They include Tabitha Sue James, whose son has been following an online curriculum at home since 2020. 

“I applied the first day,” she said. “I’ve paid thousands of dollars in property taxes to schools. Why shouldn’t we be able to have … homeschool choice?

While families won’t know until early April whether they have received funding, she could be among the nearly two-thirds of homeschooling families who say they use public dollars to educate their children, according to from the Rand Corp., shared exclusively with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.  

Of those who live in a state without education savings accounts or tax credits for private education, more than 70% said they would use public funds to offset homeschooling costs if they could, the data show. 

RAND’s American Life Panel on homeschool ESA use of parents who homeschool at least one child:

The similarity between the two figures is significant, said Angela Watson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Homeschool Research Lab.

“That gives some confidence that these responses are accurate,” she said. “Sometimes people will say they might do something when in reality, they wouldn’t actually do it. But here we see that people say and do things at the same rates.”

The lab commissioned Rand to ask the questions as part of its American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of more than 2,400 parents with K-12 students. While homeschoolers only represented about 10% of the respondents, the data are among the first to independently measure their views on ESAs. The results follow from the ​​Arkansas Department of Education and the University of Arkansas showing that about a quarter of students who used that state’s ESA program last school year were homeschoolers. 

Most existing data come from advocates who private school choice, an issue that still sharply divides homeschoolers. Some remain strongly opposed to ESA programs and warn that they threaten parents’ rights to educate their children as they see fit. “Government cheese always comes in a trap,” one parent posted in the Texans for Homeschool Freedom Facebook group. 

On the topic of ESAs “there are not a lot of indifferent people,” said Kevin Boden, director of legal and legislative advocacy for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “They either think it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened in education, or they think that it’s the thing to be most feared.”

James, for one, is grateful for the financial support. She wants to add music lessons and buy materials for STEM projects. The Texas program “makes those opportunities possible for us.”

Under the program, she’s eligible to receive $2,000 annually. But parents who choose an accredited private school will receive $10,474 or up to $30,000 for a child with a disability. 

While James prefers the “low-stress” environment of homeschooling, that funding gap is enough of an incentive to make some homeschoolers rethink their educational model.

“Maybe the family has always wanted to get into an accredited private school and now they can,” said Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and engagement with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, which supports the state’s new program. “There are other families who say ‘Homeschooling is what would have been best for my child but we can’t afford what the child needs, so we’re going to have to go to this other option.’ ” 

Erin Flynn, lead instructor at , an Austin-area microschool for seventh through 12th graders, said she’s received several calls over the past few months from homeschooling families inquiring whether she will be accepting Education Freedom Accounts for tuition. 

Operating out of a converted house with a large porch, she offers a twice-a-week option for $600 per month and a full-time program for $950. She described the curriculum, which focuses on humanities, STEM and art, as “self-directed.” 

“We want to put the power back in students’ hands so that they aren’t just learning the canon; they’re learning how to identify what it is that they love,” said Flynn, a former English teacher. She was the principal of a charter school until she founded Hedge during the pandemic.

Microschools, she said, can be “a bridge” between homeschooling and traditional private school because they often allow students to attend part time. 

‘So many options’

According to Travis Pillow, spokesman for the Texas comptroller’s office, which runs the program, there’s no “seat time requirement.” As long as students are enrolled in a on the state’s list and take an annual assessment, they qualify as a private school student. 

To Pillow, who previously worked for the nonprofit running Florida’s school choice program, the different funding levels in Texas have been an adjustment. Florida’s program doesn’t differentiate between homeschoolers and private school students.

“I saw a lot of virtue in that idea because there are just so many options that don’t necessarily fit in a traditional box anymore,” he said. It’s hard in some cases, he said, to draw “a bright line” between schooling and homeschooling.

Some applicants educating their kids at home, he said, will likely enroll in approved online schools, which would qualify them for the larger award. But Newman, with the Coalition, also expects homeschoolers to pressure lawmakers to increase the amount for their children’s educational expenses. He thinks the proportion of homeschool applicants would be “dramatically higher” if the funds weren’t capped at $2,000.

“Many families homeschool because they have special needs children,” he said. Some types of therapy, “can very quickly surpass $2,000.” 

‘Out of necessity’

Texas isn’t the only state that offers different amounts for private school students and homeschoolers. Alabama’s awards $7,000 per student toward private school tuition and $2,000 for a “home education program.” Homeschooling families are capped at $4,000 even if they have more than two school-age children.

Texas and Alabama are “incentivizing people to go to private school and not to homeschool,” said Watson, with Johns Hopkins. But that could be a challenge for families living in rural areas without a lot of private school options, she said.

Like Florida, Arizona took a different approach when it passed the nation’s first universal ESA program in 2022. The base funding amount, which typically ranges between $7,000 and $8,000, is the same whether parents choose homeschooling or private school. Arizona parent Kathy Visser, whose son has disabilities, said $2,000 wouldn’t cover a month of his tutoring costs. In total, he receives about $40,000. Her daughter, formerly homeschooled, is now in a private school and receives $9,000.

“For families who choose to homeschool out of personal preference, I am sure the $2,000 is welcome,” she said. “For families like mine who homeschool out of necessity, because we could not find any traditional school that came close to meeting either of our kids’ needs, it wouldn’t go far.”

Arizona, however, is the state ESA critics most often point to for examples of a lack of guardrails on spending. A of expenditures turned up a number of “unallowable” items, like diamond jewelry, expensive gaming consoles and designer purses. State Superintendent Tom Horne of the program, but his methods for determining whether purchases violate the letter, or at least the spirit, of the law. 

Pillow said Texas limited homeschool awards to $2,000 because those families don’t have the “big ticket expense” of tuition. But another reason was to avoid “politically hard-to-explain purchases.” Parents also have to shop for supplies and materials within a “closed marketplace.” 

