to earnings of 4.2 percent. In best-in-the-nation North Carolina, the increase in earned income was even higher at 7 percent. 

But that happy news must be revised in light of the pandemic-era learning loss illustrated by last week’s NAEP release. The average decline of eight points would conversely imply a loss of 1.6 percent of earnings. Using existing estimates of Americans’ lifetime income, the authors present a rough calculation of what that would mean across 48 million public school students: $900 billion.

That stark projection assumes that the learning effects observed over three school years — massive learning loss beginning in spring of 2020, then likely reaching its nadir in 2021 before rebounding more recently — are rendered permanent. Several pieces of contemporary evidence indicates that this will not be the case, as the recent release of state test scores show reading and math performance climbing gradually upward.

But some researchers argue that a complete turnaround will only come through historic changes to K-12 schooling in the years ahead. Harvard’s Kane has publicly struck a pessimistic tone, noting in a conversation with The 74 that the learning recovery strategies implemented in most states won’t come close to reversing the full impact of learning loss for all K-12 students.

Staiger issued a similar call to urgency, arguing that the $190 billion cost of the federal government’s pandemic aid to schools would be well spent if it could trigger a revival of math performance and earning potential. Hints of progress from the return to in-person learning could still end in the diminished learning trajectories of tens of millions of students, he added.

“They’re not saying that test scores are back to where they were. We’re half a year behind, and we’re staying half a year behind. So you ask, are we going to catch up by 2024? If we do nothing and just go back to business as usual, I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that we will.”

Eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” fell by a jarring eight points since the test was last administered in 2019, while fourth-grade scores dropped by five points; both are the largest math declines ever recorded on the test. In reading, both fourth- and eighth-grade scores fell by three points, leaving them statistically unchanged since 1992, when NAEP was first rolled out. 

The findings comport with those of previous assessments of students’ COVID-era achievement, whether conducted by academic researchers or state and district authorities, which have shown undeniable evidence of diminished performance in English and especially math. Just a few months ago, the release of scores for 9-year-olds on NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” assessment — a different exam measuring today’s students against a baseline set in the early 1970s — offered similarly ominous results.

Even still, the education world has waited nervously for the unveiling of today’s data, perhaps the most important federal scores to appear since the pandemic began. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that while relative stability in reading scores across some of the nation’s largest districts offered a few “bright spots … amidst all the chaos of the pandemic,” the unprecedented reversals in math should spark serious concern.

“Normally for a NAEP assessment … we’re talking about significant differences of two or three points,” Carr said on a Friday call with reporters. “So an eight-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.”

A look at the results in their entirety show just how significant. There were no statistically significant gains in math, for either fourth or eighth graders, in any state in 2022. Instead, fourth-grade scores dropped significantly in 43 jurisdictions (either the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity) while remaining statistically unchanged in 10. Eighth-grade math fell in 51 jurisdictions while holding steady in just two, Utah and the DoDEA schools. The average eighth-grade score has not only fallen since 2019 — it is significantly lower than when the test was administered in 2003.

Translated into the exam’s performance levels, a massive downward shift can be seen. In 2019, 34% of fourth graders and 27% of eighth graders scored below the “NAEP Basic” level in reading — the most rudimentary threshold of English mastery classified by the test. In 2022, those groups had grown to 37% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders, respectively. The below-basic classification also swelled in math, from 19% of fourth graders and 31% of eighth graders in 2019 to 25% of fourth graders and 38% of eighth graders in 2022.

Beneath the headline numbers, differing effects among student groups also made an impact on longstanding achievement gaps. For example, gaps expanded in fourth-grade math performance between white and African-American students, white and Hispanic students, male and female students, and students with and without disabilities. Conversely, gaps actually closed between many of the same groups in eighth-grade reading — including by a surprising seven points between English learners and native English speakers. 

Brown University economist Emily Oster, who has studied the effects of COVID and remote learning on student achievement, said that trends in NAEP scores were dynamic and varied, making them difficult to distill. Big-picture phenomena, however, broadly lined up with the existing evidence, she argued.

“Every state has four numbers, so one can construct quite a lot of different narratives around that. But the general patterns are that the losses are big, they’re much bigger in math than in reading, and they’re much bigger in more vulnerable kids. Those seem like things that are very consistent with every other piece of information that we’ve seen in post-pandemic testing.”

Julia Rafal-Baer is a K-12 education expert who serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, a nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP. In a statement, she said the results demonstrated the existence of “an education crisis” that demanded new solutions.

“The latest data isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know,” Rafal-Baer wrote in an email. “COVID was exceptionally disruptive, and we’re running out of time to ensure that kids can indeed recover from this level of unfinished learning.”

State-by-state comparisons difficult

No state could be said to have defied the downward pressure exerted by the pandemic and its countless challenges to learning. But the national averages do conceal substantial variation across different areas of the country. 

Some of the states where scores dropped the furthest, for example, were clustered in the mid-Atlantic region. Delaware’s fourth-grade math scores dropped an astonishing 14 points — nearly three times the national average — while its losses in fourth-grade reading (-9), eighth-grade math (-12), and eighth-grade reading (-7) were also significant. Virginia (-11 points in fourth-grade math), Maryland (-11 in eighth-grade math), and the District of Columbia (-8 in fourth-grade reading) also saw some of the worst declines across various grade/subject combinations.

By contrast, a small group of states seemed to weather COVID reasonably well, experiencing less severe declines than most. Overall, while performance in eighth-grade math was weakened virtually everywhere, 10 jurisdictions, including Georgia and Wisconsin, saw no statistically significant decline in fourth-grade math. Another 22 were able to stave off declines in fourth-grade reading, while 18 did so in eighth-grade reading. 

A small number of states — Alabama, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa and Louisiana — kept scores from significantly falling in three out of four grade/subject combinations. Most impressive of all, Department of Defense Education Activity schools — 160 across 11 foreign countries, seven states, and two territories, each serving military families — saw no statistically significant drops in any subject or age group. Eighth graders in DoDEA schools, in fact, made the only statistically significant growth of any student group in this round of NAEP, improving in reading by two points since 2019. 

The differences between states will naturally raise questions about the procedures they followed to offer schooling during the pandemic. Among the states that saw the largest score declines, many stuck with remote learning far into the 2020-21 school year as a precaution against COVID spread. 

Oster, whose previous research has found that longer periods of remote instruction were linked with more severe learning loss, called the results “very consistent with what we’ve seen in state-level data, which suggests that places that had the most in-person learning lost less than the places that had more virtual learning.” Even so, she added, a state like California — where she would have expected student scores to fall especially dramatically based on that correlation — instead saw more modest declines.

NCES’s Carr argued that the release provided little scope for comparisons between states, since so many jurisdictions experienced “massive, comprehensive declines.”

“There’s nothing in this data that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and student achievement,” she said. “Let’s not forget that remote learning looked very different across the United States — the quality, all the factors that were associated with implementing remote learning. It is extremely complex.” 

