The case also has large ramifications for the nation’s charter school sector, potentially settling a debate over whether charters are public or private. 

Last summer, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The school appealed the case to the Supreme Court last fall.

A proposed Christian charter school is taking its case to the U.S. Supreme Court, hopeful that a conservative supermajority will offer a sympathetic ear to the notion that schools that practice religion should not be barred from receiving public funds.

and Oklahoma’s filed separate petitions with the court Monday, asking the justices to decide an issue that could not only upset accepted norms about charter schools, but radically shift legal understanding about the boundaries between church and state. 

While the court might not make a call for months, several experts predict that if it takes up the case, the justices in the majority would likely rule in favor of St. Isidore.

“I believe that if the Supreme Court decides to review it 
 they will reverse the Oklahoma decision and allow the religious charter school,” Martha Field, a Harvard University law professor, said last month on emerging school models held at Harvard. “I would not support such a decision, but I believe it is coming.”

The case centers on a dispute over whether or not a public charter school, where students practice religion as part of the curriculum, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In April, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, argued that state officials broke the law when they approved the charter — an argument the state Supreme Court backed in June. But attorneys for the school and religious freedom advocates say St. Isidore is essentially a private contractor that receives public funding to offer a service — not an arm of the government. 

“The Supreme Court has made it clear repeatedly in the last few years that if the government opens up a program to private organizations 
  it can’t then say ‘But if you’re religious, you’re not eligible,’ ” said Phil Sechler, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian law firm and advocacy group that represents the charter board. “That’s essentially what Oklahoma did.”

In response to the petitions, Drummond warned that allowing religious charter schools would open the “floodgates” to non-Christian religions like “radical Islam or even the Church of Satan.”

In its brief, the charter board said the state’s stance toward “minority faiths” is still “open hostility toward religion” and poses a “grave threat” to religious parents.

“Those with progressive values may send their children to progressive charter schools on the state’s dime. Those who subscribe to the principles of Montessori education may send their children to Montessori charter schools for free,” the petition states. “But religious parents may not avail themselves of this same benefit because the would-be charter school they desire is religious.”

‘State actors’

During oral arguments in Oklahoma, one judge asked whether the state was being used as a “test case” to overturn prevailing legal opinions on church-state separation. A national movement of wants the courts to rule in favor of greater religious freedom in schools. 

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, an advocacy organization, is suing over Louisiana’s law that classrooms post the 10 Commandments, and is currently over Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters’s mandate that teachers use the Bible in their lessons. 

But one element that could cast doubt on the Supreme Court’s willingness to hear the Oklahoma case is its refusal last year to take about charter schools — one that religious freedom advocates hoped would have paved the way for faith-based charters. 

In , three families sued the school, saying its dress code requiring girls to wear skirts violated their constitutional rights. The charter founders argued that as a nonprofit, the school should be free to enforce rules in line with its traditional values, raising the question of whether a charter school is public or private. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said no, and the school appealed to the Supreme Court.

While the justices asked for the U.S. solicitor general’s , suggesting some were intrigued by the issues presented, they ultimately turned it down.

As the school’s founders argued in Peltier, supporters of religious charters say that nonprofits, including churches, don’t automatically become “state actors” because they receive public funds. At that same Harvard conference, Mike Moreland, a Villanova University law professor, offered up an analogy.

“Boeing, by entering into an agreement to produce airplanes as a government contractor for the Pentagon, doesn’t become a state actor,” he said. Charter schools, therefore, don’t “turn into state actors for purposes of First Amendment analysis.”

Those who agree with him point to a 1982 case, , in which the Supreme Court said a private school receiving substantial public funding to educate troubled teens was not acting under the “color of state law” when it fired six employees. 

The Ninth Circuit reached a similar conclusion in a more that involved a charter school, but focused on employment issues rather than what students learn in the classroom. 

Those cases could indicate which way the court would lean if it takes the case, said William Jeynes, an at California State University Long Beach, the third panelist at the Harvard event. 

“The Supreme Court loves precedent,” he said. 

Opponents of religious charter schools say religious freedom proponents are fueling a non-existent debate. 

”State laws are clear,” said Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Charter schools are public schools created by the government, and the government is not allowed to establish any religious public schools.”

‘Incredibly popular’

Former Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal, raised the possibility of a religious charter school in a in which the court ruled 5-4 that officials could not exclude a Christian school from a state tax credit scholarship program simply because it was religious.

“What about charter schools?” he asked in his dissent, saying that the court’s ruling introduced “uncertainty” about the distinction between public and nonpublic schools. He reiterated his concern in , a 2022 opinion in which the court ruled 6-3 that states with school choice programs can’t discriminate against schools that teach religion.

The case focused on a Maine program that pays families to attend private school if their own communities lack a public high school. Breyer wrote that requiring states to fund religious schools blurred the lines between public and private entities. He asked if that “transformation” means that districts with charters “must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to give their children a religious education?”

Six months later, Oklahoma’s former Attorney General John O’Connor and state Solicitor General Zach West expanded on the majority’s opinion to say religious organizations should not be prohibited from opening charter schools. When he took office in 2023, Drummond, O’Connor’s replacement, threw out his predecessor’s interpretation.

Since then, Drummond has been at odds with fellow Republicans on the issue, including Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt. Despite his warning that the charter violates the law, the state’s virtual charter school board voted last October to approve the contract with the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. That prompted Drummond’s lawsuit.

When the school and the charter board lost, Stitt said the decision “sent a troubling message that religious groups are second-class participants in our education system. Charter schools are incredibly popular in Oklahoma — and all we’re saying is: We can’t choose who gets state dollars based on a private entity’s religious status.”

Even after the state Supreme Court ruled against the school, the state charter board initially refused to rescind its contract and then joined St. Isidore in appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Under pressure from Drummond, who called the charter “a serious threat to the religious liberty of all four million Oklahomans,” the board finally voided the contract in August. 

While the school was prepared to serve up to 500 students this fall, it received less than half that number of applications.

Despite the court’s traditional deference to existing case law, Field noted that the current justices haven’t shown the for previous opinions they disagree with. Overturning is just one example she cited.  

For someone who clerked for former Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s — when the court prayer and Bible readings in the classroom — she said it’s been disconcerting to see the legal ground shift so radically. 

“It seems that a lot of people here don’t like the Warren court,” she told the Harvard attendees.  “When I went to law school, separatism was the doctrine, and we all believe whatever we learned in law school.”

Offering the yet at students’ recovery from pandemic learning loss, the report showed that students actually made impressive academic gains last school year. But achievement gaps grew wider during the pandemic, and students in some high-poverty districts performed worse than they did before COVID. 

“There’s a whole generation of kids, especially in poor districts, that are half a grade level or more behind still and are going to need extra help,” he said.

The crowd, composed of some of the nation’s top tutoring providers and researchers, wondered what they should do next. 

His answer satisfied few. Despite the high stakes and the imminent end of federal relief funding, many schools still don’t know which interventions are working. As states and districts rushed to hire tutors and sign contracts, many failed to record which programs helped students the most. 

“It is amazing that the systems that we entrust with managing our own children’s learning are terrible at learning themselves,” he bluntly told attendees at the event, organized by Accelerate, an organization that works to scale high-dosage tutoring. “It is so frustrating to hear those questions being asked now when the federal dollars are about to run out.” 

Those dollars — $122 billion from the 2021 American Rescue Plan — expire at the end of September. At a time when the research shows many students are still far behind, the U.S. Department of Education is a chance to spread out use of remaining funds until March 2026, especially if they use it to reduce absenteeism, provide intensive tutoring and extend learning time. But Kane said states should also seize the opportunity to better track which recovery strategies are helping students the most. 

“I don’t mean to complain about water under the bridge, but let’s try to think of this going forward,” he said. 

Education department officials say they’re trying. , all districts will have to provide more details on how the funds were spent. Previously, districts had to show whether they provided summer learning, afterschool programs or tutoring to address learning loss. Now they’ll how much they’ve spent on those areas as well. 

Districts also have to report how many students participated in high-dosage tutoring and “evidence-based” summer and afterschool programs and whether they came from traditionally disadvantaged groups such as low-income students, English learners or students with disabilities. And if states want to apply for an extension, they’ll need to submit a letter explaining how they would use the funds to reach the neediest students. 

“We do want to know more from states and from districts about how they’re putting these dollars to use to support academic recovery,”  Roberto Rodriquez, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “Are we investing in some of these evidence-driven strategies?”

‘Students won’t have caught up’

Kane cited a previous lack of “federal leadership” on collecting such information and said states were hesitant to impose additional requirements not mandated by the 2021 relief fund law.

“States were in the back seat, watching districts make decisions on how to spend the money. They’ve been slow to get in the front seat,” he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. He urged federal officials to “publicly challenge states” to continue recovery efforts. “As the recovery dollars are tapering down, it’s clear students won’t have caught up.”

According to , states had about $53 billion remaining in American Rescue Plan funds last November. Rodriquez said the department has received a lot of interest from states on extensions, but no applications yet. 

Even if they don’t get more time to spend the funds, districts still have this summer to focus on students who are furthest behind, Kane said. He recommended that states require districts to inform parents whether their children are below grade level in reading and math and then serve all who sign up for summer school.

Most parents are “fairly removed” from discussions about relief funds, said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that explains achievement data to parents. But she said they shouldn’t be misinformed about whether their children are far behind.

“They often think that’s someone else’s child, not their own,” she said. The , she said, reinforces how important it is that “parents know exactly where their children are academically at the end of the school year.” 