“Legos are legitimate educational items,” he said, noting purchases that have in Arizona. “But are we going to curate that marketplace with the latest and greatest collectors’ item? The $500 Harry Potter set is not necessarily going to be available.” 

Newman, with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, added that there’s much less “administrative weight” on the program when parents primarily spend the money on tuition. But both he and Pillow agreed that the state is likely to revisit the issue.

Don Huffines, who won the Republican nomination for comptroller, and is expected to easily win the general election in November, has said he the program. 

But the staunch conservative is also a . Newman said he hopes that means Huffines’ will be open to addressing the “disparities.”

“People have this idea of what they think homeschooling is,” he said. “It’s the people who have done it who really understand.” 

And bedrock attitudes about attendance seem to be changing. A recent noted that one in four students now doesn’t think being chronically absent from school “is a problem.” The study found that about 40% of school districts consider reducing chronic absenteeism among their top three most pressing challenges. One in 12 ranks it as their biggest challenge. 

As school districts push to lower absenteeism rates, the software company , which helps schools keep track of students and communicate with parents, examined four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts. It analyzed 3.3 million text messages across 15 states, representing 88,000 students and 22,000 educators. 

In a , it finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks. Here’s a breakdown of the key takeaways:

1: Early intervention works

Contacting families before students become chronically absent is crucial. Once a student crosses the 10% threshold, fixing their attendance becomes much harder, so intervening when students register just three to five absences is most effective. Contacting parents early with a letter improved attendance dramatically, reducing absence rates by 28%.

Researchers found that 51% of students whose families receive just one letter don’t need a second one. The “save rate” for these students suggests that many families simply don’t realize how quickly absences accumulate. 

2: Timing and communication methods matter

Parents are highly responsive to text messages, researchers found, with 73% of texts garnering a response from parents in just 11 minutes. They’ll engage with schools when communication is “accessible, timely and specific.”

“The method does matter,” said Joy Smithson, a SchoolStatus data scientist. “We get a lot higher rates of response with text messages.” Placing a phone call, on the other hand, is “for those more critical conversations,” she said.

Kara Stern, the company’s director of education, agreed. “Not every parent is in a position where they can pick up a phone call during the day. For many people, it might jeopardize your work situation, and so to assume that that’s the best way to reach a parent is not necessarily to be in tune with the actual realities of the parents in your community.”

The best times to text families, the data suggests, are either around 8 a.m., when parents and students are preparing for school, or 2-4 p.m., typically during pickup times. These align with natural breaks in parents’ daily routines, when they’re most likely to check their phones.

The best time of year to engage families is August or September. Parents who hear from schools early maintain higher response rates throughout the year — 77% vs. 71% — and respond, on average, one minute faster. By January, 33% of these parents are still engaging with schools, compared to just 16% of parents who first heard from schools later in the fall term. 

That suggests that early conversations “do extra work,” researchers maintain, establishing trust, opening communication channels and signaling to families that working together matters.

“It’s important to reach out at the beginning of the year, so that you’re not waiting for a crisis,” said Smithson, “because it’s too late to build a relationship at that point.”

3. Plain language outperforms edu-jargon

Researchers found that being specific about how much school a student has missed outperforms vague messages such as, “We’ve noticed some absences.” 

Direct offers of help, such as “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns,” also outperform lengthy explanations of attendance policy.

And when students are older, direct messages can be very effective.

“What this data shows us is that connection is really driving so much of a student’s experience,” said Stern. “When a school is able to reach out to the kid and say, ‘Hey, Greg, we missed you today, what’s going on? What do you need to help you come to school?’ that’s a really different experience than having a form letter appear at your house saying, ‘Greg has missed school six days.’” 

She added, “What I hope districts will take away from this report is that communication is intervention,” she said. “It’s not extra work. It’s the work that makes everything else stick.”

4: Three key moments merit extra attention

Students at three moments in their school careers are more likely to be chronically absent: in pre-K, sixth grade and high school. Stern called them “high alert moments.”

Surprisingly, pre-K students have the highest chronic absenteeism rates of any group, mostly due to the high frequency of illness and families underestimating the impact of missing school. 

Sixth grade is “the tipping point,” said Stern, with chronic absenteeism spiking by 3.3 percentage points from fifth to sixth grade, the sharpest increase across all grades.

Smithson said middle-schoolers typically have more autonomy. They’re often getting their first mobile phones. And current sixth-graders, she said, were in kindergarten when COVID hit in 2020. “So just imagine knowing that patterns get established in kindergarten,” she said. For those kindergartners in 2020, school “really got disrupted,” with their baseline experience of school being “categorically different” from what it should have been.

And for many students, the transition from elementary school to middle school represents a shift from a safe, contained environment, where both students and parents are highly engaged, to a less personal one, with less consistency and connectivity, said Stern. Students “don’t know that there is someone who’s really paying attention, who cares that they’re there, who knows what’s happening with them, and so maybe it doesn’t really matter if they’re there or not.”

And middle school can also be the place where many students first experience bullying, which also worsens attendance.

In high school, chronic absence rates more than double, and students have lower response rates to traditional methods like letters, suggesting that schools should contact students directly — actually, they found that direct student messaging could work for students as young as 11. 

A text message to a high school freshman can start a conversation that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Pairing these messages with notes to parents can improve response rates in these critical years, researchers found.

“The chronic absenteeism numbers in high school suggest that kids are really voting with their feet,” said Stern. “And so one way to get them back would be to invite them in to be part of the solution, to say, ‘What is it that is not meeting your needs? How can we include your voice in the process of making high school what you want it to be?’”

In many ways, the new findings echo what researchers like Johns Hopkins University’s and have long suggested. Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit , said Wednesday’s report “reflects what we know from common sense and research. Improving attendance is possible when we use data to take early action as well as determine where we should invest in building relationships so we can partner with students and families to encourage showing up, monitor absences, and address barriers to getting to school.”