Megan Kuhfeld, a researcher at the nonprofit testing organization NWEA, said that the average NAEP effects dovetailed with her own expectations based on previous research studies of post-pandemic learning loss. That said, she agreed with Carr that the huge diversity of COVID learning policies — where neighboring school districts sometimes took radically different approaches — made direct comparisons difficult.

“Prior research has supported the idea that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps, but I think it is harder to make that sort of inference at the state level because district reopening policies often varied widely within states,” Kuhfeld wrote in an email.

Urban districts fared better in reading 

If a silver lining exists within the release, it comes from some of America’s biggest cities.

In addition to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., 26 urban school districts around the country participate in NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment program. The measure offers a unique look inside districts that collectively enroll millions of students and were subject to substantially different state-level public health policies.

Disappointingly, math results in these districts were no better than elsewhere: Fourth-grade and eighth-grade scores alike sank by eight points on average, matching or surpassing the declines for the nation as a whole. 

Performance in English, however, offered somewhat sunnier news: Average scores in reading held up in 17 cities, falling in just nine. Fully 21 of the 26 urban districts managed the same in eighth-grade reading, with only Shelby County, Tennessee; Jefferson County, Kentucky; Guilford County, North Carolina; and Cleveland, Ohio, experiencing statistically significant drops. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, eighth-grade reading performance even improved. 

Michael Petrilli, who leads reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, nevertheless took a dark view of the overall NAEP outcomes. 

“There’s no sugar coating these awful results,” Petrilli said. “Save for Los Angeles (which I honestly cannot explain), the only question is whether states and localities did bad or worse. These data tell us how big a hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Now it’s up to all of us to dig ourselves — and our students — out.” 

Others took a somewhat more hopeful outlook. Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said the urban districts’ results provided “a glimmer of hope in these otherwise dismal data.” Moreover, he added, both the NAEP data and state standardized test scores have already shown evidence that student achievement is bouncing back from its pandemic nadir.

Going forward, Loveless observed, state and school district leaders will likely view this round of scores as a kind of new student performance baseline. That could provide an accountability mechanism if things don’t improve.

“I think 2021 was probably the bottom, and we’re getting little shards of progress in these NAEP data,” he said. “But I’m expecting [the 2024 NAEP results] to look quite a bit better, and the state tests, too. If they don’t, I think people will start raising harsh questions.”

Dismal releases from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — often referred to as the “nation’s report card” — have become a biannual tradition in recent years as academic progress first stalled, then eroded for both fourth and eighth graders. But today’s publication, tracking long-term academic trends for 9-year-olds from the 1970s to the present, includes the first federal assessment of how learning was affected by COVID-19.

The picture it offers is bleak. In a special data collection combining scores from early 2020, just before schools began to close, with additional results from the winter of 2022, the report shows average long-term math performance falling for the first time ever; in reading, scores saw the biggest drop in 30 years. And in another familiar development, the declines were much larger for students at lower performance levels, widening already-huge learning disparities between the country’s high- and low-achievers. 

The results somewhat mirror last fall’s release of scores for 13-year-olds, which also revealed unprecedented learning reversals on the long-term exam. But that data was only collected through the fall of 2019; the latest evidence shows further harm sustained by younger students in the following years. 

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a call with reporters that the “sobering” findings illustrated the learning losses inflicted by prolonged school closures and student dislocation. 

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group of students,” Carr said. “We don’t make this statement lightly.”

Average math scores for 9-year-olds sank by a staggering seven points between 2020 and 2022, the only such decline since the long-term test was first administered in 1973. Average reading performance — generally thought to be less affected by schooling than math, and therefore theoretically shielded from pandemic shock — fell by five points. 

Inevitably, that means that fewer students hit the test’s benchmark performance levels than two years ago. For math, the percentage of 9-year-olds scoring at 250 or above (defined as “numerical operations and basic problem solving”) fell from 44 percent of test takers to 37 percent this year; those scoring 200 or higher (“beginning skills and understanding”) fell from 86 percent to 80 percent; even the vast majority scoring at the most basic threshold of 150 (“simple arithmetic facts”) shrank slightly, from 98 percent to 97 percent, across the two testing periods.

No demographic subgroup saw gains on the test, but disparities existed in the rates of decline. For instance, math achievement for white 9-year-olds dropped by five points, but for their Hispanic and African American counterparts, the damage was even greater (eight points and 13 points, respectively). As a result, the math achievement gap between whites and African Americans increased by a statistically significant amount. 

In reading, scores for African Americans, Hispanics, and whites were all six points lower, leaving relative gaps unchanged. Scores for Asian students only fell by one point. 

Notably, the long-term trend assessment differs somewhat from the main NAEP test administered every two years. It follows student performance going back a half-century, and it is taken with a paper and pencil instead of digitally. For the most part, testing items are unchanged from the early 1970s, assessing more basic skills of literacy and computation than are generally seen on the main NAEP.

The broad trend-line has been positive over the life of the exam, and even in the most recent release, student scores on both subjects are far higher than when they were first measured. But Dan Goldhaber, a researcher and longtime observer of student performance, said it was striking to see that upward momentum evaporate so quickly.

“A bit of a hidden story in education, when you look at a swath of 40 or 50 years, is the progress that students have made — and the disproportionate progress that historically marginalized students have made,” said Goldhaber, the of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes. “We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years.”

‘Particularly bad’

One of the most consistent, and consistently worrying, findings of previous NAEP rounds has been the sharp disjunction of students at either end of the performance scale. For over a half-decade, high-scoring students have generally performed a point or two better with each iteration of the test — or at least stayed at the same level — while low-scoring students have seen their scores fall.

The phenomenon of growing outcome gaps is again apparent in the post-COVID results, though it takes a slightly different form. At all performance levels across both subjects, 9-year-olds experienced statistically significant declines in their scores; but even with the identical downward trajectory, struggling students lost so much ground that disparities still expanded.

In reading, 9-year-olds scoring at the 90th percentile of all test takers in 2022 lost two points compared with their predecessors in 2020. But students scoring far below the mean, 10th percentile fell by 10 points.

Consequently, the average reading gap between kids at the 90th versus the 10th percentile grew from 103 points to 110 points in just two years. In math,the divergence grew from 95 points to 105 points over the same period.

Goldhaber said that the trends visible in NAEP performance largely dovetailed with those he and other researchers have identified using test scores from the MAP test, administered by the assessment group NWEA. In multiple data sources, he argued, it has become clear that the pandemic’s effects have been disproportionately negative for already struggling and disadvantaged children.

“It’s not just the drops, it’s where we’re seeing the drops in math and reading tests, and they’re disproportionately at the bottom of the test distribution,” he said. “So the pandemic is reversing a long-term trend of narrowing achievement gaps. That’s particularly bad, to my mind.”

The fact that losses are so heavily concentrated among the lowest-scoring segment of students may help explain what Goldhaber termed an “urgency gap”; neither states, school districts, or even families seemed driven to embrace the generational learning interventions — from dramatically lengthening the school year to implementing widespread one-to-one tutoring — that the scale of learning loss demands. As just one indicator, billions of dollars of federal COVID aid to schools remains unspent more than a year after it was first allocated.