The Harvard study was conducted in partnership with Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon. The district-level results show that students made up  a third of the learning they lost in math and a quarter of the loss in reading. This was more than students typically gained in a year prior to the pandemic. Alabama, for example, saw the most improvement in math and was the only state to exceed pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

Three states rebounded past 2019 performance in reading: Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi. Black students made more progress between 2022 and 2023 than white and Hispanic students, but the achievement gap between white and Black students was still larger last year than it was before the pandemic. 

Despite the growth, most students performed below 2019 achievement levels, especially in high-poverty districts. In six states, the gap between high- and low-poverty districts grew wider in reading between 2019 and 2023. 

Virginia was one. 

“We were struggling to catch up, much less get a step ahead,” state Superintendent Lisa Coons told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. She added that officials “expect persistent learning loss.”

To supplement declining relief funds, the state added last fall for tutoring, improving literacy and reducing chronic absenteeism. While she said her state would likely ask for an extension, she wants districts to move away from a “buffet” of initiatives and choose programs that fit the effective models outlined in a new state . The resource provides details on how to choose students for tutoring and fit sessions into the school schedule.

“We need to continue to prune,” she said, “and work on the things that we know are showing results for our students.”

Meanwhile, Hawaii appeared at the bottom, with students there learning the equivalent of a year-and-a-half less than the typical charter school student.

The study, by Paul E. Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel of Harvard University and published Tuesday in , finds that students in Alaska turned in the strongest academic performance as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

Students in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, and New Jersey followed closely behind, the researchers found, while charter school students in Hawaii, Tennessee, Michigan, Oregon and Pennsylvania performed the worst.

Peterson said using NAEP data for the analysis offered researchers an opportunity for a fresh, unvarnished look at charter school performance, one not often seen via state achievement tests, which for years have been criticized for manipulating proficiency levels. 

NAEP, he said, is “a low-stakes test” that’s not tied to teacher pay or school rankings. And the data is “very clean because exactly the same test is being administered to every single student. So we are comparing student performances on the same tests and no other.”

The disadvantage is that the results are much more constrained than typical state tests, offering scores in just fourth and eighth grades. That makes it impossible to analyze high school performance, a key concern. But Peterson noted that most charter schools are elementary or middle schools, so the data actually capture a more accurate picture of how the sector performs.

One thing the NAEP data revealed: a serious achievement gap among charter school students in several states.

In D.C. and five states — Missouri, Wisconsin, Delaware, Michigan and Maryland — the  gap between Black and white charter school students was roughly the equivalent of  three-and-one-half years of learning.

They found the largest score differences between white and Hispanic students in D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho and Massachusetts. 

In a statement, the said the new data are “sobering in many respects,” showing that charter schools in many places have “room to grow.” But it said the data show “many bright spots in the charter sector, and we are especially proud of the exceptional work being done in states like Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York and Oklahoma to produce positive outcomes on NAEP.” 

Peterson said he was most surprised by Alaska’s performance, but soon realized he shouldn’t be: It’s got a highly educated population and an unusual education culture. Because it’s so remote and sparsely populated, he said, correspondence schools have had a presence there since the 1930s. “And not just a few, a lot of them,” he said. “So the idea of having alternatives to the neighborhood school is very much part of their history.”

He also theorized that Alaska’s charters may have the resources to staff and equip new schools more easily than elsewhere.

As for Hawaii, he noted that half of its charter schools are explicitly serving the indigenous Hawaiian population — and half of those are teaching not in English, but in Hawaiian, as their purpose is to preserve that disappearing language.

States’ rankings based on charter students’ NAEP scores, the researchers said, were “only weakly correlated” with state rankings based on NAEP data for all public school students. And they found no significant difference in performance among states with different per-pupil charter funding levels or percentages of students enrolled in charter schools.

And though the study looked at charter schools nationally, the analysis isn’t all-encompassing. 

Peterson and Shakeel looked at 145,730 NAEP results for fourth- and eighth-graders in 35 states and D.C. from 2009 to 2019, but excluded 10 states without enough data: Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Washington, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

In five other states — Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont — there were no charter schools during the time period studied.

Management, authorizers matter

The researchers also found that the type of charter school matters, as does the governmental body authorizing it.

Students in schools managed by a nonprofit network scored better on NAEP tests, while those at freestanding independent charters and for-profit charter schools did more poorly.

Though just 20% of charters are in networks, said Harvard’s Peterson, “It’s clear that if you have a network, you have more opportunities for promotion within the organization. So you can keep people for a longer period of time. You’ve got more management roles that people can grow into.”

Charter schools in networks can also share practices and standardize back office functions. “A lot of the problems that the little mom-and-pop school faces when it’s starting up, it’s got to sort of invent the whole wheel all over again.”

Who authorizes the school also matters: Students whose charter schools are authorized by a state education agency fared better than those whose schools were authorized by a school district, mayor’s office or a university. Peterson said that shouldn’t come as a surprise either, since a state department of education’s job is to supervise schools’ performance. “They have been doing this for 100 years. So if they’re now given a task to also do this for charter schools, they have the institutional capacity to do it. If you ask a university to do it, the university has never done this before. So they’re probably not going to be likely to have the equipment to do a great job of it.”

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, which supports the U.S.’s largest public charter school network, said the new findings “confirm our experience, which is that public charter schools perform better when they are part of a larger network.”

The new analysis differs from the recent Stanford University , which compared charter school performance to that of students in nearby district schools. In its statement, the alliance said the CREDO study affirms that students who attend charter schools “generally have better academic outcomes when compared to their peers at nearby district schools. And we maintain our commitment to serving all students well, especially those who have been chronically underserved.”

Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18, the report found. Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.

, from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows a fivefold increase in the percentage of elementary and middle schools with extreme rates, where at least 30% of students are chronically absent. 

In addition, the researchers released an at 2022-23 figures from . The data shows that overall chronic absenteeism levels remain extremely high at 28%  — well above the pre-pandemic level of 16%.

Empty desks have a on both teachers and students who are still trying to make up for lost learning during the pandemic, said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works.  

“It makes teaching and learning much harder,” she said. She finds the increase at the elementary level especially alarming because absenteeism becomes “habit forming.”

Many students started preschool and kindergarten remotely during the early years of COVID and missed out on a normal transition into school. “When they start off not ever having a routine of attendance, what does that mean for addressing it in middle and high school?” she asked. 

The analysis — the first of three researchers plan to release on the federal data — shows that the percentage of high schools with extreme rates increased from 31% to 56% during that time period. A November release will focus on demographic disparities and one in January will examine state-level trends.

Soaring absenteeism rates have contributed to declines in math and reading scores on national tests, the said last month. Despite billions available to schools to address learning loss, students of extra help if they’re not in school. Districts are tackling the problem by dedicating staff to attendance, offering home visits with families and targeting voicemail messages to alert parents that their children’s absences are piling up. Experts say it takes multiple strategies to make a dent in what might seem an insurmountable challenge.

“If we aren’t careful, the problem can feel overwhelming,” said Terri Clark, literacy director at Read On Arizona. The nonprofit began efforts to improve attendance seven years ago when that reading performance declined as chronic absenteeism increased. But when schools tailor their strategies to students’ needs, they can make progress, Clark said. 

“Often the focus is on awareness and getting the word out,” she said. “But you can’t stop there. What if a family can’t get [to school] everyday?”

Her organization is working with about 60 districts across the state to better identify the barriers that keep students from attending school regularly. One is the Tanque Verde Unified School District, near Tucson, where chronic absenteeism has more than doubled to 27% since 2018. Superintendent Scott Hagerman pointed to a practice that he hopes will bring the rate back down. 

When students are absent, teachers are required to make sure they get their assignments. He knows from experience how important that connection can be to a student.

“When I was a kid, I had a chronic health issue, and the back and forth, in and out of school, without any idea of what was happening when I was gone made coming back harder,” he said. “We are trying to deal with that issue — absences causing more absences.”

Health- and transportation-related issues before the pandemic, Chang said. But now a school has further complicated daily commutes. And in , she’s heard from kindergarten parents who are confused about when they can send children back to school after a fever or illness.

“These are lingering effects of COVID protocols that aren’t helpful,” she said. She stressed the need for frequent, two-way communication between parents and school staff and the importance of reversing a “more-relaxed attitude” about attendance that has permeated school culture. 

The risk of ‘wasting precious time’

Sometimes a robocall from an NFL player emphasizing the importance of daily attendance is the added boost a student needs. That’s one of the methods an Ohio district used as part of the Cleveland Browns Foundation’s initiative.

“If you want to make your dreams become a reality, whether that’s getting into college, getting a good job or even becoming a champion on the playing field, it all starts with hard work,” said cornerback Greg Newsome II, one of three players to record the same message. 

The East Cleveland City Schools found that the player’s messages caused a 1.6% decrease in absenteeism among students who had missed school within the previous two weeks. That’s on top of a 6.3% reduction in absences after families received an automated message from a district staff member. 

The experiment was part of a Harvard University effort to help schools find the right combination of strategies to address absenteeism. 

“How do we layer in the right supports, at the right intensity, for the right students, at the right time?” asked Amber Humm Patnode, interim director of Proving Ground, a project of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. The team works with districts to test solutions before scaling them districtwide. Without gathering evidence on what works, Patnode said, “we risk wasting precious time, resources and energy on things that may not result in actual reduced absences.”

The Euclid City School District has also participated in Stay in the Game. One kindergartner last year received three tickets to a Browns game after making significant progress in attendance. Six-year-old Mekhi Bridges had a speech delay, which made his mother Tasia Letlow extra cautious about getting him to school everyday. 

