cites content, competencies, ways of thinking, and motivators as the cornerstones to numeracy. The findings build upon hundreds of earlier studies and will help kids enter middle school with a strong math foundation, CEO Arun Ramanathan said. 

And there is considerable consensus to the approach, he said.  

鈥淭he framework offers long-needed alignment: not how to teach, but what must be developed and how the pieces fit,鈥� Ramanathan said in an email. 

According to its report, released Feb. 4, content is centered on the core mathematical ideas all future learning is based on while competencies refers to the skills students need to use math meaningfully. 

Ways of thinking encompasses the cognitive processes that support reasoning and problem-solving while motivators signal the beliefs and mindsets that foster engagement and persistence.

鈥淚f you asked teachers what they think numeracy is, you will get a lot of different answers,鈥� said Gloria Lee, lead author of the report. 鈥淭here is not a clear framework or scaffolding for people to communicate all of these parts. So, we are trying to fill that void.鈥� 

The organization acknowledges the ongoing math wars, which pit explicit instruction, procedural fluency, guided practice and repetition against inquiry-based learning and conceptual understanding. It calls the dispute an unnecessary distraction. 

PowerMyLearning, which hopes their paper becomes a guide for educators and policymakers, said each of these pillars breaks down into four different categories. 

The four areas of content, for example, are integers, fractions, shapes and data while the four competencies are conceptual understanding, fact fluency, procedural fluency and application. The four ways of thinking are symbolic understanding, pattern recognition, explaining and sense-making while the motivators include math identity and persistence.

鈥淭eachers, administrators and families must make intentional efforts to communicate that math is for everyone and everyone belongs in math,鈥� the paper notes. 鈥淭his requires explicitly promoting inclusive messages and countering negative ones, creating inclusive classroom environments, and establishing policies for support and acceleration rather than exclusivity.鈥�

Jo Boaler, a mathematics education professor at Stanford University who co-authored California鈥檚 new math framework, reviewed PowerMyLearning鈥檚 paper and provided research for it. 

鈥淚 appreciate that the report gives a balanced perspective on number sense, highlighting the importance of reasoning, problem solving and mindset, as well as procedures,鈥� she said. 鈥淗opefully it helps to bridge the divides in mathematics education.鈥�

was established in 1999 under another name and focused on technology in the classroom, including giving free hardware and software to schools in need. It later shifted to the 鈥渢riangle of learning relationships鈥� among students, teachers and families before zeroing in on early math. Though the organization aims to improve education for all, it has a focus on multilingual learners and children from historically underserved communities.

CEO Ramanathan told 社区黑料 in an interview last week that despite ongoing disputes about how math should be taught, there is actually an enormous amount of agreement around what students need to succeed. 

鈥淲hen you look at the areas folks are disagreeing about 鈥� conceptual understanding, fact fluency and procedural fluency 鈥� we put them all in one area, as competencies,鈥� he said. 

Students, he said, can鈥檛 spend all of their time repeating certain skills. 

鈥淭hey also have to be able to dig deeply into the reasons why certain elements of mathematics result in a correct answer,鈥� he said. 鈥淔or folks to be focusing on one element of that versus all of them together, when you see them all in one place, you don鈥檛 see them as (being) in conflict but in alignment.鈥� 

There is no need to favor one element of learning over another, the report notes.

鈥淚n fact, the evidence is clear that fluency with facts and procedures helps students with conceptual understanding and vice versa. Numeracy requires fluency with facts and procedures as well as conceptual understanding and the ability to apply these mathematical capabilities to situations in the real world.鈥�

The group says its findings further the and integrate more than 200 studies across math learning science, developmental psychology, and mathematics education.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation and the Joseph Drown Foundation provide financial support to PowerMyLearning and 社区黑料.

The findings span the early weeks of the second Trump administration. Since that time, immigration enforcement has escalated dramatically, particularly in Democratic cities targeted by the president, including and . 

Schools became fair game days into the new administration when it against enforcement actions near or on-site. Hospitals and churches, too, are no longer exempt from raids.

Earlier this month, a day care teacher in Chicago was dragged out of her preschool by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and their families. A federal judge ruled her and she has since been . 

The incident, caught on camera and made public, has drawn widespread condemnation. 

鈥淪chools should be safe environments for children to learn, for their brains to develop and for them to form secure attachments,鈥� said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at , an early childhood advocacy group.  

Boteach noted, too, 20% of the early educator workforce are immigrants and while a vast majority have legal status, their families and communities might not. 

鈥淚f they are fearful and anxious, they are bringing that fear and anxiety with them,鈥� she said. 鈥淎nd now you don鈥檛 know when enforcement will strike and that can be incredibly traumatic even if the child is a U.S. citizen.鈥�

Many high school students, including in , have already been held or deported. 

The 113,000 children in the Stanford study 鈥� they attended Bakersfield City Elementary, Fresno Unified, Kerman Unified, Southern Kern Unified and Tehachapi Unified school districts 鈥� lost more than 81,000 days of instruction in the two months following the January raids, which lasted three days and targeted agriculture workers. 

None of the Central Valley schools returned calls or emails last week requesting comment. 

Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford鈥檚 Graduate School of Education, examined daily attendance data, which helped him pinpoint a falloff he attributes to harsh immigration tactics.

鈥淭hat really allowed me to identify how things changed when the raids began,鈥� he said. 鈥淪omething very distinctive occurred.鈥�

Dee examined data from August through May in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years and from August 2024 through February of this year. He said he was surprised by the magnitude of the impact the raids had on attendance.

Forceful immigration tactics, pandemic-related learning loss and mental health issues combine to exhaust students and families to the point that kids stay home from school, he said.

鈥淚 see this increase in absences as an indicator of ways in which we are exacerbating all of those problems,鈥� Dee said. 鈥淎ggressive interior immigration enforcement drives families with school-age children away.鈥�

Just this week, student absences in Charlotte, North Carolina, two days after federal immigration agents swept into the city, arresting 130 people. The Charlotte-Mecklenberg School District Monday. 

Adam Strom, co-founder and executive director of Re-Imagining Migration, said the relationship between schools and families is based on good faith. Immigration enforcement, a powerful disruptor, can be catastrophic.  

“Schools ask immigrant families for profound trust 鈥� trust with their children, their personal information, their futures,鈥� Strom said. 鈥淲hen ICE raids their communities, families respond by withdrawing from public institutions out of caution 鈥� a protective instinct that’s entirely rational. The attendance data tells us exactly what happens when institutions meant to build belonging become sources of fear instead.鈥�

And, he said, that anxiety extends well beyond families with undocumented members.

鈥淲hen people with legal status, and even citizens, are being detained based on how they look and speak, every immigrant family regardless of documentation worries about whether their children will be safe on the way to and from school,鈥� he said. 

Immigration agents have swept up , including children, holding some detainees for days. Dee said aggressive immigration tactics not only hurt kids, but schools themselves as they are funded based on attendance. 

As to why absenteeism holds steady even weeks after a raid, he said the impact of such enforcement actions linger. Some families become shut-ins. Others might move away in search of safety. 

He said, too, the 81,000 missed days of instruction shoots up to 725,000 when applied to the entire four-county region. 