But Chang said that while timely, data-informed engagement of families is essential, “it is not always sufficient and should be combined with other strategies for identifying and addressing barriers to getting to school.” Those barriers could exist in the community or in schools and should be addressed in “a comprehensive, systemic approach.”

She suggested that of interventions is sometimes necessary, including “intensive interventions” for students who miss more than 20% of school days. It could include housing supports, a student attendance review board, a community-based, non-criminal truancy court, individualized learning and success plans and even, as a last resort, legal intervention.

Stern and Smithson said the findings boil down, in a larger sense, to the importance of what they call “active noticing” about attendance. 

“I really think that it would be a big plus for faculties to actively notice every week and go through their rosters,” said Stern. “‘Who do we not know? Who can’t speak about this child? Who doesn’t know anything about this student’s life after school? We have someone that we need to actually pay attention to learning more about — who’s suddenly not coming to school, who’s turned it around and suddenly being there?’ ” 

Smithson said the biggest takeaway for educators is that “Timing is everything. Do not wait. Act with urgency. It’s about building those relationships, and it’s just so important — and it’s so important to start right away.”

The , released Tuesday morning, used data from 1,419 educators who took the . It found that female teachers — who make up 75% of American educators — are more likely than males to experience challenges that make it harder to juggle work and their personal lives. 

Nearly three-quarters of female educators said it was somewhat or very difficult to change their schedule to accommodate personal matters, compared with 62% of male teachers. About 63% of female teachers and 48% of male educators reported it was hard to take a personal phone call during work hours.

More than half of female teachers said they were frequently or always too tired for activities in their private life because of their job. Only 27% of male teachers reported the same. About 44% of women said they worry about work when they aren’t at school, versus 33% of men. 

A main factor that could contribute to the gender gap is the number of hours spent on household duties, including caring for children, according to the survey. Female teachers with children reported they spend 41 hours on chores and child care, versus 30 hours for male teachers with kids. The men also reported having more time for themselves, spending 45 hours on leisure activities. Female teachers with children clocked only 33 hours.

“One of the really big drivers of challenges with job flexibility and its relationship to well-being is the amount of time that teachers, particularly female teachers, spend on household duties, particularly child care, outside of working hours,” said Elizabeth Steiner, a survey co-author.

The RAND study also compared teacher data with findings from the , which polled 507 adults who have a bachelor’s degree and work similar hours. The nonprofit found that educators experienced a worse work-life balance than the other adults. 

More than 70% of educators said changing work schedules to accommodate personal or family matters was somewhat or very difficult, compared with 22% of similar working adults. Educators spent on average 25 hours per week on household duties, while other adults used only 16 hours. 

Teachers also got the short end of the stick with benefits, according to the survey. More than half of educators and a third of adults with other careers said they received average benefit packages — paid sick leave, retirement, health insurance and personal time off. But only 29% of teachers received above-average benefits, compared with 49% of similar working adults. 

“When teachers reported better benefits packages — things that included, for example, paid parental leave or slightly more days of paid time off — they reported fewer work-life balance challenges and better well-being,” Steiner said.

Paid parental leave is a key benefit that could boost job satisfaction for educators, she said. Only 30% of teachers with children said their schools offer paid parental leave that was separate from other time off.

“More districts are offering it and paying attention to how important it is, but it is not universal,” Steiner said. “When paid parental leave isn’t available, teachers tend to use the paid leave that they have access to [for] time off to care for their new children, which leaves them with little to no paid leave when they return to work to address things like their own mental health or doctor’s appointments.”

The survey results link insufficient work-life balance to poor well-being for teachers. RAND research found that 2 out of 3 teachers experience job-related stress, and more than half feel burned out. 

In an open-ended survey question, teachers were asked to describe what their school or district could do to help them balance work and home responsibilities. More than half said they couldn’t come up with an answer because “their school or district did not provide any support to help them achieve this balance.” 

The rest said job flexibility could improve work-life balance. Respondents suggested that schools consider mental health or wellness days, adjustable work hours and opportunities for using planning periods to address personal matters. Some said taking days off in smaller increments or allowing occasional remote work hours would help.

“Teachers said that it was helpful when school leaders helped them set work boundaries, such as limiting meetings and minimizing administrative work, and messaged an expectation that teachers keep work at work,” the report said. “[These] could be a low-cost way for school leaders to help improve teachers’ work-life balance.”

But if classroom instruction isn’t improving, we shouldn’t be surprised that test scores are stagnant or dropping. 

How teachers are taught to teach—along with what curriculum materials they use with students and how they use those materials—are the most critical factors for improving student learning. Many state education leaders are doing their part to ensure school districts adopt high-quality curriculum materials and help teachers use them well. The colleges and universities that prepare teachers to enter the profession largely have not. 

Back in 2017, the Council of Chief State School Officers formed a of interested state departments of education – called the High Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development Network – to put good curriculum into the hands of teachers.

The network is getting its job done: According to and that of the states themselves, more teachers are using curriculum materials for English language arts and mathematics that are aligned with rigorous state standards. More schools are also providing professional development to teachers that is grounded in their curriculum materials. 

Louisiana – a network state that is also for state curriculum reform efforts – was the only state to see gains in fourth-grade reading scores on NAEP since 2017. Louisiana and Mississippi, another network member, were two of only four states that have seen gains in fourth-grade mathematics since 2017.

But one area where we consistently have seen little change is in college and university teacher preparation programs. In surveys every year since 2019, RAND has asked teachers across the nation which approach their teacher preparation program emphasized: 

(a) “how to develop my own lessons and unit plans,” or

(b) “how to skillfully use and modify curricula provided to me.” 