That may change in the wake of the NAEP release. While previous studies have pointed to similar, and similarly inequitable, learning loss over the last few years by using data from the MAP and state standardized tests, the Nation’s Report Card is seen as the authoritative performance metric for American K-12 schools. As NCES Commissioner Carr noted, today’s release provides the first nationally representative results measuring achievement before and after the pandemic. Ninety-two percent of schools where the test was administered in 2020 were re-assessed earlier this year.

Tom Kane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agreed that NAEP scores definitively affirmed what prior studies have already demonstrated. More observers needed to study the magnitude of the loss, he added, because the proposed academic remedies in most of the country are “nowhere near enough” to combat it.

Kane analogized classroom learning to an industrial process — the conveyor belt slowed in 2020 and 2021, but has resumed functioning since at roughly the same rate as before the pandemic. But to make up for lost time, he argued, it would need to be sped even further.

“What we learned…is that the conveyor belt is back on, but at about the same old speed,” Kane said. “Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to help students learn even more per year in the next few years, or these losses will become permanent. And that will be a tragedy.”

Teacher turnover rates are actually about the same as they were before the pandemic, according to a working paper released this month through the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. Flush with pandemic relief money and faced with the generational challenge of fostering learning recovery, school districts are hiring for more positions and leaving vacancies open for longer.

A wide-ranging analysis of employment trends from national and state-level sources, the brief does confirm that the K-12 workforce shrank significantly after the onset of COVID-19 and its disruptions to schooling. After roughly a half-decade of steady growth, total public school jobs decreased by roughly 9% through May 2020. The initial drop represented more than twice the number of positions erased during the financial crisis of 2008. 

But the data also suggested that those positions were disproportionately cut from non-teaching ranks. Occupational records from both national and state sources showed measured declines among nurses, administrative support staff, paraprofessionals and other predominantly non-instructional employees. Across all the states included in the study, there was actually generally less teacher turnover during the summer of 2020 — likely the residue of that year’s severe economic slowdown, which discouraged many from leaving their jobs. (During the summer of 2021, seven of those states saw an average turnover increase of 1.2 percentage points, effectively bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels.)

Confusion about the state of the education field has emerged due to a lack of consistently reported data on millions of school employees, the authors argue. In fact, the report was only made possible by combining several overlapping federal data sets — each with its own liabilities — with additional findings from 16 states that publicly reported annual statistics on turnover through the first year of the pandemic.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown economist and the paper’s lead author, said he was “very concerned” about the increased burnout teachers reported experiencing over the last few years. While a true mass exodus of educators hasn’t yet occurred, Kraft said that profession-wide exhaustion could someday trigger one. But he added that short-term instability in the education workforce has “obfuscated” longer-term issues of working conditions and public funding that demand more thorough examination.

“There’s no doubt that this story [of educator dissatisfaction and turnover] is catching our national attention, and it’s generating headlines,” Kraft said. “The problem is that most of those stories are asking a question for which there is a nuanced response, and nuance isn’t communicated effectively in our sound-bite world.”

Kraft and his co-author, Joshua Bleiberg, culled figures from four surveys conducted by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, each collecting regular reports from tens or hundreds of thousands of employers in both the private and public sectors. That information allowed them to not only generate month-by-month estimates of the total number of elementary and secondary education jobs, but also form a clearer view of the large swings in hirings, resignations and layoffs between March 2020 and May 2022.

The pair supplemented that picture with files from 16 state education agencies — though these additions were complicated by the states’ differing definitions of turnover. For the purposes of their study, Kraft and Bleiberg described it as the percentage of teachers in one school year who did not return to the same school or district in the next year.

One possible explanation for the vacancies that did linger was a period of weak job growth after schools were closed in spring 2020. According to one federal survey, K-12 and higher education institutions collectively hired 32,000 fewer educators per month over the first six months of the pandemic. That belt-tightening was likely caused by worries that the austerity measures of the last global economic downturn would be repeated, Kraft remarked.

“We had lived through the lessons of the Great Recession, which substantially cut education funding over multiple years and led to hundreds of thousands of teachers being laid off,” he said. “So schools were cautious, and I think rightly so, about filling positions even from natural turnover.”

After the slashed budgets of the 2010s, few if any observers predicted the federal government would allocate nearly $200 billion in pandemic relief to American schools. If that understandable misapprehension guided decisions during the early phases of the crisis, a general absence of accurate, real-time data has further clouded the picture ever since. 

The deficiencies of public data sources are several, Kraft and Bleiberg note. Some surveys don’t clearly differentiate among K-12 employees, such that job additions or attrition among non-instructional staff can be conflated with those affecting teachers. Others make it hard to differentiate between public K-12 schools and private institutions (or even colleges and universities). And as with virtually all data regularly collected by the government, figures are subject to serious revisions even months after their initial publication. 

Chad Aldeman is the policy director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, a research group that studies education finance. In an email to The 74, Aldeman called national teacher employment data “at best a patchwork quilt of federal, state and local databases, much of it several years old.” That disorganization makes it difficult to answer even basic questions, such as how many job openings exist throughout the nation’s K-12 schools and which specific positions principals and superintendents are hiring.

In normal circumstances, that kind of opacity paves the way to misguided policy choices. But at a time of unprecedented tumult in the labor market, it might come at the cost of critical, one-time resources that could otherwise be spent helping students climb back from years of lost learning. Aldeman said he was aware of cases in which districts were poaching from their neighbors, or even cannibalizing their own workforce, to fill specialist roles.

“I don’t think state and federal policymakers are taking these data gaps seriously,” he wrote. “Instead, states seem to be spending their own money blindly, and I don’t see many thoughtful plans to track the spending alongside student outcomes to make sure the increased staffing levels actually translate into better services for students.”

Kraft said that public confusion over the nature of teacher shortages is a serious concern, pointing to previous evidence showing higher vacancy rates at high-poverty or predominantly minority schools. The difficulties those schools face in hiring, and the increased stress suffered by their staff, are persistent problems that call out redress through higher pay and better working conditions, he argued; misbegotten narratives based on incomplete information could only make them harder to solve.

“We are failing these communities by failing to understand the nature of the problem, Kraft said. “And by failing to understand the nature of the problem, we may well diagnose it incorrectly and prescribe remedies that fail to address the underlying, structural inequities.”

New polling on the American education system shows widespread approval of local schools — along with ominous signs of dissatisfaction among both parents and the public at large.

In a report published today by PDK International, a professional organization for teachers, over 1,000 adults expressed higher levels of faith in their community’s public schools than have ever been recorded in the survey’s 48-year history, with 54% giving them an A or B. That figure represents an 11-point increase from 2018 and a robust show of support given the extraordinary challenges of post-COVID learning recovery.