Some fuel California鈥檚 agricultural industry. Reports show roughly half have citizenship or other work authorization. California is home to nearly : Roughly 112,000 between the ages of 5 and 18 are enrolled in the state鈥檚 schools. 

Dubbed 鈥淥peration Return to Sender,鈥� the Central Valley raids, conducted by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, began January 7, 2025, during the tail end of the Biden era 鈥� and the day after the 2024 presidential election was certified by Congress. 

Three former Biden aides said the man who led the effort, Gregory Bovino, and conducted the Central Valley action 鈥� hundreds of miles from the U.S. border 鈥� without the permission of higher-ups. While border patrol officials said they were targeting only criminals, subsequent investigations found that they of 77 of the 78 people arrested during the sweep. 

The American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Border Patrol officials in February for these enforcement actions, which it deemed a 鈥渇ishing expedition.鈥� Bovino has since led other controversial immigration operations, including those in and the one . Reports this week say enforcement target.

Dee said kids in early grades were more likely to miss school than their older peers because those living with undocumented immigrants tend to be younger and families with small children might be more fearful of deportation.

Kathy Mulrooney, director of the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Strategy Program at , said young children also suffer a particular cognitive trauma when the adults around them are detained. 

鈥淓ven if babies don鈥檛 have the words for what鈥檚 happening, their bodies feel the fear,鈥� she said. 

When a parent is suddenly taken, Mulrooney said, or when a community is shaken by aggressive immigration tactics, students are left with little ability to feel the type of safety and curiosity they need to learn.

鈥淪imply put, when a child鈥檚 brain is in survival mode, learning takes a back seat,鈥� she said. 

The 49% of families who reported not being able to access these necessities 鈥� including food, housing, utilities and child care 鈥� marks a 13 percentage-point jump since June and one of the highest rates recorded since the began collecting data in 2020. 

The economic struggles were paired with significant emotional distress among parents, including anxiety and depression. 

鈥淲e’re really seeing for the first time rates that are this high,鈥� said Philip Fisher, director of the early childhood center, which runs the monthly data collection. 鈥淣ever 鈥� even during the midst of the pandemic 鈥� have we seen anything like this 鈥� And the fact that it’s now going into its third month where we see rates around this high suggests that it’s not a one-time anomaly.鈥�

The numbers are a warning sign for the state of families鈥� financial well-being writ large, he noted.

鈥淲e’re talking about half of families now that are saying, 鈥業 can’t afford child care,鈥� or 鈥業’m skipping meals in order to feed my kids,鈥欌�� he added. 鈥淎nd that should be of concern, regardless of your political affiliation or where you live.鈥�

While the latest data is from Sept. 1, more detailed research is available for the month of July. In response to open-ended questions posed that month, parents expressed significant anxiety and upset.

鈥淓very bill feels heavier than the last,鈥� wrote one Tennessee parent. 鈥淚t鈥檚 exhausting to live like this. We鈥檙e not asking for luxury, we just want to be able to meet our basic needs without constant fear.鈥�

鈥淎 huge portion of our monthly budget goes just to keeping a roof over our heads, leaving very little for savings, groceries, transportation, or emergencies,鈥� said one Florida parent. 鈥淭he pressure to stay housed is constant, and it forces tough trade-offs, sometimes delaying bills, cutting back on essentials, or skipping activities for the kids.鈥�

An Oklahoma parent cited the cost of baby diapers and formula as their biggest concern, while another in Alabama wrote about the rising cost of utilities.

The three-month period between June and September marked the highest rates of material hardship for parents since the survey鈥檚 inception, with a record 56% reporting at least one basic necessity being out of reach or difficult to access in August. Since the pandemic started, at least a quarter of families have reported living with this challenge every month.

The spring and summer of 2021 saw a drop in these rates. Fisher said this coincided with the majority of the pandemic relief efforts, including the expanded Child Tax Credit, which increased the maximum credit amount, widened the scope of coverage to include 17-year- olds and allowed some people to receive monthly advance payments. The expansion was credited with cutting child poverty rates nearly

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Congress and signed by President Trump this summer increased the maximum credit amount though it also cuts other benefits for lower-income families.

The most recent survey numbers were recorded before the ongoing government shutdown began earlier this month, which experts warn will likely exacerbate the pain families were already feeling. Advocates are particularly concerned about programs such as Head Start, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, all of which may be at risk if the shutdown continues. 

Several states have that families may lose access to SNAP and funding for 65,000 Head Start seats is in jeopardy if the three-week-old shutdown drags into November.

And even once the government re-opens, many of these challenges will persist, according to Amy Matsui, vice president of Income Security and Child Care at the National Women鈥檚 Law Center.

鈥淏etween the ongoing increase in housing costs and the cost of living, the aggravating impact of tariff policies, we really are seeing everyday costs for families continuing to increase, and it鈥檚 really putting women and children in an impossible situation,鈥� she said.

Matsui also emphasized the extraordinary cost of child care, noting that this administration鈥檚 鈥渟ustained attacks鈥� on programs such as Head Start have only added to this stressor.

Fisher warned that high levels of fiscal strain among parents can lead to a 鈥渃hain reaction of hardship,鈥� which ultimately trickles down to kids.

Indeed in July, about 3 in 4 parents surveyed said their kids were also experiencing emotional distress. Chronic anxiety in kids can have long-term effects on their learning, relationships and health.

鈥淲e know uncertainty and instability for families is very destabilizing and very, very stressful, particularly with young children,鈥� said Ruth Friedman, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and former director of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Child Care.

鈥淚f parents’ economic conditions are uncertain and more challenging,鈥� she added, 鈥渢hat absolutely has an impact on children’s development and well-being both in the short term, and beyond.鈥�

returns to Austin, Texas, running March 3-6. As always, it鈥檒l offer a huge number of panels, discussions, film screenings, musical performances and workshops exploring education, innovation and the future of schooling.

Keynote speakers this year include neuroscientist , founder of Ness Labs, an online educational platform for knowledge workers; astronaut, author and TV host , and , CEO of Search for Common Ground, an international non-profit. Idriss will speak about what it means to be strong in the face of opposition 鈥� and how to turn conflict into cooperation. Also featured: indy musical artist Jill Sobule, from her musical F*ck 7th Grade.

As in 2024, artificial intelligence remains a major focus, with dozens of sessions exploring AI鈥檚 potential and pitfalls. But other topics are on tap as well, including sessions on playful learning, book bans and the benefits of prison journalism. 

To help guide the way, we鈥檝e scoured the to highlight 25 of the most significant presenters, topics and panels: 

Monday, March 3:

A new independent film features a Seattle school counselor who builds a world-class Ultimate Frisbee team with a group of immigrant children at Hazel Wolf K-8 School. 

Generative AI is accelerating the adoption of a skills-based economy, but many are skeptical about its value, impact and the pace of growth. Will AI spark meaningful change and a new economic order, or is it just another overhyped trend? Meena Naik of Jobs for the Future leads a discussion with Colorado Community College System Associate Vice Chancellor Michael Macklin, Nick Moore, an education advisor to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, and Best Buy鈥檚 Ryan Hanson.

The Clayton Christensen Institute鈥檚 Julia Freeland Fisher headlines a panel that looks at how generative AI can help students access 24/7 help in navigating pathways to college. As new models take root, the panel will explore what entrepreneurs are learning about what students want from these systems. Will AI level the playing field or perpetuate inequality? 

