How Schools Adapt during the Pandemic Can Reshape Adolescent Learning Experiences for Generations
This brief, informed by interviews with school and system leaders in the New England region, suggests some efforts to reinvent schools before the pandemic have helped schools to navigate the current crisis.
To make up for lost learning time, set priorities
For students not to fall perpetually behind because of school closures and the difficulties of virtual learning, schools and districts must set priorities. Students need to catch up as quickly as possible on the core ideas and skills that are prerequisites to the material that will come next year. Schools may need to add tutors […]
Reopening schools hinges upon trust that must be built from the ground up
Trust, a societal resource that has been steadily bleeding away, is indispensable for schooling. As the classic book by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider showed, a school can’t be good, and can’t improve, without trust all around. Teachers must trust one another and show respect for parents and loving concern for children. Parents must trust […]
It takes a village: The pandemic learning pod movement, one year in
Since the spring of 2020, learning pods have evolved from a new idea to a significant feature of the pandemic learning landscape. As the pod movement grows in real-time through the current school year and morphs into new models and approaches, the work of learning is moving beyond the four walls of the school building […]
Vanishing in plain sight: Districts face barriers identifying and serving students experiencing homelessness
Students who are unhoused or in housing transition, an already vulnerable population before the pandemic, are falling even further out of sight in the 2020–21 school year. This summer, CRPE conducted a deep dive into the supports districts offered to their students experiencing homelessness. We found that unhoused students were largely unmentioned in districts’ fall […]
Toward Understanding Unionization’s Impact on Charter School Students
In this brief, we set out to understand how unionization may or may not shape practices central to charter schools’ ability to serve students.
State Accountability Systems in the COVID Era and Beyond
This brief presents a set of ideas and themes to begin to inform challenges around testing and accountability during the pandemic.
“Public Education Will Never Be the Same”: How COVID-19 Forced School District Leaders to Innovate on the Fly
In this brief, we summarize themes from an American School District Panel survey on innovation during COVID-19.
How Are School Districts Addressing Student Social-Emotional Needs during the Pandemic?
In this brief, we look at how our nationally representative sample of 477 school districts attended to students’ social-emotional learning and well-being in fall 2020.
The New Landscape of Public Schooling
This article originally ran in the November 2010 edition of the Phi Delta Kappan. We’re republishing it here because many of the ideas it describes are now being tested in real time on a large scale, as school systems across the country experiment with new structures that allow them to support remote learning. Critics of […]