The revelations came from the latest release of the , 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 — 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 , 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 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.” 

And the way the government has distributed the funds — through a formula that targets high-poverty schools — left some communities hit hard by the pandemic with insufficient funding to offset learning declines, wrote Kenneth Shores of the University of Delaware and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University in Virginia in by the American Educational Research Association.

The researchers push for greater accountability, calling a lack of reporting on how districts are using the funds a “policy failure.” When officials learned which districts participated in remote learning longer, they could have made adjustments, Steinberg said.

“There weren’t efforts in real time … to update the distribution of this aid in ways that would try to maximize its reach to the students and communities that would need it the most,” he said.

In order to build public trust, they recommend that the U.S. Department of Education at least collect data on how a representative sample of districts is allocating the funds. 

National test scores set for release later this month are expected to further drive home the impact of school closures on students’ academic progress and spark more debate about whether districts are making wise choices with the unprecedented windfall. The AERA report echoes growing demands from parents and policymakers for greater transparency from districts. have asked the department for “insight into how schools are using federal dollars to help America’s students catch up,” and parent groups are seeking training in school finance to track the money. The researchers recommend that officials add incentives to get districts to prioritize academic interventions over projects “such as athletic fields.”

The most recent round of funding, the American Rescue Plan, requires districts to spend a minimum of 20% of their funds to address learning loss.

“But nobody had to stop there,” said Heather Tolley-Bauer, co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a parent-led group monitoring spending in the Cobb County School District, north of Atlanta. The organization is among those that have received from the National Parents Union to track the funds. “When we look at the things they could have spent the money on and the things they did spend the money on, it’s frustrating.”

Her leading example is the $9.7 million the district spent on “Iggy” hand-rinsing machines that dispense a mixture of water and ozone. The company’s points to studies that say the machines kill COVID, but disagree and others say there’s . But even if the technology is effective at killing the virus, the devices at some schools are inaccessible, with plastic over the openings, Tolley-Bauer said. (A spokesperson for 30e Scientific, the company that makes the machines, explained that some of them have experienced “vandalism by unknown individuals.”) 

She understands the district was “in a hot hurry” to address the crisis, but said parents feel excluded from funding decisions. 

“I’m not surprised that the federal government didn’t put a lot of parameters around [the money],” she said. “It would help if the schools would …make very strategic decisions that would impact students positively for years to come.”

Some districts have participated in “halftime reviews” to assess spending patterns, said Jonathan Travers, managing partner at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts resolve budget challenges. In some cases, districts are waiting two to three months for approval of any changes to their spending plans. Districts were able to spend the money quicker on bulk purchases and HVAC upgrades, while tutoring and other student services have taken longer to implement, he said.

Phyllis Jordan, associate director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank that has been tracking the spending, argued that the department has held districts accountable by requiring them to submit plans for the third round of funds. 

“There is a level of oversight that you haven’t had before,” she said. “You at least have to articulate how you plan to spend it.”

And the department recently proposed that all states participate in a that previously was optional. While it won’t focus just on COVID funds, that spending will be included. 

Impact on Black students 

To reach the $700 billion estimate, researchers drew from multiple data sources and existing studies. One was a that used assessment data to pinpoint how much of a district’s budget would need to be replaced to make up for missed instruction. In high-poverty districts that were in remote learning for much of the 2020-21 school year, it would be over 40% of their budget.

The researchers on the earlier study, led by Dan Goldhaber of the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and Thomas Kane of Harvard University, concluded districts would need to spend all of their relief funds to address learning loss, not just 20%. 

But Shores and Steinberg think that estimate could be too low because it might not account for learning loss among students that weren’t tested and it doesn’t reflect how families and other “non-school inputs” contribute to student achievement. , Steinberg said, shows that student performance depends considerably on what is “happening outside of school.”

Their estimates range from a low of $325 billion to make up for missed instruction to a high of $930 billion, with $700 billion roughly in the middle.

Goldhaber said their estimates could be too high, but he noted that either way, the education system has never faced a challenge like this.

“We’re trying to do across the country what has only been done at a small scale,” he said. 

Shores and Steinberg also draw attention to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black and Hispanic students, regardless of whether they come from low-income families. 

The Education Department’s survey of schools, for example, showed that while the vast majority were open by the end of the 2020-21 school year, the rate of Black and Hispanic students attending full, in-person learning still fell at least 20 percentage points below that of white students. Asian students were the least likely to attend in-person.

Additionally, released last year from researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the racial unrest that broke out during the first summer of the pandemic contributed to higher levels of trauma among Black students and families and that schools were “ill-equipped” to support them.

Distributing the funds through the existing Title I formula, which some argue is across the country, resulted in less funding for districts where the disruption to learning may still have been extensive, Shores and Steinberg wrote. 

But Goldhaber cautioned that “it’s easy to be critical retrospectively. When you’re trying to get money out the door quickly, it’s reasonable to use existing vehicles.”

Shores and Steinberg compare COVID relief packages with the federal stimulus package passed to combat the effects of the Great Recession. There’s “not a single study,” they wrote, that demonstrates the impact of that 2009 stimulus package on student learning.

Shores said he’s been disappointed by the “lack of creativity” in directing COVID relief funds. But it’s not too late to change course, particularly when it comes to spending money from the American Rescue Plan, they said.

