article about education in america

How much does the government spend on education? What percentage of people are college educated? How are kids doing in reading and math?

Table of Contents

What is the current state of education in the us.

How much does the US spend per student?

Public school spending per student

Average teacher salary.

How educated are Americans?

People with a bachelor's degree

Educational attainment by race and ethnicity.

How are kids doing in reading and math?

Proficiency in math and reading

What is the role of the government in education?

Spending on the education system

Agencies and elected officials.

The education system in America is made up of different public and private programs that cover preschool, all the way up to colleges and universities. These programs cater to many students in both urban and rural areas. Get data on how students are faring by grade and subject, college graduation rates, and what federal, state, and local governments spending per student. The information comes from various government agencies including the National Center for Education Statistics and Census Bureau.

During the 2019-2020 school year, there was $15,810 spent on K-12 public education for every student in the US.

Education spending per k-12 public school students has nearly doubled since the 1970s..

This estimate of spending on education is produced by the National Center for Education Statistics. Instruction accounts for most of the spending, though about a third includes support services including administration, maintenance, and transportation. Spending per student varies across states and school districts. During the 2019-2020 school year, New York spends the most per student ($29,597) and Idaho spends the least ($9,690).

During the 2021-2022 school year , the average public school teacher salary in the US was $66,397 .

Instruction is the largest category of public school spending, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Adjusting for inflation, average teacher pay is down since 2010.

In 2021 , 35% of people 25 and over had at least a bachelor’s degree.

Over the last decade women have become more educated than men..

Educational attainment is defined as the highest level of formal education a person has completed. The concept can be applied to a person, a demographic group, or a geographic area. Data on educational attainment is produced by the Census Bureau in multiple surveys, which may produce different data. Data from the American Community Survey is shown here to allow for geographic comparisons.

In 2021 , 61% of the Asian 25+ population had completed at least four years of college.

Educational attainment data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey allows for demographic comparisons across the US.

In 2022, proficiency in math for eighth graders was 26.5% .

Proficiency in reading in 8th grade was 30.8% ., based on a nationwide assessment, reading and math scores declined during the pandemic..

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative data that measures student achievement. NAEP is Congressionally mandated. Tests are given in a sample of schools based on student demographics in a given school district, state, or the US overall. Testing covers a variety of subjects, most frequently math, reading, science, and writing.

In fiscal year 2020, governments spent a combined total of $1.3 trillion on education.

That comes out to $4,010 per person..

USAFacts categorizes government budget data to allocate spending appropriately and to arrive at the estimate presented here. Most government spending on education occurs at the state and local levels rather than the federal.

Government revenue and expenditures are based on data from the Office of Management and Budget, the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Each is published annually, although due to collection times, state and local government data are not as current as federal data. Thus, when combining federal, state, and local revenues and expenditures, the most recent year for a combined number may be delayed.

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Americans like to believe that education can be a great equalizer, allowing even the poorest child who studies hard to enter the middle class. But when I looked at what academic researchers and federal data reports have said about the great educational divide between the rich and poor in our country, that belief turns out to be a myth. Basic education, from kindergarten through high school, only expands the disparities.

In 2015, during the Obama administration, the federal education department issued a report that showed how the funding gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade between 2001-2 and 2011-12. That meant that the richest 25 percent of school districts spent $1,500 more per student, on average, than the poorest 25 percent of school districts. 

I wish I could have continued to track this data between rich and poor schools to see if school spending had grown more fair. But the Trump administration crunched the numbers differently. When it issued a report in 2018 , covering the 2014-15 school year, it found that the wealthiest 25 percent of districts spent $450 more per student than the poorest 25 percent. 

That didn’t mean there was a giant 70 percent improvement from $1,500. The Trump administration added together all sources of funds, including federal funding, which amounts to 8 percent of total school spending, while the Obama administration excluded federal funds, counting only state and local dollars, which make up more than 90 percent of education funds. The Obama administration argued at the time that federal funds for poor students were intended to supplement local funds because it takes more resources to overcome childhood poverty, not to create a level playing field. 

Rather than marking an improvement, there were signs in the Trump administration data that the funding gap between rich and poor had worsened during the Great Recession if you had compared the figures apples to apples, either including or excluding federal funds. In a follow-up report issued in 2019, the Trump administration documented that the funding gap between rich and poor schools had increased slightly to $473 per student between the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years. 

It’s not just a divide between rich and poor but also between the ultra rich and everyone else. In 2020, a Pennsylvania State University researcher documented how the wealthiest school districts in America — the top 1 percent — fund their schools at much higher levels than everyone else and are increasing their school spending at a faster rate. The school funding gap between a top 1 percent district (mostly white suburbs) and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32 percent between 2000 and 2015, the study calculated. Nassau County, just outside New York City on Long Island, has the highest concentration of students who attend the best funded public schools among all counties in the country. Almost 17 percent of all the top 1 percent students in the nation live in this one county. 

Funding inequities are happening in a context of increased poverty in our schools. In 2013, I documented how the number of high poverty schools had increased by about 60 percent to one out of every five schools in 2011 from one out of every eight schools in 2000. To win this unwelcome designation, 75 percent or more of an elementary, middle or high school’s students lived in families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. It’s since gotten worse. In the most recent federal report , covering the 2016-17 school year, one out of every four schools in America was classified as  high poverty. 

It’s not just that poverty is becoming more concentrated in certain schools; more students in the school system are poor. In 2014, I documented a 40 percent jump in the number of school-aged children living in poverty between 2000 and 2012 from one out of every seven children to one out of every five students. In the most recent report, for the 2016-17 school year, the poverty rate declined from 21 percent in 2010 to 18 percent in 2017. About 13 million children under the age of 18 were in families living in poverty.

When you break the data down by race, there are other striking patterns. One third of all Black children under 18 were living in poverty in 2016-17, compared with a quarter of Hispanic children. White and Asian children have a similar poverty rate of 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

Sociologists like Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California have built a body of evidence that school segregation by income is what’s really getting worse in America, not school segregation by race. But it’s a complicated argument because Black and Latino students are more likely to be poor and less likely to be rich.  So the two things — race and poverty — are intertwined. 

In 2019, Reardon studied achievement gaps in every school in America and found that the difference in poverty rates between predominantly Black and predominantly white schools explains the achievement gaps we see and why white schools tend to show higher test scores than Black schools. When white and Black schools have the same poverty rates, Reardon didn’t see a difference in academic achievement. The problem is that Black students are more often poor and attending schools with more poor students. And other than a handful of high-performing charter schools in a few cities, he couldn’t find examples of academic excellence among schools with a high-poverty student body.

“It doesn’t seem that we have any knowledge about how to create high-quality schools at scale under conditions of concentrated poverty,” said Reardon. “And if we can’t do that, then we have to do something about segregation. Otherwise we’re consigning Black and Hispanic and low-income students to schools that we don’t know how to make as good as other schools. The implication is that you have got to address segregation.”

Previous Proof Points columns cited in this column:

The number of high-poverty schools increases by about 60 percent

Poverty among school-age children increases by 40 percent since 2000

The gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade

Data show segregation by income (not race) is what’s getting worse in schools

In 6 states, school districts with the neediest students get less money than the wealthiest

An analysis of achievement gaps in every school in America shows that poverty is the biggest hurdle

Rich schools get richer: School spending analysis finds widening gap between top 1% and the rest of us

This story about education inequality in America written by Jill Barshay and produced by  The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the  Hechinger newsletter .

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Thanks to Jill Barshay for the excellent column reminding us that there is much more to the rich/poor divide in our public schools than just the availability of digital devices and wi-fi. The real problem with equity in education is the lack of equity in school funding, which is an issue both of inequity in society and the ways in which public schools are funded (i.e., primarily local tax revenues).

Other barriers that kept the “school door blocked” for many low income students during this season of remote learning — and, presumably, next school year, as well — include: 1. Some with access to devices and wi-fi have had service disconnected at times due to unpaid (unpayable) bills. 2. Many have no private space in their homes from where to participate in synchronous learning/Zoom calls 3. With loss of family income and no child care, some have work or baby-sitting responsibilities that interfere with participation 4. Deadening effects of online learning cause many low-income students to disconnect and/or “drop out”. 5. In ability to access teacher supports and specialized instruction, esp. for English language learners and children with special needs. 6. Parent inability to assist students with computer routines, glitches, log-ins, etc

As districts address equity in the coming school year, we must also address the modes of learning that we consider both effective and valuable. If the top priority is engaging all students we need high engagement models based in trauma-informed practices, social and racial justice curricula, service learning, interdisciplinary project- and place-based learning, outdoor learning and other innovative ways to make education relevant to all students, regardless of their zip codes. Relax the standards. Cancel high stakes testing. Trust teachers to use their creativity to connect with every student and family. Otherwise, “remote” or “hybrid” learning, regardless of the availability of technology, will only be widening the gaps that structural racism has already created.

Why are we NOT reaching out to the teaching programs started by Marva Collins in Chicago and Ron Clark in Atlanta? Why are we NOT looking at a book called Schools That Work and viewing the achievements and strategies followed by successful programs. Let’s follow successful schools, successful environments in urban, rural, and suburban locations. As an eductor who started teaching in the Ocean-Hill Brownsville area of Brooklyn, N,Y. in 1971, there was a wildcat strike happening and this area was the where decentralization took place in N.Y.C. Rev. Al Sharpton’s church was down the block from I.S. 271. It took 2 years before a no nonsense, BLACK principal, took control over the choas and the movement of 125 teachers going and then coming to this “high poverty” intermediate school. There was stability of staff and the message was, you’re here to learn. I taught there for 7 incredible years and grew to understand what it was like being a minority teacher and human being. I then moved to Columbia, MD. where I lived in a planned community where diversity of color, homes, religions and belief in humanity living together as ONE took place. I taught in a white disadvantaged area for 2 years and observed the same behaviors students exhibited except there was no leadership at the top of this school. Now I teach in a suburban area for the last 31 years with limited diversity and succeeds because of innovative leadership, extraordinary teachers, and pretty high achieving students. Yes, I know every students must have access to technology as a MUST. Yes, I know urban education, rural education, and suburban education do education diffferently. Yes, I know poverty sucks, and I know distant learning may be around for a while. Change must come from the top. Let’s follow the successful educators, the successful programs, the dynamic elected officials who can shake up things so our students, our kids, our educational systems can be the change that can bring poverty to it’s knees.

I live on Long Island and know that whatever is written here about us is true. The Freeport Public School waste millions of taxpayers dollars throwing out teaching equipment, devices books that could be just given to the less fortunate schools next door-Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx; where we see children suffering because of lack of proper learning tools. I am from the Caribbean where l taught for years. Oh l wish we were as privileged as these children. Maybe one day the disparity will end. Hopefully.

I enjoy reading this post. I am currently doing my thesis and the research question is: Do California K-12 public schools in lower-income communities offer the same level of academic curriculum as those in middle-income and wealthy communities? Do you have the reference page for those studies or even any peer reviewers where you got the information? I would like to review those studies and use them for my thesis. Thank you

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The State of Education: Rebuilding a More Equitable System

Covid-19 has exposed long-standing inequities in america’s education system..

The pandemic’s toll on our education system has had a broader effect on academic regressions than initially predicted. And the most vulnerable learners—students of color, those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and students with additional learning needs—have been impacted the most. While the pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities, it’s also presented a unique opportunity to dramatically overhaul our education system.

We convened education advocates and practitioners, from both K–12 and higher education, to explain how the disruption of the pandemic is pushing forward long-overdue pedagogical reform. And we outlined the innovative solutions that should be implemented to create an equitable learning environment for all students.

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President and CEO, The Education Trust

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CEO, Baltimore City Schools

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Where Does Education Reform Go from Here?

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What Changes to the U.S. Education System Are Needed to Support Long-Term Success for All Americans?

With the pandemic deepening inequities that threaten students’ prospects, the vice president of the Corporation’s National Program provides a vision for transforming our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures 

At no point in our nation’s history have we asked so much of our education system as we do today. We ask that our primary and secondary schools prepare all students, regardless of background, for a lifetime of learning. We ask that teachers guide every child toward deeper understanding while simultaneously attending to their social-emotional development. And we ask that our institutions of higher learning serve students with a far broader range of life circumstances than ever before.

We ask these things of education because the future we aspire to requires it. The nature of work and civic participation is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and social media are driving rapid changes in how we interact with each other and what skills hold value. In the world our children will inherit, their ability to adapt, think critically, and work effectively with others will be essential for both their own success and the well-being of society.

At Carnegie Corporation of New York, we focus on supporting people who are in a position to meet this challenge. That includes the full spectrum of educators, administrators, family members, and others who shape young people’s learning experiences as they progress toward and into adulthood. Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

All of our work is geared toward transforming student learning. The knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for success today call for a vastly different set of learning experiences than may have sufficed in the past. Students must play a more active role in their own learning, and that learning must encompass more than subject-matter knowledge. Preparing all children for success requires greater attention to inclusiveness in the classroom, differentiation in teaching and learning, and universal high expectations.