“I wasn’t comfortable with him riding the bus because of not being able to necessarily communicate everything,” Letlow said. But she also had car trouble, and it wasn’t long before Mekhi amassed over 20 absences. The district sent a letter alerting her to the problem. 

Targeted letters are just one way the district has addressed a chronic absence rate that reached 73% in 2021. This fall, Jerimie Acree, attendance and residency coordinator for the district, is trying a different approach for middle and high school students who miss class — a deterrent he calls “working lunch.” Students who cut three times have to spend lunch in the media center away from their friends and without their phones. 

“It is totally in place to inconvenience them,” Acree said. 

The district’s attendance clerks — staff members who are supposed to focus on improving attendance — now report to him. Previously, they reported to principals, where they frequently got sidetracked with other duties. 

“[Administrators] would pull that person to do supervision of field trips” among other things, he said. “Attendance work wasn’t being done everyday.”

To respond to the absenteeism crisis, districts and nonprofits across the country have tapped for dedicated positions or to pay educators stipends for home visits. With the deadline to use those funds coming up next year, the ability of districts to sustain those efforts has become “a huge question,” Chang said.

Gina Martinez-Keddy, executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits — which began in Sacramento 25 years ago — said she’s talking to districts about how to use other sources of federal funding, like Title I, to support the efforts. the model can have what she called “spillover effects” on chronic absenteeism even if the original intention was to build trust with families.

“Relationship-building works,” Chang said. “That was proven before the pandemic. One-on-one engagement is really essential.”

For the first time, a majority of Ivy League schools will soon be led by women.

Starting July 1, 2023, will assume the role of president at Harvard University, at Columbia University and at Dartmouth College. They will join current female presidents at Brown University, Cornell University and University of Pennsylvania.

, an associate professor of higher education at Old Dominion University, explains what this means for gender equity in the college presidency – and why U.S. colleges and universities still have a long way to go.

Why does this matter?

While women make up about as well as in the U.S., only about of American colleges and universities are women.

However, the Ivy League is not new to selecting female presidents – they have been doing so for a few decades. Judith Rodin was the first, in 1994, when she became president of the University of Pennsylvania. She was followed by and , both in 2001. Rodin was succeeded by another woman, , in 2004.

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Still, one reason this moment may be one to watch is that Ivy League institutions are often seen as exemplars of elite, complex institutions. So seeing what one could consider a critical mass of female leaders in the Ivy League could signal the benefit of women in leadership to other boards that are hesitant or slow to hire women as presidents.

How unusual is this across higher ed?

I think it would be more surprising to see mostly female presidents at the majority of large public research universities, or at a majority of the schools in the .

Despite what may seem like a boom in women leading institutions, the percentage of women in the presidency at colleges and universities more broadly has plateaued at for the past decade. This was after increasing from to .

A number of factors contribute to this low percentage, including – such as exclusion from networks that provide mentorship – reward and that are not equitable across genders, and .

A recent analysis of explains how this bias against women occurs, specifically when it comes to academic leadership roles. This is important because college presidents typically through such as deans, vice provosts and provosts.

What are the biggest challenges that college presidents face?

The biggest priority or challenge really depends on the individual college or university. However, all institutions must ensure they are financially healthy and identify opportunities to strengthen their financial resources. College presidents have reported that they spend the most time on , followed by fundraising.

Particularly in the current , where the average cost of college runs , college leaders must work to keep their institutions fiscally strong and also competitive and affordable. This may involve, for example, , creating new programs and cultivating new sources of funding.

What effect does having a woman in the top seat have?

For colleges that have only ever had a man in the president’s role, hiring their first woman as president can signal that the institution embraces change and evolution. This can be an especially important message to send to funders, alumni donors, philanthropists, state legislators and corporate partners, who all play a role in ensuring a particular college’s financial vitality.

Female presidents add to the diversity of the college presidency. They to conversations that shape practices and policies both within their college and across higher education. They might, for example, provide their particular perspective regarding compensation for female faculty members of color, who tend to on campuses.

Organizational scholars and business leaders affirm that made by organizations and . A more diverse group of decision-makers can generate than a homogeneous group that may be susceptible to group think.

And lastly, having women at the helm of academic institutions that it is indeed possible.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

It was the year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent public health authority, declared that the country was “,” as COVID case rates plummeted from their Omicron highs. By the fall, President Biden was with that sentiment, noting that most people had laid down their masks and returned to something like normal. 

And around the possibility of winter surges in American schools, the most visible hallmarks of the COVID era have at last receded. The lurching progression from in-person to virtual classes is over, following an explosion of school exposures last winter. Mask mandates, social distancing, and endless disinfectant wipes are also predominantly a thing of the past, with virtually all children approved to receive vaccines. 

But in terms of the pandemic’s impact on education, it’s still only the end of the beginning. With each month, new findings emerge revealing more about what remote instruction did to learning and how families reacted. The potentially lifelong shadow the virus has cast over K-12 students — from how babies develop speech to what today’s adolescents will earn decades from now — is largely mysterious. 

Previous editions of this list have covered the wider world of education policy and research: issues like school financing, choice, accountability, and testing. This year, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ is focusing exclusively on the lessons of the COVID era — one that is now passing from the scene — and the questions that remain in its wake.

Here, laid out in charts, maps, and tables, are 14 discoveries that changed how we think about schools in 2022.

The scope of learning loss

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects. 

The unprecedented drop in math scores, which fell by an average of eight points for eighth graders and five points for fourth graders, was especially disturbing. But reversals in literacy were also notable, with sizable increases in the number of students testing below even the “basic” level of reading proficiency. What’s more, the results affirmed dismal findings from NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” test — an earlier version of the exam that has been administered since the early 1970s — showing that the pandemic set back nine-year-olds’ performance in math and reading to levels last seen two decades ago. 

“We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years,” said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington professor, of the long-term results.

As many experts warned, additional research has also made clear that the academic damage of COVID was not shared equally. NWEA, the nonprofit testing group whose MAP exam has proven an invaluable assessment tool throughout the pandemic, released a study in November indicating that already-wide achievement gaps in elementary classrooms have grown between 5 and 10 percent in the last few years. Those disparities grew, NWEA analysts specified, because of slumping achievement among struggling students. 

College entrance exams contributed yet another dispiriting perspective, with average scores on the ACT slipping below 20 for the first time since the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Only about one in twelve test-takers from low-income families met standards of college readiness across all of the test’s four subjects.

In 2022, researchers, educators, and the public discovered the full extent of what COVID did to K-12 learning. 2023 will provide a test of how quickly that learning can be restored — and how seriously we are approaching the problem.

The geography of remote learning

Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.

co-authored by experts at NWEA, the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research used data from over 2 million students to show that — whether in states that reopened schools relatively quickly, like Florida, or those that stayed remote much longer, like Virginia — schools serving the highest proportions of low-income students spent the most weeks remote during the 2020–21 academic year. Notably, however, the socioeconomic gaps in exposure to virtual teaching were much larger among the group of predominantly blue states that tended to reopen more hesitantly. In those states, high-poverty schools spent more than two additional months in Zoom classrooms than low-poverty schools. 

Harvard economist and study co-author Thomas Kane observed that the greater prevalence of remote learning among poor students, who are already less likely to succeed academically than their better-off peers, could be an additional driver of achievement gaps for years to come. In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Kane said that the academic recovery interventions planned by school districts were “nowhere near enough” to compensate for COVID’s toll.

“Based on what I’m seeing, most districts are going to find that students are still lagging far behind when they take their state tests in May 2023,” Kane said.

But was the public convinced by the reams of detailed and well-intentioned research on the results of online learning? Public polling suggests that the answer is ambiguous. At least — albeit one conducted before much of the research on learning loss was released — indicated that Americans prioritized curbing the pandemic’s spread over keeping schools open.

Poorer districts lost the most

Few doubt that some amount of learning loss is linked to the hasty and unplanned adoption of remote instruction. How much is still ambiguous, however. released in October — devised by Harvard’s Kane and the eminent Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, among others — leveraged a combination of state test scores and federal NAEP results to deliver a granular, district-by-district overview of the pandemic’s academic impact.

While the researchers found that academic performance in predominantly in-person districts held up much better than mostly remote districts within the same state, they also stipulated that school closures were not “the primary factor driving achievement losses”; some states that spent much of the pandemic open as usual, such as Maine, sustained far greater score declines than those that saw widespread closures, such as California. And beyond the question of remote-versus-in-person, it is clear that districts with greater concentrations of poor students experienced the worst academic effects over the last few years.

In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer than 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost. Above all, the ultra-local look at test scores showed a startling amount of variation in how different school districts experienced the same event; in reading, almost 15 percent of all students were enrolled in districts where achievement actually grew during the pandemic.

Enrollment fell as families fled 

The pandemic left an impact on schools far beyond its blow to student achievement. Due to a combination of public dissatisfaction, increased mobility, and economic upheaval, families withdrew from their public schools in unprecedented numbers — as many as 1.5 million during the 2020–21 school year, or about 3 percent of all public K-12 enrollment, according to a 2021 report from NCES.

Further scholarly investigation has unearthed the important role that learning modality played in that flight. According to a comprehensive report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the districts that spent the most time remote throughout the first pandemic school year lost at least 500,000 more students than they would have if they had stayed open during that time. And in the period that followed, fewer students returned than did to districts where campuses mostly operated in-person. 

The findings suggested that widespread loss of students was not just “pandemic-related; it was pandemic-response related,” Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Linda Jacobson. 

Meanwhile, enrollment trends detected this spring by the data company Burbio showed that major urban districts continued losing students through the 2021–22 school year. Only a handful of states examined by the organization during that time saw an enrollment increase of more than 1 percent compared with the previous year.