But respondents also showed only modest trust in educators to deliver capable instruction on potentially controversial subjects like race, gender and sexuality. In keeping with other recent public opinion data, that result was split across partisan and ideological lines, with Democrats showing greater trust than Republicans. And the percentage of respondents saying they would want their own children to become teachers fell to just 37%, a record low.

Teresa Preston, PDK’s director of publications, said the perceived desirability of the teaching profession had been declining in recent years and that its current low might reflect public recognition of the hardships inflicted by COVID.

Observed Preston, “2018 was the first year when we had a majority of respondents say that they would not want their child to become a teacher, and now it’s an even higher percentage. It suggests continued awareness of how tough teaching is, especially during the pandemic, and all the pressures that teachers have been under.”

Poor compensation was the most commonly listed reason for the negative reaction (cited by 29% of respondents), followed by workplace demands and stress (26%) and lack of respect (23%). Across 13 previous polls that included a version of that question, an average of 60% of respondents favored the idea of their children working in classrooms.

Perhaps more concerning was the low confidence in educators to teach sensitive subjects. Although fully 72% of public school parents said they had faith in their community’s teachers, compared with 63% of the full adult sample, far fewer members of the general public trusted teachers to “appropriately” handle politically contentious issues. 

Only in the case of U.S. history and civics did bare majorities believe teachers could do this (56% and 50%, respectively); in five other areas — social-emotional growth (48%), racial and ethnic diversity (46%), media literacy (46%), gender and sexuality (38%), and how the history of racism affects America today (44%) — fewer than half of respondents said the same. Among parents, who generally thought more highly of teachers’ capacity to navigate dicey subjects, just 44% said teachers would handle gender and sexuality appropriately.

Those figures dovetail with findings from other recent surveys. An Ipsos poll from October showed a six-point dip in trust for teachers between 2019 and 2021. More recently, a survey released this week by the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education found a majority of state residents wanted parents to be able to opt students out of content that they found objectionable.

Notably, stark divisions existed in which demographic groups trusted teachers in their community most (though margins of error were higher for these subgroups, given their smaller sample sizes). Black respondents in particular said they trusted teachers less than their white counterparts with respect to every controversial subject. Just one-third said they believed teachers would handle gender, sexuality or racial diversity appropriately.

A partisan disparity prevailed as well. While Democrats said they trusted local teachers by a nearly 50-point margin (73%, versus 27% who said they did not), the spread among Republicans was less than half that (60%/40%). Just 58% of independents said they had confidence in local teachers, compared with 42% who didn’t. 

Preston noted that respondents did not list reasons for their assessment of teachers — it is possible, for instance, that African-Americans want much more intensive instruction in racial diversity than is currently offered, she said.

“I think it does speak to the fact that Americans have a lot of questions about what’s going on in their local schools and schools across the nation,” said Preston.

That view was shared by others in the education community.

Shannon Holston, the chief of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that favors strengthening teacher preparation and classroom standards, said it was “heartening” that parents and the public gave high marks to their local schools. Still, she added, the declining prestige of the profession was a major concern that could be driven by the perception that “teaching doesn’t require specialized skills and knowledge.” 

“The significant increase in the number of people who wouldn’t want their child to become a teacher is concerning,” Holston said in a statement. “To elevate the status of teaching so that we can attract and retain the strong, diverse teacher workforce our children need, we must set a high bar for entry into the classroom and provide teachers with comprehensive support and the competitive salaries they deserve.” 

The poll’s full sample was 1,008 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

Correction: Shannon Holston is chief of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality.

New research released last month has offered persuasive new evidence of the potential of summer learning opportunities, particularly in STEM subjects. One, a meta-analysis compiling the findings of dozens of prior studies over the last two years, shows consistent gains in math achievement resulting from student enrollment in summer coursework. Another showed participants in a summer STEM program enjoying significant later-life benefits, including greater success in college and higher earnings. 

The papers emerged just as national leaders made a concerted push to broaden access to summer instruction. In July, the White House exhorted state and district leaders to spend more of their federal relief funds on tutoring, afterschool activities, and summer enrichment. Next, the Department of Education launched the Engage Every Student Initiative, a public-private partnership designed to guide local communities toward evidence-based programming. The administration even sent First Lady Jill Biden on the road to highlight the work of schools that have expanded their summer offerings.

The campaign demonstrates the promise that many experts see in summer learning — and the enormous academic challenges facing the nation’s schools after three school years disrupted by COVID-19. Along with extended school days and a stiff dose of high-quality tutoring, researchers and policymakers alike are turning to the traditionally vacant summer months as an untapped resource in the battle against academic erosion. 

Kathleen Lynch, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut and coauthor of the meta-analysis, said the existing research shows not only that summer learning is an effective means of bolstering academic growth, but also a worthy recipient of finite COVID recovery dollars.

“Summer programs provide an opportunity for children to catch up on material they may have missed, or to enrich their learning on new topics aligned with their interests,” Lynch wrote in an email. “I would recommend an effort to replicate successful models over the next few years, as schools and districts continue to combat learning setbacks that children experienced due to the pandemic.”  

Lynch and her co-authors cast a wide net to gather relevant findings from existing research dating between 1998 and 2020, ultimately selecting 37 studies of summer math initiatives that included control groups against whom program effects could be assessed. Programs could be conducted in a school, a community site, or private homes, and while some of the experiments were exclusively math-focused, others provided instruction in other subjects as well.

Participation in the programs significantly lifted children’s math performance. The average effect size of .1 standard deviations (a common measure showing the difference in any group from the statistical mean) in improved standardized test scores compares favorably to other touted learning interventions, such as teacher merit pay and school choice. And the benefits were similar in scope regardless of whether a given program served primarily low-income or high-income children. 

That distinction is critical given the intense diversity of summer learning experiences. Many are operated by school districts on a remedial basis, recruiting (or requiring the participation of) students who struggled academically during the year. Historically, these forms of summer school have struggled with poor attendance and low engagement from participants.

By contrast, Lynch noted, “contemporary summer programs increasingly focus on enrichment, hands-on activities, and learning via projects and inquiry.” Such programs, offered electively, are more likely to attract high-achieving pupils from relatively advantaged families.

Another paper released in July focused on a particular initiative that attempted to split the difference by signing up high-achieving students from racial or ethnic backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in STEM fields. The program, offered by an elite technical university located in the Northeast, draws a disproportionately nonwhite field of rising high school seniors with top test scores and an average GPA of 3.86. 

Researchers from Columbia Teachers College, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the consulting company Mathematica assessed the effects of three separate varieties of the program: two summer residential periods (one week and six weeks, respectively) on campus, complete with direct coursework in STEM subjects as well as workshops and visits to STEM-focused workplaces, as well as a six-month engagement that was primarily offered to participants online. 

In all, participants from the 2014, 2015, and 2016 cohorts of experiment gained impressive life advantages in the years to come. Across all three summer offerings, students were more likely than members of a demographically similar control group to enroll in college, as well as persist and finish with a degree. Perhaps most importantly, since the program’s top priority was to diversify the STEM pipeline, participants offered seats in the six-week residential experience were 33 percent more likely to graduate in four years with a STEM degree. 