New research shows students who are engaged in schoolwork not only do better in school but are happier and more confident in life. And educators say they鈥檇 be happier at work and less likely to leave the profession if students engaged more deeply. In this session, LEGO Education鈥檚 Bo Stjerne Thomsen will explore the science behind playful learning and how it can get students and teachers excited again.

Mike Yates of The Reinvention Lab at Teach for America leads an interactive session offering participants the chance to build their own AI tools to solve real problems they face at work, school or home. The session is for AI novices as well as those simply curious about how the technology works. Participants will get free access to .

Join Charlotte West of Open Campus, Lawrence Bartley of The Marshall Project and Yukari Kane of the Prison Journalism Project to explore real-life stories from behind bars. Journalism training is transforming the lives of a few of the more than 1.9 million people incarcerated in the U.S., teaching skills from time management to communication and allowing inmates to feel connected to society while building job skills. 

Tuesday, March 4:

Amid the hand-wringing about what AI means for the future of education, there鈥檚 been little conversation about how a few smart educators are already employing it to shift possibilities for student engagement and classroom instruction. In this workshop, attendees will learn how to leverage promising practices emerging from research with real educators using AI in writing, creating their own chatbots and differentiating support plans. 

AI-enabled tools can be helpful for students conducting research, outlining written work, or proofing and editing submissions. But there鈥檚 a fine line between using AI appropriately and taking advantage of it, leaving many students wondering, 鈥淗ow much AI is too much?鈥� This session, led by Turnitin鈥檚 Annie Chechitelli, will discuss the rise of GenAI, its intersection with academia and academic integrity, and how to determine appropriate usage.  

Explore the real-world impact of AI in education during this interactive session hosted by Zhuo Chen, a text analysis instructor at the nonprofit education startup Constellate, and Dylan Ruediger of the research and consulting group Ithaka S+R. Chen and Ruediger will share successes and challenges in using AI to advance student learning, engagement and skills. 

In 2025, authors face unprecedented challenges. This session, which features Scholastic editor and young adult novelist David Levithan, as well as Emily Kirkpatrick, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, will explore the battle for freedom of expression and the importance of defending reading in the face of censorship attempts and book bans.

Kate Arend and Kim Lessing, the co-presidents of Amy Poehler鈥檚 production company Paper Kite Productions, will be live to record their workplace and career advice podcast 鈥淢illion Dollar Advice.鈥� The pair will tackle topics such as setting and maintaining boundaries, learning from Gen Z, dealing with complicated work dynamics, and more. They will also take live audience questions.

With rising recognition of neurodivergent students, advocates say AI can revolutionize how schools support them by streamlining tasks, optimizing resources and enhancing personalized learning. In the process, schools can overcome challenges in mainstreaming students with learning differences. This panel features educators and advocates as well as Alex Kotran, co-founder and CEO of The AI Education Project.

Assessments are often disruptive, cumbersome or disconnected from classroom learning. But a few advocates and developers say AI-powered assessment tools offer an easier, more streamlined way for students to demonstrate learning 鈥� and for educators to adapt instruction to meet their needs. This session, moderated by 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo, features Khan Academy鈥檚 Kristen DiCerbo, Curriculum Associates鈥� Kristen Huff and Akisha Osei Sarfo, director of research at the Council of the Great City Schools.

Wednesday, March 5:

Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children and teens, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yet coverage of gun violence鈥檚 impact on youth is usually reported by adults. Run, Hide, Fight: Growing Up Under the Gun is a 30-minute documentary by student journalists about how gun violence affects young Americans. Produced by PBS News Student Reporting Labs in collaboration with 14 student journalists in five cities, it centers the perspectives of young people who live their lives in the shadow of this threat. 

Educators are at the forefront of testing, using artificial intelligence and teaching their communities about it. In this interactive session, participants will hear from educators and ed tech specialists on the ground working to support the use of AI to improve learning. The session includes Stacie Johnson, director of professional learning at Khan Academy, and Dina Neyman, Khan Academy鈥檚 director of district success. 

As AI becomes increasingly present in the classroom, educators are understandably concerned about how it might disrupt their teaching. An expert panel featuring Jake Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association andKarim Meghji of Code.org, will look at how teaching will change in an age of AI, exploring frameworks for teaching AI skills and sharing best practices for integrating AI literacy across disciplines.

Generation Alpha is the first to experience generative artificial intelligence from the start of their educational journeys. To thrive in a world featuring AI requires educators helping them tap into their natural creativity, navigating unique opportunities and challenges. In this session, a cross-industry panel of experts discuss strategies to integrate AI into learning, allowing critical thinking and curiosity to flourish while enabling early learners to become architects of AI, not just users.

Join a panel of educators, tech leaders and nonprofit officials as they discuss AI鈥檚 ethical complexities and its impact on the education of Black children. This panel will address historical disparities, biases in technology, and the critical need for ethical AI in education. It will also offer unique perspectives into the benefits and challenges of AI in Black children鈥檚 education, sharing best practices to promote the safe, ethical and legal use of AI in classrooms.

Is teacher morale shaped by where teachers work? Find out as Education Week releases its annual State of Teaching survey. States and school districts drive how teachers are prepared, paid and promoted, and the findings will raise new questions about what leaders and policymakers should consider as they work to support an essential profession. The session features Holly Kurtz, director of EdWeek Research Center, Stephen Sawchuk, EdWeek assistant managing editor, and assistant editor Sarah D. Sparks.

While most students in U.S. public schools are now young people of color, more than 80% of their teachers are white. How do white educators understand and address these dynamics? Join a live recording of a podcast that brings together white educators with Christopher Emdin and sam seidel, co-editors of From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity (Beacon, 2024).

Schools are locked in a battle with students over fears they鈥檙e using generative artificial intelligence to plagiarize existing work. In this session, join Elliott Hedman, a 鈥渃ustomer obsession engineer鈥� with mPath, who with colleagues and students co-designed a GenAI writing tool to reframe AI use. Hedman will share three strategies that not only prevent plagiarism but also teach students how to use GenAI more productively.  

Thursday, March 6:

Join futurists Sinead Bovell and Natalie Monbiot for a fireside discussion about how we prepare kids for a future we cannot yet see but know will be radically transformed by technology. Bovell and Monbiot will discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on our world and the workforce, as well as its implications for education. 

Young children spend 80% of their time outside of school, but too many lack access to experiences that encourage learning through hands-on activities and play. While these opportunities exist in middle-class and upper-income neighborhoods, they鈥檙e often inaccessible to families in low-income communities. In this session, a panel of designers and educators featuring Sarah Lytle, who leads the Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network, will look at how communities are transforming overlooked spaces such as sidewalks, shelters and even jails into nurturing learning environments accessible to all kids.

In this session, participants will build an AI chatbot alongside designers and engineers from Stanford University and Stanford鈥檚 d.school, getting to the core of how AI works. Participants will conceptualize, outline and create conversation flows for their own AI assistant and explore methods that technical teams use to infuse warmth and adaptability into interactions and develop reliable chatbots.  