The youngest weren’t spared

While we’ve gained a better empirical understanding of how K-12 students’ lives and learning trajectories were altered by COVID, it will be years before we fully grasp the ways in which the youngest Americans were affected. But a provocative study of child development and language acquisition has already given cause for alarm.

Using LENA “talk pedometers” — a that measures the number of spoken interactions occurring in the vicinity of young children, as well as their own vocalizations — researchers at Brown discovered that babies born after July 2020 produced fewer vocalizations and demonstrated slower verbal growth than comparable children born before 2019. The younger group of babies also experienced slower growth of white matter — subcortical nerve fibers that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain — perhaps the result of hearing fewer words spoken and engaging less often with their caregivers. 

If the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, it will produce unavoidable consequences for schools in the next decade.

Old before their time

Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.

A slew of surveys highlight newly elevated levels of student stress, the product of public health worries, economic anxiety, and even domestic abuse. But a recently published offers proof that those factors actually changed the neurobiology of some adolescents. Examining MRIs of 128 matched subjects — half measured before and half after the pandemic began — a team of psychologists found that the group assessed after COVID demonstrated higher “brain age” than their chronological age and experienced faster growth in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain that regulate fear, stress, and memory.

Such sped-up aging has historically been seen in cases of household trauma and neglect, and its consequences can include decreased capacity across a range of intellectual functions. Follow-up scans are already planned to assess whether the process has been remediated.

Teachers under strain

Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021. 

That figure almost certainly doesn’t betoken a future exodus from the profession; educators have historically been much more likely to say they intend to leave than to ultimately act on those plans. But it could mean that large numbers will stay in their jobs past the point of burnout, their effectiveness permanently dimmed. On average, the poll found that the teachers and principals were more than twice as likely to report experiencing frequent, job-related stress than other workers.

Teachers were also twice as likely as comparable adults to say they were not “coping well” with their stress. While the most commonly cited contributing factor was the task of addressing learning loss, some school employees also complained of staff shortages and the difficulty of managing their own childcare responsibilities. 

Social shuffle

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers. 

In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty. 

Somewhat surprisingly for a survey administered over two years after the emergence of COVID, nearly 20 percent of the teen respondents said they had not attended classes exclusively in-person during the spring of 2022 (a time of somewhat elevated virus case rates). About two-thirds said they would prefer a return to entirely in-person schooling in the future.

Future earnings endangered

The downstream consequences of thwarted or deferred academic success are destined to include financial disadvantages; after all, today’s underserved pupils are tomorrow’s underprepared workers. But until the fall release of NAEP, it was difficult to produce a broadly shared measure of American students’ stifled progress. 

With the arrival of those scores, Harvard economist Kane — him again — and Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger immediately calculated a projection of how much potential income could be lost due to diminished math learning among eighth-graders since 2020. Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, the figure they reached was astounding: $900 billion of future earnings, if the declines in learning were to remain permanent for all students in the United States.

“When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life,” Staiger told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

The paper was one of a series of analyses focusing specifically on the drop in math knowledge, which appears to have been particularly significant. But the extended disruption to literacy instruction left a substantial mark as well, particularly among students at the beginning of their reading careers. Amplify, a curriculum provider, released data this fall showing that 4 percent fewer second graders and 8 percent fewer first graders are reaching grade-level reading goals than in 2019; meanwhile, almost one-third of third graders were assessed as needing “intensive intervention.”

Those bleak findings echo the results of Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready assessment, which revealed that the percentage of elementary students reading below grade level grew between 2021 and 2022. That subgroup of students, sometimes called the “COVID cohort,” is running out of time to get back on track.

Costs of recovery

The havoc inflicted by the pandemic is now an inescapable fact for schools, families, and public authorities to deal with. But what’s it going to take to surmount the considerable educational challenges and get kids back on track?

The federal government has allocated roughly $190 billion in relief funding to states for that purpose. But , that amount won’t be sufficient to get the job done. The true cost, they say, will fall somewhere between $325 billion and $930 billion, huge sums that include not only the pedagogical resources to restore lost learning opportunities from the last several years, but also the out-of-school interventions that power so much of the academic growth that goes on inside classrooms. 

There is no indication that anywhere near that level of funding — or even any further money at all — is coming. In the meantime, school districts are only required to spend 20 percent of their federal aid on learning recovery. 

Latino students take a hit

Children of all backgrounds were bruised by the effects of shuttered schools, but among them, Latino students are notable for having recently enjoyed sustained academic momentum. As their share of the national student body has increased to nearly 30 percent, they have also seen rising achievement scores and post-secondary outcomes compared with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

COVID put that progress on pause, according to from the advocacy organization UnidosUS. After leaping from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade, the on-time high school graduation rate for Latino students fell slightly in 2021. Worse still, the rate of college enrollment for Latino freshmen shrunk by 7.8 percent between the spring of 2020 and 2021. That figure bounced back somewhat over the next academic year — along with rates of college-going for most Americans — but still fell below the pre-pandemic norm.

The particular stumbles experienced by Latino kids have explanations that both precede the pandemic and are directly linked to it, the report found. Long before 2020, Latino households were less likely to report having a computer or high-speed broadband in the home. Meanwhile, Latino students were disproportionately likely to be enrolled in low-income schools, which were themselves more likely to stay remote longer during the pandemic.

Explosion of absenteeism

Along with the surge of full-on disenrollment from schools, a shocking number of K-12 students spent the last few years missing day after day of instruction. Just how many days of absence is difficult to know precisely, however, because of ambiguities in the way attendance figures were collected during the COVID era.

An released this fall indicated that over 10 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missing over 10 percent of the school year) in 2020–21. That would be an increase of more than 25 percent relative to the pre-pandemic norm, but from Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit group Attendance Works, it is also very likely a serious underestimate. Because of challenges in knowing which students “attended” all of their virtual lessons (versus simply logging into Zoom and then logging off, for instance), statewide absence counts in the NCES figures sometimes vary widely from district-level reporting.

Based on the early release of more detailed 2021–22 figures from California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, the authors wrote, it is reasonable to predict that as many as 16 million kids were chronically absent last school year, a doubling of the pre-pandemic number. 

The teacher exodus that wasn’t

Were American schools plagued with teacher absences this year, or not? It was a question that captivated news sources, but also divided education experts, because it contained an even thornier question within it: If the supply of teachers remains mostly steady, but demand for them spikes, are they truly at a deficit?

In spite of widespread fears that veteran teachers were quitting in huge numbers as a reaction to the pandemic, no mass departure ever took place, according to a paper by Brown economist Matt Kraft. Turnover actually fell slightly in the summer of 2020 and stayed within the typical annual range the next year. But weak hiring during the first few months of the pandemic may have contributed to higher-than-usual vacancy rates, perhaps triggered by fears of Great Recession-style budget cuts that never materialized.

In fact, a windfall of federal cash followed instead, leading districts to add new jobs in late 2020 and 2021, and the resultant hiring spree has indeed made candidates for teaching positions hard to find. But even that phenomenon isn’t true everywhere, since numbers differ widely across state lines. According to a paper released this summer, Mississippi’s rate of vacancies per 10,000 students is more than 68 times higher than that of Utah. 

Hopeful signs

As the long legacy of COVID grew clearer, research in 2022 gave the education world plenty of reasons to worry. But it has also contributed some hopeful signs of renewed progress in schools. 

The good omens aren’t popping up everywhere, but some are to be found in state-level testing, which has resumed around the country after being suspended for at least the first pandemic year. According to Tennessee’s state exams, the number of students meeting or beating grade-level reading standards rose from 29 percent in 2020–21 to over 36 percent in 2021–22. In all, more than three-quarters of the state’s school districts reported reading scores higher than were seen in the pre-pandemic period. 

“We are seeing this broadly across the state, and across district types — urban, rural and suburban,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Beth Hawkins. “We are really, really proud of what our districts have done.”

Several other Southern states have begun to make their turnaround, with Mississippi a particular standout. This of 2021–22 testing data showed average scores in math, English, and science nearing or exceeding 2019 levels, while performance on the U.S. history exam skyrocketed compared with 2020–21 (the first in which it had been given). Just as notably, — a state-mandated test that students must pass to progress to the fourth grade — fell by only .6 percentage points between 2019 and 2022. 

If the tenor of the sometimes pointed exchanges are any indication, the outcome may hinge on how long universities expect to employ race-conscious admissions before such practices are no longer needed.

In arguments that lasted close to five hours, the court heard a pair of high-profile cases brought by a pro-Asian organization against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

During the UNC case, which was heard first, attorneys representing the university argued that students are not admitted based on checking a racial box; rather, they look “holistically” at multiple factors, said Ryan Park, solicitor general of North Carolina, who insisted that race plays a “minimal” role in UNC’s decisions. 

“If it’s irrelevant, then you shouldn’t care whether it’s ruled out,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was only on the bench for the UNC arguments, repeatedly homed in on the notion that the universities only employed race as one criteria among many. 

“The university is not requiring anybody to give their race. When you give your race, you’re not getting any special points. It’s being treated just on par with other factors in the system,” Jackson said. “No one’s automatically getting in.”

At a time when racial issues are at the forefront of educational debates and school politics, the historic cases reflect how polarizing attempts to address past discrimination have become. The court’s lengthy gauntlet Monday is also an indication of the far-reaching implications of its decisions in the two cases, which are expected in June.

Advocates for affirmative action argue it’s important for colleges and universities to consider race as one factor in their efforts to create a diverse student body, especially since K-12 schools for Black and Hispanic students. But the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions — with strong backing from Republicans and conservative organizations — say such policies are a form of illegal racial discrimination that put Asian students at a disadvantage. 