Sarah Cohodes, an associate professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a co-author of the study, said that the experiment provides evidence of a somewhat rarefied type of summer learning opportunity, tailored to students who were likely to enjoy its full benefits. That makes it a limited, though suggestive, window into what can be expected from summer school generally.

“Does it look like what we’re thinking about when we’re thinking about remediating learning loss? No, it doesn’t,” Cohodes said. “But I think you can see this as an existence proof that, yes, carefully designed programs targeted at the right level for students can make a huge difference for their life trajectories, and it is possible to create summer opportunities that change the lives of students.” 

Intriguingly, the study’s findings in terms of college outcomes aren’t clearly attributable to a particular facet of the college program; for instance, graduation rates after five years with a STEM degree were not significantly different in the one-week experience versus the six-week experience. This suggests that the benefits might be attributable to the simple influence of gathering students from traditionally underrepresented groups together on a prestigious campus, Cohodes argued.

“It’s not clear that the learning that made a difference here was standard, ‘I know more physics than I knew before’-type learning,” she observed. “A lot of it seemed to be around knowledge of the college application process, knowledge of what was out there, peer effects and social networks.”

The development of non-cognitive skills and traits was an explicit point of focus in Lynch’s compilation of summer learning studies. Across a range of 37 non-cognitive outcomes (including mindsets and attitudes, social skills, and academic behaviors like school attendance), summer math programs were associated with positive movement in 27; the average effect size for those outcomes was roughly equivalent to the programs’ effects on math test scores and course grades, with notable reductions to school-year absenteeism.

“The number of studies that measured noncognitive impacts is relatively small, but the evidence we found suggested that there’s unlikely to be a tradeoff between learning and noncognitive outcomes from attending summer programs,” Lynch said.

One example singled out in the meta-analysis was the Horizons National Summer Enrichment Program, an intensive summer intervention serving thousands of low-income pre-K–8 students across dozens of affiliates in 20 states. A 2018 report commissioned by the organization found that its enrollees were less likely to be chronically absent or repeat a grade. A Horizons affiliate in New Haven, Connecticut, was one of the stops on the first lady’s July tour of summer learning and enrichment programs.

As policymakers at the state and federal levels search for tools to restore the academic growth forfeited during the pandemic, they will have access to thousands of existing summer schools, camps, and enrichment activities targeted toward K-12 students of different ages and achievement levels. National Summer Learning Association CEO Aaron Dworkin, who accompanied First Lady Biden on her visit to Horizons, said in an interview that this panoply of approaches — wedded to ample government support — could make a significant impact in the next few years.

“We have a lot of people who are doing what they think is best, but we can support and train them and invest in them so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. A lot of people have tried already and learned the hard way. What’s different is that we have a lot of training, data, intermediaries, and infrastructure to support all kinds of people who are trying to be helpful right now.”

Despite heavy pushback from students, the change had its intended effect. The new rule reduced overall absences by 20-28%, according to a working paper published in July by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“There is a quite substantial impact on absenteeism,” explained co-author Nina Drange, an economist at the Frisch Centre and Statistics Norway. “These students do indeed reduce their absences.”

What’s more, it became much rarer for students to miss school days en masse. Some 29-39% fewer Norway high schoolers were what researchers call “chronically absent,” missing more than 10% of all school days. Chronic absenteeism remains one of the pandemic’s most serious consequences for U.S. schools.

In Norway, the policy change produced a “sharp” drop, Drange observed. 

Drange and her colleagues were able to document the policy’s impact by comparing Norway high schools students in 11th-13th grade, who faced the strict consequence of missing multiple classes, with 10th graders who did not. That ruled out the possibility that observed changes between the two groups were caused by other factors. Absences among the older students saw a steep decline while the 10th graders’ rate held mostly steady.

Experts highlight the risk of chronic absenteeism and the 10% absence threshold because it can predict reading difficulties by third grade, failure to earn a diploma in high school and higher risk of juvenile delinquency later in life.

Now, with the American education system still reeling from the pandemic, many school leaders are concerned with the amount of instructional days their students are missing. Rates of chronic absenteeism have skyrocketed nationwide, hitting 40% in the nation’s two largest school systems, New York City and Los Angeles.

“We believe that chronic absences doubled across the country, maybe more” since COVID struck, said Hedy Chang, who closely follows the issue as executive director of Attendance Works. 

She estimates the issue affected 16% of students nationwide before the pandemic and now affects over 30%. Missing school has escalated into a “full-scale crisis,” a June report from her organization said.

Those increases came partly because students were forced to miss class for quarantine. But also because of social factors, such as youth needing to pick up jobs to support their families, having spotty internet connections during remote learning or being fearful of catching the virus at school.

Those are underlying conditions the Norway rule can’t solve, Chang points out.

“The policy itself doesn’t address root causes,” she told The 74. 

The Norwegian government supports unemployed families to a greater degree than the U.S., added Drange. If students were missing class because they had to pick up jobs to financially support loved ones, “I guess we wouldn’t see these huge effects” from the no-grade policy, she said.

Further, Chang worries that penalizing students who miss a higher share of school would disproportionately affect youth who already face severe disadvantages, putting them even further behind. 

“I’m concerned that … the grading approach will exacerbate existing inequalities,” she said.

The Gini index, which measures inequality on a scale of zero to 100, with 100 being most unequal, rates the United States a 41.5 and Norway a 27.7, indicating that students in the Scandinavian state may begin from a more level playing field than American youth. Furthermore, obtaining a doctor’s note to explain an absence due to illness, an exception to the no-grade rule in Norway, could pose a greater challenge in the U.S., where universal health insurance does not exist, the Attendance Works executive director pointed out. 

Through much of COVID, Norway suspended its no-grade policy, said Drange. Though the very youngest students in the country went back to in-person learning after less than a two-month shutdown, localities took varying approaches for older students.

Even when the no-grade policy was in effect, Drange’s research indicates that the rule had a modest positive effect on teacher-awarded grades, but little impact on externally graded end-of-year assessments — a disappointment for those who hoped stronger attendance would automatically spell increases in achievement.

In the U.S., with poverty-related issues and mental health posing a key barrier to school attendance, Chang says education leaders should use the 10% absence threshold to identify which students might need extra support — not to punish them as truant.

“If you’re experiencing bullying, if you’re experiencing lack of access to health care, if you’re experiencing unreliable housing situations, those conditions are … affecting your learning, in addition to causing you to not show up to school,” she said.

“Could [schools] create options so kids have another way of making up the time?”

“They were both segregated middle schools,” said Akeshia Craven-Howell, who until recently was assistant superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, overseeing student school assignments. 

“Sedgefield Middle School serves students primarily from lower socioeconomic communities and Alexander Graham serves students from communities with primarily higher socioeconomic factors.”

But in 2019, the district, fueled by strong parent advocacy, tried something new. It mixed the two buildings’ student populations by creating a combined attendance area and rearranging which elementary schools sent students to which middle schools.

