When America’s public school system began creeping back open in January 2021 after last year’s holiday break, only 32% of children were in school full-time five days a week – the majority of them from middle- and upper-income school districts that served mostly white families.
“We owe it to our students – especially students in underserved communities and students with disabilities – to get all our schools opened safely and to meet the social, emotional, mental health, and academic needs of all students,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in one of his first communications as a newly minted member of the Biden administration.
“It will take years to address the devastating impacts of COVID-19 – including the ways that the pandemic exacerbated the existing inequities in our education system,” he said, acknowledging the stark disparities in access to education in year two of the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, heading into 2022, virtually all of the country’s 51 million children are back in classrooms learning in person – an incredible victory given states’ disparate responses to the risks posed by COVID-19 and the country’s bifurcated education system in which schools have access to varying levels of resources.
Of course the path to the universal reopening was made possible, in large part, by two major changes to the education landscape: an unprecedented influx of federal aid to the K-12 system and the availability of vaccines, both for teachers and students.
“Last Christmas, our children were at risk without a COVID-19 vaccine,” President Joe Biden said earlier this month. “This Christmas, we have safe and effective vaccines for children 5 and over, with 20 million children and counting now vaccinated. Last year, a majority of our schools were closed at Christmas time. Now, 99% of our schools are open.”
But over the course of the last calendar year, several other significant shifts occurred, too – shifts that many believe have laid the groundwork for seismic overhauls in what’s asked of public schools, how they’re supported, and how they serve students and their families.
“Students’ diverse needs demand diverse solutions,” says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “We have to think about reaching kids in new ways, and now is a critical time for us to ask older students and parents, ‘What are your family’s needs and how can we address them in creative ways?’ and ‘What do you want longer term?’”
“There is serious demand for this,” she says. “Whether or not we realize that, change will depend on forward-thinking system leaders and school leaders and, barring that, advocacy from the community to do something about it.”
With more than $200 billion in federal aid directed to the K-12 system to help schools reopen safely, hire additional staff and begin making inroads on the academic, social and emotional learning loss incurred over the last two year, schools have seen an influx of resources like never before – and they stand to gain even more.
If Congress can find a path forward on its appropriations packages, the federal government’s biggest education programs stand to receive a windfall, including doubling funding for Title I, the program that supports school districts that serve large portions of low-income families, and supercharging funding for students with disabilities. And the Build Back Better package could add up to $400 billion for new child care and universal pre-kindergarten programs – programs that crumbled under the weight of the pandemic and funding that early childhood experts are calling a “game-changer” for the country’s education system.
The pandemic also highlighted how public schools are much more than just a place for learning. They provide a whole host of community support – from food to health care to internet connections, job training, language services and more. And research shows school leaders are intent on finding a way to ensure they can continue providing a wide range of support when the pandemic is over.
At least some of the federal funding, should Congress clear it, would go to a model of schooling that would allow school leaders to continue those efforts and one that the Biden administration has been trying to prioritize: community schools. Such facilities seek to understand what the families of their students need and then find a way to provide that support – something that often happens naturally in communities with more economic, social and political capital but which is often left unchecked in low-income and socio-economically diverse neighborhoods.
Community schools have become increasingly important for the Biden administration – as well as for the two biggest national teachers unions – as a way to address inequity in the K-12 system and also as a way to blunt enrollment drops that have especially haunted big urban school districts in the last two years.
And with college enrollment down significantly even with a record number of colleges not requiring the SAT and ACT entrance exams – especially among students from low-income families – education experts also anticipate an entire rethinking of preparing high school students for what comes after graduation with renewed emphasis on certifications and job training.
“The interest in reinventing high school is very, very high among district leaders and the need is great,” Lake says. “That need was emerging pre-pandemic, and I think there will be an explosion in career pathway programs and faster, more affordable routes to colleges, including dual enrollments, apprenticeships, partnerships between colleges and industries at the high school level.”
While the school year is only half over, perhaps nothing stood out more in calendar year 2021 in the education space than the elevation of parents, who turned into teacher’s aides overnight when schools across the country shuttered at the onset of the pandemic and who had a front-row view of the type of education their children received.
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