The student group wants the court to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 ruling that upheld race-based admissions at the University of Michigan Law School. They argue that allowing such policies to continue violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to any institution receiving federal funds, and the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which applies to UNC as a public university. 

“Grutter assumed that race would only be a plus. But race is a minus for Asians, a group that continues to face immense racial discrimination in this country,” said Cam Norris, representing the group in its lawsuit against Harvard. Asian students, he said, “should be getting into Harvard more than whites, but they don’t because Harvard gives them significantly lower personal ratings.”

He said that Harvard is not socioeconomically diverse and that removing race-conscious admissions would actually increase opportunities for Black students. But Seth Waxman, representing Harvard, disagreed with Norris’s statement that 80% of students at the university come from wealthier families. The university, he said, has increased financial aid as a way to reduce its reliance on racial preferences. 

In the Harvard arguments, the conservative justices focused on a preliminary “personal rating” the university’s 40 admissions counselors apply to applicants as a form of “triage” to help sift through over 60,000 applications for just 1,600 spots at the elite university. Waxman showed the justices a chart that he said proves the role of race was so small, it was almost zero.

“So there is only a little racial discrimination,” Chief Justice John Roberts quipped.

In the Grutter decision, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested that 25 years in the future — 2028 — the use of racial preferences would no longer be necessary. The conservative justices repeatedly pressed the Harvard and UNC attorneys to give an “endpoint.” 

Representing the Biden administration, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the “arc of progress” has been slower than O’Connor envisioned and that universities should be diligent in using alternatives to race in their admission decisions.

Reacting to Monday’s arguments, Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, called the responses to the justices’ questions on this issue disappointing.

The lack of an endpoint “will allow the conservatives to say that schools have no intention of ever ending it, in violation of Grutter,” he said.

Both Waxman for Harvard and Park for UNC said that race-neutral alternatives have been insufficient in creating a diverse student body. Removing the option to consider race would reduce the percentage of Black students admitted to Harvard from 14% to 10%, Waxman said.

The justices — even conservatives Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett — raised the possibility of using race only in the context of a student’s life experiences.

“What if an applicant wrote an essay about how integral their racial identity was to them as a source of pride and the cultural attributes of their racial heritage were very important?” Barrett asked. “Would that be OK?”

But Thomas expressed some skepticism that diversity offered a value in and of itself. “I’ve heard the word diversity quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means,” he said.

‘The bigger question’

This line of questioning suggests the court might not be as quick to end all racial preferences in admissions as many assumed, said Art Coleman, managing partner of EducationCounsel, a consulting firm.

“There is a majority of the court that is uncomfortable at some level with the notion of the consideration of race in admissions,” he said. “But I think the bigger question is what they do about that.”

While some observers have questioned whether the court would ultimately end even race-neutral, voluntary integration programs in K-12, Coleman said he doesn’t see the justices leaning that way. Instead, the legal question for the court is whether a student gets some “material benefit,” like admission or a scholarship, because of their race. That, he said, could have implications for “college counselors who are guiding students to and through the admissions process.” 

The liberal justices pushed attorneys for the plaintiffs to explain whether eliminating racial preferences in college admissions would result in a lack of racial diversity across society as a whole. Prelogar, representing the U.S. government, said during the UNC hearing that it is “critically important” to have diversity in the military, and then added during the Harvard arguments that removing race-conscious measures would have “destabilizing ramifications in just about every important industry in America.”

The two hearings offered a history lesson on the nation’s unfinished work to redress its racist past. Speaking on behalf of UNC, David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said Black students can be discouraged from applying to the university when they see Confederate statues on campus or witness demonstrations by white supremacy groups. 

The plaintiffs argued that the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ending desegregation in K-12, should have applied to race-conscious admissions in college. That prompted a strong response from Prelogar.

“There is a world of difference between the situation this court confronted in Brown, the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that was designed to exclude African Americans based on notions of racial inferiority,” she said. The court recognized, she said, that such discrimination affected children’s “hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

While it is focused on higher education, the court’s ruling in those cases is bound to filter down to K-12 schools.

“Despite the best efforts of school districts 
 to create more diverse schools, racial segregation has increased over the last two decades. As a result, educational inequities persist,” according to filed by the Council of the Great City Schools in defense of admissions policies at Harvard University and the University North Carolina.

At least 18 million students attend K-12 schools where more than three-quarters of the enrollment is of a single race, a recent report showed, and 14% of students attend schools where at least 9 out 10 of students are of the same race.

Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs in the case, are challenging admissions criteria at those universities they claim discriminate against Asian students. Admissions, they say, should be based on merit.

They want the court to overturn a in Grutter v. Bollinger that upheld race-based admissions at the University of MIchigan Law School. In that ruling, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor foresaw a nation in which “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The Biden administration, , and advocates for Black and Hispanic students argue that affirmative action is even more essential today because schools are still segregated and the promise of integration under Brown v. Board of Education “remains unfulfilled.”

Supporters of affirmative action expect the court’s six conservative justices to side with the plaintiffs. While this will be the first time Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hears an education case, she’s one of just three liberal justices. And she’ll only sit on the bench for the UNC arguments, having recused herself from the Harvard case because she served on the school’s Board of Overseers until this past June. 

“I think it is highly likely that the court takes a position that disallows the use of race whatsoever in higher education admissions,” said Stefan Lallinger, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Such a ruling, he said, could put “a final nail in the coffin of efforts by colleges and universities around the country to directly ensure that all of their students benefit from a racially diverse student body.”

Most experts see two routes for the court to take in this case. First, it could follow the precedent set for K-12 schools in a 2007 case against Seattle Public Schools and the Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky. 

In , the court ruled that school districts couldn’t explicitly use race in their efforts to create more diverse schools. But separately, former Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that districts still had a “compelling interest” to pursue racial integration. Since then, districts have moved toward based on family income. 

Noting the court’s recent decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, many predict that the six conservative justices won’t be bound by precedent. 

“It should be noted that the only reason the court salvaged any use of race in the [Parents Involved] case was the moderation of Justice Anthony Kennedy,” Lallinger said. 

That’s why he thinks it’s possible the court could take a second approach and rule as unconstitutional all race-conscious efforts to achieve diversity.

“The current court does not have an Anthony Kennedy,” Lallinger said. 

‘Pressure to discriminate’

In the wake of the Parents United opinion, many conservatives continue to hold that some of the admissions policies K-12 schools use for competitive schools are discriminatory.

In the Fairfax County, Virginia, schools, for example, the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation is representing plaintiffs who sued the district over changes to acceptance criteria at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The district dropped a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Board members expressed hope that the changes would increase representation of Black and Hispanic students at the school, which the plaintiffs argued was illegal “racial balancing.”

“We’re all entitled to each be judged on our own individual characteristics, not on the basis of our membership in a group,” said Wen Fa, a senior attorney at the law firm, which is also challenging similar admission policies in New York City, Boston and Montgomery County, Maryland.

In supporting Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit Parents Defending Education wrote that the 2003 decision in Grutter v Bollinger has “spawned increasing racial discrimination” that has spread to the K-12 system.

“As long as Grutter remains the law, K-12 schools will face an inexorable pressure to discriminate based on skin color,” the brief said.

But even those challenging the university policies point to integration efforts based on family income as the direction for higher education, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher who wrote on the issue. He served as an for the plaintiffs when the case was in a lower court, and he doesn’t think the justices have hinted that they would rule out all efforts to achieve diversity.

“Not a single Supreme Court justice has indicated that they entertain that extreme position,” he said. 

He pointed to Clarence Thomas’s in 1991, in which the justice defended programs that give preference to students who overcome obstacles. 

“The kids could come from any background of disadvantage,” Thomas said. “The kid could be a white kid from Appalachia, could be a Cajun from Louisiana, or could be a Black kid or Hispanic kid from the inner cities or from the barrios, but I defended that sort of a program then and I would defend it today.”

But the court has grown far more conservative since Thomas joined. Most experts don’t expect different outcomes from the two cases, but note that Jackson is likely to raise questions in the UNC case that might not surface in the Harvard hearing.

There’s one clear difference between the two. Harvard is a private university and therefore subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to any institution receiving federal funds. But UNC is a public university and is guided by the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

Kahlenberg said that by taking both cases, the court can issue rulings based on both laws. 

Impact on recruiting

Education advocates in North Carolina are already assessing the possible impact if the court ends affirmative action. Black and Hispanic students in the state may have fewer opportunities to attend the flagship university, according to researchers at the Hunt Institute, an education think tank.   

Just look at California, where voters banned affirmative action in 1996, wrote Madeline Smith and Erica Vevurka, directors of higher education and K-12, respectively, at the institute.

“The ban [on] affirmative action made it more difficult for the state’s public institutions of higher education to explicitly recruit students of color,” they wrote. “It also restricted the access that students of color had to information around financial aid options.”

After 1996, the enrollment of freshman from underrepresented minority groups dropped by at least 50%, according to that the University of California submitted to the Supreme Court in support of Harvard and UNC. 

Even though the state has implemented diversity efforts targeting low-income families and first-generation college students, the university system “struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity,” the brief says. 

Beyond college admissions, some experts say the case has implications for efforts to create a more diverse teacher workforce, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

A ruling for the plaintiffs could “derail the progress” made in grow-your-own programs and teacher residencies that target Black and Hispanic college students, said Jerell Hill, dean of the School of Human Development and Education at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. 

The college participates in an that targets universities serving large numbers of minority students. “It is difficult to measure a court decision that could delay social, economic and educational opportunities for decades,” he said.

Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West said if the court rules for the plaintiffs, there are still strategies to increase diversity in teaching. They include building strong teacher education programs at historically Black colleges and universities and expanding affordable housing for teachers.

“To have diverse professions like teaching, you’ve got to have a pipeline of folks who are coming out of undergrad who are also diverse,” he said. “We know diverse teachers are good for all students.”

The delay is significant, experts say, because points to a direct correlation between the closures and lost learning.

Of the nation’s 25 largest districts, those that were in remote learning for at least half of the 2020-21 school year have spent an average of roughly 15% of their relief funds from the American Rescue Plan. 

compiled by the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University shows that Los Angeles Unified, where schools stayed closed until April 2021, didn’t start spending any of its $2.5 billion until this fall. And the Chicago Public Schools, which reopened the same month, has spent just over 6% of almost $1.8 billion.

“What opportunities might we be missing for kids to catch up?” asked Jana Wilcox Lavin, CEO of Opportunity 180 in Las Vegas, where the Clark County School District never fully reopened that year. The nonprofit helped gather ideas from the community on how to use the funds, but the district has so far spent less than a quarter of it. Parents, she said, “can’t point to where they see that money showing up in the classroom.”

The dire consequences of school closures were reinforced last week when the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed sharp declines for 9-year-olds in reading and math since 2020.

From the moment the U.S. Department of Education began distributing $122 billion in relief funds in March 2021, officials emphasized the need to act swiftly to help students make up lost ground.

“It’s hard to argue with the importance of addressing lost instructional time for all students,” Roberto Rodriguez, the department’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “We want to see these dollars put to work now.”

But some districts haven’t spent the first dollar, much less the minimum 20% specifically spelled out for academic recovery.

The sluggish pace has caught the attention of House Republicans, who last month sent Education Secretary Miguel Cardona asking how districts are using the funds to “remedy the acute learning losses brought on by prolonged school closures.” Experts expect the tempo to pick up this fall, but education groups are with the department to stretch the to the end of 2026.

The disconnect is frustrating for parents and local politicians seeking evidence the money is being used to boost student performance.

The reopened on time in the fall of 2020. But as in many urban districts, high percentages of Black and Hispanic families So far, the district has spent just 6.8% of its $804 million.

“We’re going to get to the end of the next two years and nothing is going to look different for the school system,” said Sue Deigaard, a Houston school board member. “We’re not, so far, demonstrating consistency of any result, nor do I even see the dollars being spent in a way that looks particularly strategic and targeted.”

She points to from the 2021-22 school year showing that third graders not only didn’t reach the district’s literacy goal, but performance actually dropped between winter and spring.

District leaders insist they’re not just sitting on their hands. Projects have been bogged down in supply chain delays and staff vacancies have been difficult to fill. Changes in leadership have also taken a toll: Among the 25 largest districts, 16 have lost at least one superintendent during the pandemic.

While superintendent turnover might not change a district’s spending plan, it can have a “cascading impact,” said David Rosenberg, a partner at Education Resource Strategies, which advises districts on budget issues. 

Staff vacancies and burnout can drag down even the “highest-functioning and most stable district teams,” he said. “Layer in superintendent turnover and potential turnover at the level below them and the work gets even more complicated.”

Houston, which superintendent Millard House II has led for about a year, is one district experiencing such churn. 

Click here to view full chart.

August Hamilton, special assistant to House, said he’s grateful for the federal funds. But he doesn’t hold out much hope students will make rapid gains.

“I think we have to understand that you have first graders who never went to pre-K, never went to kindergarten — a first grader who’s now being asked to take a [state] test in 3rd grade,” he said. “That is going to be the challenge of this work. It’s a long time to have virtual instruction.”

That’s one reason, he said, why the district moved $6.1 million in relief funds to aid the academic recovery of its neediest students this year. Officials said they no longer needed that money for masks and other COVID mitigation strategies.

‘Backfilling’ budgets

To pinpoint spending patterns, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ reviewed relief fund data from the and checked it against state figures. Districts provided details on when they fully reopened five days a week in 2020-21 — if they did. And the , led by Brown University economist Emily Oster, offered additional data on the extent to which districts remained open, closed or in hybrid mode.

Districts generally haven’t made it easy to track how the money is being spent. Some states, like California,  how their districts are spending the 20% targeted specifically for learning loss. But most do not. 

New York state doesn’t post any information on relief fund spending. The Georgetown lab had to use a public records request to get any data, according to director Marguerite Roza. That showed that New York City, the nation’s largest school system, had spent none of its $4.8 billion. A spokesman for the district, which is tied up in  over its budget, declined to give an actual figure and called it a “moving number.” 

The halting pace ignores what researchers say is needed to lift performance in high-poverty districts that spent most of 2020-21 online. The authors of a May said districts need to spend all of their American Rescue Plan funds on extra instruction to help students recover — not just the 20% the law requires. The longer they wait, the authors wrote, the greater the “implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality.”

Districts closed the longest have also seen the most enrollment loss. On average, enrollment in those districts has fallen by 4.4%, according to from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Because state funding is tied to enrollment, some are now “backfilling” budgets with relief dollars to make up for the losses, said Roza. In fact, she expects spending partly for that reason. 

“In the ones that were closed longer, it’s been harder to get kids to come back,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. She points to districts such as the Seattle Public Schools, which plugged federal funds into its last year, and the , which described its use of relief dollars as an effort to “ensure continuity of existing programs and services.” 

In Los Angeles, enrollment fell almost 6% this year and is expected to drop below a year from now. The district waited to dip into its $2.5 billion because it still all it received from the first two rounds of federal aid, said board member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin. 

Statewide, California schools were among the last to bring students back in person. Unlike some governors, California’s Gavin Newsom didn’t order schools to reopen. 

Click here to view full chart.

Several districts in the state never resumed in-person instruction that spring, and some have yet to spend any of their funds from the March 2021 bill. They include the Simi Valley Unified School District, where Ron Todo, associate superintendent of business and facilities, said the district is hanging on to its $13.8 million for now. The deadlines to spend the earlier relief funds are more pressing, and the newest grant, he said, has a “longer shelf life.” 

Roza has heard such explanations before. But Congress designed the third round of funding to be different from earlier relief bills: It appropriated almost twice as much as the other packages combined and specifically required districts to address learning loss.

Districts “should be well into” spending it by now, she said.

Under the legislation, districts have to obligate the funds by September 2024, and have through March 2026 to spend them. But Roza asked, “If the money was intended to get kids back on track, why wait two years?”

Education advocacy groups, like AASA, the School Superintendents Association, want the department to extend that deadline until the end of 2026. 

“I definitely have concerns about spending it all in time — not just for the practicality of getting it done,” Ortiz-Franklin said, “but also strategically to best serve our students’ short- and long-term academic and social-emotional recovery.”

Extending the timeline has political ramifications, Roza said during a recent .

“The accusation will be that we didn’t really need it, or at least if you needed it, you’re not even spending it on the kids that were impacted in the pandemic because they got older and they graduated,” she said. 

In Simi Valley, Todo said his district plans to use the funds this school year for additional elementary counselors, social workers and intervention teachers to help students who have fallen behind. But a plan to get math teachers to work an extra class period met with resistance. 

“We have teachers who have survived the pandemic, and they are too tired to be in the classroom an extra hour,” he said. Despite the exhaustion, Todo added, he sees a benefit to the current spending deadline: “When there is at least a healthy sense of urgency, we push ourselves a little harder.”

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.”

But the upbeat mood belies the more serious reason that brings many of them here: They’re missing too much school. A short distance from southern California’s famous theme parks, the bright blue stucco building has become an extension of the Buena Park School District’s response to soaring absenteeism. The club is a place to make friends and for many, offers the only stability they’ve had during the pandemic.

“We are serving a need that the school hasn’t been able to fill,” said Luz Valenzuela-Trout, director of operations.

The district’s partnership with the club is an example of the extensive steps many educators nationally are taking to track down students missing school and reverse unprecedented levels of disengagement. But those efforts are rubbing up against the sheer scope of the problem. Chronic absenteeism has hit 40% in, New York City and Los Angeles, and is reaching dangerously high numbers in many districts in between.

“The pandemic radically changed norms about going to school,” said Emily Bailard, CEO of , a company that partners with school districts to improve attendance.

It has compounded issues that have always contributed to absenteeism, from lack of food at home to bullying in school, she said. Many teens began working or added more hours at their jobs to help out their families. Now educators “have to be able to address four or five things instead of one or two.”

Elsie Briseño Simonovski, the Buena Park district’s director of student and community services, sometimes scours apartment complexes with granola bars in her pockets to round up children who might otherwise not make it to class. She escorts families to gas stations to fill up their cars — courtesy of a state grant that covers fuel costs if parents show they’re taking their kids to school.

Yvette Cantu, the district’s chief academic officer, said even high-achieving students have racked up more absences than usual during the pandemic. Such students often thrive on positive feedback from adults, she said, something they missed during closures and quarantine.

‘For no reason’ 

In some districts, chronic absenteeism far exceeds the 10% a year that typically defines the problem. In March, the U.S. Government Accountability Office showing that over a million teachers — nearly half — had at least one student during the 2020-21 school year that never showed up for class. 

Some educators say they haven’t seen any improvement since then.

Jenevieve Jackson, a digital photography and video teacher in the Orange County Public Schools in Florida, has some students who have only been in class twice the entire year. Others have racked up over 80 absences. 

“Many of the absences are for no reason. The students who were not that excited about school in the first place are even less motivated,” Jackson said. The district hired “intervention teachers” to help struggling students, she said, but “they’re often used to cover the massive teacher and sub shortage and to proctor exams.”