This transformation needs to happen in higher education as well. A high school education is no longer enough to ensure financial security. We need more high-quality postsecondary options, better guidance for students as they transition beyond high school, and sufficient supports to enable all students to complete their postsecondary programs. Preparing students for lifelong success requires stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and work.

The need for such transformation has become all the more urgent in the face of COVID-19. As with past economic crises, the downturn resulting from the pandemic is likely to accelerate the erosion of opportunities for low-skilled workers with only a high school education. Investments in innovative learning models and student supports are critical to preventing further inequities in learning outcomes. 

An Urgent Call for Advancing Equity 

The 2020–21 school year may prove to be the most consequential in American history. With unfathomable speed, COVID-19 has forced more change in how schools operate than in the previous half century.

What is most concerning in all of this is the impact on the most underserved and historically marginalized in our society: low-income children and students of color. Even before the current crisis, the future prospects of a young person today looked very different depending on the color of her skin and the zip code in which she grew up, but the pandemic exposed and exacerbated long-standing racial and economic inequities. And the same families who are faring worst in terms of disrupted schooling are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn and disproportionately getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying.

Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

Every organization that is committed to educational improvement needs to ask itself what it can do differently to further advance the cause of educational equity during this continuing crisis so that we can make lasting improvements. As we know from past experience, if the goal of equity is not kept front and center, those who are already behind through no fault of their own will benefit the least. If ever there were a time to heed this caution, it is now.

We hope that our nation will approach education with a new sense of purpose and a shared commitment to ensuring that our schools truly work for every child. Whether or not that happens will depend on our resolve and our actions in the coming months. We have the proof points and know-how to transform learning, bolster instruction, and meet the needs of our most disadvantaged students. What has changed is the urgency for doing so at scale.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have. We need to reimagine the systems that shape student learning and put the communities whose circumstances we most need to elevate at the center of that process. We need to recognize that we will not improve student outcomes without building the capacity of the adults who work with them, supporting them with high-quality resources and meaningful opportunities for collaboration and professional growth. We need to promote stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and employment so that all students are prepared for lifelong success.

The pandemic has deepened inequities that threaten students’ prospects. But if we seize this moment and learn from it, if we marshal the necessary resources, we have the potential to transform our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures.

In a pandemic-induced moment when the American education system has been blown into 25 million homes across the country, where do we go from here?

We Must Learn to Act in New Ways

These are not controversial ideas. In fact, they constitute the general consensus about where American education needs to go. But they also represent a tall order for the people who influence the system. Practically everyone who plays a part in education must learn to act in new ways.

That we have made progress in such areas as high school completion, college-going rates, and the adoption of college- and career-ready standards is a testament to the commitment of those working in the field. But it will take more than commitment to achieve the changes in student learning that our times demand. We can’t expect individuals to figure out what they need to do on their own, nor should we be surprised if they struggle to do so when working in institutional structures designed to produce different outcomes. The transformation we seek calls for much greater coordination and a broader set of allies than would suffice for more incremental changes.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have.

Our best hope for achieving equity and the transformation of student learning is to enhance adults’ ability to contribute to that learning. That means building their capacity while supporting their authentic engagement in promoting a high-quality education for every child. It also means ensuring that people operate within systems that are optimized to support their effectiveness and that a growing body of knowledge informs their efforts.

These notions comprise our overarching strategy for promoting the systems change needed to transform student learning experiences on a large scale. We seek to enhance adult capacity and stakeholder engagement in the service of ensuring that all students are prepared to meet the demands of the 21st century. We also support knowledge development and organizational improvement to the extent that investments in these areas enhance adult capacity, stakeholder engagement, and student experiences.

Five Ways We Invest in the Future of Students

These views on how best to promote systems change in education guide our philanthropic work. The strategic areas of change we focus on are major themes throughout our five investment portfolios. Although they are managed separately and support different types of initiatives, each seeks to address its area of focus from multiple angles. A single portfolio may include grants that build adult capacity, enhance stakeholder engagement, and generate new knowledge.

New Designs to Advance Learning

Preparing all students for success requires that we fundamentally reimagine our nation’s schools and classrooms. Our public education system needs to catch up with how the world is evolving and with what we’ve come to understand about how people learn. That means attending to a broader diversity of learning styles and bringing what happens in school into greater alignment with what happens in the worlds of work and civic life. We make investments to increase the number of innovative learning models that support personalized experiences, academic mastery, and positive youth development. We also make investments that build the capacity of districts and intermediaries to improve learning experiences for all students as well as grants to investigate relevant issues of policy and practice.

Pathways to Postsecondary Success

Lifelong success in the United States has never been more dependent on educational attainment than it is today. Completing some education beyond the 12th grade has virtually become a necessity for financial security and meaningful work. But for that possibility to exist for everyone, we need to address the historical barriers that keep many students from pursuing and completing a postsecondary program, and we must strengthen the options available to all students for education after high school. Through our investments, we seek to increase the number of young people able to access and complete a postsecondary program, with a major focus on removing historical barriers for students who are first-generation college-goers, low-income, or from underrepresented groups. We also look to expand the range of high-quality postsecondary options and to strengthen alignment between K–12, higher education, and the world of work.

Leadership and Teaching to Advance Learning

At its core, learning is about the interplay between teachers, students, and content. How teachers and students engage with each other and with their curriculum plays a predominant role in determining what students learn and how well they learn it. That’s not to say that factors outside of school don’t also greatly impact student learning. But the research is clear that among the factors a school might control, nothing outweighs the teaching that students experience. We focus on supporting educators in implementing rigorous college- and career-ready standards in math, science, and English language arts. We make investments to increase the supply of and demand for high-quality curricular materials and professional learning experiences for teachers and administrators.

Public Understanding

As central as they are to the education process, school professionals are hardly the only people with a critical role to play in student learning. Students spend far more time with family and other community members than they do at school. And numerous stakeholders outside of the education system have the potential to strengthen and shape what happens within it. The success of our nation’s schools depends on far more individuals than are employed by them. 

We invest in efforts to engage families and other stakeholders as active partners in supporting equitable access to high-quality student learning. We also support media organizations and policy research groups in building awareness about key issues related to educational equity and improvement.

Integration, Learning, and Innovation

Those of us who work for change in education need a new set of habits to achieve our vision of 21st-century learning. It will take more than a factory-model mindset to transform our education system into one that prepares all learners for an increasingly complex world. We must approach this task with flexibility, empathy for the people involved, and an understanding of how to learn from what’s working and what’s not. We work to reduce the fragmentation, inefficiencies, and missteps that often result when educational improvement strategies are pursued in isolation and without an understanding of the contexts in which they are implemented. Through grants and other activities, we build the capacity of people working in educational organizations to change how they work by emphasizing systems and design thinking, iteration, and knowledge sharing within and across organizations.

Two recent surveys by Carnegie Corporation of New York and Gallup offer insights into how our education system can better help all Americans navigate job and career choices

Join Us in This Ambitious Endeavor

Our approach of supporting multiple stakeholders by pulling multiple levers is informed by our deep understanding of the system we’re trying to move. American education is a massive, diverse, and highly decentralized enterprise. There is no mechanism by which we might affect more than superficial change in many thousands of communities. The type of change that is needed cannot come from compliance alone. It requires that everyone grapple with new ideas.

We know from our history of promoting large-scale improvements in American education that advancements won’t happen overnight or as the result of one kind of initiative. Our vision for 21st-century education will require more than quick wins and isolated successes. Innovation is essential, and a major thrust of our work involves the incubation and dissemination of new models, resources, and exemplars. But we must also learn to move forward with the empathy, flexibility, and systems thinking needed to support people in making the transition. Novel solutions only help if they can be successfully implemented in different contexts.

Only a sustained and concerted effort will shift the center of gravity of a social enterprise that involves millions of adults and many tens of millions of young people. The challenge of philanthropy is to effect widespread social change with limited resources and without formal authority. This takes more than grantmaking. At the Corporation, we convene, communicate, and form coalitions. We provide thought leadership, issue challenges, and launch new initiatives. Through these multifaceted activities, we maximize our ability to forge, share, and put into practice powerful new ideas that build a foundation for more substantial changes in the future.

We encourage everyone who plays a role in education to join us in this work. Our strategy represents more than our priorities as a grantmaker. It conveys our strong beliefs about how to get American education to where it needs to be. The more organizations and individuals we have supporting those who are working to provide students with what they need, the more likely we are to succeed in this ambitious endeavor. 

LaVerne Evans Srinivasan is the vice president of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s National Program and the program director for Education.

TOP: Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, a lower-school substitute teacher works from her home in Arlington, Virginia, on April 1, 2020. Her role in the school changed significantly due to the pandemic. Whereas she previously worked part-time to support teachers when they needed to be absent from the classroom, amid COVID-19 she now helps teachers to build skills with new digital platforms so they can continue to teach in the best way for their students and their families. (Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

Addressing post-pandemic learning loss should include far greater support for programs that involve parents and caregivers in their kids’ educations

The former editor of the Washington Post argues that without democracy, there will be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy 

What the Future of Education Looks Like from Here

• Posted December 11, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

After a year that involved a global pandemic, school closures, nationwide remote instruction, protests for racial justice, and an election, the role of education has never been more critical or more uncertain. When the dust settles from this year, what will education look like — and what should it aspire to?

To mark the end of its centennial year, HGSE convened a faculty-led discussion to explore those questions. The Future of Education panel, moderated by Dean Bridget Long and hosted by HGSE’s Askwith Forums , focused on hopes for education going forward, as well as HGSE’s role. “The story of HGSE is the story of pivotal decisions, meeting challenges, and tremendous growth,” Long said. “We have a long history of empowering our students and partners to be innovators in a constantly changing world. And that is needed now more than ever.”

Joining Long were Associate Professor Karen Brennan , Senior Lecturer Jennifer Cheatham , Assistant Professor Anthony Jack, and Professors Adriana Umaña-Taylor and Martin West , as they looked forward to what the future could hold for schools, educators, and communities:

… After the pandemic subsides

The pandemic heightened existing gaps and disparities and exposed a need to rethink how systems leaders design schools, instruction, and who they put at the center of that design. “As a leader, in the years before the pandemic hit, I realized the balance of our work as practitioners was off,” Cheatham said. “If we had been spending time knowing our children and our staff and designing schools for them, we might not be feeling the pain in the way we are. I think we’re learning something about what the real work of school is about.” In the coming years, the panelists hope that a widespread push to recognize the identity and health of the whole-child in K–12 and higher education will help educators design support systems that can reduce inequity on multiple levels.

… For the global community

As much as the pandemic isolated individuals, on the global scale, people have looked to connect with each other to find solutions and share ideas as they faced a common challenge. This year may have brought everyone together and allowed for exchange of ideas, policies, practices, and assessments across boundaries.

… For technological advancements

As educators and leaders create, design, and imagine the future, technology should be used in service of that vision rather than dictating it. As technology becomes a major part of how we communicate and share ideas, educators need to think critically about how to deploy technology strategically. “My stance on technology is that it should always be used in the service of our human purpose and interest,” said Brennan. “We’ve talked about racial equity, building relationships. Our values and purposes and goals need to lead the way, not the tech.”

… For teachers

Human connections and interactions are at the heart of education. At this time, it’s become abundantly clear that the role of the teacher in the school community is irreplaceable. “I think the next few years hinge on how much we’re willing to invest in educators and all of these additional supports in the school which essentially make learning possible,” Umaña-Taylor said, “these are the individuals who are making the future minds of the nation possible.”

Cutting-edge research and new knowledge must become part of the public discussion in order to meaningfully shape the policies and practices that influence the future of education. “I fundamentally believe that we as academics and scholars must be part of the conversation and not limit ourselves to just articles behind paywalls or policy paragraphs at the end of a paper,” Jack said. “We have to engage the larger public.”

… In 25 years

“We shouldn’t underestimate the possibility that the future might look a lot like the present,” West said. “As I think about the potential sources of change in education, and in American education in particular, I tend to think about longer-term trends as the key driver.” Changing student demographics, access to higher education, structural inequality, and the focus of school leaders are all longer-term trends that, according to panelists, will influence the future of education. 

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Remote learning turned spotlight on gaps in resources, funding, and tech — but also offered hints on reform

“Unequal” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. This part looks at how the pandemic called attention to issues surrounding the racial achievement gap in America.

The pandemic has disrupted education nationwide, turning a spotlight on existing racial and economic disparities, and creating the potential for a lost generation. Even before the outbreak, students in vulnerable communities — particularly predominately Black, Indigenous, and other majority-minority areas — were already facing inequality in everything from resources (ranging from books to counselors) to student-teacher ratios and extracurriculars.