“We were able to create two middle schools that were much more socioeconomically diverse,” said Craven-Howell, who now works as an advisor for Bellwether Education Partners.

Across the country, thousands of schools closely resemble the segregated Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, a new U.S. Government Accountability Office report reveals. 

Over 7,800 predominantly same-race schools, it finds, are located within just five miles of a different same-race school. Widening the radius to 10 miles swells the total to over 13,500. 

Those cases may represent “low-hanging fruit” for integration efforts, said Craven-Howell. 

“It doesn’t require a significant trade-off with home-to-school distance, which I think is often a barrier for some families when they think about school diversity.”

A strong majority of parents say they would like to see schools increase their racial and socioeconomic balance, but support wanes when the undertaking involves busing programs or further travel, according to polling from The Century Foundation. Opponents of integration schemes often cite lengthy bus rides in their resistance to the plans.

In many cases, however, such a sacrifice is not required, said Richard Kahlenberg, the organization’s director of K-12 equity.

“It’s so often true that people will say, ‘We would love integrated schools, but it’s just not logistically possible because of distances,’” he told The 74.

That’s often a false dichotomy.

“Distance, in many cases, is not an excuse for segregation,” he said.

‘Wrong side of the tracks’

Roughly a third of the 13,500 schools identified in the federal report belong to the same school system as their counterpart campus, meaning possible desegregation efforts would lie directly in the hands of district leaders. 

Some 9 in 10 have a pair across district lines, which can entrench racial imbalances between campuses, said report co-author Jacqueline Nowicki. (The percentages, 32% and 90%, add to more than 100% because some schools have pairs both within and outside of their district.)

“Where we choose to draw school district boundaries, … that matters a lot as to where kids are going to schools,” the GAO education director told The 74.

“School district lines are not God-given,” added Kahlenberg. Florida and several other states, for example, use large county-based school systems to help balance their classrooms racially and socioeconomically.

Using 2020-21 data, the most recent figures available from the U.S. Education Department’s Common Core of Data, Nowicki’s team found that over a third of U.S. students — roughly 18.5 million — attend predominantly same-race schools. They applied the “predominantly same-race” label to schools where students of a single race or ethnicity make up at least 75% of the enrollment. The percentage of highly segregated U.S. schools decreased slightly from 2016, the last time the GAO investigated the issue. But given increases in diversity over that time span, including more students who identify as Asian or Hispanic, the researcher doesn’t see the numbers as particularly encouraging. 

The share of students of color attending highly segregated schools, which tend disproportionately to also be high-poverty schools, ticked up, she pointed out. Those campuses, on average, have worse academic outcomes compared to their wealthier peers.

“What does it mean, in a country that’s increasingly becoming more diverse, to have large portions of kids going to school only with other kids who look like themselves?” said Nowicki.

The reasons why the U.S. continues to have divided classrooms stretch far into the past, her agency’s report explains. In one major example, redlining, a federal 1930s practice of denying home loans to borrowers of color while supplying them to white candidates, systematically reduced Black homeownership and codified racial divisions between neighborhoods. The impacts of the discriminatory policy continue to haunt education outcomes to this day. 

“This is where phrases like ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ have come from,” said the GAO director.

‘The city that made desegregation work’

In the case of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the recent school integration push comes on the heels of a back-and-forth history after Brown v. Board of Education.

Charlotte was once known as “the city that made desegregation work.” After the landmark 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling upheld the district’s busing scheme, the city’s integration plan became a model for cities across the southern U.S. — which in the current day are less segregated than other regions of the country.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools,” the Charlotte Observer editorial board stated in 1984.

But after a 1999 decision struck down court-mandated desegregation requirements, campuses in the area quickly became more and more divided — with starkly unequal outcomes between its 180 schools.

In 2014, the area received sobering news: a study by Harvard University researchers ranked Charlotte dead last out of 50 American cities in upward mobility, or the likelihood of low-income youth rising out of poverty.

The report blamed two main factors for the abysmal assessment: racial segregation and school quality.

“One of the predictors of low levels of social mobility is school and neighborhood segregation,” explained Kahlenberg.

When the 140,000-student district resurrected decades-old conversations on how to integrate its schools, the memory of past efforts remained vivid for many residents. There was an appetite for the changes, but they still proved difficult, said Craven-Howell. In merging communities that had different socioeconomic makeups, the district had to be careful to make sure the voices and needs of wealthier parents did not drown out those of lower-income families.

But the effort has been a success thus far, said the former Charlotte-Mecklenburg administrator, and they have begun to move the needle on integration. However, they affect only a small share of campuses. She hopes the district will continue to build on its progress and “identify opportunities to replicate some of the great work that was done six years ago,” the last time it reviewed student school assignments.

Charlotte is not alone in the push. The district is a member of The Century Foundation’s Bridges Collaborative, a network of 27 school systems, 17 charter school networks and 13 housing organizations across the country undertaking efforts to chip away at segregation in their schools and communities. Though they account for only a tiny fraction of the 13,500 segregated school pairs identified by the GAO report, Craven-Howell believes they demonstrate what’s possible. 

“There are districts all over the country who are thinking about [integration], who are trying things,” she said. “It’s not the case that a district has to embark on this work without there being any models or examples to look to.”

And as for Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, the Charlotte middle schools that combined their student bodies in 2019, the change has worked, said Craven-Howell.

“People don’t think about it as the two schools and the two communities that paired. They really have become a single community.”

It makes intuitive sense. Students who spend less time in the classroom have a harder time keeping up with their peers and may face difficulties developing positive relationships with school staff.

During the pandemic, rates of chronic absenteeism have skyrocketed, hitting 40% in the nation’s two largest school systems, New York City and Los Angeles, and reaching dangerously high levels in many districts in between. 

In many cases, difficulties with remote learning, fear of COVID-19 spread in schools, poverty-related barriers such as students being forced to pick up jobs or a mix of those and other factors have added obstacles to students’ school attendance.

But with all eyes on absenteeism as schools nationwide seek to recover from the lasting impacts of the pandemic, Jing Liu, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, argues that officials should begin by gaining a more complete understanding of the issue.

That starts with expanding what is usually a binary statistic — whether or not a student is absent 10% of days — into a multi-dimensional measure.

In two recent papers, Liu and co-authors find key differences based on when in the school year absences occur and whether they are excused or unexcused. The trends can help schools more quickly identify at-risk students, so they may intervene to support them in getting back on track, he said.

The 74 sat down with the researcher, over Zoom, to glean the key takeaways from his timely work.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Why do we care about absenteeism? What are the typical differences in outcomes between Student A, with perfect attendance, and Student B, who misses school a few times a month?

Jing Liu: We care about absenteeism for several reasons. First of all, students have to be in school to learn. So for any education policy intervention to work, you have to have students in school. 

Second, I have this new paper published with Dr. [Seth] Gershenson that shows there’s this strong impact of absenteeism on student learning in the short run and also for longer-run outcomes including high school graduation and college enrollment. So if we care about those outcomes, we have to reduce absenteeism. 