Schools are under pressure to reduce chronic absenteeism because most states track it for federal accountability purposes. Those rates, however, offer little information about what schools are doing to improve attendance, according to Jing Liu, an education professor at the University of Maryland. 

He thinks that needs to change. In published by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, he recommended reporting attendance in a way that goes beyond chronic absenteeism. He proposed an “attendance value-added” measure that would reveal schools’ contributions to reducing absenteeism and offer “a much fairer” comparison.

Focusing on ninth graders, Liu analyzed 16 years of attendance data from a diverse, urban school district in California with 60,000 students. On average, students in the sample — he would not identify the district — missed 79 class periods each year, or roughly 11 school days. 

But when he disregarded characteristics that schools can’t control — like race, gender and poverty level — attendance rates leaped by 28 class periods, or about four days, in schools with a strong value-added result. In some schools, the average rates increased as much as eight days. 

Todd Rogers, a public policy professor at Harvard University who studied absenteeism and launched , said the concept “seems like an amazing idea.” Nudging parents to get their children to school and showing them how absences add up — Rogers studied — only reduces chronic absenteeism by 10% to 15%. 

“There’s no silver bullet, so the goal is to do everything you can that works,” he said.

But for the time being, schools are struggling to address the problem in front of them.

“It’s going to be really hard in the short term until behaviors and school norms stabilize,” Rogers said.

‘The heavy lift’

In the Metro Nashville Public Schools — with a 30% chronic absenteeism rate this year — Carol Lampkin, the district’s director of attendance services, said students are less likely to come to school if their teachers are absent, a problem that has intensified with staff members out because of COVID.

The issue has fueled creative approaches to reminding parents of the importance of keeping their children in school. Staff members recently gathered at a local Baptist church as part of their newest strategy — offering information on COVID vaccines, housing and transportation assistance in hopes of pinpointing the reasons children miss school.

Families whose children have at least half a dozen absences were more likely to get an invitation or a knock on the door, urging them to attend the event.

“The idea was to take the heavy lift off of the schools,” Lampkin said. “Our schools, our teachers, our principals 
 are dealing with so much.”

Lampkin thought grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, served while DJs spun family-friendly tunes, would be more effective at getting frequently absent students back in class than stern warnings about truancy. 

Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy organization, said she appreciates what the district is trying to do, but thinks officials could be overlooking important reasons students are absent. 

“I don’t think it has anything to do with affordable housing,” she said. She urged educators to ask themselves, “What does the school culture look like when [students] enter the building?” 

She’s worked with families whose children have been suspended multiple times this year for dress code violations, and she recently held a to draw attention to a Black student who reported being called the N-word by a paraprofessional. (A spokesman for the district said the employee has been placed on administrative leave and will “face appropriate disciplinary action” if the report is substantiated.)

“We’ve got to dig deeper. Is that child being bullied at school?” Thomas asked. “Is that child feeling like they’re not doing well?”

Liu’s research backs up Thomas’s concerns. Examining three years of survey responses from students, he found that the most likely way to improve the value-added measure was to increase their sense of safety at school.

Meanwhile, Simonovski in Buena Park developed her own method of recognizing schools for reducing absenteeism. Instead of just giving awards to those with the highest attendance — which meant a lot of repeat winners — she highlights schools showing the most improvement.

Winners get what she described as a sort of “Publishers Clearinghouse” ceremony — balloons, certificates and trays of treats. 

That tells schools, “we’re paying attention,” she said, “and we’re celebrating these checkpoints with you.”

Lead Image: Boys did their homework in the teen room at the Boys and Girls Club of Buena Park. The local school district’s partnership with the club is addressing chronic absenteeism. (Linda Jacobson)

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. With a vote of 53 to 47, Jackson picked up support from three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah.

According to the White House, Jackson, who will be the first Black woman on the court, watched the vote with President Joe Biden. 

Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, said Wednesday that if confirmed, she would recuse herself from an upcoming case focusing on race-conscious college admissions involving Harvard University. 

Jackson is currently on the Harvard Board of Overseers. Her term runs through June.

“Your and my alma mater, Harvard, is currently being sued for its explicitly and, in my view, egregious policy of discriminating against Asian Americans,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said during Jackson’s second full day of hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If you’re confirmed, do you intend to recuse from this lawsuit?”  

Jackson responded, “That is my plan, senator.”

The , which combines challenges to race-based admissions decisions at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is considered the most significant case involving both race and education in several years. The plaintiffs argue that the admission policies discriminate against Asian applicants. The debate is taking place in K-12 as well with a recent federal judge’s against the Fairfax County Public Schools regarding its so-called “racial balancing” practice at a selective science and technology school. Observers speculate that the court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, would of the plaintiffs. But if Jackson is confirmed, which appears likely, her recusal would create the potential for a 4-4 tie. 

If that’s the case, the “lower court decision would remain intact,” explained Cedric Powell, law professor at the University of Louisville. That means both Harvard and the University of North Carolina could keep in place their current practices of considering underrepresented groups when making admissions decisions. 

Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in both cases, said in response to Jackson’s statement that, “as a litigant, it would be improper for us to comment.”

The case, which is scheduled to be heard in the court’s next term, starting in October, would typically be scheduled for one hour of oral argument. the court could allot one hour for each petition, in which case Jackson could participate in the case against the University of North Carolina. 

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. With a vote of 53 to 47, Jackson picked up support from three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah.

According to the White House, Jackson, who will be the first Black woman on the court, watched the vote with President Joe Biden. 

President Joe Biden made history Friday when he nominated federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, however, she’ll likely face pressure to sit out one of the most important cases involving race and education in recent years. 

In 2016, she recused herself from a against the U.S. Department of Education because she has served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, where she previously graduated magna cum laude and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. Prior to her confirmation hearings for a federal judgeship, she explained in a that she “was serving on the board of a university that was evaluating its own potential response” to sexual assault guidelines.

That rationale is likely to be revisited if she sits on the court next term when it hears an upcoming case in which the university is a defendant, one of two challenging race-based admissions policies. Plaintiffs argue that affirmative action policies at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminate against Asian Americans by giving preference to Black and Hispanic students. 

Charles Geyh, an expert in judicial conduct at Indiana University, said Jackson’s first responsibility would be to ask herself whether she can be impartial. But the degree of the board’s involvement in creating and implementing the policy also factors into the decision.

“The more involved she was, the more a reasonable person would look at this and say, ‘I don’t know if she can weigh this thing in an even-handed way,’” he said. “It wouldn’t shock me to find that some senators will try to leverage that.”

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is one of several high-profile education cases the court will hear in coming years. Other potential issues expected to work their way up from the lower federal courts involve religious school choice, the rights of transgender students and the public status of charter schools.

Jackson, who attended a Miami-Dade high school, is the daughter of public school educators, whom she thanked Friday during remarks at the White House. 

“My father made the fateful decision to transition from his job as a public high school history teacher and go to law school,” she said. “Some of my earliest memories are of him sitting at the kitchen table reading his law books. I watched him study. He became my first professional role model.” Her father served as a school board attorney for the Miami-Dade County Public Schools and her mother was a principal at one of the district’s magnet schools for 14 years.

Despite her strong public school connections, Jackson has served on boards of private schools in the D.C. area — Georgetown Day School and a Christian school in Maryland that has since closed.

The Montrose Christian School opposed abortion, another issue Jackson could face on the court. The school’s mission statement also said marriage should be limited to those between a man and a woman. Questioned by Sen. Josh Hawley, a conservative Republican from Missouri during hearings last year on her nomination to the appellate court, she responded that she did not “necessarily agree with all of the statements 
 that those boards might have in their materials.” 

None of those potential conflicts came up Friday, however, when Biden formally announced her nomination.

“Her opinions are always carefully reasoned, tethered to precedent and demonstrate respect for how law impacts everyday people,” he said. “It doesn’t mean she puts her thumb on the scale of justice one way or the other, but she understands the broader impact of the decisions.” 

If confirmed, Jackson won’t change the ideological make-up of the court, where conservatives have enjoyed a supermajority since 2020. That means on a major educational issue like school choice — where liberals typically oppose public funds for religious schools — the addition of Jackson would be unlikely to affect the outcome.

But as the first Black woman on the court, Jackson would likely be more attuned to issues of race and gender as reflected in school dress codes or , and she might see “discrimination that maybe another justice might not,” said Preston Green, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. 

Jackson would join the court at a time when conservative justices have signaled they’re open to rolling back abortion rights and have already moved in the direction of more religious freedom. 

“This court is really undoing a lot of decisions that people have thought were off the table,” Green said.

‘So long overdue’

Prior to her service on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Jackson served as a trial judge on the Federal Court in Washington for 8 years. Biden called Jackson’s experience as a trial judge a “critical qualification,” and civil rights organizations celebrated the nomination.

In 2020, she blocked the from allowing child welfare agencies receiving federal grants to turn away LGBTQ youth and families. And in 2018, Jackson ruled that the Trump administration failed to follow proper procedure when it sought to end funding for teen pregnancy prevention.

“I’m elated. It’s groundbreaking, and so long overdue to have a Black woman on the Supreme court,” said Sasha Buchert, senior attorney at Lambda Legal, which focuses on the rights of LGBTQ students and adults. “She has a stellar civil rights record.”

Buchert is among the legal experts who expect a case involving the rights of transgender students to reach the court at some point. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments in last week, could clash with the 4th Circuit,which ruled in that a transgender boy could use the bathroom that matched his gender identity. The Supreme Court turned down an appeal of that case, but conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have heard it. 

Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, said the court also could ultimately confront the issue of whether transgender girls should be able to play women’s sports.

“I don’t see any way that they can dodge that one,” Dunn said. “There will be some split circuit decisions sooner rather than later.”

— a challenge to Idaho’s ban on transgender girls in women’s sports — is currently moving through the 9th Circuit. Long considered one of the most liberal appellate courts, the circuit court recently because of appointments by former President Donald Trump. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Arizona-based law firm, is also expected to appeal challenging a Connecticut policy that allows transgender girls to play in girls high school sports.

Dunn said it’s hard to predict how justices would rule in such a case, adding that if Jackson is confirmed, all three liberal members of the court would be women. 

The conservative members, he said, could be “suspicious” of ruling that bans like Idaho’s should stand, but added he could see “some of the liberal wing of the court having concerns” about transgender girls in sports.

The fact that Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative, wrote the 2020 opinion in could be a factor in any future cases involving LGBTQ rights. In that case, the court decided that federal law prohibits employment discrimination against LGBTQ workers. But Buchert said the ruling also left open the door for restrictions outside the workplace.

A ‘minimalist course’ 

Before the end of the current term, the court will issue an opinion in , which challenges a Maine law banning some religious schools from receiving public funds for tuition assistance. How the court rules in that case could determine whether Jackson might face a similar school choice issue if she’s confirmed.

Experts expect the court to rule in favor of the plaintiffs, who say the state is discriminating against religious families. “My sense is that [Chief Justice John] Roberts’s ability to keep the conservatives on the minimalist course that he established is over,” Dunn said, but added that the court could also leave open the possibility for similar cases in the future.

A decision in a , which focuses on whether a student can sue a charter school under the federal equal protection clause, is expected this spring. 

Jackson won’t be on the court to hear a church-state separation case this term in which a football coach argues he should be allowed to pray publicly after games. But when she clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court justice she’s in line to replace, the court ruled that student-led prayer at football .

In choosing Jackson, Biden passed on California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and J. Michelle Childs, a federal district court judge in South Carolina, who not only went to public K-12 schools like Jackson, but also earned a law degree from the University of South Carolina.

On Sunday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York state will end its mask requirement for schools and child care facilities starting Wednesday. “The day has come,” the governor said. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said indoor masking at schools and child care facilities after March 11. For students in Los Angeles Unified School District, masking appears to remain in place through the end of the year per an agreement between the district and the teachers union, although the timetable could be renegotiated. New York City Mayor Eric Adams already followed the governor’s lead, saying that he plans to drop the city’s school masking rule — along with vaccine requirements for restaurants, gyms and movie theaters — on March 7. Adams said his administration would continue to monitor COVID case rates and promised to make a final decision by Friday. “New Yorkers stepped up and helped us save lives by reaching unprecedented levels of vaccination,” he in a statement.

In early February, a flurry of Democratic states including New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut announced the end of their K-12 face-covering rules. Yet a few holdout states, and many individual districts, still require students to cover up without a set end date — and decision makers are seeking further clarity on when to safely drop the practice.

As if on cue, two new papers deliver a clear, quantitative look at just how many cases unmasking might trigger, helping school leaders set customized benchmarks for the end of mandates based on their community’s expressed goals.

“Instead of saying, ‘Well, you know, masks off, people get sick. Masks on, fewer people get sick,’ [officials can understand] what exactly the magnitude of these outcomes are,” said John Giardina, the lead author of one of the papers and a Harvard University Ph.D student.

His , which was peer-reviewed and published Feb. 14 in JAMA Network, uses simulation modeling to identify the COVID transmission levels at which virus spread would stay in control even when classrooms are mask-optional. 

It comes as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said leaders in her state are such as community COVID transmission levels and pediatric hospitalizations as they decide whether to lift the statewide school mask mandate in March. And California officials say they are examining student vaccination rates to when schools might be able to scrap their mask rules, even as health officials say the county will likely for other settings by late March.

“We’re among the 13 states that have not ended their school masking requirements,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said . “I have stated very clearly that on the 28th of this month we will be announcing a specific date. That date with destiny, the masks will come off, and we’ll do it in an appropriate manner.”

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have signaled that they will be looking to in the coming weeks, with an emphasis on preventing hospitalizations rather than avoiding transmission altogether.

The study Giardina published with co-authors from universities such as Stanford, Brown and Johns Hopkins allows decision makers to consider all of those metrics — case rates, vaccination levels and hospitalizations — simultaneously.

Using the ‘formula’

School leaders can select from three possible objectives: Avoiding all in-school transmission (which Giardina acknowledges may be an unrealistic standard), keeping the average additional cases due to unmasking below a specified level, such as 5 per month, or keeping the average additional hospitalizations under a threshold, such as 3 per 100,000 people per month. 

Then, based on the share of students who have been inoculated with COVID vaccines, they can find the appropriate community transmission level for unmasking.

“If you have your goals and you have the context you’re in in your community when it comes to vaccination and how effective you think masks are, you could certainly look at that table as a kind of formula and say, ‘Should we take off masks, or shouldn’t we?’” Giardina told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

He cautions, however, that the model used in the study relies on certain assumptions that decision makers should take into account. For example, it uses transmission rates from Delta rather than Omicron, and assumes a school with 638 students and 60 staff.

“I would still hope policymakers take all the uncertainties into account and how things might differ for each particular community,” he said.

In the table above, schools can usually focus on the middle column, the researcher explained, which assumes the switch to mask-optional classrooms will decrease overall COVID mitigation effectiveness from 70 percent to 30 percent. But if the building has particularly effective ventilation, staving off some virus particles even when kids don’t cover up, they might push to the left column, where mitigation remains slightly higher even after scrapping face coverings. Conversely, if the school previously helped students access high-quality masks like KN95s, the dropoff in mitigation effectiveness when unmasking might be steeper, pushing schools to the right column.

A school with 50 percent student vaccination that assumes an average drop in protection without masks (middle column) and is willing to accept an average of up to 10 additional COVID cases per month due to the policy change could go mask optional once community transmission falls below 22 cases per 100,000 residents per day, according to the table. If the school increases its student vaccination rate to 70 percent, the threshold jumps to 32 cases per 100,000 because the stronger immunization rate will help stave off the higher community transmission rate.

Fifteen states and Washington, D.C. were at or below per day, as of Feb 22. Another 15 were below 32 per 100,000. Nationally, case counts are trending downward, in some communities dramatically with 60 to 75 percent declines over the last 14 days.

Of the 500 largest U.S. school districts, currently require students to wear masks, according to data collected by Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. That’s down from 60 percent at the beginning of February, and other districts have mask-optional policies set to kick in in the coming weeks.

In New York, where no end to the statewide school masking rule has yet been specified, of registered voters said they supported Gov. Hochul’s plan to review COVID data in early March before making any changes, while 30 percent thought the mandate should already have been lifted, according to a from the Siena College Research Institute released Tuesday. Another 10 percent said they wanted the policy to end after this week’s school vacation.

A second datapoint

As the move toward unmasking continues, a out of Duke University’s corroborates Giardina’s findings, adding a second tool for school leaders to use in their decision making.

Like the study published in JAMA Network, the ABC Science Collaborative paper links school face-covering policies to additional likely COVID cases based on community transmission rates.

“You can see the differences in masking versus not masking and how many cases per week will happen in the community as a result of school policy,” said Danny Benjamin, professor of pediatrics at Duke and co-chair of the Collaborative, explaining his findings to educators in a Feb. 14 . “You can then match these differences with your community’s risk tolerance as it relates to COVID.”

The paper, which the authors call a “blueprint” for navigating school policy this spring, draws on data from 61 school districts with varying mask rules. The researchers used those figures to then project the implications of mask-optional versus mask-required policies in a hypothetical 10,000-student school system.

When community case rates are high, mask mandates prevent much would-be transmission, the authors found. In universally masked schools, it generally takes 20 to 25 COVID-positive individuals to set foot in the building for one case of in-school transmission to occur, said Benjamin, compared to other settings where the average infected person tends to pass the virus on to at least one other person. 

“The short version is that masking clearly works,” he said.

However, when community case rates are low, the difference in prevented cases shrinks and school leaders may decide that enforcing a mandate is not worth the downsides. Research suggests that masks may hinder youngsters’ and interfere with for people of all ages.

When case rates are just 100 per 100,000 residents per week, or about 14 per 100,000 per day (roughly the infection level before the Delta surge), districts with universal masking prevent only three additional cases compared to districts with voluntary masking. At 250 per 100,000 residents per week, where many communities currently stand, school mask mandates fend off an extra 10 cases in the district per week, the paper projects.

The brief does not break down expected cases by school vaccination rates. Nationwide, just under a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and 56 percent of youth aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the .

For some broader perspective, Benjamin reminded school leaders that children are just as likely or more likely to be hospitalized when they catch the flu or RSV compared to the coronavirus in all age groups except for 12- to 17-year-olds who have not been vaccinated against COVID.

Still, Benjamin’s co-chair at the Collaborative, Kanecia Zimmerman, emphasized that any shift in policy has implications not just for families’ physical health but also their mental health. An early February conducted by CBS News found that 57 percent of parents of school-aged children believe masks should still be required in school while only 36 percent said they should be optional. Another 7 percent want face coverings banned in classrooms.

Even when epidemiologically sound, a shift to voluntary masking may create distress for families, and the Duke associate professor of pediatrics urged school officials to consider bolstering the mental health supports available to students.

“Unmasking 
 is going to represent a substantial change for many families, for many districts, for many children,” she said. “When you’re making decisions about how to move forward, make those decisions in light of how you might be able to do things for the whole child.”