The additional stressors of systemic racism and the trauma induced by poverty and violence, both cited as aggravating health and wellness as at a Weatherhead Institute panel , pose serious obstacles to learning as well. “Before the pandemic, children and families who are marginalized were living under such challenging conditions that it made it difficult for them to get a high-quality education,” said Paul Reville, founder and director of the Education Redesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (GSE).

Educators hope that the may triggers a broader conversation about reform and renewed efforts to narrow the longstanding racial achievement gap. They say that research shows virtually all of the nation’s schoolchildren have fallen behind, with students of color having lost the most ground, particularly in math. They also note that the full-time reopening of schools presents opportunities to introduce changes and that some of the lessons from remote learning, particularly in the area of technology, can be put to use to help students catch up from the pandemic as well as to begin to level the playing field.

The disparities laid bare by the COVID-19 outbreak became apparent from the first shutdowns. “The good news, of course, is that many schools were very fast in finding all kinds of ways to try to reach kids,” said Fernando M. Reimers , Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice in International Education and director of GSE’s Global Education Innovation Initiative and International Education Policy Program. He cautioned, however, that “those arrangements don’t begin to compare with what we’re able to do when kids could come to school, and they are particularly deficient at reaching the most vulnerable kids.” In addition, it turned out that many students simply lacked access.

“We’re beginning to understand that technology is a basic right. You cannot participate in society in the 21st century without access to it,” says Fernando Reimers of the Graduate School of Education.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

The rate of limited digital access for households was at 42 percent during last spring’s shutdowns, before drifting down to about 31 percent this fall, suggesting that school districts improved their adaptation to remote learning, according to an analysis by the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge of U.S. Census data. (Indeed, Education Week and other sources reported that school districts around the nation rushed to hand out millions of laptops, tablets, and Chromebooks in the months after going remote.)

The report also makes clear the degree of racial and economic digital inequality. Black and Hispanic households with school-aged children were 1.3 to 1.4 times as likely as white ones to face limited access to computers and the internet, and more than two in five low-income households had only limited access. It’s a problem that could have far-reaching consequences given that young students of color are much more likely to live in remote-only districts.

“We’re beginning to understand that technology is a basic right,” said Reimers. “You cannot participate in society in the 21st century without access to it.” Too many students, he said, “have no connectivity. They have no devices, or they have no home circumstances that provide them support.”

The issues extend beyond the technology. “There is something wonderful in being in contact with other humans, having a human who tells you, ‘It’s great to see you. How are things going at home?’” Reimers said. “I’ve done 35 case studies of innovative practices around the world. They all prioritize social, emotional well-being. Checking in with the kids. Making sure there is a touchpoint every day between a teacher and a student.”

The difference, said Reville, is apparent when comparing students from different economic circumstances. Students whose parents “could afford to hire a tutor … can compensate,” he said. “Those kids are going to do pretty well at keeping up. Whereas, if you’re in a single-parent family and mom is working two or three jobs to put food on the table, she can’t be home. It’s impossible for her to keep up and keep her kids connected.

“If you lose the connection, you lose the kid.”

“COVID just revealed how serious those inequities are,” said GSE Dean Bridget Long , the Saris Professor of Education and Economics. “It has disproportionately hurt low-income students, students with special needs, and school systems that are under-resourced.”

This disruption carries throughout the education process, from elementary school students (some of whom have simply stopped logging on to their online classes) through declining participation in higher education. Community colleges, for example, have “traditionally been a gateway for low-income students” into the professional classes, said Long, whose research focuses on issues of affordability and access. “COVID has just made all of those issues 10 times worse,” she said. “That’s where enrollment has fallen the most.”

In addition to highlighting such disparities, these losses underline a structural issue in public education. Many schools are under-resourced, and the major reason involves sources of school funding. A 2019 study found that predominantly white districts got $23 billion more than their non-white counterparts serving about the same number of students. The discrepancy is because property taxes are the primary source of funding for schools, and white districts tend to be wealthier than those of color.

The problem of resources extends beyond teachers, aides, equipment, and supplies, as schools have been tasked with an increasing number of responsibilities, from the basics of education to feeding and caring for the mental health of both students and their families.

“You think about schools and academics, but what COVID really made clear was that schools do so much more than that,” said Long. A child’s school, she stressed “is social, emotional support. It’s safety. It’s the food system. It is health care.”

“You think about schools and academics” … but a child’s school “is social, emotional support. It’s safety. It’s the food system. It is health care,” stressed GSE Dean Bridget Long.

Rose Lincoln/Harvard file photo

This safety net has been shredded just as more students need it. “We have 400,000 deaths and those are disproportionately affecting communities of color,” said Long. “So you can imagine the kids that are in those households. Are they able to come to school and learn when they’re dealing with this trauma?”

The damage is felt by the whole families. In an upcoming paper, focusing on parents of children ages 5 to 7, Cindy H. Liu, director of Harvard Medical School’s Developmental Risk and Cultural Disparities Laboratory , looks at the effects of COVID-related stress on parent’ mental health. This stress — from both health risks and grief — “likely has ramifications for those groups who are disadvantaged, particularly in getting support, as it exacerbates existing disparities in obtaining resources,” she said via email. “The unfortunate reality is that the pandemic is limiting the tangible supports [like childcare] that parents might actually need.”

Educators are overwhelmed as well. “Teachers are doing a phenomenal job connecting with students,” Long said about their performance online. “But they’ve lost the whole system — access to counselors, access to additional staff members and support. They’ve lost access to information. One clue is that the reporting of child abuse going down. It’s not that we think that child abuse is actually going down, but because you don’t have a set of adults watching and being with kids, it’s not being reported.”

The repercussions are chilling. “As we resume in-person education on a normal basis, we’re dealing with enormous gaps,” said Reville. “Some kids will come back with such educational deficits that unless their schools have a very well thought-out and effective program to help them catch up, they will never catch up. They may actually drop out of school. The immediate consequences of learning loss and disengagement are going to be a generation of people who will be less educated.”

There is hope, however. Just as the lockdown forced teachers to improvise, accelerating forms of online learning, so too may the recovery offer options for educational reform.

The solutions, say Reville, “are going to come from our community. This is a civic problem.” He applauded one example, the Somerville, Mass., public library program of outdoor Wi-Fi “pop ups,” which allow 24/7 access either through their own or library Chromebooks. “That’s the kind of imagination we need,” he said.

On a national level, he points to the creation of so-called “Children’s Cabinets.” Already in place in 30 states, these nonpartisan groups bring together leaders at the city, town, and state levels to address children’s needs through schools, libraries, and health centers. A July 2019 “ Children’s Cabinet Toolkit ” on the Education Redesign Lab site offers guidance for communities looking to form their own, with sample mission statements from Denver, Minneapolis, and Fairfax, Va.

Already the Education Redesign Lab is working on even more wide-reaching approaches. In Tennessee, for example, the Metro Nashville Public Schools has launched an innovative program, designed to provide each student with a personalized education plan. By pairing these students with school “navigators” — including teachers, librarians, and instructional coaches — the program aims to address each student’s particular needs.

“This is a chance to change the system,” said Reville. “By and large, our school systems are organized around a factory model, a one-size-fits-all approach. That wasn’t working very well before, and it’s working less well now.”

“Students have different needs,” agreed Long. “We just have to get a better understanding of what we need to prioritize and where students are” in all aspects of their home and school lives.

“By and large, our school systems are organized around a factory model, a one-size-fits-all approach. That wasn’t working very well before, and it’s working less well now,” says Paul Reville of the GSE.

Already, educators are discussing possible responses. Long and GSE helped create The Principals’ Network as one forum for sharing ideas, for example. With about 1,000 members, and multiple subgroups to address shared community issues, some viable answers have begun to emerge.

“We are going to need to expand learning time,” said Long. Some school systems, notably Texas’, already have begun discussing extending the school year, she said. In addition, Long, an internationally recognized economist who is a member of the  National Academy of Education and the  MDRC board, noted that educators are exploring innovative ways to utilize new tools like Zoom, even when classrooms reopen.

“This is an area where technology can help supplement what students are learning, giving them extra time — learning time, even tutoring time,” Long said.

Reimers, who serves on the UNESCO Commission on the Future of Education, has been brainstorming solutions that can be applied both here and abroad. These include urging wealthier countries to forgive loans, so that poorer countries do not have to cut back on basics such as education, and urging all countries to keep education a priority. The commission and its members are also helping to identify good practices and share them — globally.

Innovative uses of existing technology can also reach beyond traditional schooling. Reimers cites the work of a few former students who, working with Harvard Global Education Innovation Initiative,   HundrED , the  OECD Directorate for Education and Skills , and the  World Bank Group Education Global Practice, focused on podcasts to reach poor students in Colombia.

They began airing their math and Spanish lessons via the WhatsApp app, which was widely accessible. “They were so humorous that within a week, everyone was listening,” said Reimers. Soon, radio stations and other platforms began airing the 10-minute lessons, reaching not only children who were not in school, but also their adult relatives.

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The alarming state of the American student in 2022

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, robin lake and robin lake director, center on reinventing public education - arizona state university @rbnlake travis pillow travis pillow innovation fellow, center on reinventing public education - arizona state university @travispillow.

November 1, 2022

The pandemic was a wrecking ball for U.S. public education, bringing months of school closures, frantic moves to remote instruction, and trauma and isolation.

Kids may be back at school after three disrupted years, but a return to classrooms has not brought a return to normal. Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed historic declines in American students’ knowledge and skills and widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students.

But even these sobering results do not tell us the whole story.

After nearly three years of tracking pandemic response by U.S. school systems and synthesizing knowledge about the impacts on students, we sought to establish a baseline understanding of the contours of the crisis: What happened and why, and where do we go from here?

This first annual “ State of the American Student ” report synthesizes nearly three years of research on the academic, mental health, and other impacts of the pandemic and school closures.

It outlines the contours of the crisis American students have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and begins to chart a path to recovery and reinvention for all students—which includes building a new and better approach to public education that ensures an educational crisis of this magnitude cannot happen again.

The state of American students as we emerge from the pandemic is still coming into focus, but here’s what we’ve learned (and haven’t yet learned) about where COVID-19 left us:

1. Students lost critical opportunities to learn and thrive.

• The typical American student lost several months’ worth of learning in language arts and more in mathematics.

• Students suffered crushing increases in anxiety and depression. More than one in 360 U.S. children lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19.

• Students poorly served before the pandemic were profoundly left behind during it, including many with disabilities whose parents reported they were cut off from essential school and life services.

This deeply traumatic period threatens to reverberate for decades. The academic, social, and mental-health needs are real, they are measurable, and they must be addressed quickly to avoid long-term consequences to individual students, the future workforce, and society.

2. The average effects from COVID mask dire inequities and widely varied impact.

Some students are catching up, but time is running out for others. Every student experienced the pandemic differently, and there is tremendous variation from student to student, with certain populations—namely, Black, Hispanic, and low-income students, as well as other vulnerable populations—suffering the most severe impacts.

The effects were more severe where campuses stayed closed longer. American students are experiencing a K-shaped recovery, in which gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students, already growing before the pandemic, are widening into chasms. In the latest NAEP results released in September , national average scores fell five times as much in reading, and four times as much in math, for the lowest-scoring 10 percent of nine-year-olds as they had for the highest-scoring 10 percent.

At the pace of recovery we are seeing today, too many students of all races and income levels will graduate in the coming years without the skills and knowledge needed for college and careers.

3. What we know at this point is incomplete. The situation could be significantly worse than the early data suggest.

The data and stories we have to date are enough to warrant immediate action, but there are serious holes in our understanding of how the pandemic has affected various groups of students, especially those who are typically most likely to fall through the cracks in the American education system.

We know little about students with complex needs, such as those with disabilities and English learners. We still know too little about the learning impacts in non-tested subjects, such as science, civics, and foreign languages. And while psychologists , educators , and the federal government are sounding alarms about a youth mental health crisis, systematic measures of student wellbeing remain hard to come by.

We must acknowledge that what we know at this point is incomplete, since the pandemic closures and following recovery have been so unprecedented in recent times. It’s possible that as we continue to dig into the evidence on the pandemic’s impacts, some student groups or subjects may have not been so adversely affected. Alternatively, the situation could be significantly worse than the early data suggest. Some students are already bouncing back quickly. But for others, the impact could grow worse over time.

In subjects like math, where learning is cumulative, pandemic-related gaps in students’ learning that emerged during the pandemic could affect their ability to grasp future material. In some states, test scores fell dramatically for high schoolers nearing graduation. Shifts in these students’ academic trajectories could affect their college plans—and the rest of their lives. And elevated rates of chronic absenteeism suggest some students who disconnected from school during the pandemic have struggled to reconnect since.