In this session, participants will learn how educators, technologists and policymakers work to develop AI responsibly. Panelists include Isabelle Hau of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, Amelia Kelly, chief technology officer of the Irish AI startup SoapBox Labs, and Merlyn Mind CEO Levi Belnap. They鈥檒l talk about how policymakers and educators can work with developers to ensure transparency and accuracy of AI tools.聽

Released this morning through Stanford鈥檚 right-leaning Hoover Institution, the report prior by its author, one of the nation鈥檚 most cited experts on education finance. Hanushek has cautioned since the emergence of COVID that the prolonged experience of virtual instruction would meaningfully harm the skills and earning potential of today鈥檚 students.

His newest release builds on those predictions by examining the math performance of U.S. students on two standardized tests. One, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), is a worldwide exam comparing American 15-year-olds against adolescents in dozens of other countries; the other, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (often referred to as the Nation鈥檚 Report Card) is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders around the United States.

The PISA results, revealed in December, showed U.S. math scores falling significantly between 2018 and 2022, offering more evidence of what federal officials have called a COVID-era 鈥渃risis鈥� in that subject. But because other countries saw even larger declines, America鈥檚 international ranking actually moved upward slightly, leading Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to the Biden administration鈥檚 emergency assistance to schools during the pandemic.

In an interview with 社区黑料, Hanushek was much less sanguine, pointing to K鈥�12 students鈥� persistently mediocre performance in math over the last few decades. After overlaying the NAEP math scores of individual U.S. states onto PISA鈥檚 international scoring system, he found that even test takers in the top-scoring state, Massachusetts, ranked below their counterparts in 15 other countries. The lowest-performing American jurisdiction, Puerto Rico, placed below developing nations like Kosovo, El Salvador and Cambodia.

鈥淧eople in the past , ‘Massachusetts is doing pretty well, maybe we could get New Mexico going like that too,鈥欌�� Hanushek said. 鈥淏ut if our best-performing state school system is 16th in the world, compared to the average kids in other countries, that doesn’t seem good to me.”

In general, the analysis shows, the top-line U.S. math ranking on PISA rose primarily because the pandemic鈥檚 disruptions to schooling were much more acutely felt in countries like Slovenia and Norway, which had been among the top performers on earlier iterations of the test.

Overall, students in relatively higher-scoring countries on the 2018 PISA exam sustained larger losses during COVID than those in countries that hadn鈥檛 done as well previously. Hanushek called the trend a 鈥渟traightforward鈥� validation of the importance of high-quality schools: Canadian students stood to lose more from weeks or months of online classes than those in less-effective Philippine schools.

鈥淚f you weren’t learning very much in school before the pandemic, you didn’t lose as much,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f you were learning a lot in school before the pandemic, you tended to lose more.”

The United States, long mired in the middle of the international pack, saw somewhat smaller math declines between 2018 and 2022 than the PISA average. Meanwhile, in spite of the clear trend, high-achieving East Asian countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea actually improved in the subject during the pandemic. 

The learning loss exhibited in both NAEP and PISA strongly suggests that the long-term prospects of affected students will be substantially worse than they would have been otherwise. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said this is largely due to the very nature of the American economy, in which skills and educational attainment are more highly prized than almost anywhere else in the world.

鈥淭he U.S. is a society in which skills really do matter for economic success,鈥� West said. 鈥淲hat that means is that the impact of learning loss on individual students through their earnings is going to be larger in the U.S. than it might be in a society like Sweden.鈥�

Wide state variation

Hanushek鈥檚 total calculation for the cost of learning loss, a staggering $31 trillion through the year 2100, is a figure that would dwarf the economic damage wrought by the business closures and layoffs necessitated by COVID鈥檚 spread, or even the years of stalled dynamism following the Great Recession. 

The projection is based on prior economic research into the connection between students鈥� test scores and future earnings. Hanushek further posits that the aggregate slowdown in innovation and human capital development will tend to slow the U.S. economy鈥檚 growth over the long haul, burdening even those who didn鈥檛 experience learning loss themselves.

The analysis estimates a far greater toll than that of another prominent prediction. In 2022, economists Thomas Kane of Harvard and Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth used eighth-grade math results on the NAEP exam following the pandemic. While that estimate pointed to a 1.6 percent decline in students鈥� future earnings, Hanushek and co-author Bradley Strauss believe that slump will fall between 5 and 6 percent.

Staiger said his paper with Kane represented a 鈥渓owball estimate鈥� while Hanushek鈥檚 offers an upper-bound projection, adding that most of the discrepancy between their findings likely stemmed from Hanushek鈥檚 broader lens on overall growth in addition to direct earnings. Whatever their differences, however, he noted that even marginal losses in productivity could eventually amount to considerable squandered potential.

鈥淭here are some that find smaller effects of test scores on economic growth, particularly for high-income countries like the U.S.,鈥� Staiger wrote in an email. 鈥淗owever, as Hanushek and Strauss make clear, even small impacts of the learning loss on future economic growth impose enormous costs on society.鈥� 

If Hanushek鈥檚 analysis proves correct, those costs will be borne unevenly. The largest state economies, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania, are all projected to absorb losses greater than $500 billion; their disproportionate burden reflects both the scope of their learning setbacks to this point and the number of future workers living in each. 

Individual income losses are also projected to differ considerably depending on location. By the paper鈥檚 calculations, students affected by the pandemic will lose less than 2 percent of their lifetime earnings in Utah, where math scores fell the least between 2019 and 2022. In West Virginia, Delaware, and Oklahoma, where they fell the most, former students could forgo an average of 9 percent of their career income.

Sarah Cohodes, an economist at the University of Michigan, said that the inequity of learning loss was a cause for particular concern. While the math performance of all students suffered between 2020 and the present, the losses were especially large for those who were already struggling or navigating critical life changes when COVID emerged. She referred to her own daughter, who wasn鈥檛 yet enrolled in a K鈥�12 school when the pandemic began, as an example.

“She lost a year of preschool, but she’s going to be fine 鈥� she hung out with me and went to all the parks in New York City,鈥� Cohodes said. 鈥淭he people I worry about are the ones who were transitioning between elementary and middle school, or who graduated from high school and missed out on some of the final preparations for what comes next.”

Hanushek, whose preferred strategy for learning recovery is to provide financial incentives to top teachers in exchange for taking on more students, observed that the worst-off students were likely the high schoolers who graduated or dropped out over the last few years. The unsuccessful efforts to mitigate their academic reversals, whether led by state or federal officials, were evidence that education authorities 鈥渉ave not really taken seriously the magnitude of this event,” he argued.

“My calculation is that 17 million kids [affected by the pandemic] have already left school,鈥� Hanushek said. 鈥淥nce they’ve left school, we have little hope of ever fixing their problems. Universities or firms are not going to make up for the lack of learning that these kids suffered, and each year that goes by, we lose four or five million more kids that will never recover.”

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to 社区黑料.

All significant harms. But then there鈥檚 the bottom-line figure that appeared last winter: $28 trillion.

罢丑补迟鈥檚 , to the children whose academic abilities were set back during the COVID-era, totalling about $70,000 per person over the course of their careers. The figure was reached by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, based on the cratering eighth-grade math performance measured by last year鈥檚 National Assessment of Educational Progress. And it could be permanent if schools don鈥檛 do something about those diminished skills.