With roughly a quarter of the funds spent, Steinberg said there’s still time to redirect the money toward tutoring or other interventions that “seem to have potentially positive returns.”

In 2019, 60% of Americans graded their schools an A or a B. But after more than two years of disruption, 52% give those marks in the latest Education Next survey, which has measured opinions on major education topics for 16 years. 

“Those grades have been going up for a very long time and were remarkably high [early on] during the pandemic itself. In some ways, it was an expression of solidarity,” said David Houston, an assistant professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and a co-author of the report. He said that while the public’s views “haven’t tanked by any means, they suggest that if there was a kumbaya moment, it appears to be ebbing.”

As fall elections approach, the results provide a glimpse into how education issues could sway voters. With almost 1,800 responses, the data points to a widening “partisan gap” between Democrats and Republicans on a lot more than just mandating masks and teaching about race. Over time, the parties have grown further apart on issues such as teachers unions, education spending and how they rate their local schools.

“The potential middle ground is truly vanishing,” Houston wrote with Paul Peterson and Martin West of Harvard University. “Public opinion on education issues seems to be increasingly drawn into the powerful current of partisanship in contemporary American politics.”

The Education Next poll, which brings a more conservative lens to education issues, adds to recent takeaways from surveys conducted by left-leaning organizations. Those show that with elections nearing, Democrats may have lost their edge over Republicans on education issues.

In the past, Democrats and Republicans were fairly united in giving their local schools high grades. But now, just 47% of Republicans assign an A or a B, compared with 56% of Democrats. 

Perhaps due to the public’s dimming perception of schools, support for education reforms, including vouchers, charter schools and free college, has bounced back to almost pre-pandemic highs. At the start of the pandemic, there was a decline in support “for almost everything across the ideological spectrum,” Houston said.

Before the pandemic, for example, 49% of Americans supported vouchers for students from low-income families. That dropped to 43% last year and is now back up to 48%

“I don’t think the public had this huge appetite for dramatic change” at the start of the pandemic, he said, adding that they were “interested in getting the status quo back.”

While the survey doesn’t provide a pre-pandemic comparison on the question of homeschooling, it captures growing support for the model — from 49% in 2020 to 54% this year.

Given the challenges of the past two years, it’s not surprising that people feel less favorable toward their schools, said Teresa Preston, director of publications at PDK International, another organization that measures on education.

But true feelings about schools are complex, she said.

“Opinions are so divided that I think it’s difficult to get a clear understanding of how members of the public feel — or how they’ll feel as concerns about the pandemic recede,” she said.

Case in point: Even with waning trust in schools, overall support for increasing teacher salaries has climbed to 72% — the highest since Education Next first conducted its survey in 2007. But the gap between the parties has grown to more than 20 percentage points. 

Despite the lower school ratings, Preston understands why Americans favor boosting teacher compensation.

“Teachers worked tremendously hard during the pandemic, and this may reflect the public’s understanding of how difficult it has been for teachers over the past few years,” she said. 

Experts disagree about the extent of teacher shortages, but with staff vacancies in the news, the public “may be seeing the need to give them more reasons to stay,” she said.

Parents agree, according to another out this week from Lexia Learning, a literacy curriculum company, which was conducted by the Harris Poll. Almost two-thirds of parents with a child in school this fall say paying teachers more would improve retention. And more than 75% said they’re concerned about staff shortages at their child’s school.

‘Deep family engagement’

The drop in support for local schools held true among parents. In a separate Education Next sample of over , 59% gave their local schools an A or B, compared to 64% in 2020.

With enrollment drops and families facing greater hardship, schools have had to work harder to maintain contact over the past two years, said Patience Peabody, executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, which supports schools’ family engagement efforts.

She saw those challenges up close in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington.

“Family trust was at an all-time low. Where trust was maintained, it was at local schools that had a culture of really deep family engagement,” she said. “You see how well the relationships are rooted when things are spiraling out of control.”

In surveys and focus groups, the foundation heard from parents who wanted their children to feel joy about school again. It donated $125,000 to 50 schools for projects that made learning fun, such as and outdoor . 

As the school year begins and districts drop COVID mitigation measures, parents’ worries over learning loss have eased compared to the fall of 2020, Education Next finds. Almost half say they are confident their children will catch up and just 9% responded that they don’t think their children will recover. The rest said their children didn’t experience learning loss.

And parents say they aren’t overly concerned about how their children’s teachers discuss race-related issues in the classroom, despite widespread attention to disputes at school board meetings and on social media. Another recent poll from NPR and Ipsos showed , with a minority — about a quarter of parents — saying they don’t have enough say over what schools teach.

Almost two-thirds of parents said their child’s school gives the right amount of attention to the topic. But that’s where parents strongly diverge from the general public. Forty percent of Americans overall feel there’s an appropriate amount of focus on the issue, with 54% of Democrats saying there’s too little emphasis and 51% of Republicans saying there’s too much.

There is an “unhappy minority” among parents and the public, and that “could play out in interesting and pivotal ways in the upcoming election,” Houston said.

But he stressed that people can afford to relax a bit. “This isn’t a moment of widespread perceptions of crisis.”