4. The harms students experienced can be traced to a rigid and inequitable system that put adults, not students, first.

• Despite often heroic efforts by caring adults, students and families were cut off from essential support, offered radically diminished learning opportunities, and left to their own devices to support learning.

• Too often, partisan politics, not student needs , drove decision-making.

• Students with complexities and differences too often faced systems immobilized by fear and a commitment to sameness rather than prioritization and problem-solving.

So, what can we do to address the situation we’re in?

Diverse needs demand diverse solutions that are informed by pandemic experiences

Freed from the routines of rigid systems, some parents, communities, and educators found new ways to tailor learning experiences around students’ needs. They discovered learning can happen any time and anywhere. They discovered enriching activities outside class and troves of untapped adult talent.

Some of these breakthroughs happened in public schools—like virtual IEP meetings that leveled power dynamics between administrators and parents advocating for their children’s special education services. Others happened in learning pods or other new environments where families and community groups devised new ways to meet students’ needs. These were exceptions to an otherwise miserable rule, and they can inform the work ahead.

We must act quickly but we must also act differently. Important next steps include:

• Districts and states should immediately use their federal dollars to address the emergent needs of the COVID-19 generation of students via proven interventions, such as well-designed tutoring, extended learning time, credit recovery, additional mental health support, college and career guidance, and mentoring. The challenges ahead are too daunting for schools to shoulder alone. Partnerships and funding for families and community-driven solutions will be critical.

• By the end of the 2022–2023 academic year, states and districts must commit to an honest accounting of rebuilding efforts by defining, adopting, and reporting on their progress toward 5- and 10-year goals for long-term student recovery. States should invest in rigorous studies that document, analyze, and improve their approaches.

• Education leaders and researchers must adopt a national research and development agenda for school reinvention over the next five years. This effort must be anchored in the reality that the needs of students are so varied, so profound, and so multifaceted that a one-size-fits-all approach to education can’t possibly meet them all. Across the country, community organizations who previously operated summer or afterschool programs stepped up to support students during the school day. As they focus on recovery, school system leaders should look to these helpers not as peripheral players in education, but as critical contributors who can provide teaching , tutoring, or joyful learning environments for students and often have trusting relationships with their families.

• Recovery and rebuilding should ensure the system is more resilient and prepared for future crises. That means more thoughtful integration of online learning and stronger partnerships with organizations that support learning outside school walls. Every school system in America should have a plan to keep students safe and learning even when they can’t physically come to school, be equipped to deliver high-quality, individualized pathways for students, and build on practices that show promise.

Our “State of the American Student” report is the first in a series of annual reports the Center on Reinventing Public Education intends to produce through fall of 2027. We hope every state and community will produce similar, annual accounts and begin to define ambitious goals for recovery. The implications of these deeply traumatic years will reverberate for decades unless we find a path not only to normalcy but also to restitution for this generation and future generations of American students.

The road to recovery can lead somewhere new. In five years, we hope to report that out of the ashes of the pandemic, American public education emerged transformed: more flexible and resilient, more individualized and equitable, and—most of all— more joyful.

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions

How politics and the pandemic put schools in the line of fire

A previous version of this story incorrectly said that 39 percent of American children were on track in math. That is the percentage performing below grade level.

Test scores are down, and violence is up . Parents are screaming at school boards , and children are crying on the couches of social workers. Anger is rising. Patience is falling.

For public schools, the numbers are all going in the wrong direction. Enrollment is down. Absenteeism is up. There aren’t enough teachers, substitutes or bus drivers. Each phase of the pandemic brings new logistics to manage, and Republicans are planning political campaigns this year aimed squarely at failings of public schools.

Public education is facing a crisis unlike anything in decades, and it reaches into almost everything that educators do: from teaching math, to counseling anxious children, to managing the building.

Political battles are now a central feature of education, leaving school boards, educators and students in the crosshairs of culture warriors. Schools are on the defensive about their pandemic decision-making, their curriculums, their policies regarding race and racial equity and even the contents of their libraries. Republicans — who see education as a winning political issue — are pressing their case for more “parental control,” or the right to second-guess educators’ choices. Meanwhile, an energized school choice movement has capitalized on the pandemic to promote alternatives to traditional public schools.

“The temperature is way up to a boiling point,” said Nat Malkus, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “If it isn’t a crisis now, you never get to crisis.”

Experts reach for comparisons. The best they can find is the earthquake following Brown v. Board of Education , when the Supreme Court ordered districts to desegregate and White parents fled from their cities’ schools. That was decades ago.

Today, the cascading problems are felt acutely by the administrators, teachers and students who walk the hallways of public schools across the country. Many say they feel unprecedented levels of stress in their daily lives.

Remote learning, the toll of illness and death, and disruptions to a dependable routine have left students academically behind — particularly students of color and those from poor families. Behavior problems ranging from inability to focus in class all the way to deadly gun violence have gripped campuses. Many students and teachers say they are emotionally drained, and experts predict schools will be struggling with the fallout for years to come.

Teresa Rennie, an eighth-grade math and science teacher in Philadelphia, said in 11 years of teaching, she has never referred this many children to counseling.

“So many students are needy. They have deficits academically. They have deficits socially,” she said. Rennie said that she’s drained, too. “I get 45 minutes of a prep most days, and a lot of times during that time I’m helping a student with an assignment, or a child is crying and I need to comfort them and get them the help they need. Or there’s a problem between two students that I need to work with. There’s just not enough time.”

Many wonder: How deep is the damage?

Learning lost

At the start of the pandemic, experts predicted that students forced into remote school would pay an academic price. They were right.

“The learning losses have been significant thus far and frankly I’m worried that we haven’t stopped sinking,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research.

Some of the best data come from the nationally administered assessment called i-Ready, which tests students three times a year in reading and math, allowing researchers to compare performance of millions of students against what would be expected absent the pandemic. It found significant declines, especially among the youngest students and particularly in math.

The low point was fall 2020, when all students were coming off a spring of chaotic, universal remote classes. By fall 2021 there were some improvements, but even then, academic performance remained below historic norms.

Take third grade, a pivotal year for learning and one that predicts success going forward. In fall 2021, 38 percent of third-graders were below grade level in reading, compared with 31 percent historically. In math, 39 percent of students were below grade level, vs. 29 percent historically.

Damage was most severe for students from the lowest-income families, who were already performing at lower levels.

A McKinsey & Co. study found schools with majority-Black populations were five months behind pre-pandemic levels, compared with majority-White schools, which were two months behind. Emma Dorn, a researcher at McKinsey, describes a “K-shaped” recovery, where kids from wealthier families are rebounding and those in low-income homes continue to decline.

“Some students are recovering and doing just fine. Other people are not,” she said. “I’m particularly worried there may be a whole cohort of students who are disengaged altogether from the education system.”

A hunt for teachers, and bus drivers

Schools, short-staffed on a good day, had little margin for error as the omicron variant of the coronavirus swept over the country this winter and sidelined many teachers. With a severe shortage of substitutes, teachers had to cover other classes during their planning periods, pushing prep work to the evenings. San Francisco schools were so strapped that the superintendent returned to the classroom on four days this school year to cover middle school math and science classes. Classes were sometimes left unmonitored or combined with others into large groups of unglorified study halls.

“The pandemic made an already dire reality even more devastating,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, referring to the shortages.

In 2016, there were 1.06 people hired for every job listing. That figure has steadily dropped, reaching 0.59 hires for each opening last year, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. In 2013, there were 557,320 substitute teachers, the BLS reported. In 2020, the number had fallen to 415,510. Virtually every district cites a need for more subs.

It’s led to burnout as teachers try to fill in the gaps.

“The overall feelings of teachers right now are ones of just being exhausted, beaten down and defeated, and just out of gas. Expectations have been piled on educators, even before the pandemic, but nothing is ever removed,” said Jennifer Schlicht, a high school teacher in Olathe, Kan., outside Kansas City.

Research shows the gaps in the number of available educators are most acute in areas including special education and educators who teach English language learners, as well as substitutes. And all school year, districts have been short on bus drivers , who have been doubling up routes, and forcing late school starts and sometimes cancellations for lack of transportation.

Many educators predict that fed-up teachers will probably quit, exacerbating the problem. And they say political attacks add to the burnout. Teachers are under scrutiny over lesson plans, and critics have gone after teachers unions, which for much of the pandemic demanded remote learning.

“It’s just created an environment that people don’t want to be part of anymore,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. “People want to take care of kids, not to be accused and punished and criticized.”

Falling enrollment

Traditional public schools educate the vast majority of American children, but enrollment has fallen, a worrisome trend that could have lasting repercussions. Enrollment in traditional public schools fell to less than 49.4 million students in fall 2020 , a 2.7 percent drop from a year earlier .

National data for the current school year is not yet available. But if the trend continues, that will mean less money for public schools as federal and state funding are both contingent on the number of students enrolled. For now, schools have an infusion of federal rescue money that must be spent by 2024.

Some students have shifted to private or charter schools. A rising number , especially Black families , opted for home schooling. And many young children who should have been enrolling in kindergarten delayed school altogether. The question has been: will these students come back?

Some may not. Preliminary data for 19 states compiled by Nat Malkus, of the American Enterprise Institute, found seven states where enrollment dropped in fall 2020 and then dropped even further in 2021. His data show 12 states that saw declines in 2020 but some rebounding in 2021 — though not one of them was back to 2019 enrollment levels.

Joshua Goodman, associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, studied enrollment in Michigan schools and found high-income, White families moved to private schools to get in-person school. Far more common, though, were lower-income Black families shifting to home schooling or other remote options because they were uncomfortable with the health risks of in person.

“Schools were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t,” Goodman said.

At the same time, charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded, saw enrollment increase by 7 percent, or nearly 240,000 students, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. There’s also been a surge in home schooling. Private schools saw enrollment drop slightly in 2020-21 but then rebound this academic year, for a net growth of 1.7 percent over two years, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, which represents 1,600 U.S. schools.

Absenteeism on the rise

Even if students are enrolled, they won’t get much schooling if they don’t show up.

Last school year, the number of students who were chronically absent — meaning they have missed more than 10 percent of school days — nearly doubled from before the pandemic, according to data from a variety of states and districts studied by EveryDay Labs, a company that works with districts to improve attendance.

This school year, the numbers got even worse.

In Connecticut, for instance, the number of chronically absent students soared from 12 percent in 2019-20 to 20 percent the next year to 24 percent this year, said Emily Bailard, chief executive of the company. In Oakland, Calif., they went from 17.3 percent pre-pandemic to 19.8 percent last school year to 43 percent this year. In Pittsburgh, chronic absences stayed where they were last school year at about 25 percent, then shot up to 45 percent this year.

“We all expected that this year would look much better,” Bailard said. One explanation for the rise may be that schools did not keep careful track of remote attendance last year and the numbers understated the absences then, she said.

The numbers were the worst for the most vulnerable students. This school year in Connecticut, for instance, 24 percent of all students were chronically absent, but the figure topped 30 percent for English-learners, students with disabilities and those poor enough to qualify for free lunch. Among students experiencing homelessness, 56 percent were chronically absent.

Fights and guns

Schools are open for in-person learning almost everywhere, but students returned emotionally unsettled and unable to conform to normally accepted behavior. At its most benign, teachers are seeing kids who cannot focus in class, can’t stop looking at their phones, and can’t figure out how to interact with other students in all the normal ways. Many teachers say they seem younger than normal.

Amy Johnson, a veteran teacher in rural Randolph, Vt., said her fifth-graders had so much trouble being together that the school brought in a behavioral specialist to work with them three hours each week.

“My students are not acclimated to being in the same room together,” she said. “They don’t listen to each other. They cannot interact with each other in productive ways. When I’m teaching I might have three or five kids yelling at me all at the same time.”

That loss of interpersonal skills has also led to more fighting in hallways and after school. Teachers and principals say many incidents escalate from small disputes because students lack the habit of remaining calm. Many say the social isolation wrought during remote school left them with lower capacity to manage human conflict.

Just last week, a high-schooler in Los Angeles was accused of stabbing another student in a school hallway, police on the big island of Hawaii arrested seven students after an argument escalated into a fight, and a Baltimore County, Md., school resource officer was injured after intervening in a fight during the transition between classes.

There’s also been a steep rise in gun violence. In 2021, there were at least 42 acts of gun violence on K-12 campuses during regular hours, the most during any year since at least 1999, according to a Washington Post database . The most striking of 2021 incidents was the shooting in Oxford, Mich., that killed four. There have been already at least three shootings in 2022.

Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security, which maintains its own database of K-12 school shootings using a different methodology, totaled nine active shooter incidents in schools in 2021, in addition to 240 other incidents of gunfire on school grounds. So far in 2022, it has recorded 12 incidents. The previous high, in 2019, was 119 total incidents.