One of the studying American education, Hanushek has spent over 40 years studying how schools lift kids鈥� achievement and whether test scores translate into later-life success. A longtime fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution, he won for Education Research in 2021, which brought a $3.9 million award for new projects. He is also deeply involved in some of the biggest ongoing debates in education policy, including whether the achievement gap between rich and poor students .

Above all other issues, Hanushek is tied to the question of whether spending more on schools will consistently result in better student outcomes. He has been both resolutely skeptical of the proposition and influential in the statehouses and courtrooms deciding whether to increase education funding. Over the last decade, a raft of studies have offered new evidence that increasing expenditures on schooling does, in fact, lift achievement 鈥� a in a lengthy review released this spring, while still insisting that the amount of dollars expended matter far less than the quality of the interventions they underwrite.

Money is also at the center of what the veteran researcher calls his 鈥渟imple and complete鈥� fix for COVID-related learning setbacks, detailed in . But rather than paying to lengthen school days or fund tutoring programs, Hanushek advises that districts spend remaining pandemic relief aid on incentives for the best teachers to take on extra students; he also proposes buying out the contracts of their least effective colleagues. 

In a conversation with 社区黑料鈥檚 Kevin Mahnken, Hanushek talked about how the most advanced economies reward skill (and punish the lack of it), why he believes voluntary learning initiatives tend to increase achievement gaps and what the United States could do with $28 trillion.

鈥淭he cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery.鈥�

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Can you contextualize actually means? It’s a sum so large as to be almost mystical.

Sure. You know that we had a recession because of the pandemic, when businesses closed. The total cost of that is about 1/15th the same amount, maybe $2 trillion. The best estimates I’ve seen of the effects of the 2008 recession are something like $5 trillion. And if you want a third option, $28 trillion is a little more than one year of America’s GDP. So it’s as if you closed down the economy for a whole year. 

Am I right in thinking about this as essentially a huge number of deferred opportunities for growth, like businesses that don’t expand or innovations that are slower to arrive?

It’s everything about the economy. But a better way to think about it for most people is that everybody who was in school during the pandemic will experience 5鈥�6 percent lower lifetime earnings. It’s almost like a 5 or 6 percent added tax, with this cohort earning less than the cohorts immediately ahead of it and immediately behind it, because they’re just less skilled. Unless we do something about it. 

But how confident are we that these test results are really measuring skills that are important in later life? Do we have proof that there’s an actual relationship between student scores on NAEP or state exams scores and their future economic activity?

Historically, people haven’t looked so much at the effect of test scores or cognitive skills on earnings because we just haven’t had much data. We’ve [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development], and it shows that the U.S. rewards economic skills more than almost any other country on earth.

But consider that in reverse. It also means that the U.S. punishes the lack of skills more than almost any other country on earth. What this is essentially showing is that employers really do pay attention to the skills people have. Those skills determine how well people can adapt to new jobs, and they help determine how capable people are in actually doing their jobs. Nobody objects to the idea that people who are smarter generally earn more. And while there is a lot of variation around that 鈥� from NBA players, who often don’t finish their degrees, to college graduates who find themselves driving taxis 鈥� that’s the kind of relationship we would expect to see.

Is that connection between demonstrated academic achievement and economic success just a result of the highly knowledge-based economies that prevail in rich, Western countries like the U.S.?

Precisely. One country is Singapore, and Singapore basically doesn’t do anything except for knowledge-based industries.

If it’s so clear that increased educational attainment is linked to better economic prospects, does it worry you that we’ve seen the last few years?

We don’t know if that’s going to last. But in the short run, it’s a potential concern that people aren’t going off to get more skills. Part of it is that in the current economy, it looks like you can get a huge reward from going straight into the labor market after high school. But it just won’t compare with the reward from going to college.

There are variations in the returns [to college]. You can go into some college programs that ultimately don’t pay off, at least if you pay the full tuition. But on average, college graduates are earning something like 75 percent more than high school graduates, and that differential is large enough that people who get fixated on the cost of tuition and debt cost are really making a huge mistake if they don’t go to college. The differential more than compensates for the cost of getting that college degree.

Could you please explain the “simple and complete” way of addressing learning loss?

Every time I mention my preferred strategy, people sort of turn away. [Laughs] People are much happier saying, “Let’s do exactly what we’re doing already, but just a little bit more of it.” And it boils down to lengthening the school day, lengthening the school year, trying some tutoring here and there. But even if you could implement that 鈥� which nobody knows how to do 鈥� the data suggests that it wouldn’t make up for the kinds of losses that kids have suffered. It’s just not a strong enough treatment.

Something everyone mostly agrees with is that teachers are really important, and that effective teachers are very, very valuable. People start to disagree when you ask, “What do you make of that?” My answer for dealing with the current learning losses of the COVID cohort is to try to get our most effective teachers to just work more intensively by taking on a few more kids. You can, in fact, provide incentives from the existing ESSER money 鈥� which will be around for at least another year 鈥� and provide them with help in grading, essentially lighten the load and make it possible for them to teach more kids.

The place where everybody stops listening is here: We know that our most ineffective teachers are just harming kids. If we could take some of the ESSER money and buy out the contracts of our least effective teachers, the combination of those things could be enough to make up for the learning loss we’ve seen. 

We’re almost completely back to normal schooling. But the cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer; we’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery. So we have to do something that’s quick 鈥� we can’t wait to hire and train a new group of teachers, or wait to figure out which kinds of instruction might help them the most. We just don’t have the time. But my point is that our current workforce is good enough to make up for this! We have, on average, a really good teaching force, though we don’t use the most effective teachers enough, and we overuse the least effective teachers.

The issue of urgency is obviously critical, but I wonder if it really supports your point. Given the logistical and political difficulties of that kind of approach, it seems much simpler to increase the quantity of instruction students receive 鈥� by providing tutoring and lengthening the school year, for instance 鈥� than by improving the quality through the strategy you describe.

The problem is that nobody is willing to actually make it mandatory that people stay longer in school. Los Angeles had a voluntary program to try to add four days to the school year, and . But even if they did, what would it mean? Say a quarter of your kids actually show up for two extra days: What do you teach them, and how do you integrate that with their normal classroom instruction? You could, at best, improve their soccer skills. 

Voluntary added days generally expand variation in academic performance because the kids who need [extra schooling] the least are the ones who tend to show up for voluntary learning days. It’s people at the top of the academic scale who take advantage of voluntary activities, and the people at the bottom don’t. That’s why I said before that we don’t know how to implement things like tutoring and supplemental instruction at scale. We have a few examples of it working, but we don’t know how to put it into 100,000 schools.

Does it surprise you that, in the five years since the Janus ruling, the organizing strength of teachers’ unions seems to have risen in much of the country? Teacher pay became something of a national issue during the summer of 2018, and now you see Republican governors excited to announce pay raises.

It鈥檚 a huge obstacle that you can’t get schools and teachers’ unions to agree to anything. We have a strike going on in Oakland Public Schools, where the union is trying to wring the last bit of money out of the pandemic; they’ve been offered over 20 percent pay increases over three years, but they don’t think that’s enough. [After nearly two weeks of school closures, on May 16.]

One of my favorite books on my bookshelf is called . It has a 1962 copyright. The thesis of the book is basically that if you pay all teachers the same amount, you’re likely to get either very underpaid math teachers or very overpaid PE teachers; you tend to see the former, and that’s where some teacher shortages come from. It’s a problem that certainly exists, and in my opinion, the biggest shortage is a shortage of highly effective teachers that we would like to keep in.

