The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a period for reexamination of how the world schools its children. Policy makers are considering how to address myriad challenges during this tenuous post-COVID era in primary and secondary education. This paper discusses potential school calendar change in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Modifying the…

In this paper we examine academic recovery in 12 mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states during the 2021-22 school year. Our findings highlight the challenges that recovery efforts faced during the 2021-22 school year. Although, on average, math and reading test score gains during the school year reached the pace of pre-pandemic…

In the fifteen years of working in higher education (with the vast majority of those years in the registrar's office), the authors have participated in all types of emergency planning--a registrar staple--including earthquakes, fires, severe weather, floods, bomb threats, and even H1N1 pandemics. But none of that planning truly prepared them for…

The spread of coronavirus infection brings changes to all spheres of activity, including education, which is increasingly moving to a distance learning format. The ultimate goal of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the recommendations for developing a rigid class scheduling method in the framework of online learning using advanced…

The COVID-19 pandemic placed an undeniable burden onto the teaching profession which already faced levels of prestige and interest at 50-year lows. The strains of the pandemic resulted in educators reporting higher levels of job-related stress and burnout and exacerbated concerns about potential teacher shortages. This dissertation leverages…

Challenges to teaching in the post-COVID classroom plagued schools across the globe. This qualitative study followed two middle-school teachers in a charter school located in the Western United States to identify the changes to classroom teaching and their effects on the classroom environment through the first year of teaching after the 2020…

School choice is a tool used to fight inequality and is important to consider how students are assigned to schools. The essays in this dissertation study mechanisms designed to improve and understand students' attendance at schools. Chapter 1 examines the inequality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic with respect to schools switching to a hybrid…

Immersive scheduling engages students in one or two subjects at a time over short teaching periods. While there is incipient evidence that immersive delivery can heighten academic outcomes in undergraduate education, much less is known about its effectiveness in pathways or access programs. This exploratory mixed-methods study investigated how a…

This study was conducted as a mixed method design to investigate teacher and administrator perceptions of how a later school start impacted the school culture. Many teenagers are sleep deprived, which can affect student attendance/tardiness, achievement, engagement, and behavior/discipline. Teenagers are biologically programmed to go to bed after…

During the 2020-21 school year, Wisconsin districts applied to the Department of Public Instruction for waivers to respond to the evolving public health pandemic. This analysis, which focuses on districts utilizing Hours of Instruction and Length of School Day flexibilities, was designed to take stock of what was learned during this unusual year…

Policymakers have renewed calls for expanding instructional time in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We establish a set of empirical facts about time in school, synthesize the literature on the causal effects of instructional time, and conduct a case study of time use in an urban district. On average, instructional time in U.S. public schools is…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted non-formal education, which includes children's informal learning and social development. Due to the required closings of many informal learning spaces, children have been left without methods to construct their learning physically and socially. This essay discusses how informal…

The COVID-19 pandemic closed schools across the country, limiting access to instruction and resulting in learning loss. In this article, we define learning loss and describe the history and complexity of its impact on students.

Pandemic-era disruptions to schooling resulted in academic setbacks for many students. To help students catch up, school districts nationwide are implementing a range of academic recovery interventions. In this paper, we use multiple data sources to evaluate the impact and implementation of academic recovery interventions in four school districts…

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…