David Riedman, lead researcher on the K-12 School Shooting Database, points to four shootings on Jan. 19 alone, including at Anacostia High School in D.C., where gunshots struck the front door of the school as a teen sprinted onto the campus, fleeing a gunman.

Seeing opportunity

Fueling the pressure on public schools is an ascendant school-choice movement that promotes taxpayer subsidies for students to attend private and religious schools, as well as publicly funded charter schools, which are privately run. Advocates of these programs have seen the public system’s woes as an excellent opportunity to push their priorities.

EdChoice, a group that promotes these programs, tallies seven states that created new school choice programs last year. Some are voucher-type programs where students take some of their tax dollars with them to private schools. Others offer tax credits for donating to nonprofit organizations, which give scholarships for school expenses. Another 15 states expanded existing programs, EdChoice says.

The troubles traditional schools have had managing the pandemic has been key to the lobbying, said Michael McShane, director of national research for EdChoice. “That is absolutely an argument that school choice advocates make, for sure.”

If those new programs wind up moving more students from public to private systems, that could further weaken traditional schools, even as they continue to educate the vast majority of students.

Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, who opposes school choice programs, sees the surge of interest as the culmination of years of work to undermine public education. He is both impressed by the organization and horrified by the results.

“I wish that organizations supporting public education had the level of funding and coordination that I’ve seen in these groups dedicated to its privatization,” he said.

A final complication: Politics

Rarely has education been such a polarizing political topic.

Republicans, fresh off Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race, have concluded that key to victory is a push for parental control and “parents rights.” That’s a nod to two separate topics.

First, they are capitalizing on parent frustrations over pandemic policies, including school closures and mandatory mask policies. The mask debate, which raged at the start of the school year, got new life this month after Youngkin ordered Virginia schools to allow students to attend without face coverings.

The notion of parental control also extends to race, and objections over how American history is taught. Many Republicans also object to school districts’ work aimed at racial equity in their systems, a basket of policies they have dubbed critical race theory. Critics have balked at changes in admissions to elite school in the name of racial diversity, as was done in Fairfax, Va. , and San Francisco ; discussion of White privilege in class ; and use of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which suggests slavery and racism are at the core of American history.

“Everything has been politicized,” said Domenech, of AASA. “You’re beside yourself saying, ‘How did we ever get to this point?’”

Part of the challenge going forward is that the pandemic is not over. Each time it seems to be easing, it returns with a variant vengeance, forcing schools to make politically and educationally sensitive decisions about the balance between safety and normalcy all over again.

At the same time, many of the problems facing public schools feed on one another. Students who are absent will probably fall behind in learning, and those who fall behind are likely to act out.

A similar backlash exists regarding race. For years, schools have been under pressure to address racism in their systems and to teach it in their curriculums, pressure that intensified after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Many districts responded, and that opened them up to countervailing pressures from those who find schools overly focused on race.

Some high-profile boosters of public education are optimistic that schools can move past this moment. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona last week promised, “It will get better.” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “If we can rebuild community-education relations, if we can rebuild trust, public education will not only survive but has a real chance to thrive.”

But the path back is steep, and if history is a guide, the wealthiest schools will come through reasonably well, while those serving low-income communities will struggle. Steve Matthews, superintendent of the 6,900-student Novi Community School District in Michigan, just northwest of Detroit, said his district will probably face a tougher road back than wealthier nearby districts that are, for instance, able to pay teachers more.

“Resource issues. Trust issues. De-professionalization of teaching is making it harder to recruit teachers,” he said. “A big part of me believes schools are in a long-term crisis.”

Valerie Strauss contributed to this report.

The pandemic’s impact on education

The latest: Updated coronavirus booster shots are now available for children as young as 5 . To date, more than 10.5 million children have lost one or both parents or caregivers during the coronavirus pandemic.

In the classroom: Amid a teacher shortage, states desperate to fill teaching jobs have relaxed job requirements as staffing crises rise in many schools . American students’ test scores have even plummeted to levels unseen for decades. One D.C. school is using COVID relief funds to target students on the verge of failure .

Higher education: College and university enrollment is nowhere near pandemic level, experts worry. ACT and SAT testing have rebounded modestly since the massive disruptions early in the coronavirus pandemic, and many colleges are also easing mask rules .

DMV news: Most of Prince George’s students are scoring below grade level on district tests. D.C. Public School’s new reading curriculum is designed to help improve literacy among the city’s youngest readers.

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• Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
• v.117(32); 2020 Aug 11

A century of educational inequality in the United States

Michelle jackson.

a Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305;

Brian Holzman

b Houston Education Research Consortium, Rice University, Houston, TX, 77005

Author contributions: M.J. and B.H. designed research; M.J. and B.H. analyzed data; and M.J. wrote the paper.

Associated Data

The analysis code and auxiliary data required to produce the figures and tables in this paper can be accessed at https://osf.io/jxne5 . Code to produce estimates for each of the individual datasets (see Table 1 ) is also provided. Details on how to access these datasets are provided in SI Appendix (most datasets are available for download upon registration with the data provider, while others are accessible only with a restricted use license from the National Center for Education Statistics).

Significance

There has been widespread concern that the takeoff in income inequality in recent decades has had harmful social consequences. We provide evidence on this concern by assembling all available nationally representative datasets on college enrollment and completion. This approach, which allows us to examine the relationship between income inequality and collegiate inequalities over the full century, reveals that the long-standing worry about income inequality is warranted. Inequalities in college enrollment and completion were low for cohorts born in the late 1950s and 1960s, when income inequality was low, and high for cohorts born in the late 1980s, when income inequality peaked. This grand U-turn means that contemporary birth cohorts are experiencing levels of collegiate inequality not seen for generations.

The “income inequality hypothesis” holds that rising income inequality affects the distribution of a wide range of social and economic outcomes. Although it is often alleged that rising income inequality will increase the advantages of the well-off in the competition for college, some researchers have provided descriptive evidence at odds with the income inequality hypothesis. In this paper, we track long-term trends in family income inequalities in college enrollment and completion (“collegiate inequalities”) using all available nationally representative datasets for cohorts born between 1908 and 1995. We show that the trends in collegiate inequalities moved in lockstep with the trend in income inequality over the past century. There is one exception to this general finding: For cohorts at risk for serving in the Vietnam War, collegiate inequalities were high, while income inequality was low. During this period, inequality in college enrollment and completion was significantly higher for men than for women, suggesting a bona fide “Vietnam War” effect. Aside from this singular confounding event, a century of evidence establishes a strong association between income and collegiate inequality, providing support for the view that rising income inequality is fundamentally changing the distribution of life chances.

It has long been suspected that the takeoff in income inequality has made the good luck of an advantaged birth ever more consequential for accessing opportunities and getting ahead. The “income inequality” hypothesis proposes that intergenerational inequality—with respect to educational attainment, social mobility, and other socioeconomic outcomes—will increase as income inequality grows. Because this hypothesis shot to public attention with Krueger’s ( 1 ) discussion of the Great Gatsby curve, the proposition that high levels of income inequality have generated correspondingly high levels of intergenerational reproduction is now a staple of public and political discourse. Despite the prominence of this argument, the evidence in its favor is less overwhelming than might be assumed ( 2 ), and is largely limited to the empirical result that intergenerational income inheritance has increased in recent decades, at least in some analyses ( 3 , 4 ). Even this result has been contested and is far from widely accepted ( 5 ).

In this paper, we assess the plausibility of the income inequality hypothesis by examining changes over the past century in the income-based gaps in college enrollment and completion. This is a field in which descriptive evidence is key: Designs that would allow for convincing causal inference are in short supply, and where designs are available, the data are not. And yet most of the descriptive evidence in regard to the college level pertains only to recent decades, when both income inequality and collegiate inequalities have increased (refs. 6 – 8 ).

The trends through earlier decades of the century, within which the great U-turn in income inequality occurred, remain largely undocumented. To overcome this evidence deficit, we might be inclined to draw on evidence on other educational outcomes, such as test scores and years of schooling. Reardon’s analysis of family income test score gaps, for example, shows steadily rising gaps between cohorts born in the 1940s and those born in the present day (ref. 9 ; cf. ref. 10 ). But test scores are quite imperfectly correlated with educational attainment, and evidence from studies of inequalities in years of schooling would support different conclusions on trend. Hilger’s ( 11 ) analysis of long-term trends using Census data shows that there was a decline in the effects of parental income on child’s education between the 1940s and 1970s, while Mare ( 12 ) shows an increasing effect of family income on higher-level educational transitions for midcentury cohorts as compared to early-century cohorts. Taking these studies together, it is difficult to reach any firm conclusion about the income inequality hypothesis, as one might infer an increase, a decrease, or stability in collegiate inequalities during the midcentury, depending on which study is considered.

Extending the time series over the whole of the past century allows for a fuller assessment of the income inequality hypothesis, as the long-run historical series on income inequality exhibits a relatively complicated pattern, as opposed to the simple increase in the recent period. In much the same way as the magnitude of changes in income inequality could only be appreciated when considered in the long run, current levels of educational inequality must be evaluated and understood in full historical context ( 13 ). In a comprehensive extension of previous research on collegiate inequalities, we thus use all nationally representative data sources that we were able to locate and access. This strengthens the descriptive evidence that can be brought to bear upon the income inequality hypothesis.

In the following sections, we discuss the available data and the methods of analysis, and present our results on long-term trends in collegiate inequalities. We will focus on inequalities in completion of 4-year college, enrollment in 4-year college, and enrollment in any college (2- or 4-year). We will demonstrate an essential similarity in inequality trends across the range of collegiate outcomes. Although we will show that income inequality is strongly associated with inequalities at the college level, we will also highlight that it is not the only force at work.

College Enrollment and Completion in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century was the first century in which education systems were widely diffused and, at least in principle, accessible to all social groups. The century witnessed substantial expansion at the college level: The college enrollment rate for 20- to 21-y-olds increased from around 15 % for the mid-1920s birth cohorts to almost 60 % for cohorts born toward the end of the century. * As Fig. 1 shows, rates of enrollment rose rapidly for cohorts born in the early century to midcentury, and flattened out and even declined for the midcentury birth cohorts, before resuming a steady increase for cohorts born in the later decades of the century.

Proportion of birth cohort enrolled in college ages 20 y to 21 y ( 14 ), and proportions completing 2- and 4-year college degrees, Current Population Survey March, Annual Social and Economic Supplement ( 15 ).

We see in Fig. 1 a stark reversal of the gender gap in college enrollment; for birth cohorts from the mid-1950s to mid-1990s, the proportion of women enrolled in college grew by around 30 percentage points, while the corresponding increase for men was just under 20 percentage points ( 16 , 17 ). The reversal occurred immediately after the rapid increase in enrollment rates observed for male birth cohorts at risk for service in the Vietnam War ( 16 ). A literature in economics has demonstrated that men born in the 1940s and 1950s were unusually likely to attend and graduate from college, although there is disagreement with respect to whether the observed increase in men’s college participation rates should be attributed to draft avoidance or to postservice GI Bill enrollments (ref. 18 ; cf. ref. 19 ).

Alongside trends in college enrollment, Fig. 1 presents rates of college completion by type of degree. While rates of completion of 2-year college are rather flat for cohorts born from the 1950s onward, rates of 4-year college completion have increased considerably. As the figure suggests, rates of 4-year college completion are highly correlated with rates of enrollment, but research shows that, over the past half-century, rates of college completion increased less sharply than rates of enrollment, because the college dropout rate increased ( 6 , 20 ).

Materials and Method

Although it is relatively straightforward to examine changes in rates of college enrollment and completion over time, it is rather less straightforward to examine income inequalities in collegiate outcomes across the span of the twentieth century, because data on parental income, college enrollment, and college completion are not routinely collected in government surveys. We must therefore piece together the trends in collegiate inequalities through the analysis of available sources of nationally representative data. We include results from the analysis of both cross-sectional surveys of adults and longitudinal surveys beginning with school-aged children, and, for a number of recent cohorts, we calculate estimates from tax data results in the public domain. Although this approach presents obvious challenges as regards comparability of data sources and measures, for much of the period that we cover, we have multiple estimates of collegiate inequalities for any given period of time. The datasets and their key characteristics are listed in Table 1 ; detailed descriptions of each dataset are included in SI Appendix .

Characteristics of the datasets included in the analysis

Add Health, National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health; ELS, Education Longitudinal Study; HSLS, High School Longitudinal Study.

The datasets cover cohorts born between 1908 and 1995, and it is only at the beginning and the end of the data series that our birth cohorts are represented by no more than one dataset. Although we aim to define cohorts according to year of birth, for some of the datasets we must construct quasi-cohorts based on age or grade, because year of birth was not recorded.

The biggest constraint that we face in analyzing income inequalities in collegiate attainment relates to gender. Data on the earlier birth cohorts come from the Occupational Changes in a Generation (OCG 1973) survey, which was administered in conjunction with the Current Population Survey ( 21 ). This survey was completed by men only, so we lack information on the educational attainment of women in the earliest birth cohorts. By presenting all results separately for men and women, patterns over time can be compared by gender.