Do you think there’s something positive in the settlement we’ve reached in the U.S., wherein we hire lots of teachers but have largely deferred salary increases? I’m reminded of written by your frequent collaborator, Ludger Woessmann, which found that students earn better grades and stay in school longer when they have an adult mentor in school 鈥� that seems like something that small class sizes would foster, no?

It can be very important to build close relationships [between students and teachers]. The problem is that everything we measure suggests that reducing class size is not the most important thing, and that having an effective teacher in a classroom is so much more important than having a slightly smaller class. 

People get excited if they can see anything positive in the data about smaller classes. But the impact is so small relative to the impact that great teachers have. As you mentioned, teachers are now concerned about low salaries. But has to do with hiring more people too; it’s just hiring more people and paying them more. There are demands for more ancillary people in schools, like counselors and nurses, and they want to put caps on class size as well. So no one’s given up on quantity, which is the thing that unions like. Unions make their money by having more people, so they’re always happy to push for smaller class sizes.

If I could change the subject slightly: We’ve , which radically changed the way it evaluates and pays teachers. It’s much more related to effectiveness in the classroom now than under the traditional salary schedule. The other thing they did was introduce an incentive scheme to get the best teachers, measured by prior performance, to work in the lowest-performing schools in Dallas.

We found two things from this experiment. One is that the most effective teachers were willing to do that for relatively modest average salaries. The second was that once they moved to the lowest-performing schools, the worst schools in Dallas began approaching the citywide average within two years. This is a policy that has been shown to work, and work at scale where you can turn around entire schools.

But the unfortunate thing they did was say, “Oops! Now that these schools are performing well, they aren’t eligible for the program anymore.” They took the incentives away, and the best teachers left because there are lots of easier places to work. And they will if they don’t get paid.

You’ve got on Dallas’s pay-for-performance reform. It reminded me of the debate over Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system, which people have said is really hard to replicate, in part because was so fierce.

There was a bit of blowback in Dallas as well. Mike Miles was the superintendent who devised the entire Dallas system, and a somewhat grumpy school board to put it in place. Then, just as it was starting to come together, he left. So there’s no doubt, this is politically difficult.

The question is, are you willing to give up $28 trillion and settle for having the 31st-ranked school system in the world because it’s politically difficult? I’m not somebody who needs to make my living by politics. But it’s clear that the rewards of adopting these policies are so, so large, even if there are also political costs. Someday I hope the teachers’ unions also see that it’s in their interest to make some marginal changes to the old “no differentiation” policy.

I realize that’s just your estimate, and it’s not as though it would be dropped as a lump sum in the national checking account; but if the value of restoring lost learning is anything approaching $28 trillion, it could fund all our K鈥�12 schools many times over.

The cost of the current U.S. education system is about $750 billion, so you’re talking about potentially funding that system for decades with the money that you could get out of this. Frankly, we have to get some people who are willing to lead in this time of crisis.

Are there any useful lessons from the catastrophe of the pandemic 鈥� or perhaps technology, including advances in virtual and asynchronous learning 鈥� that we might use to improve schools going forward?

The thing I learned was sort of the opposite. 

It became very clear that having a teacher in the classroom is much better than hybrid instruction that only sometimes has a live, in-person teacher. And hybrid instruction, in turn, is better than fully remote instruction. There鈥檚 noy doubt that we gained a greater appreciation of the importance of the classroom teacher, even in these kinds of chaotic circumstances. We had other ways of trying to teach, but we couldn’t do away with effective classroom teachers. 

We did mobilize the tech industry to try to improve virtual instruction in a variety of ways, and maybe we’ll come out a bit ahead from that. But I worry that we won’t try to learn from when and where virtual instruction works best, and when and where it doesn’t work. 

Do you think the public sector, including federal entities like the Institute of Education Sciences, needs to take a more active role as a catalyst for breakthrough learning platforms and technology? Given the mixed record of ed-tech generally, I wonder if we actually have reason to be hopeful.

Sure, I like what IES has been doing. The amount of money we’re talking about there is pathetic, really, compared with the size of the problem. We have systematically underplayed any role of research and evaluation in education compared with other industries. But education is the base industry for most of this other stuff that we’re pouring money into.

The most recent NAEP release shows decades’ worth of progress 鈥� this time in civics and U.S. history 鈥� essentially erased since the beginning of the pandemic. I’m wondering whether you think the gains of the last 25 years or so, often characterized as the “education reform era,” were all that big to begin with.

Reform has been less reformist than many of us would have liked. It hasn’t accomplished what we wanted.

On the latest NAEP release, the thing that I thought was most important is that we really expanded the gaps in scoring. The top end of the scoring distribution did okay in social studies, but the lower-performing students fell further. What we’re seeing just reinforced these gaps, the spread-out distribution. At the bottom end, it seems that some eighth graders don’t even know what the separate branches of government do; they barely know the difference between the legislature and the executive. That’s very worrisome to me because the U.S. has thrived by having a common society. We might be losing some of that, and the polarization we see in our politics can only be heightened by these kinds of results.

The expanding achievement gap, which we’ve seen on other NAEP tests, is really concerning. Forty percent of eighth-graders scored below the NAEP Basic level in U.S. history, for example.

Yeah, and NAEP Basic is really basic. On subject-matter tests like these, kids scoring below that level really don’t know much at all; on math and reading tests, they’re kind of hopeless because they are not likely to be able to go on past eighth-grade knowledge. In the math test, it’s also roughly 40 percent of eighth-graders in the country scoring below Basic. That’s not a position you want to be in.

There’s been an enormous amount of newer research from scholars like and on the effects of education funding on school outcomes, with much of it suggesting that money really does matter. As perhaps the single figure most associated with the opposing view, are you getting ready to wave the white flag?

You get very different effects across these studies, and it’s not well understood when money has a big effect and when it doesn’t. There’s no reason to infer from some of this recent work that we can be assured of a great achievement gain, or a lifetime earnings gain, by simply putting more money into the existing system.

At a certain level, this is largely a political debate because Kirabo Jackson and Jesse Rothstein recognize that how you spend money is also really important. My view is that how you spend money is considerably more important than how much you spend. We’re currently spending something like $17,000 per kid on education, and an extra $300 is not going to make much difference unless you spend that money well. 

I’m reminded of that argued that the positive effects of school finance reforms are mostly driven by states that also adopted test-based accountability.

Yeah, it was very simple and straightforward that if you put more money into systems with good accountability for outcomes, you get much larger results. Part of the problem is that the current federal accountability law, ESSA, is loosening accountability all over the place and . What states have done since 2016 is backing off holding teachers responsible for student outcomes. This has negative effects on learning. 

The effects of spending have been argued endlessly over the last few decades. What are the biggest questions you’d like to see investigated going forward?

One of the developments coming out of the pandemic is that schooling is going to start becoming very different. It’s clear to me that just doing what’s called homeschooling is not going to be the answer, but parents have often looked for something different than what they got during the pandemic and even before the pandemic. You have lots of political fighting over education savings accounts and choice.

I don’t think any of these things is going to be the answer, but understanding the possible choices is important because choices are going to expand for lots of people. We don’t understand where they’re going to go and what the effects of those choices are going to be. 