Year over year, only about 10% of U.S. teachers indicate that their program emphasized helping them use curriculum materials. A little less than half say the emphasis was on how to develop their own lessons and unit plans. The balance say their program emphasized both or neither.

These percentages hold regardless of the teacher’s state, whether the teacher is in an elementary or high school; in an urban or rural school; in an English language arts/reading, math or science classroom; or was trained 20 years ago versus in the past five years. 

All teacher preparation programs should show teachers-in-training how to skillfully use the curricula they are given. This is a prerequisite to ensuring that most children meet state academic standards. Think about it: If every teacher uses a school-provided curriculum that is aligned with their state standards, the chances of meeting those standards is better than if teachers are reinventing the wheel by developing their own lessons.

Other data beyond our surveys underscore this point: Teacher preparation is slow to incorporate what we know about good classroom instruction. 

For example, the and confirmed that elementary schoolers need instruction in five key components: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Yet, in NCTQ’s 2023 nationwide of the elementary reading course syllabi of nearly 700 teacher preparation programs, they found that only 25% of those programs adequately addressed those five core components of reading instruction. Another 25% didn’t adequately address any of those components. 

The idea that teachers should write their own curriculum is outdated and ill-serving; it’s a holdover from the era before the advent of academic standards in the U.S. and growing knowledge about what makes a good curriculum material. These days, according to a recent RAND American Instructional Resources Survey, encourage teachers to develop their own curriculum. Instead, most principals expect teachers to use their required curriculum materials.

At their best, professional curricula are developed by experts in subject matter and pedagogy, are written to build students’ knowledge over time, and have been endorsed by third party organizations such as that deem the material aligned with state academic standards. 

Adopting a prepared curriculum needn’t turn teachers into robots; it takes considerable skill and subject-matter knowledge to use any materials thoughtfully and productively. Teacher prep programs should give teachers ample, hands-on training on how to use their grade-level curriculum materials and the expertise to make just-in-time adjustments that help students catch up when they are struggling to master those materials. 

States and school districts know that curriculum matters. Many have revamped their policies accordingly. It’s time for teacher preparation programs to do the same.

In all, two-thirds of respondents said they hadn’t used AI in their work, including 9 percent who reported they’d never heard of tools and products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. By contrast, 18 percent of participants said they regularly relied on such offerings, and 15 percent said they had tried them before but don’t intend to use them more regularly.

Melissa Kay Diliberti, a policy researcher at RAND and one of the report’s co-authors, said the current minority of users constitutes a “foothold” in schools that is poised to grow with time — and that has already expanded massively in the 17 months to an unsuspecting public in November 2022.

“There seem to be a small number of people on the bandwagon, but the bandwagon is moving forward,” Diliberti said.

The poll, incorporating responses from a nationally representative sample of more than 1,000 teachers in 231 public school districts, offers the most recent data from a technological shift that has as . The potential of AI to maximize teacher efficiency, individualize instruction for every pupil, and offer support to kids struggling with mental health problems has stoked a growing demand for new products that is quickly being met by major tech players like Google and Khan Academy.

The gleanings of broader public opinion research are somewhat diffuse, but there is reason to think that the level of AI take-up by teachers is comparable to, or even further along than, that of other professionals. In previous polls, similar minorities of (15 percent), (28 percent), human resources staff (), and doctors () have reported using AI in a variety of tasks. 

And teachers’ outlook on the future is suggestive: Nearly all respondents who already use AI tools believe they will use it more in the 2024–25 school year than they do now, while 28 percent of non-users predicted they would eventually try them out. 

Use of artificial intelligence was roughly even across different kinds of schools, whether broken down by student demographics, poverty levels or rural/urban geography. By contrast, middle and high school teachers were almost twice as likely to say they used AI than their counterparts in elementary school (23 percent vs. 12 percent), and English and social studies instructors reported higher use than those in STEM disciplines (27 percent versus 19 percent).

While cautioning against overinterpreting results in a relatively small sample, Diliberti reasoned that English and social studies teachers are also more likely to create or modify their own curricular materials, or source them from online marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers. Outsourcing some of those efforts — along with periodic non-instructional tasks, such as composing emails to parents or letters of recommendation to colleges — to AI could save hundreds of hours over the course of a school year.

“You could see where AI might be a way to ease the burden of a task they’re already doing,” she said. “That might be why these teachers appear to be more inclined to use AI than a math teacher, who could be more tightly focused on a given curriculum that’s used throughout the school.”

Among teachers regularly using AI, close to half said they did so to generate classroom assignments or worksheets (40 percent), lesson plans (41 percent), or assessments for students (49 percent). 

Establishing a ‘foothold’

Amanda Bickerstaff, CEO of , a company that advises school districts on the use of artificial intelligence, said the RAND poll is notable for being “the first survey I’ve seen that seems representative of what is happening in schools. 

In training sessions she has conducted for tens of thousands of classroom teachers and administrators since last year, Bickerstaff said she and her colleagues have received a warm reception from audiences, but also uneven awareness of what AI can accomplish. Early adopters might simply be tech enthusiasts, or they could be special education teachers .

Curiosity about the new technology “is coming from the bottom-up as well as the top-down,” she observed. “One of the more interesting things is that we’re seeing more teachers using AI in schools than schools and districts teaching them to use it.”

Partly because guidance and professional development still trail teacher interest, a little under 10 percent of all survey respondents said they were seeking out AI tools of their own initiative. At present, the most commonly used products were popular platforms like Google Classroom, adaptive learning systems offered by Khan Academy and i-Ready, and the nearly ubiquitous chatbots. 

Diliberti said she wasn’t surprised that incumbent players like Google and OpenAI, powered by billions of dollars in investment and promotion, have gained early primacy in the K–12 arena. But she added it was striking that lesser-known products that are specifically geared toward activities like lesson planning and assessment generation haven’t won the following of more multifunctional alternatives like ChatGPT.