Lastly, absenteeism is also linked to drug abuse, crime, teen pregnancy, a host of undesirable outcomes. So cutting absences can also benefit students in those different aspects.

One pattern that you and your co-authors found in the April study that caught my attention is when a student has an unexcused absence early in the year it tends to precipitate increased levels of truancy later on in the year and in future grades. But that trend doesn’t hold for excused absences like a doctor’s appointment. So can you tell me a little more about what you saw there?

Sure. So for this study, we are able to use really nuanced data. We were able to look at the patterns in how absences evolve within a school year and also as students progress over grades. 

So what do we see? Unexcused absences grow pretty dramatically within a school year while the excused absences stay relatively stable over time. If we look at just absences in the first month, especially unexcused absences, you can do a pretty good job of predicting their [increased] trajectory in the rest of the school year. For students who are really disengaged in the first month, they are likely to be very disengaged for the entire school year.

Why is that?

There’s some existing research looking at how absences beget absences. For example, if you’re missing a few mathematics classes at the beginning of the year, when you come back, you’ll find it harder to keep track of the content. And that may generate additional absences. 

It might also be related to personal relationships. Because if you are absent, now you are not having a strong connection with your teacher, with your classmates. And that might make you more disengaged, not wanting to come to class even more in the future. 

My research team is planning to do some surveys of students to understand more about their experience.

What sort of interventions should educators be thinking about to remedy those issues?

A first place to look is how to intervene early instead of waiting until the end of the school year. By just relying on the first month of absenteeism data and students’ reasons for absences, we can get a pretty good sense about who’s going to be the most disengaged. Although all loss of instructional time is bad, what we show is, really, those unexcused absences in middle and high school are driving the growth of absences. By looking out early, district leaders and school principals can decide with whom to intervene. Timing really matters.

Secondly, it’s very telling that growth of absences was linked to perception of school climate. We would want to intervene in terms of improving someone’s perception of school climate, so it’s either a sense of belonging or support of their learning. Starting there, I think we might be able to prevent the accelerating growth of absences down the road.

For school districts that want to operationalize some of this, is there a magic formula they could use instead of the typical 10% threshold that gives issues like absence type and timing their proper weight?

First of all, I think chronic absenteeism is still a useful metric. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, more and more states are using that as an indicator for school quality. Before we didn’t really actually have an indicator on absenteeism. So I don’t want to just critique [the approach]. 

However, we can do better than just using a binary measure [of whether absences are above or below 10% of all school days]. A lot of places are now collecting this detailed level data that includes the timing and also the type of absences. But they’re not systematically putting the data together and using it in useful ways. 

We are actually working with a middle school team in [an undisclosed district] to use those absenteeism data to create our own on-track/off-track indicator and see whether we can flag kids for a risk of disengagement very early in the school year. And then by intervening in a dynamic and targeted manner, we’ll see if we can change kids’ trajectory.

In hard and fast terms for a school leader who is collecting these data, when would you say is the right time to check in with the numbers and see which kids are at risk? Is it October 1, October 15? Halloween? 

I think one month after the school year starts, that’s what we did with our research. 

Although to actually address the question, we not only need a timing, we also need a threshold. So how many kids are going to be put in the bucket to intervene? We need a little bit more work to look at how setting different thresholds can change the results and how predictive those early absences are for other outcomes we care about. This is one of the first studies doing this kind of thing and we need a bit more research to provide more actionable suggestions.

In words that folks who aren’t statisticians can understand, can you say a little bit more about how you and your team crunched the numbers to get these results?

Basically, we just look at the growth of absences over time. So we basically put all the absences into weekly measures. So for example, for Jing, for me, if I’m absent for two classes in the first week, three classes in the second week, then we can see this growth by using a model and the number we get is just the slope. So we use this metric to indicate the level of engagement [in school].

Any last points? What topics haven’t we covered yet?

One detail is that as we look more deeply into the reasons for absences, we know that the excused/unexcused division is not perfect. Sometimes maybe an unexcused absence is just that the parent forgot to contact the school. And sometimes it’s really an unexcused absence, but the student is able to make up a reason. 

I remember when I turned 18 as a high school senior, that was when I could call myself out of school. So then I had a lot of “excused” absences.

Exactly. So from a practical perspective, given that the volume of excused absence is pretty minimal, I think if we are going to design interventions for use in practice, I probably would suggest school districts to not differentiate between absence types, because it creates an additional data collection burden and it probably won’t impact results that much.

The paper, part of a series of studies conducted in the wake of high-profile litigation against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, shows that Hispanic and African American applicants to both colleges enjoy substantial advantages relative to whites and Asian Americans. Their chances of acceptance are drastically higher than they would be in the absence of affirmative action, but with a somewhat counterintuitive addendum: preferential treatment is relatively weaker for minority applicants from poor and working-class backgrounds than it is for their peers from more affluent families.

Those findings, and those of the preceding papers, are built on data that was made publicly available during the discovery phase of two lawsuits — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — that were consolidated for oral argument before the court. Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and the studies’ lead author, has provided expert testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim that the storied institutions have systematically discriminated against Asian applicants. In an interview with The 74, he said he hoped his work would help clarify the public debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

“So much of the debate about affirmative action is happening in this binary where you’re either for it or against it,” Arcidiacono observed. “But there’s a large range of possibilities, from just [using] race as a tiebreaker to fully equal outcomes. So in order to get a sense for whether affirmative action has gone too far or has not gone far enough, you have to understand the role that race plays currently, and you can’t do that without the data.”

Those questions are becoming more concrete by the month. Opening briefs have been filed in the case, which will be heard in the 2022-23 term. With plaintiffs asking the nation’s highest court to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in the college application process, and Republicans in Congress pursuing legislation that would force colleges to publicize their use of non-academic characteristics in admissions, the stage is being set for a major rollback of affirmative action as it has been practiced for half a century. According to Arcidiacono’s latest study, a significant reversal could shrink the percentage of African American students admitted to Harvard by more than two-thirds.

Georgetown economist Harry Holzer finds those projections plausible. A proponent of race-based affirmative action, he signed a 2018 brief (alongside multiple Nobel laureates) defending Harvard’s policies that was filed in a lower-court iteration of the suit. Arcidiacono’s line of research “makes reasonable points,” Holzer said, while arguing that it does not invalidate the use of racial considerations by admissions officers. 

“It doesn’t change my support for affirmative action to see his numbers, though I certainly don’t disagree with the research findings. It shows that when very elite schools practice affirmative action in admissions, which they do, it does effectively raise the admission rate for people of color — especially African Americans — by a lot.” 

Race & class

Arcidiacono and his coauthors dug into admissions records for over 300,000 domestic applicants to the admissions classes of 2014–2019, of which roughly 142,000 applied to Harvard, 57,000 applied to UNC as in-state candidates, and 105,000 applied to the same college from out of state. Applicant-level information included demographic attributes such as race and socioeconomic status, as well as richly detailed academic records covering high school grades, standardized test scores, and individual ratings from admissions officers across a range of academic and non-academic indicators. 

