While the United States leads the world in Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation, the schools lag behind in preparing teachers and students for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The extraordinary pace of technological change, and the potential for both opportunity and risk, may be unprecedented. What leaders in education and education policy do…

Lengthy school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic were challenging across the country. In cities like Detroit, where many students already were struggling, the difficulties for students and families were compounded. Bernita Bradley, a social entrepreneur and education-reform advocate, launched Engaged Detroit to help Black families interested…

Black Mothers Forum (BMF) was founded in 2016 to combat institutional racism, including disproportionate discipline, unrepresentative curricula, and racial bullying in Phoenix-area schools. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted public education, the organization launched a network of microschools as outposts of this mission. These microschools were…

Over the past few years, leaders and educators at East Hartford High School in East Hartford, Connecticut, have sought out and tested ways to ensure that each of their 1,700 students have opportunities to form meaningful relationships with adults, engage in rigorous instruction, and receive tailored support. They have prioritized initiatives aimed…

This brief gives a snapshot of how school districts across the country are currently planning for fall 2020, how they are planning for contingencies of COVID-19 spread, and how this varies based on district characteristics. During the week of July 27-31, we reviewed district websites, social media, and local news to collect data from a sample of…

In the summer of 2022, the Center on Reinventing Public Education convened a panel of education and youth development experts to take stock of recent efforts to address students' mental health and well-being and to reestablish core elements of social and emotional learning (SEL) in schools. The panel agreed that the pandemic's impact has been…

As schools across the country continue to search for innovative practices to address pandemic-related learning loss and combat social isolation, experts are pointing to high dosage tutoring as a strategy worthy of consideration. Great Oaks Charter School Bridgeport in Connecticut offers an example of a high dosage tutoring model that has been…

Like every school across the country, Holyoke High School, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, struggled during remote learning: Teachers had to adjust to new technologies, and many students felt disconnected from the school environment. Despite these pandemic-induced challenges, Holyoke school leaders and staff kept student engagement at the forefront of…

When the pandemic closed schools in Denver, an enterprising parent with community connections stepped in to meet immediate needs--and paved a new path to supporting students and families in the future. Joanna Rosa-Saenz determined to "turn negatives into positives" by using whatever means she had to ensure her children and others in the…

Arizona Autism Charter School (AZACS), a public charter school for K-12 students, opened in 2014 to provide individualized education for students with autism and other disabilities alongside typically developing peers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders moved quickly to adapt instruction to online and hybrid models, coordinate comprehensive…

What supports were needed to enable the small learning communities, or pods, that emerged in 2020 and 2021? While learning pods may have emerged as a temporary response to a crisis, some persisted in fall 2021, either because of continued uncertainty over the pandemic's trajectory or because of their potential value as part of new structure for…

In response to concerns about the children of first responders needing a safe, supervised place to learn in the midst of COVID-19 school closures, the City of North Las Vegas funded education nonprofit Nevada Action to set up a microschool. Students left the school district to learn at the microschool, which received from the city facilities,…

Founded by mothers long concerned about the safety and welfare of their Black children, Black Mothers Forum (BMF) is an Arizona-based education advocacy group that responded to the COVID-19 crisis by launching two microschools for Black families in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2021. BMF partnered with Prenda, a well-known microschool provider, but…

As the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools across the country in 2020, Washington state's emergent charter sector was growing. During this time, charter enrollment was growing by 28% each year, on average, and the number of schools in operation doubled from eight to 16. The new schools that opened were planned long before the pandemic. But even…

When it comes to understanding what happened in the 2020-21 school year, the relatively new COVID-19 School Data Hub is an easy to use tool, and one of the few school closure trackers with information at the school, rather than the school district level. The COVID-19 School Data Hub can be used to understand how the pandemic influenced learning…