“It’s notable that teachers seem to be using more generic tools instead of dedicated tools that were developed for this purpose,” she said.

Bickerstaff argued that the survey results demonstrated that teachers, increasingly finding their own way to AI, should be provided more training on the use of existing tools. Beyond that, she said, public and private actors should broaden access to more advanced versions of those tools, at subscription costs averaging about $20 per month, to allow teachers to gain a better understanding of their applications. 

“These tools make mistakes, they’re biased, and they require significant training to be able to use them. You need support on how to use the tools before you can get the best out of them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She granted a blanket, one-year “accountability waiver.” But in February, with a new administration in place, then-Education Secretary nominee Miguel Cardona said he’d require states to administer the federally mandated tests in the spring, with an asterisk: They had the option of giving shorter, remote, or delayed versions.

Now, as students begin a third year of school under the cloud of COVID-19, a pair of researchers suggest that those two moves, by two administrations, may have made the results of annual testing less valuable — and could harm the delicate political support such testing still enjoys.

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Using different versions of tests makes the results less comparable across different years and school districts. And shorter tests produce less “actionable” information about individual student achievement in the short term, said Dan Goldhaber of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the University of Washington.

“The waivers looked to us like they made state tests less useful for diagnostic purposes, both for parents and for teachers,” Goldhaber said in an interview.

In a new , Goldhaber, along with Paul Bruno of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, say that as states begin planning for next spring’s tests, they should consider exactly how useful the results are for families, who spent much of the past school year getting an up-close look at just how much their children know.

When these tests return full-force in schools post-pandemic, as they likely will in 2022, they run the risk of being out-of-step with parents’ new, pandemic-fueled understanding of their children’s needs, the authors warn.

If the test results can’t help guide decisions about student placement and skills levels, they could lose what tenuous political support they still have, according to the analysis.

The researchers looked at testing policies nationwide and found that in most states, educators use tests either for diagnostics, for research and evaluation, or as the basis for accountability systems.

But they might also be better used to provide “actionable and timely information” about how to help individual students do better in the subjects tested. If results could be disaggregated more often and in a timely fashion, they say, that would help parents and teachers look more closely at students’ skill levels and academic needs.

As it is, they say, state test results “often take several months to make it into the hands of educators or families, impeding the use of testing to help individual students.”

“We need to make sure, I think, that they are useful for more than just accountability purposes,” said Goldhaber, who is also affiliated with the American Institutes for Research.

He noted, for instance, that in Washington State, many high-achieving students in underrepresented minority groups, who wouldn’t typically be assigned to advanced classes, get that option based on end-of-year assessment results. “They’re used for those kinds of things, but I don’t think it’s well-known,” he said.

Twenty years after No Child Left Behind first mandated widespread spring testing in K-12 schools, the authors say refocusing the tests could also keep them from losing popular support among parents and teachers.

Federal testing requirements are “popular in the abstract,” Bruno and Goldhaber write, but that support appears fragile: 41 percent of respondents in a 2020 Phi Delta Kappa poll said there’s “too much emphasis on achievement testing” in public schools, up from 37 percent in 2008 and just 20 percent in 1997.

They also note that support for testing drops 20 percentage points when respondents are told that test administration takes, on average, eight hours of class time annually.

“I think there’s probably less public support than there was, certainly, when No Child Left Behind passed” in 2001, Goldhaber said.

Because of remote schooling, Goldhaber said, “Many parents have a window into what’s actually going on inside the classroom, in a way that they did not have before the pandemic, because they could sit in with their kids during classes.”

But in many cases, he said, the test results don’t necessarily offer “concrete information that suggests maybe your kids need help with complex fractions — the kind of information that you could at least imagine would inform parent-teacher meeting discussions.”

Jonathan Schweig, a researcher at the RAND Corp. and a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School who studies education policy and teacher evaluations, among other topics, said he generally agreed with Bruno’s and Goldhaber’s notion that using tests for diagnostic purposes might be a way to increase public support.

Echoing Goldhaber’s point about concrete data, he said state summative tests generally “were not designed to provide diagnostic or instructionally useful information. Even under routine conditions, the tests are administered towards the end of the school year, and score reports are returned to schools and families during the summer, after the school year has ended.”

Schweig also said the scores generated by these assessment systems “are not at a grain size that would be useful to support remediation or other diagnostic uses.”

Summative tests, he said, “are best thought of as providing one piece of information about student learning, but they do not provide the only piece and perhaps not even the most important piece. As such, it is important for school leaders to think comprehensively about assessment and design coherent systems that include a mix of formative, interim and state-wide summative assessments.”

Any broad new federal testing policies will have to wait until Congress approves a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which helps fund public schools. That could take years, since lawmakers typically push back the timeline for reauthorization by years. But in today’s political climate, Goldhaber said, “I think that if we were to have a negotiation right now, I don’t know that the tests would survive.”

Here’s the paradox about remote learning: During the pandemic it has not gone particularly well. And an increasing number of states such as New Jersey and school districts like New York City are next year.

And yet, according to our new surveys, roughly one-third of schools are keeping it as an option going forward for any family that wants it and more teachers prefer remote learning than ever before.

Is remote learning a pandemic blip or a permanent feature of public education moving ahead?

This spring we a nationally representative set of principals and teachers, and their responses about remote learning were particularly worrisome.

Only 15 percent of teachers who have been fully remote for most of the year reported covering all or most of the curriculum they would cover in a typical year, compared to more than one-third of in-person teachers. Of teachers who delivered mostly remote instruction this year, two in ten reported still having an inadequate internet connection even a year into the pandemic.

School principals reported similar shortfalls. Half of remote schools shortened the school day. Elementary students who spent most of the year in a fully remote school year were receiving 100 fewer minutes of instruction per week in English language arts than their peers who attended school in person, as well as less instructional time in math and science.