If states continue to expand school choice, does it become harder to improve policy through the districts? It seems like the lever of traditional public schooling will just move fewer students in the future.

Well, if we had everywhere, we’d still see 80 percent of kids enrolled in traditional public schools. I like having more choice, and I think it’s important. It’s important to improve the charter sector as well. But the traditional public schools are still going to be there for the rest of my lifetime, and probably yours too. So we still have to be concerned about how we operate traditional public schools because they’re the backbone of our economy.

How do we know this? from our team at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University looked at learning patterns in 16 states to see how recovery efforts will affect students’ academic careers.

Our partnerships with state education departments provide the means to examine the experience of anonymous individual students as they move through public schools. Their scores on standardized state tests reveal what they know at the end of each school year and how that knowledge changes over time. This level of insight is both wide (covering all tested students in each state) and deep (the data illuminate students’ learning histories).

The COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified existing learning disparities. If an average student typically gains a year鈥檚 worth of knowledge in a year鈥檚 time, then those with greater-than-average learning progress more quickly. Conversely, those who do not learn as much as the average student gain less than what鈥檚 expected. Reviewing this data over multiple years yields a picture of the Pace of Learning (POL) for individual students.    

The differences in POL are the missing factor in policy decisions about post-COVID efforts.  

Our research assumes that the pre-pandemic pace of learning for individual students is the best that can be expected in the post-COVID years. Using longitudinal student data, we calculated each student鈥檚 historical POL and, based on those measures, projected outcomes under different learning loss scenarios. Here, we assume students have lost an average of 90 days of learning due to COVID-19, which has corroborated. We then considered the effects of additional time, measured in extra years of schooling.

The table below shows the percentage of students across the 16 states who would meet the benchmark of average knowledge in reading and math by the end of their senior year in high school.

Without additional learning time, fewer than two-thirds will attain that level in either subject. But more critically, even many years of additional instruction will yield only a small improvement. Even if schools offer an additional five years of education (assuming students would partake), only about 75% of students will hit that 12th-grade benchmark. One-quarter will remain undereducated.

Of course, these estimates are theoretical: No district in the country is capable of extending the years of schooling they offer by these amounts.

These findings reveal a lot about the future students face. Those who will reach the 12th-grade benchmark on time have POLs that are strong enough to keep them on track. They are not the ones to worry about. It is the students with smaller POLs who require the most attention and support. Currently, for every day of instruction, they gain less than a full day of learning. Even a full year of additional schooling may have little impact for them. Programs of shorter duration are even less likely to produce their desired aims.

Current remedies are insufficient to solve the learning gaps for low-POL students. High-dosage tutoring, for example, consists of four to six hours a week of extra learning time. For average learners, that leads to an increase of about eight percentile points on state achievement tests. But because students with low POLs receive less benefit from every hour or day of instruction offered, they will not progress to the same degree as the average student. At the end of a school year, the total number of hours cannot produce the needed for the low-POL population. Moreover, a large number of have found that the benefits from tutoring do not survive into the future for any students. Summer camps offer even less cause for optimism: They provide , and for a shorter time.

Ultimately, the accounting does not add up.

Still, against these discouraging findings, there are promising options for addressing learning recovery. One is to allow students to progress at their own pace toward established benchmarks rather than holding everyone to a fixed timeline of learning. Shifting to a mastery-based approach, rather than maintaining the current system of organizing students by grade level, could achieve this. As long as students continue to progress and demonstrate growth, their schooling could continue. High achievers could reach the benchmarks faster than is usually allowed and move on to more advanced goals. Releasing students from the traditional school year would free up resources that could be devoted to helping lower-POL students.

Another option would be to change the pace of learning only for students with slower rates of progress. Children need higher-quality instruction to realize greater learning gains, and the evidence is clear that the best teachers get than average educators. Making sure each classroom has excellent instruction should be the ultimate goal.

Ways to find and deploy the most successful educators already exist. exist. By utilizing data from professional observations and student test scores, schools could identify the instructors who truly make a difference in their students鈥� learning and deploy those high-impact teachers in new ways. One approach would be to offer incentives 鈥� bonus pay, for example, or credit that could be put toward a sabbatical or other specialized training 鈥� to motivate higher-quality teachers to add students to their classes. Offering extra support to teachers who take on extra tasks, such as class aides or release from other duties, could also help. And placing lower-performing students in classes with a high-quality teacher and higher-performing peers can produce a .

In places where the supply of high-need students outstrips the availability of high-impact teachers, an alternative could be to find the best educator in the state for a given subject, who would receive a substantial payment for recording an entire year’s worth of lessons. The videos and all supporting materials 鈥� lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, etc. 鈥� would be posted online for other teachers to use.  

We call this approach the Instructional Commons. Building on the notion of Massive Open Online Courses, it offers significant benefits: peer-to-peer training, the opportunity for teachers to observe high-quality instruction in depth, a ready resource for their own lesson planning and a common standard for educators and administrators to employ for professional development. If adopted successfully, this approach can elevate the caliber of the existing teacher force at relatively modest cost and without political battles.

The country is at a pivotal moment in K-12 public education. It is time to decide whether we are willing to make the necessary changes to the current system for our students鈥� future. This will require deep alterations to the existing organization and practice of K-12 public education. The alternative: continued support of an institutional system that will almost certainly fail.聽

Disclosure: Margaret (Macke) Raymond is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which provides financial support to 社区黑料.

The paper was released this morning by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), a research organization at Stanford University that examines education reform and school effectiveness. Its prior releases have often shown the academic performance of charter schools comparing favorably against traditional public schools.

In a call with reporters, Macke Raymond, CREDO鈥檚 director and a distinguished senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, called the findings 鈥渁 remarkable case study of what happens when schools are in this kind of operating framework.鈥澛�

鈥淚t makes me wonder what would happen if we gave that opportunity to other public schools,” Raymond added.

The study is a continuation of that focused exclusively on remote learning in New York charter schools during the first few months of the pandemic. In this paper, survey data from New York charters was combined with that of two other states, California and Washington State. In all, CREDO sent questionnaires to over 1,700 charters in all three states; they received 524 responses from schools enrolling roughly 225,000 students. All of Washington鈥檚 13 charter schools responded to the survey, while 21 percent of California鈥檚 and 64 percent of New York鈥檚 did the same.

The polling delved into the specifics of each school鈥檚 reaction to the emergence of COVID-19 and resultant switch to remote learning, first between March and June of 2020, then during the 2020-21 school year. The questions touched on how long it took for schools to complete that switch, how they altered instruction, how learning modes changed over time, and what kind of training they provided to employees during the pandemic鈥檚 first year.

At that time, charter leaders reported focusing overwhelmingly on how to keep delivering instruction and maintaining contact with families. Measuring priorities among respondents, the study showed that 86 percent listed the transition to digital learning as 鈥渧ery urgent鈥�; 81 percent said that establishing connections with families was very urgent, and 78 percent said the same of maintaining student engagement. By comparison, a smaller group characterized the provision of meals (55 percent), developing protocols for positive cases (37 percent), or ensuring student housing (35 percent) as very urgent.