The datasets were prepared to provide consistent measures of family income, college enrollment, and college completion. We produce simple binary variables that capture whether an individual completed a 4-year degree, whether an individual enrolled in (without necessarily completing) a 4-year degree program, and whether an individual enrolled in (without necessarily completing) a college program. Unfortunately, the tax data results pertain only to college enrollment per se, so we have fewer available data points for the analyses of 4-year completion and enrollment than for the analyses of enrollment in any college program. All samples are restricted to individuals who enrolled in high school, in order to maximize consistency across samples. In SI Appendix , we also include results for a smaller sample restricted to high school graduates ( SI Appendix , Fig. S6 ).

A more difficult variable to harmonize over time is family income. Although in some datasets family income is measured directly (e.g., annual net family income in dollars), in many of the available datasets family income is measured only as an ordinal variable. For these datasets, we employ the method used by Reardon ( 9 ) to calculate test score gaps from coarsened family income data; the method uses the proportions in each income category to assign an income rank to all of those in a given category, and income rank is then the explanatory variable in the analysis ( SI Appendix , SI Methods ).

We estimate logits predicting college enrollment and completion as a function of family income or income rank. Following Reardon ( 9 ), we fit squared and cubed terms to capture the nonlinear effects of income rank. Using the model, we estimate the enrollment and completion rates of those at the 90th percentile of family income and those at the 10th percentile. We choose the 90 vs. 10 comparison over other ways of defining inequality because it accords with past assessments and with the main source of trend in income inequality ( 9 ). † From these rates, we calculate log-odds ratios capturing, for example, the log-odds of completing a 4-year college degree for the 90 vs. 10 family income comparison.

We would be remiss if we did not note the difficulty in measuring family income reliably, particularly using one-shot measures, which are all that are available in almost all of the datasets that we analyze. Further worries might arise because some of the income measures are retrospective, or because the questions are asked of children, not parents. Although we would not minimize the danger of retrospection or of using children’s reports of family income, evidence suggests that child reports of parental socioeconomic characteristics are not substantially worse than parental reports of those characteristics ( 9 , 22 ). Furthermore, the types of errors that individuals make when reporting income appear to have changed very little over time ( 23 ), which is the key issue when mapping trend. To address concerns about the varying quality of the family income data, we multiply all log-odds ratios by 1 / r , where r is the estimated reliability of the family income measure (see SI Appendix , Table S5 for reliability estimates) ( 9 ).

We recognize that “researcher degrees of freedom” are of particular concern when presenting results from a large number of datasets ( 24 ). We provide additional results based on alternative specifications, in SI Appendix , and make our analysis code publicly available on Open Science Framework, https://osf.io/jxne5 .

The Great U-turn in Collegiate Inequality

We now examine collegiate inequalities for cohorts born between 1908 and 1995. Given data constraints, we are limited to examining inequalities over the whole period for men only, but we present results for women for a more limited range of birth cohorts.

In Fig. 2 we present, for the full male series, the estimated probabilities of completing 4-year college at the 90th and 10th percentiles of family income. ‡ We see in Fig. 2 that the increase in 4-year college degree attainment over the twentieth century was far from equally distributed across income groups. Men from the 90th percentile of family income were at the leading edge of the expansion; the figure shows a rapid increase in college completion rates through the 1940s birth cohorts, then a tailing off through the 1950s cohorts, followed by a further rapid increase for those cohorts born in the 1960s onward. In contrast, expansion at the bottom of the income distribution was more sluggish; 4-year college completion rates at the 10th percentile were less than 10 percentage points higher for cohorts born at the end of the century than for cohorts born at the beginning.

Probabilities of 4-year college completion at the 90th and 10th percentiles of family income, male birth cohorts, 1908–1986.

Fig. 2 shows that absolute differences in completion rates between income groups increased from the beginning to the end of the century. But this important result must be considered alongside changes over the century in the overall completion rate ( 12 ). Although the probability gap was small at the beginning of the century, the odds of college completion were around 7 times higher for the rich than for the poor, because the rich were able to secure a large proportion of the limited number of college slots. In relative terms, the poor born in the early century were more disadvantaged than their counterparts born in the 1960s, when 90 vs. 10 gaps in the probability of college completion were substantially larger. Although both probability gap and odds-ratio measures are informative, we focus from this point forward on odds-ratio measures of educational inequality, which are margin insensitive and thus feature relative—rather than absolute—advantage. But, in SI Appendix , we present probability plots for the three collegiate outcomes ( SI Appendix , Fig. S1 ), and include analyses based on probability gaps in SI Appendix , Table S3 . The key results hold for both types of analysis.

We plot, in Fig. 3 , the 90 vs. 10 log-odds ratios describing inequalities in collegiate outcomes for each of the datasets in our analyses, with trends estimated from generalized additive models (GAM). The GAMs are fitted to the plotted data points, with each point weighted by the inverse of the SE for the estimate. § In the earlier period covered by OCG, we fit the model to the estimates derived from analyses of single birth cohorts, but present point estimates representing groups of birth cohorts to show the consistency across these specifications. Confidence intervals are presented in SI Appendix , Fig. S2 ; figures showing 90 vs. 50 and 50 vs. 10 inequalities are included as SI Appendix , Figs. S3 and S4 .

The 90 vs. 10 log-odds ratios expressing inequality in 4-year completion, 4-year enrollment, and any college enrollment. ( Left ) Male birth cohorts, 1908–1995; ( Right ) female birth cohorts, 1951–1995.

We focus first on describing the trends for men, for whom we have results spanning the whole century. It is clear from Fig. 3 that the over-time trends are similar across the various collegiate outcomes and, further, that there is no simple secular trend for any of the outcomes under consideration. There are three key attributes of the trends that should be emphasized.

First, Fig. 3 shows that, toward the middle of the century, there was a great U-turn in collegiate inequality. Inequalities fell rapidly for cohorts born in the early to mid-1950s, then bottomed out until the mid-1960s, before ultimately rising steeply for cohorts born from the mid-1960s onward. The U-turn appears to be more pronounced for 4-year and “any college” enrollment than for completion of a 4-year degree, but it is present for all of the collegiate outcomes under consideration.

Had we measured collegiate inequalities in but a single dataset, we might be skeptical that our observed trend was on the mark and, in particular, that there was a rapid fall in inequality for the midcentury birth cohorts. But this trend is supported across all of the datasets from the period: OCG and National Longitudinal Study (NLS) Young Men show high inequality in the early 1950s; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), NLS72, and High School and Beyond (HS&B) pick up the lower inequality of the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s; and the subsequent uptick in inequality is captured in PSID, the school cohort surveys, and the National Longitudinal Studies of Youth (NLSY79&97). Indeed, Fig. 3 demonstrates that there is great consistency across a large number of different data sources. ¶ At the trough, inequality in 4-year college completion was reduced to a log-odds ratio of around 1.5, indicating that, even in this low-inequality period, the odds of those at the 90th income percentile completing a 4-year college degree were almost 4.5 times greater than the equivalent odds for those at the 10th percentile. Inspection of SI Appendix , Fig. S3 suggests that the U-turn observed in Fig. 3 is largely driven by changes in the top half of the income distribution: the U-turn is rather more pronounced for the 90 vs. 50 comparison than for the 50 vs. 10 comparison.

Second, if skepticism about a midcentury fall in collegiate inequality were to be sustained, suspicion would also have to fall upon all currently accepted results on over-time trends, which demonstrate a substantial increase in inequalities in college enrollment and completion between cohorts born in the midcentury and late century. If we were to impose a simple linear smooth on the century-long data series, this would indicate relatively modest increases in collegiate inequalities over the period taken as a whole (see dashed lines, Fig. 3 ). # Again, because the trends are mapped using multiple datasets, we are confident that the pattern of a U-turn in collegiate inequality is supported.

Third, any evidence of a U-turn must bring to mind the pattern of income inequality over the past century. As Piketty and Saez ( 27 ) described, toward the middle of the twentieth century, the share of income going to the top 10% rapidly declined, before rising again over the later decades of the century. The U-turn in collegiate inequality mimics this trend, although it is notable that, insofar as we see similarity in patterns of income inequality and collegiate inequalities, it is income inequality around year of birth that appears to matter most. But, despite the obvious similarities, there is at least one clear divergence in the pattern of collegiate inequality and income inequality: The U-turn in collegiate inequality comes very late. Income inequality begins to fall in the early 1940s, but inequalities in enrollment and completion begin to decline only for cohorts born in the mid-1950s. Men born in the mid-1940s onward were not just born into a period of low inequality, but they spent most of their formative years in a low-inequality society. Despite this, the evidence shows that collegiate inequality increased substantially for the cohorts born in the 1940s and early 1950s; the log-odds ratios describing inequality are increased by around a third over this short period.

Some of the same key features are visible in the results for women, shown in Fig. 3 , Right , although we only have access to data for women born after 1950. We see a basic similarity with the men’s analyses from the mid-1950s birth cohorts onward: Collegiate inequalities are relatively flat for the 1950s to 1960s birth cohorts, and increase for women born in the 1970s and onward. Just as with men, toward the end of the period we see flat and even declining inequalities in enrollment and completion. There are perhaps some subtle differences in the pattern by gender—the upturn in collegiate inequality begins, for example, several years later for women than for men—but we have little evidence here to support a conclusion of substantial difference in inequality for men and women over this period.

There is one notable difference between the men’s and women’s results, relating to the period when trends in male collegiate inequality substantially diverged from trends in income inequality. This exceptional period appears to be exceptional for men, but not for women. Although we cannot track collegiate inequalities for women across the whole midcentury period, the first data points in the female data series (NLS Young Women: 1951–1953 birth cohorts) are lower than the nearby estimates for men (NLS Young Men: 1949–1951 birth cohorts). ** This period of divergence between collegiate inequality and income inequality coincides with the period that we identified above as holding special consequences for men’s educational attainment: Men born in the 1940s and early 1950s were subject to the threat of military service in the Vietnam War.

There are no cohort studies of women that would allow us to compare male and female inequalities in college enrollment and completion throughout this period. We do, however, have access to data on men who fathered children who were at risk for service during the Vietnam War: The NLS Older Men survey can be used to track collegiate inequalities for the children of men who were aged 45 y to 59 y in 1966. The structure of this dataset is somewhat different from the datasets underlying our time series, but we nevertheless find confirmation, in Fig. 4 , that male and female inequalities diverged in the Vietnam years.

The 90 vs.10 log-odds ratios expressing inequality in 4-year college completion, 4-year enrollment, and any college enrollment, men and women born 1935–1943 and 1944–1952, NLS-Older Men data.

In the pre-Vietnam period, male and female collegiate inequalities were of similar magnitude. The log-odds ratio for 4-year enrollment, for example, was 2.3 for men (95% CI: 1.5, 3.1), as compared to 2.4 for women (1.7, 3.2). But, for the birth cohorts at risk for serving in Vietnam, the male log-odds ratio increased slightly, to 2.5 (1.8, 3.2), while inequality fell substantially for women, to 1.4 (0.8, 2.0) (see SI Appendix , Fig. S8 for a figure with CIs). These results provide support for the claim that men’s collegiate inequality was substantially and artificially raised relative to expected levels during this period because of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, our data are not well-suited to evaluating why male and female collegiate inequality differed in the Vietnam period. But some evidence can be brought to bear on this question by comparing preservice and postservice inequalities in college participation for the men in OCG ( SI Appendix , Fig. S9 ). These data are more consistent with a draft-induced increase in male collegiate inequality than with a GI Bill-induced increase. ††

Bringing the results in Fig. 4 together with what is known about college enrollment and completion patterns during the Vietnam War period, it seems likely that the disproportionate increase in men’s college participation rates observed in Fig. 1 was achieved, at least in part, through a gender-specific change in the effect of family income on college enrollment and completion.

The Association between Income Inequality and Collegiate Inequality.

We now present a formal statistical test of the strength of the association between income inequality and collegiate inequality. We regress the log-odds for collegiate inequalities on income inequality, as measured through the share of wages going to the top 10% ( 27 ). ‡‡ In addition to the income inequality variable, for the full male series (1908–1995), we fit a “Vietnam effect,” with a dummy variable that isolates the cohorts at risk from the draft lotteries (i.e., 1944–1952 birth cohorts). We fit models to the full male series (1908–1995 birth cohorts), a compressed male series (1952–1995 birth cohorts), and the female series (1951–1995 birth cohorts). A full regression table with coefficients and standard errors is included as SI Appendix , Table S4 . §§ In Fig. 5 , we present estimates of the predicted increase in the log-odds ratios for an eight percentage point increase in the share of wages going to the top 10%; this increase is equivalent to the “takeoff” in income inequality that occurred between the midcentury and the 1990s. ¶¶

Predicted increase in collegiate inequality log-odds ratios associated with the top 10%’s share of wages increasing by 0.08 (equivalent to the takeoff in income inequality); 90 vs. 50 (dark gray), 50 vs. 10 (light gray), and 90 vs. 10 (total) comparisons.