This adds up to likely lower quality learning experiences overall, which is especially concerning since remote schooling has been more prevalent in schools with the highest levels of student poverty and more students of color.

Still, a substantial portion of educators seem on board with remote learning. Despite their , about one in three teachers who’d done remote teaching this year said they would like to continue providing at least some remote instruction or had no preference.

Some educators, students, and families alike have come to appreciate the flexibility that remote classes afford. With less time each day spent in synchronous settings, they have more control over when to post or complete classwork. Remote instruction also could open schools up to more fluid staffing structures, such as allowing tutors or specialists to drop in.

The level of parental demand for remote instruction appears to be diminishing at least somewhat. Several spring 2021 reported that 20 to 30 percent of parents desire remote instruction for their children permanently. But our May 2021 survey of more than 2,000 parents found that, overall, just 5 percent aren’t going to send children for in-person instruction in the fall. Further, their main reasons for choosing remote schooling are concerns about COVID-19, so that preference may fade somewhat as the pandemic recedes.

Black and Hispanic parents are the most hesitant about in-person schooling in fall 2021. Only 72 and 73 percent, respectively, plan to send their children to school in-person, and about 20 percent of both groups were unsure. In contrast, 90 percent of white parents plan to send their children to school in-person in fall, while another 7 percent are unsure.

To prevent any continued remote schooling from potentially widening racial and income inequities, policymakers, principals and district leaders could do several things to ensure remote instruction translates into remote learning:

1 Boost instructional time and attention to remote students

Our survey results suggest that remote students need many more opportunities to engage with teachers and tutors. That doesn’t mean just more time on Zoom. Rather, remote students need to be engaged through small group breakouts, engaging class activities, learning pods, or one-on-one time with tutors. It also means setting minimum time requirements using online programs to practice their skills.

2 Develop remote learning experts

Teachers should not have the burden of teaching in-person and remotely simultaneously. Instead, some instructional staff who prefer remote instruction could be dedicated to running it. These staff should be provided coherent curriculum expressly designed for online instruction and trained in strategies for online engagement.

3 Get high-quality remote learning curricula

Organizations like identify standards-aligned materials for English language arts, mathematics and science — but few of those include comprehensive online options. Identifying high-quality online curriculum in all subject areas — and building what doesn’t yet exist — will require action from not just schools, but also state departments of education and curriculum developers.

4 Expand broadband internet

Principals of schools that were remote for most of the year estimated that about 10 percent of their students had inadequate internet speed. Likewise, about 20 percent of teachers in remote schools reported their internet wasn’t fast or reliable enough to deliver instruction. That’s not good enough to make permanent remote instruction equitable.

Julia Kaufman is a senior policy researcher and co director of the American Educator Panels at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. Heather Schwartz is the program director of PK–12 Educational Systems at RAND. Melissa Kay Diliberti is an assistant policy researcher at RAND and a Ph.D. candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

But new findings suggest that among many families, demand for remote or hybrid learning may not be so great.

More than eight in 10 parents surveyed (84 percent) now say they plan to send at least one of their children back for in-person schooling this fall, with another 12 percent unsure of their plans. Just five percent plan to keep their children home for the upcoming school year.

But the findings, released Thursday by researchers at the RAND Corp., come with stark differences between white parents and parents of color, among others.

Black and Hispanic parents “are the ones who are least sure they’re going to send their kids back to school in person,” said RAND researcher Heather Schwartz. While just 10 percent of white parents said they’re “not sure” of their plans or that they plan to keep their kids home, 28 percent of Black parents and 27 percent of Hispanic parents said the same.

If they do send their children back, she noted, most want mask mandates. That’s true of 86 percent of black parents, 78 percent of Hispanic parents, and 89 percent of Asian parents. By contrast, just 53 percent of white parents feel the same way.

Parents of color also want regular COVID testing — the split between black and white parents, for instance, is nearly 40 percentage points (74 vs. 36 percent).

In many districts, researchers have noted, Black families have been reluctant to let their children return to in-person school, often citing distrust in schools’ or discipline policies. In Chicago earlier this year, average in-person attendance for white students was 73 percent, the reported. For Black students, it was less than 50 percent.

Even the that parents of color are “more concerned about some aspects of school reopening, such as compliance with mitigation measures, safety, and their child contracting or bringing home COVID-19,” than were white parents.

In a New York Times op-ed this week, RiShawn Biddle, a fellow with the non-partisan think tank , said recent announcements by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to end remote instruction in the fall are “bad news for a majority of the country’s Black, Latino and Asian students and their parents who wish to keep virtual learning as an option.” The move, Biddle said, “exacerbates already-existing educational and health care inequities.”

Despite the differences, however, Schwartz said one finding seems fairly consistent: “Across the board, parents want ventilation,” she said.

Classroom ventilation is the top measure parents say schools must put in place for them to feel safe sending their children back to school in person — it’s more important than masks, social distancing and even teacher vaccinations, the data show.

Schwartz said the survey suggests that schools could allay parents’ fears by “communicating very clearly about what specific safety measures they are putting in place.”

Overall, two-thirds of parents want schools to keep COVID-19 safety measures, though rural and white parents are much more likely to prefer that schools “reduce or discontinue” their pandemic-related safety precautions. Black, Hispanic, Asian, and urban parents are much more likely to prefer that schools keep them, according to the survey, which was administered to 2,015 parents from April 30 to May 11.

Among parents who don’t plan to send their children to school this fall, the top reasons are safety-related. Nearly one in three (31 percent) said, “My child(ren) feel safer in remote school,” while nearly as many said they’re concerned about their child transmitting or contracting COVID-19.

Twenty-two percent said they’re staying home because their children “like remote school better.”

