Gokul krish

This is the latest roundup in our “Best Of” series, spotlighting top highlights from this year’s coverage as well as the most popular articles we’ve published each month. See more of the standouts from across 2020 right here. Any student will forever remember 2020 as the year that the classrooms and campuses closed down. As coronavirus cases surged in the spring — and then again in the autumn — educators, families and district leaders did their best to pivot to a socially-distanced Plan B, building a new system of remote instruction overnight in hopes of maintaining learning and community. Any education journalist will remember 2020 as the year that all the planned student profiles, school spotlights and policy investigations got thrown out the window as we scrambled to capture and process the disorienting new normal of virtual classrooms. Here at The 74, our top stories from the past nine months were dominated by our reporting in this area, by features that framed the challenges and opportunities of distance learning, that surfaced solutions and innovations that were working for some districts, and that pointed to the bigger questions of how disrupted back-to-back school years may lead to long-term consequences for this generation of students. As we approach the new year, we’re continuing to report on America’s evolving, patchwork education system via our coronavirus education reporting project at The74Million.org/PANDEMIC. With school campuses open in some states and not others, with some families preferring in-person classes or remote learning alternatives, and with some individual classrooms being forced to close in rolling 14-day increments with new coronavirus breakouts, it’s clear that our education system will begin 2021 in a similar state of turmoil. (Get our latest reporting on schools and the pandemic delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for The 74 Newsletter)