Combining high school GPA, SAT scores, and scores on SAT II subject tests, the research team created academic ratings for each applicant and ranked them by decile (a statistical measurement dividing data into 10 equal parts). The lowest-performing students were grouped into the bottom 10 percent and the strongest performers grouped into the top 10 percent. Most African Americans fell into the bottom 20 percent of all applicants to both Harvard and UNC, but they were admitted at the highest rate for almost every performance decile, followed by Hispanic, white, and Asian applicants.

The acceptance gaps between categories are largest around the middle of the spectrum for academic qualifications, with African Americans applying to Harvard being accepted at a rate double that of Hispanics — and 12 times greater than Asian Americans — at the fifth decile (i.e., between the 41st and 50th percentile of qualifications). For out-of-state applicants to UNC, African Americans at the fifth decile were almost 33 times more likely to be accepted than Asian Americans and 14 times more likely than whites. 

Overall, Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood that an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. For out-of-state applicants to UNC, the force of racial preferences multiplied African Americans from 1.5 percent of admitted students to 15.6 percent, a tenfold increase. Black applicants applying in-state to Chapel Hill gained a smaller advantage from affirmative action, becoming 70 percent likelier to win admission.

Beyond these general calculations, the authors noticed a peculiar interaction between race and class. While white applicants from lower-income families appear to receive an advantage in admissions relative to wealthier whites with similar academic profiles, disadvantaged African Americans and Hispanics do not. Affluent applicants of color therefore receive a comparatively larger boost over affluent white applicants than poor and working-class students of color enjoy over poor and working-class whites. 

Holzer said the substantive arguments in favor of affirmative action — particularly the educational value of maintaining a racially diverse campus — “don’t require that the specific recipient face bias or barriers in the past.” Still, he asserted that low-income students of color deserve “extra credit” not only for their race but also their class background.

“If the bump for just being African American is really large, you could imagine that maybe [admissions officers] think, ‘We’re already taking care of that problem,’” Holzer said. “But for someone like me, who thinks that class really matters a lot, you want to make sure that lower-income students of color get consideration.”

Arcidiacono argued that the large edge claimed by some wealthy students, even if they come from historically excluded groups, risks eroding public faith in the fairness of admissions altogether. Disillusionment already exists not only due to long-running patterns of underrepresentation, he added, but also newer blots such as the Varsity Blues scandal, which saw moneyed parents conniving with college employees and private admissions counselors to game the system.

“This is in the context of a system that completely favors people who come from richer backgrounds,” Arcidiacono said, listing the factors already favoring upper-class applicants: ready access to college counselors, special weight placed on extracurricular activities, and recruitment for sports like sailing and golf.

“To me, one of the arguments for affirmative action would be that you’re trying to build trust in the system for a group that has been traditionally disenfranchised. But the way you do that matters, and it’s not really hitting the poorer African Americans — they’re not the ones benefiting the most.” 

The ‘narrowly tailored’ standard

The Supreme Court will consider Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard this fall, eight years after it was first filed in federal district court. When a decision is finally reached, the case could fundamentally alter the practice of affirmative action in college admissions and, with it, the racial composition of some of the country’s most prestigious schools.

Existing Court precedent was set in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case, in which a plaintiff alleged that preference systems at public graduate schools — in that instance, the University of Michigan Law School — illegally disadvantaged white students on racial grounds. A majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor found instead that “the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions” was constitutionally permissible, while adding that the issue would be ripe for reexamination within 25 years. That deadline has nearly elapsed, and the Harvard litigants seek to reopen the question of whether affirmative action has been “narrowly tailored” to begin with.

The case, along with the corresponding UNC suit, centers on the accusation by a group of Asian American students that Harvard’s policies unfairly disfavored them relative to applicants from every other racial group. Although the admissions candidates with the highest GPAs and test scores are disproportionately Asian American — 2019 data from the College Board showed that about one-quarter of Asian high school graduates scored above a 1400 on the SAT, compared with 8 percent of whites, 2 percent of Hispanics, and 1 percent of African Americans — they were consistently graded lower according to Harvard’s personality scores. A 2020 study released by Arcidiacono and his colleagues suggested that, absent the subjective penalty that Asian applicants face, they would be admitted at a rate 19 percent higher than currently prevails.

The findings instantiated a theory that first gained widespread attention a decade ago, when one right-wing commentator alleged that Asian Americans were tacitly being held back by admissions quotas lest they grow to dominate Ivy League campuses. Although Asian high schoolers were routinely among the top-performing students in the United States, their numeric presence on elite campuses peaked around 1990 and remained roughly the same over the next 20 years.

Trends in Asian American college enrollment were the focus of a report released in April by the Manhattan Institute. Author Robert VerBruggen, a journalist and fellow at the conservative think tank, noted that the unmistakable stagnation in representation — which occurred even as Asians were continually growing as a percentage of all college aspirants — began to lift about about a decade ago. Whether that was connected to the growing focus on apparent discrimination is unclear.

“It’s an interesting question why that’s happened, but it’s certainly consistent with the narrative that everybody started making a stink about it, lawsuits were filed, and schools got a lot more careful about what they were doing,” Verbruggen said.

The release of the schools’ data allowed researchers to investigate trends in admissions beyond purported anti-Asian bias. In a widely covered paper released in 2019, Arcidiacono and his co-authors calculated that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard between 2014 and 2019 were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of university faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (i.e., relatives of potential high-dollar donors). Another postulated that the school, which has for years trumpeted its efforts to diversify, may deliberately recruit African American students who stand virtually no chance of gaining admission. 

“In some sense, there’s this uneasy compromise that works to the detriment of Asian Americans and poor whites,” Arcidiacono said. “You’ve got the racial preferences helping underrepresented minorities get into certain colleges, and you’ve got the legacy and athlete preferences helping rich, disproportionately white kids get into college.”

A Supreme Court ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could leave that system profoundly changed, upsetting the demographic mix that elite schools have worked hard to cultivate. By Arcidiacono’s accounting, the proportion of African Americans admitted to Harvard over the period he studied would have been less than 1 percent if acceptance was offered on the basis of academic qualifications alone; those admitted to UNC in-state or out-of-state would sink to 4.3 percent and less than 2 percent, respectively. At the same time, the percentage of Asian Americans would have risen substantially — to over 50 percent of all admitted students, in Harvard’s case.

While oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t come for months, the recently announced recusal of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a promising sign for the plaintiffs. With the departure of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has lost two members who had previously ruled in favor of race-based affirmative action in postsecondary education.

Whatever the legal outcome, VerBruggen said that Arcidiacono’s work offered considerable value simply by shining a light on the internal admissions processes in two highly competitive universities.

“Schools are so tight-lipped about their affirmative action policies that we don’t have a lot of data on them,” he remarked. “If you want to know what’s going on in a school, you basically have to sue them.”