The regression coefficients describing the associations between income inequality and 90 vs. 10 collegiate inequalities can be straightforwardly decomposed into two parts: an association between income inequality and the 90 vs. 50 log-odds ratio, and an association between income inequality and the 50 vs. 10 log-odds ratio. In Fig. 5 , the total height of each bar represents the predicted increase in the 90 vs. 10 log-odds ratio for an eight percentage point increase in income inequality, while the dark and light gray bars show the predicted increases in the 90 vs. 50 and 50 vs. 10 log-odds ratios, respectively.

Examining first the results for the 90 vs. 10 comparison, we see confirmation of a relatively strong association between income inequality and collegiate inequality over the full sweep of the twentieth century. For women, for example, the model predicts that an increase in income inequality equivalent to that observed in the takeoff period would increase the 90 vs. 10 log-odds ratio by around 1 for 4-year enrollment and completion, and by around 1.3 for enrollment in any college. Although there is variation in the strength of the association for the different outcome measures, the income inequality effects are large and positive in all of the analyses, indicating substantial support for the income inequality hypothesis.

Given that the takeoff in income inequality was largely characterized by the top of the income distribution moving away from the middle and bottom of the distribution, the income inequality hypothesis would predict larger effect sizes for the 90 vs. 50 comparison than for the 50 vs. 10 comparison. When we decompose the 90 vs. 10 results into 90 vs. 50 and 50 vs. 10 components, we see precisely this result. The income inequality effects for the 90 vs. 50 comparisons in all cases outweigh those for the 50 vs. 10 comparisons, particularly in the analyses of 4-year college enrollment and completion.

But the results also provide grounds for exercising caution when interpreting differences in effect sizes across the models, as the effect sizes in the full and compressed male series are more similar for the “any college” analyses than for the 4-year analyses, where the sample sizes are smaller. Even when analyzing all available datasets and exploiting the full range of variation in income inequality over the century, our statistical power is limited. This is even more clear when we extend the models summarized in Fig. 5 to include additional macro-level regressors that social scientists have previously used to predict inequalities at the college level. These additional variables include the economic returns to schooling, which are assumed to influence individual decisions about whether or not to invest in college education ( 33 ), and the high school graduation rate, which has been shown to influence educational expansion at the college level ( 34 ). As shown in SI Appendix , Table S1 , estimates from these models are more volatile, particularly for women.

The volatility arises because some of our analyses are, like past analyses, limited to more recent cohorts in which the takeoff assumes a monotonically increasing form. This makes it difficult to adjudicate between the large number of monotonically increasing potential causes. An important advantage of our full-century approach is that it reaches back to a time in which these competing causes did not always move together. In Fig. 6 , we present the results of a simulation exercise, in which we run 1,000 regressions for a range of different model specifications on the full and compressed male series, with each regression including a new variable containing random numbers drawn from a normal distribution ( μ = 0; σ = 1). We examine the stability of the income inequality effects with respect to inequality in college enrollment, for which we have the largest number of data points. We add to the basic model in Fig. 5 controls for time, either in the form of 1) a linear effect of year or 2) dummies for decades, and measures of the returns to schooling ( 33 , 35 , 36 ) and the high-school graduation rate ( 34 , 37 ).

Predicted income inequality effects (coefficients × 0.08) from 1,000 regressions of 90 vs. 10 inequality in “any college” enrollment on income inequality and random number variables, for various model specifications, for full and compressed series, men only. Models: 1, Inequality; 2, Inequality+year; 3, Inequality+controls; 4, Inequality+controls+year; and 5, Inequality+controls+decade.

As Fig. 6 shows, the income inequality effects estimated for the full male series are robust to the inclusion of other potential confounding variables. But Fig. 6 also highlights the extent to which a proper evaluation of the income inequality hypothesis requires researchers to exploit all of the available data. Although the bivariate analysis shows a similar effect of the income inequality variable in both the full and compressed series, the effects are a good deal more volatile in the more highly parameterized models in the compressed relative to the full series. *** The substantive implication of this analysis is clear: It is only with the full data series that we obtain relatively precise and reliable estimates of the association between inequality in collegiate outcomes and income inequality.

We have examined descriptive evidence on the association between inequality in collegiate attainment and income inequality over the past century. Although there has been much recent interest in the income inequality hypothesis, it has been difficult to make headway because commonly used datasets pertain only to recent decades, when income inequality was increasing. We have thus proceeded by reaching back to the very beginning of the twentieth century, assembling all of the available datasets, and harmonizing the variables in these datasets.

The results show that collegiate inequalities and income inequality are, in fact, rather strongly associated over the twentieth century. Just as with income inequality, we see evidence of a U-turn in 90 vs. 10 collegiate inequality, and evidence of a substantial takeoff in collegiate inequalities in recent decades. When we examine trends in 90 vs. 50 and 50 vs.10 inequalities, we find that the 90 vs. 50 trends mirror the 90 vs. 10 results. Taken together, our results offer solid descriptive support for the income inequality hypothesis.

Inequalities in collegiate attainment increased hand in hand with the expansion of college education in the United States. Rates of college enrollment and completion were higher at the end of the century than they had been at any time in the preceding hundred years, and yet, for these birth cohorts, we see substantial inequalities, as captured in both percentage point gap and odds ratio measures. In point of fact, the only time during the twentieth century for which we observe a reduction in educational inequality is during the period when expansion at the college level had paused. Although the counterfactual is obviously not observable, these results emphasize the importance of attending to the distribution of college opportunities in addition to overall levels of attainment. These distributional questions will take on even greater significance in the context of the economic and social crisis engendered by coronavirus disease 2019, a crisis that is likely to have enduring effects on both the distribution of income and access to the higher education sector.

Our analyses are not well suited to evaluating the mechanisms generating the association between income inequality and collegiate inequalities. However, given the pattern of collegiate inequality across the century, we suspect that a mechanical effect is likely to be responsible. If money matters, as we know it does, and growing income inequality delivers more money to the top, then, all else being equal, these additional dollars would in themselves produce growing inequality in college enrollment and completion. The mechanical effect is therefore a parsimonious account of the trend that we see here ( 8 ). That the over-time associations are substantially stronger for the 90 vs. 50 comparison as compared to the 50 vs. 10 comparison provides further suggestive evidence in this regard. Nevertheless, there is a period for which we undoubtedly hypothesize an increase in the relational effect of income: the Vietnam War. For the war to lead to increased collegiate inequality, the effect of income on educational attainment would have to increase, particularly given that income inequality was low and stable for these birth cohorts.

Whatever the mechanisms may be, the key descriptive result is that, over the course of the twentieth century, a grand U-turn in collegiate inequality occurred. Cohorts born in the middle of the century witnessed the lowest levels of inequality in college enrollment and completion seen over the past hundred years. Contemporary birth cohorts, in contrast, are experiencing levels of collegiate inequality not seen for generations.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary file, acknowledgments.

We thank David Cox, David Grusky, and Florencia Torche for their detailed comments on earlier versions of this paper, and also Raj Chetty, Maximilian Hell, Robb Willer, the Cornell Mobility Conference, the Stanford Inequality Workshop, the Stanford Sociology Colloquium Series, and University of California, Los Angeles’s California Center for Population Research seminar for useful suggestions. Additionally, we thank Stanford’s Center for Poverty and Inequality, Russell Sage Foundation and Stanford’s United Parcel Service (UPS) Fund for research funding, Stanford’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences for secure data room access, and the American Institutes for Research for data access. We are grateful to the editor and reviewers for their helpful and productive suggestions.

The authors declare no competing interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. E.G. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.

Data deposition: Code for data analysis is archived on Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/jxne5 ).

*Throughout this paper, we use the term “college” as a shorthand for “2- or 4-year college.”

† We also include results based on comparing income quartiles in SI Appendix , Fig. S5 .

‡ The probabilities are estimated from the logit model, and we fit a GAM to establish trend. See SI Appendix , SI Methods for more details.

§ We determine the appropriate number of degrees of freedom for the trend lines by fitting a series of GAMs and comparing model fit (using the Akaike Information Criterion). For the analysis of college enrollment for male birth cohorts, we use the stepwise model builder in R’s gam package to find the best-fitting model ( 25 , 26 ). As we have fewer point estimates in the other analyses, the stepwise approach is less reliable, and we therefore choose smoothing parameters that provide a reasonable (and conservative) summary of the trend.

¶ It is also clear that some datasets are outliers from the trend. It is not surprising to see variation across samples, and we highlight this variation only because it illustrates a potential danger of using but one or two datasets to establish a trend. The estimates for National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) (1974), for example, are substantially higher than the surrounding estimates based on one-shot income measures, and there is a surprising degree of cross-cohort volatility in the PSID estimates.

# The linear trend is strongest for 4-year completion, and weakest for enrollment in 4-year college. For all collegiate outcomes, the GAM offers a significant improvement in fit over the simple linear model.

**It would be possible to track male and female educational inequality with respect to parental education or socioeconomic index scores (SEI) ( 28 ), but the sample sizes are, unfortunately, too small for a detailed analysis of gender differences in educational attainment by birth cohort. This approach is also unattractive given that parental education, parental income, and SEI were only weakly correlated in this period ( 29 ).

†† Note that, while previous research has suggested that high-socioeconomic status (SES) individuals might have taken advantage of the GI Bill to a greater extent than low-SES individuals ( 30 ), SI Appendix , Fig. S9 provides little evidence that collegiate inequality was substantially affected. See SI Appendix for further discussion of this point.

‡‡ We choose the wages measure because, for the bottom of the income distribution, wages are a more important component of income than the types of income included in the alternative measures (e.g., capital gains). We measure wage inequality in year of birth. Surprisingly, given the prominence of the income inequality hypothesis, there is not yet adequate guidance in the literature as to the age at which income inequality most influences outcomes, although in the “money matters” literature there has been particular emphasis on the prenatal period, the postnatal period, and early childhood as the lifecourse moments when money matters most ( 31 , 32 ).

§§ In the 4-year analyses, we weight the data by the inverse of the standard errors underlying the estimates. In the analysis of any college enrollment, we do not weight the data, as this data series includes the tax data estimates. Given the size of the samples underlying these estimates, weighting would allow the relationship that pertains in the tax data for cohorts born in the 1980s and 1990s to have a disproportionate influence on the estimated century-long relationship between income inequality and inequality in college enrollment.

¶¶ The estimates in Fig. 5 are obtained by multiplying the income inequality coefficients in SI Appendix , Table S4 by 0.08.

***See SI Appendix , Fig. S10 for similar figures for 4-year enrollment and completion.

This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1907258117/-/DCSupplemental .

Data Availability.

What Is School For?

The past two and a half years have brought disruption after disruption to America’s K-12 schools. It’s been … stressful. But these disturbances in our education equilibrium have also given us a chance to step back and ask, “What is school for?”

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Illustration by Chloe Scheffe; photographs by Internet Archive; Lan Gao, via Unsplash, and PediaPress and Mikus, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Most US students are recovering from pandemic-era setbacks, but millions are making up little ground

Fifth grade students attend a math lesson with teacher Jana Lamontagne, right, during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A fifth grade student explains a math answer to his classmate during a math lesson at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade students attend a math lesson with teacher Alex Ventresca, right, during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A fifth grade student attends a math lesson during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade students work on computers during a math class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade teacher Jana Lamontagne, center, teaches a math lesson during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Osbell, 9, works on the Ignite program with a live tutor, during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Bridget, 9, attends a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Jaelene, 9, works on a computer during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Students work on a writing assignment during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School principal Vincent Izuegbu talks about the school’s mission to overcome the effects of remote pandemic learning Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In the classroom, the school put a sharper focus on collaboration. Along with academic setbacks, students came back from school closures with lower maturity levels, said Izuegbu. “We do not let 10 minutes go by without a teacher giving students the opportunity to engage with the subject,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth that we’ve seen.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

The Wells Preparatory Elementary School Student Creed hangs on the wall behind principal Vincent Izuegbu on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the South Side, just 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% hit the mark. Federal relief allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers get paid to team up on recovery outside working hours. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School student Olorunkemi Atoyebi, responds to a question during an interview with The Associated Press on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. Atoyebi was an A student before the pandemic, but after spending fifth grade behind a computer screen, she fell behind. During remote learning, she was nervous about stopping class to ask questions. Before long, math lessons stopped making sense. When she returned to in classroom learning other students worked in groups, her math teacher helped her one-on-one. Atoyebi learned a rhyming song to help memorize multiplication tables. Over time, it began to click. “They made me feel more confident in everything,” said Atoyebi, now 14. “My confidence started going up, my grades started going up, my scores started going up. Everything has felt like I understand it better."(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Students at the Wells Preparatory Elementary School make their way to the cafeteria past reminders of the education and subjects they are receiving on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

The desktop of a student at the Wells Preparatory Elementary School reflects the literature they are studying in Charlotte Owens’ fifth grade class on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School teacher Charlotte Owens, left, works with her fifth grade students during the literature segment of their day, Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — On one side of the classroom, students circled teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowel sounds. In another corner, children read together from a book. Scattered elsewhere, students sat at laptop computers and got reading help from online tutors.