And just five percent said they prefer homeschooling their children, while only two percent said their children either have a job they’d have to quit or that they must care for younger siblings.

For Maritza Guridy, a mother of four in Philadelphia, safety is a big concern. She plans to send her children back to in-person schooling in the fall — Guridy is a secretary at the school that three of them will attend. But she understands that nervous parents want choices, especially those in multi-generational homes or with immunocompromised family members.

“The fact that some states are deciding not to even give parents a choice is very unfair,” she said. “There are a lot of parents that are still very scared and very worried because they’re still not even sure with certainty as to whether or not other children or even adults in the building have been vaccinated or are COVID-free.”

At her school, Guridy said, adults have been tested weekly since April. “Not every school district, not every school across the country, has had that possibility,” she said. “And there are still adults that for their own personal reasons have chosen not to vaccinate themselves.”

The new survey results also suggest that children’s vaccinations, while a game-changer for many families, aren’t finding universal acceptance among parents. Just 52 percent said they planned to vaccinate their children, while another 17 percent were “unsure.”

The Biden administration has pushed to get 70 percent of eligible Americans vaccinated by July 4, last month announcing a partnership with the ride-sharing companies Lyft and Uber to provide free rides to vaccination sites. Biden also said the nation’s largest community colleges will host vaccination clinics through the end of June. In addition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will fund “on-the-ground efforts” to promote vaccination, such as phone banking, door-to-door canvassing, and pop-up vaccination sites in workplaces and churches.

The new findings stand in stark contrast to this spring. One, from NPR, found that 29 percent of parents were “likely to stick with remote learning indefinitely.”

A by the National Parents Union found similar results to NPR in most regions: in the Midwest, 21 percent of parents said they preferred hybrid instruction to in-person instruction.

RAND’s Schwartz noted that her data have a large, 12 percent “undecided” group to consider. She also said a portion of the difference in findings could be due to how the survey questions are worded. Unlike others, hers didn’t ask parents about preferences — it asked about actual plans. “It’s a little more cut-and-dried,” she said. “It’s not ‘What would you like? Would you like an option?’ When you think about it, who doesn’t like an option?”

Brooklyn, N.Y., parent Amanda Zinoman said she’s ready for in-person schooling to resume. “I’m very excited for my son to go back to school full-time,” she said. “But I understand that if you don’t want to send your kid to school, there should be an alternative.”

Zinoman, whose 11-year-old, Jonah, has attended his small public middle school from home all year, said she has all but written off 2020-2021, which she said “feels like a bit of a lost year” for him.

“I think it’s a tough situation all around,” she said, “but my feeling is that kids need to be in school. I think that kids who thrive at home are a small minority — especially at my son’s age, adolescence. They need the social [interaction], they need the attention, and they need to be with people other than their parents.”

As more Americans receive Covid-19 vaccines and schools move to reopen widely, leaders are doing their best to make sure everyone gets the memo: School is happening in-person this fall.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently , “We must prepare now for full in-person instruction come next school year.”

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said in March he is “” schools across the state to return in-person in the fall, no exceptions. “We are expecting Monday through Friday, in-person, every school, every district,” he said.

Good luck with that.

Even as vaccination rates soar and the government authorizes access for adolescents, school districts nationwide are grappling with sometimes widespread suspicion and dissatisfaction over how they handled the pandemic, especially in communities of color. That’s forcing them to offer families an option that might have been unthinkable a year ago — and one that has a terrible track record: enrolling their children online this fall and continuing learning from home.

Dawn Williams, whose daughter will start first grade in August in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, said she’s seriously considering an online program. “Most of my friends that have children, their kids are still virtual,” she said.

So far it’s happening in just a fraction of the nation’s 13,500 districts. But those include a wide mix of rural and suburban districts, as well as large urban school systems like Albuquerque, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville, Omaha, Richmond, and the District of Columbia, according to the University of Washington’s Center for the Reinvention of Public Education (CRPE).

In Colorado’s Jefferson County, the school district, responding to “high demand” from families, an online option in the fall. District spokesperson Cameron Bell said more than 700 students have enrolled so far, with at least 1,000 expected by August.

In Montgomery County, the largest school district in Maryland, officials are developing a virtual academy “to address both the students who may want to remain virtual for health reasons but also those who have thrived in virtual learning,” said spokesperson Gboyinde Onijala.

What’s going on here?

Much of this can be chalked up to simple consumer demand. One recent found that nearly 30 percent of parents would rely on virtual learning “indefinitely” going forward. That suggests a potential market of more than 15 million students.

Districts are listening. When RAND researchers surveyed about 320 public school leaders last October, they found that were either considering or actually planning to keep “one or more virtual schools” operating after the pandemic ends, said RAND’s Heather Schwartz.

“I expect that to hold, or even to increase somewhat based on early anecdotal indications that a sizable minority of students and parents prefer remote learning,” Schwartz said via email.

More recently, in early April, researchers at CRPE surveyed officials in 100 large urban school districts and found nearly identical results: 23, or just over one in five, plan to offer a remote option next fall.

District leaders told Schwartz and other researchers that their main motivation was “to be responsive to parent and student preferences” — and in no small part to improve sagging enrollments. of 33 states by The Associated Press and the education news site Chalkbeat found that public K-12 enrollment in 2020 dropped by more than half a million students, or 2 percent.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’”

As he talks these days to school leaders nationwide, education consultant John Bailey said he hears many of them say they plan to make online learning “a more permanent part of their offering to kids going forward.” A one-time U.S. Department of Education official who now advises the Walton Family Foundation, Bailey has supported the idea that reopening schools is safe. He said that while many educators acknowledge millions of students lost ground via distance learning, “for some kids, it’s working really well. So why not offer that going forward?”

