The significant decrease in student achievement levels following the pandemic has become a pressing national problem, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts showed some of the sharpest academic achievement declines in the country. To assist schools in recovering from the pandemic, the federal government allocated three waves of funding through its…

Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to "virtual learning" was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do…

Everyone agrees that school in the fall cannot look the same as it did before the pandemic. Education leaders must organize people, time, and money to make up for learning losses, help students reconnect with schooling, support students' increased social and emotional needs, respond to physical distancing and sanitation requirements, and provide…

This report, which is the third in the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI's) "School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic" series, provides an update on the state of the nation's schools using the newest wave of COVID-19 Education Response Longitudinal Survey (C-ERLS) data. It describes how the nation's public school system has…

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the lives of millions of schoolchildren and exacerbated existing educational inequities. Most schools rapidly transitioned to remote instruction in March 2020 and continued operating under fully remote or hybrid learning conditions for the 2020-21 school year. This rapid transition to, and subsequent…

Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in the United States in March 2020, districts across the nation have faced the difficult task of reopening schools safely and keeping them open. It is useful to learn from the successes of districts that have used multilayered mitigation strategies to reduce the risk of in-school transmission. This brief…

The primary purpose of the current study was to examine barriers to the use of distance education and explore related factors in small and low-income rural schools. Data were collected via a telephone survey with administrators or other qualified personnel. The sample involved 417 randomly selected small and low-income rural school districts…

Interest in online school courses is surging nationwide, especially at the high school level, according to those who follow trends in educational technology. Much of that demand is coming from those who enroll in just one or two a year to meet a particular academic need or resolve a scheduling hang-up. Online courses have become so popular, in…

Virtual courses and schools--in which the student and the teacher are in different locations--have become commonplace at the university and high school level. Public, full-time virtual schooling for younger students, however, is still on the frontier of education. About a dozen states now offer full-time virtual schools among their public school…