The drive to move online was reflected in the speed with which charter schools got up and running after state-mandated closures began. On average, charter leaders reported an interval of just 3.5 days between closing their physical campuses and reopening for online instruction. California charters took an average of four days to manage this transition, while those in Washington said they accomplished it in just two. By contrast, held that less than 40 percent of teachers in district schools were in daily contact with their students by the end of that March.

The relatively shorter transition time for charters was previously noted in a July 2020 report from Tulane University鈥檚 National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. The slight lag displayed by traditional public schools was one the few differences between traditional public, private, and charter schools in that research.聽

Raymond described the swiftness of charters as 鈥渁mazingly different鈥� than what was occurring in district schools at the same time. 鈥淲hat we’re looking at here is literally hundreds of schools all doing the same thing,鈥� she said. 鈥淭hey’re all getting a plan, getting into motion, and doing it quickly.”

Charters responding to the CREDO survey also reported moving gradually to a hybrid learning model throughout the 2021 school year. While roughly 80 percent of respondents said they were operating in fully remote status in April 2020, only about 50 percent were still fully remote by February 2021. The other half had moved to a hybrid model by that time.

Somewhat disturbingly, a sizable number of survey participants said they were forced to change academic classes during the initial months of the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, 12 percent said they had dropped courses entirely, but that number jumped to 22 percent during the following school year. During 2020-21, 18 percent of respondents said they had altered high school graduation requirements, 40 percent said they had modified promotion requirements between grades, and 55 percent said they had reduced course content overall.

Changes to academic content also made their impact on learning time. Some 60 percent of charter leaders surveyed said they had reduced the length of their school day relative to the year that preceded the pandemic. Around 15 percent reported extending the school days, while over 30 percent said they had made 鈥渙ther calendar changes,鈥� including moving back the start of the school year, shortening vacations, or moving to a year-round schedule.

With few exceptions, charters additionally offered help to their teachers while negotiating the sudden switch to Zoom classrooms. In total, 97 percent of survey participants reportedly provided professional development to staff related explicitly to online learning, the report found. By comparison, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that most district reopening plans for the 2020-21 school year made no public commitment to increasing time for professional development.

This freedom to tinker with the structure and delivery of academic content was attributable to what Raymond described as the fundamental nature of the 鈥渃harter bargain鈥�: Schools of choice are afforded more flexibility than their more traditional counterparts, and so are continually adapting throughout their existence. Once the pandemic began, she argued, they were amply prepared to roll with its uncertainties.

鈥淲hen we kept pulling back from the data and seeing the patterns, what appears so surprising to us is that across different political contexts, different authorizing environments, different financial situations, what you have here is this practically universal response from the charter schools: Extremely fast, extremely focused on maintaining instruction, making tough trade-offs, mobilizing networks, getting all hands on deck as quickly as possible.鈥�

Thomas Dee, an economist and one of the Stanford co-authors, said that it wasn鈥檛 yet clear if or when the declines would be reversed, or how families might plan their re-entry into local schools. But a clear line connected remote schooling to fewer kids, he argued.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 社区黑料 Newsletter

鈥淯nsurprisingly, parents particularly didn’t want younger children 鈥� kindergarten or elementary-grade kids 鈥� sitting in front of a computer all day,鈥� Dee said. 鈥淲e’ve seen that in the enrollment declines, and what it implies is that some kids were missing out on those early developmental experiences, educational experiences we know can be really critical and have lifelong implications for them.鈥�

According to the study, as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, kindergarten enrollment fell by 3-4 percent in districts that opted for all-virtual instruction last fall. Elementary school enrollment fell by about 1 percent, while middle and high school enrollment was mostly unchanged.

To reach those conclusions, the research team painstakingly assembled data on student enrollment, as well as grade-level enrollment, from state departments of education, comparing 2020-21 figures with those of the preceding four school years. They also relied on data from Burbio.com, which tracks how school districts are offering instruction during the pandemic. The authors ultimately assembled a sample of 875 districts serving over one-third of all American K-12 students. While about half of those districts opened the 2020-21 school year in remote-only instruction, the other half was divided between those holding in-person classes and those using a hybrid model.

All told, they found that offering all-remote classes led to an enrollment drop of 1.1 percentage points, or roughly 300,000 students. Notably, the scale of disenrollment resulting from all-remote school was greater in demographically identifiable areas, such as rural districts and those serving more Hispanic students. The effects were almost twice as large in districts with lower concentrations of African American students, a phenomenon that could reflect attitudes previously expressed in public polling: Black parents of school-aged children as white parents to say they favored online classes, according to a survey conducted before the 2020-21 school year began.

The Stanford findings dovetail somewhat with those of other recent publications. A released in September by scholars at the University of Michigan and Boston University also detected evidence of significant enrollment drops in Michigan public schools, with coinciding increases in private school enrollment and the rate of homeschooling. co-authored by Dee and University of Hawaii professor Mark Murphy showed a 4 percent decline among K-12 students in Massachusetts between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, with larger effects in smaller districts and those serving more white families. Finally, national data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools points to a huge increase in charter enrollment last year.

Dee described the initial numbers coming out of states and districts as an imperfect tool, but one that currently offers the best guide to how families across the country have reacted to the unprecedented disruptions of COVID-19.

鈥淚 view the enrollment data as a sort of canary in a coal mine: a leading indicator that doesn’t capture the nuance we want in understanding what’s going on with kids, but that has the virtue of being available relatively quickly and comprehensively, representing the whole universe of public schools.鈥�

鈥楥ounts aren鈥檛 rebounding鈥�

While education observers are still getting a sense of how many students left traditional public schools last fall, the first inklings about the current school year are already becoming available. And so far, they don鈥檛 foretell a mass return of students who sat out last year.

by the Los Angeles Unified School District 鈥� the second-largest in the U.S. after New York City 鈥� show about 27,000 fewer students showed up for classes this September than last September. That represents a 6 percent decline in total enrollment, even as schools in L.A. have long since reopened for in-person classes.

Disenrollment has also persisted in Hawaii which has already released . Total kindergarten enrollment on the islands 鈥� which operate as a single, statewide school district 鈥� saw one of the steepest declines in the country during the pandemic, falling from 13,074 in 2019 to 11,103 in 2020. But while some have predicted an early education 鈥溾�� this year as parents finally place their kids in kindergarten, it has so far been absent; kindergarten enrollment is up by about 350, but still remains about 12 percent below the pre-pandemic status quo.

“What we’re seeing is that the fall 2021 counts are not rebounding to what we saw [before the pandemic],鈥� said Mark Murphy, Dee鈥檚 co-author on the Massachusetts paper. 鈥淚 think it’s starting to suggest that what we saw in fall 2020 may occur more commonly in fall 2021 than we originally thought.”

Instead, Murphy noted, the number of first graders has grown 鈥� an indication that families who 鈥渞ed-shirted鈥� their children last year may have opted to place them directly into first grade this September. Meanwhile, the two-year decline between 2019 and 2021 is still substantial in grades two, three, and four.

Murphy did reflect that changing perceptions of the COVID threat may still be influencing the decisions of families. The in late summer resulted in a spike in both cases and hospitalizations in Hawaii, which likely preyed on the minds of concerned parents.

鈥淭here may be some changes in the response to how families are thinking about enrolling their children given the changing dynamics, and the greater intensity of the Delta variant may impact individuals’ behavior.”