Nationwide, families of color are keeping their children home at especially high rates. In Chicago, the district’s chief of school management told school board members late last month that most students are “learning virtually.” But about one in four Black high school students was absent from both in-person and remote learning in late April. Overall, only about two-thirds of high school students attended in-person classes on days they were expected in school, the Chicago Sun-Times .

At the same time, Asian fourth-graders attend school remotely at the of any group — 95 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Eighth-graders attend at an even higher rate: 96 percent. Asian families have expressed fears about their children experiencing anti-Asian discrimination or even violence in the wake of the pandemic.

While state and local restrictions can play a part in attendance statistics like these, many families are simply voting with their feet, said Bree Dusseault, a practitioner in residence at CRPE.

“There’s still a really sizable population of students who, even when given the option to be in-person, aren’t taking it,” she said.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’ — particularly in families of color,” said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools in Baltimore. “Districts have never had to wrestle with ‘How do we provide education in multiple formats?’ They thought this was a stopgap. Now what I think they’re finding is that there are many parents that were just fine with virtual learning.”

Anderson, a Black educator who is also a mother of three teens, said the past year has taught parents “that they have a voice at the table – and they are not being shy and retiring about letting people know what they want in terms of how they want their children to learn.”

Recent survey data suggest that Black, Hispanic and Asian parents are more likely than their white peers to say they prefer online learning. For instance, the journal recently noted data from early April that showed 60 percent of white parents have a preference for in-person learning, compared to just 25 percent of Black and Hispanic parents.

At the same time, Dusseault said, many parents of color see how badly education systems have served their kids in the past, with substandard instruction and .

When Anderson surveyed her three children recently, none wanted to go back to their Baltimore school this fall. They like learning from home and have been successful.

“I think my kids sometimes miss their friends,” she said. “But aside from that, I don’t have any of my three children saying right now, ‘Mom, I want to go back to school today or tomorrow.’ They have adapted to this.”

Anderson was quick to add that her kids “have every kind of technology possible,” as well as space at home to use it. All three have their own rooms, plus their home has a backyard. But whatever their situations, she said, “There are a lot of kids who are at home and they’re thriving. You can’t negate the success of those students and the opportunity that they have had to be separated from their peers and still do well academically.”

Williams, mother of the Maryland first-grader, said her daughter is already doing advanced work — and she’d like to keep it that way. Giving her child a chance to work virtually and independently is key.

“Students that are more advanced — and parents that have the choice — we’re going to keep our kids home,” she said. “Those kids are going to accelerate. They’re going to soar and they’re going to keep advancing.”

“School hesitancy” and safety

Vladimir Kogan, an Ohio State University political scientist who studies politics and public policy, said “school hesitancy” may in part be a function of the messages families hear — especially in places where teachers’ unions loudly demonstrated last year, enacting and the like to warn of the dangers of reopening schools.

“I think that messaging has definitely filtered down to the parents,” he said.

But has shown that when prevention strategies are in place in schools, transmission of the virus is typically lower than, or similar to, levels of community transmission, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As a result, public opinion is shifting. A February Pew found that 61 percent of Americans said K-12 schools that weren’t open for in-person instruction “should give a lot of consideration to the possibility that students will fall behind academically.” That’s up from 48 percent last July. And fewer Americans said schools should give a lot of consideration to the risk to teachers or students.

“I think the number of parents who are hesitant is going to go down pretty substantially,” Kogan said. “But I don’t think it’s going to go down to zero.”

Bailey, who recently summarizing research on safe school re-openings amid Covid fears, predicted that there will be a group of parents “who will probably never feel that it’s safe until there’s a vaccine for kids.”

The prognosis on vaccines seems promising: This week, both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved expanded use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children 12 to 15 years old. Pfizer also said it’ll ask the FDA for emergency authorization in September to administer its vaccine to children as young as 2 years old.

Both Johnson & Johnson and Moderna are conducting trials in children.The U.S. vaccine developer Novavax is also on children — its vaccine has a reported 96 percent efficacy rate in adults and is awaiting emergency use authorization in the U.S.

A “really terrible” track record for virtual schools

Kogan, the political scientist, worries that by relying on virtual schools, districts are embracing a well-studied — and failed — reform.

In a 2019 , researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that graduation rates at virtual and blended-learning schools were far lower than the national average for public schools. The review followed years of from researchers nationwide.

In 2016, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, along with other groups, issued “A Call to Action” to , saying far too many virtual schools “have experienced notable problems.”

At the student level, most of the dilemma lies in what’s required for students to be successful in virtual settings: huge amounts of self-control, motivation and discipline, said Kogan, who last January that found worse declines in reading achievement among Ohio third-graders in districts that used fully remote instruction.

The track record of these programs “was terrible before Covid,” Kogan said. “And I think it’s certainly the case that there are kids who do fine. But the districts are not saying, ‘We’re going to limit it only to kids who do fine.’”

To be fair, many educators get it. In its announcement of a “modified digital learning option,” the , district last month offered an official warning: “Digital learning is not optimal for every student. Some students did not do as well academically, socially, or emotionally in the digital learning environment.”

In the long term, Kogan said, his larger worry is that this could open the door to a two-tier education system: a bigger, functional one for students whose parents are comfortable sending them to school, and a smaller, inferior one “for kids whose parents are too scared and keep them home.”

The long-term damage, he said, “is going to be so devastating. It’s going to exacerbate all the inequalities that we already have.”

Anderson, the Baltimore educator and mother, acknowledged the dilemma, but emphasized it was nothing new: Millions of kids weren’t being served well before the pandemic. Here’s a chance for something better, especially for students of color who are already staying away in large numbers.

While leaders may insist that everyone attend in-person on the first day of school this fall, Anderson said, “I’m not hearing what is going to significantly shift over the summer that is going to make sure that these large numbers of families of color are going to suddenly show up in September.”