For the third graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia, it was an ordinary school day. But educators were racing to get students learning more, faster, and to overcome setbacks that have persisted since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago.

America’s schools have started to make progress toward getting students back on track. But improvement has been slow and uneven across geography and economic status, with millions of students — often those from marginalized groups — making up little or no ground.

Nationally, students made up one-third of their pandemic losses in math during the past school year and one-quarter of the losses in reading, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard , an analysis of state and national test scores by researchers at Harvard and Stanford.

But in nine states, including Virginia, reading scores continued to fall during the 2022-23 school year after previous decreases during the pandemic.

Clouding the recovery is a looming financial crisis. States have used some money from the historic $190 billion in federal pandemic relief to help students catch up , but that money runs out later this year.

“The recovery is not finished, and it won’t be finished without state action,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist behind the scorecard. “States need to start planning for what they’re going to do when the federal money runs out in September. And I think few states have actually started that discussion.”

Virginia lawmakers approved an extra $418 million last year to accelerate recovery. Massachusetts officials set aside $3.2 million to provide math tutoring for fourth and eighth grade students who are behind grade level, along with $8 million for literacy tutoring.

But among other states with lagging progress, few said they were changing their strategies or spending more to speed up improvement.

Virginia hired online tutoring companies and gave schools a “playbook” showing how to build effective tutoring programs. Lisa Coons, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, said last year’s state test scores were a wake-up call.

“We weren’t recovering as fast as we needed,” Coons said in an interview.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has called for states to continue funding extra academic help for students as the federal money expires.

“We just can’t stop now,” he said at a May 30 conference for education journalists. “The states need to recognize these interventions work. Funding public education does make a difference.”

In Virginia, the Alexandria district received $2.3 million in additional state money to expand tutoring.

At Mount Vernon, where classes are taught in English and Spanish, students are divided into groups and rotate through stations customized to their skill level. Those who need the most help get online tutoring. In Fletcher’s classroom, a handful of students wore headsets and worked with tutors through Ignite Learning, one of the companies hired by the state.

With tutors in high demand, the online option has been a big help, Mount Vernon principal Jennifer Hamilton said.

“That’s something that we just could not provide here,” she said.

Ana Marisela Ventura Moreno said her 9-year-old daughter, Sabrina, benefited significantly from extra reading help last year during second grade, but she’s still catching up.

“She needs to get better. She’s not at the level she should be,” the mother said in Spanish. She noted the school did not offer the tutoring help this year, but she did not know why.

Alexandria education officials say students scoring below proficient or close to that cutoff receive high-intensity tutoring help and they have to prioritize students with the greatest needs. Alexandria trailed the state average on math and reading exams in 2023, but it’s slowly improving.

More worrying to officials are the gaps: Among poorer students at Mount Vernon, just 24% scored proficient in math and 28% hit the mark in reading. That’s far lower than the rates among wealthier students, and the divide is growing wider.

Failing to get students back on track could have serious consequences. The researchers at Harvard and Stanford found communities with higher test scores have higher incomes and lower rates of arrest and incarceration. If pandemic setbacks become permanent, it could follow students for life.

The Education Recovery Scorecard tracks about 30 states, all of which made at least some improvement in math from 2022 to 2023. The states whose reading scores fell in that span, in addition to Virginia, were Nevada, California, South Dakota, Wyoming, Indiana, Oklahoma, Connecticut and Washington.

Only a few states have rebounded to pre-pandemic testing levels. Alabama was the only state where math achievement increased past 2019 levels, while Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana accomplished that in reading.

In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared with 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief.

The district trained hundreds of Chicago residents to work as tutors. Every school building got an interventionist, an educator who focuses on helping struggling students.

The district also used federal money for home visits and expanded arts education in an effort to re-engage students.

“Academic recovery in isolation, just through ‘drill and kill,’ either tutoring or interventions, is not effective,” said Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s chief education officer. “Students need to feel engaged.”

At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the city’s South Side, just 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% hit the mark. Federal relief allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers get paid to team up on recovery outside working hours.

In the classroom, the school put a sharper focus on collaboration. Along with academic setbacks, students came back from school closures with lower maturity levels, principal Vincent Izuegbu said. By building lessons around discussion, officials found students took more interest in learning.

“We do not let 10 minutes go by without a teacher giving students the opportunity to engage with the subject,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth that we’ve seen.”

Olorunkemi Atoyebi was an A student before the pandemic, but after spending fifth grade learning at home, she fell behind. During remote learning, she was nervous about stopping class to ask questions. Before long, math lessons stopped making sense.

When she returned to school, she struggled with multiplication and terms such as “dividend” and “divisor” confused her.

While other students worked in groups, her math teacher took her aside for individual help. Atoyebi learned a rhyming song to help memorize multiplication tables. Over time, it began to click.

“They made me feel more confident in everything,” said Atoyebi, now 14. “My grades started going up. My scores started going up. Everything has felt like I understand it better.”

Associated Press writers Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Chrissie Thompson in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

Task Forces

Policy centers.

Improving Education Outcomes and School Access: ALEC CEO Lisa B. Nelson on Moore Money

It's been a very good week for school choice..

ALEC CEO Lisa B. Nelson spoke with economist Stephen Moore of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity on the latest episode of Moore Money. They discussed the growing trend of school choice measures adopted by states, which could benefit millions of children. They highlighted the potential for these efforts to improve education outcomes and increase access to quality schools.

It’s been a very good week for school choice. Louisiana just passed their universal bill, making them the 12th state to join the fold. This movement started three years ago with West Virginia, having passed a universal HOPE Scholarship that was universal education and the money following the students, and then Arizona quickly followed suit. Governor Ducey worked on it the entire time he was in office and finally got it done in his last year. It was also a comprehensive bill. Then, of course, right behind them was Iowa, and now we have 12 states, including Florida, North Carolina, Utah, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma. It’s an exciting idea that essentially, we’ve talked about it being the civil rights issue of the 21st century, because this money is your money. Your family — and you as an individual parent — are spending money and paying taxes for your choice of school. That’s what’s happening. I think everybody had a front row seat during Covid to what was going on in the schools, and parents are now taking a much more active role in their children’s education. How can you be against that? I think it’s great, and I love seeing it.

Listen to the full interview.

• Published: June 5, 2024
• Issues: Education , In the News
• Categories: Education , In The News

In Depth: Education

An excellent education has long been recognized as key to the American Dream. Unfortunately, the current monopolistic and expensive K-12 education system is failing our students, leaving them unprepared for college, careers, or life. Similarly, our higher education system is leaving students with higher debt burdens and fewer career guarantees…

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June 4, 2024

VCU professor Jan Rychtar wins national teaching award from the Mathematical Association of America

He is the first VCU instructor to receive the Haimo Award for classroom excellence; colleague Dewey Taylor also honored by a regional MAA section.

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By Sian Wilkerson

Virginia Commonwealth University professor  Jan Rychtar  has received prestigious recognition by the  Mathematical Association of America for excellence in teaching at the university level.

Rychtar, Ph.D., who joined VCU’s Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics  in the  College of Humanities and Sciences  in 2019 , is a 2024 recipient of the MAA’s  Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award . It honors college or university professors whose teaching effectiveness has had far-reaching influence.

The MAA was established in 1915 to advance the understanding and impact of mathematics, and it instituted the Haimo Award in 1991. Up to three are given each year, and Rychtar is the first VCU instructor to win the award.

“I am honored and grateful to be one of the award recipients,” he said, thanking the MAA and its members for their work to advance math students and teachers. “The MAA’s core values – community, inclusivity, communication, and teaching and learning – provide endless inspiration. Incorporating these values into my classroom and beyond has had a tremendous impact on my teaching.”

Rychtar, who dedicated the award to his family, also thanked his former and current students as well as his mentors, who “have my deep gratitude for all the lessons they taught me. I can only aspire to be as good as them.”

Rychtar has been honored for his service and teaching excellence throughout his career. At the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where he taught from 2004 to 2019, he received the College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence Award, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics Award for Distinguished Service and the Thomas Undergraduate Research Mentor Award.

Separately, VCU math professor  Dewey Taylor , Ph.D., was honored for teaching excellence by the MAA’s Maryland-D.C.-Virginia section, receiving the 2024 John M. Smith Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching. Each year, every MAA section is invited to honor an educator with a section award, and those recipients become nominees for the national Haimo Award. Rychtár won the Smith Award in 2022.

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America's prosperity and success are the result of cooperation, not oppression. This is the way to cultivate patriotism in civic education. (Photo illustration: franckreporter/Getty Images)

Offer a random person anywhere in the world a thousand dollars, a ticket to America, and a green card, but with the catch that the offer is only good for 24 hours. How many takers would there be?

Now, rerun the experiment for every other country. Does  any  country get more takers than America? Doubtful.

The fact that it’s only a question worth asking with respect to other free-market democracies in the West is revealing. China, Russia, India, Brazil, etc. are places people leave, not where they go. When it comes to civilizational flourishing, it truly is, as renowned historian Niall Ferguson has argued, a matter of the West and the Rest.

Identity politics makes for strange political bedfellows, but one thing on which virtually everyone on the left agrees is that the rise of the West and America is largely the story of the ever more effective oppression of the weak by the strong. This “oppression thesis” is powerful because it is simple.

And it threads together all of the anti-American leftist ideological movements: identity politics; woke; 1619; diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI; and critical race theory, or CRT. In American classrooms, it stitches together a “warts  only ” retelling of American history that hardly stokes pride and gratitude in being American. 

Americans should take pride in the system of liberty our ancestors established that now delivers historically unprecedented levels of peace and prosperity. But the oppression thesis asserts that past and continuing systemic oppression makes America deserving of moral condemnation and unworthy of patriotic attachment.

Given the increasing dominance of the oppression thesis in American K-12 and college education, we should not be surprised that Gallup found large generational disparities in civic pride. Americans 55 and older are more than two and a half times more likely than those between the ages of 18 and 34 to express that they are extremely proud of being American. 

Although there is certainly oppression in America’s story, too often children and college students are not told of how Americans, not the American government, put an end to a variety of oppressive practices that were often protected by the power of government (e.g., Jim Crow laws, government-sanctioned school segregation).

Such laws and policies were often put in place by elite political power brokers, not ordinary Americans. 

But America’s story is not one driven solely or even mostly by oppression, because a society cannot raise the level of general prosperity by means of piracy and plunder. Theft builds nothing; it merely rearranges what is already there. It is parasitic, not productive.

Only the gains that arise from cooperation—working together to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts—can result in more goods and services for the same number of people in society. This is what produced the unprecedented levels of general prosperity into which we were blessed to be born. A system rigged to allow only the fulfillment of ambition through cooperative gains is the real story of America. 

This truth is best expressed by what we call “the cooperation thesis,” which is the idea that the rise of the West and America is largely the story of the rise of ever more effective cooperation made possible by an ever more efficient market system fueled by ever freer people.

The culture and institutions that made up our civil society evolved over time in a way that led to better cooperation in every way. America is so extraordinary for the simple reason that we—as individuals and as a society—are the world’s best cooperators and have been so for a long time. 

This is what makes America exceptional. This is why it continues to be seen by the rest of the world as the land of  greatest  opportunity, the one place where anyone can build a good and honorable life if they work hard enough.

It is well past time for American civic education to embrace the cooperation thesis so that we can finally begin to cultivate the informed patriotism we so desperately need.

This article, originally published by RealClearPoitics, is made available by RealClearWire

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News & Insights

Union Rejects American Airlines' 17% Pay Hike Proposal

June 05, 2024 — 11:03 pm EDT

Written by RTTNews.com for RTTNews  ->

(RTTNews) - The Association of Professional Flight Attendants or APFA said Wednesday that it unanimously rejected the latest proposal from American Airlines.

American Airlines offered flight attendants a 17% immediate pay hike.

The Union said the latest offer has come without reaching an agreement on a complete contract. American Airlines Flight Attendants want and need a complete contract addressing all its concerns. The union has a strike vote authorization of 99.47%.

"The APFA Board of Directors unanimously rejects management's proposal and encourages, in the strongest way possible, the company to put all of its attention towards reaching an agreement with our Union and avoiding a crippling strike," the Union said.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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