Tel: 202-624-5400 | Fax: 202-737-1069, Research, Editorial, Legal and Committee Staff, E-Learning | Staff Professional Development, Communications, Financial Services and Interstate Commerce, Public Education's Response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic, Copyright 2021 by National Conference of State Legislatures. Adhering to ACIP guidelines, prioritizing frontline workers, including school staff, along with individuals 75 and over for phase 1B vaccination. Educators and policymakers face daunting challenges to ensure that U.S. students receive a quality education in an unprecedented environment. A key insight from our survey was that … How will you protect the welfare of contract teachers and others in the education workforce? What grade would U.S. public schools earn during the pandemic? t. e. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected educational systems worldwide, leading to the near-total closures of schools, universities and colleges. Everything changed the week of March 16 for corporate leaders. Spring projections suggested that students may have returned this school year with less than two-thirds their normal annual learning gains. COVID-19 presents a number of new challenges compared to other kinds of emergencies. Khan Academy, the most successful provider of free online learning resources, has launched new tutoring programs to improve the quality of learning for students using its product. The federal E-Rate program supports broadband connectivity and other digital learning infrastructure for schools and libraries, and during the COVID-19 crisis schools can purchase additional bandwidth to improve remote learning. As seen in West Africa during the Ebola crisis, school closures mean the loss of protection for those most vulnerable, including girls. In addition, state accountability systems use student attendance rates as a key performance metric for establishing school ratings and determining sanctions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the cost of mitigation strategies may rise as high as $442 per student. Now that most states have experienced COVID-19 outbreaks among those students who attend classes in person full time or in a hybrid model, the question of liability has become more pressing. Ministers, educators, communities, families, and learners will all have to make decisions in a context of “radical uncertainty.” To assist decision-making during the pandemic, we highlight six things that you as a minister of education should consider as you plan. Explain what you do know—and what you do not. As you learn from the experience of others, also consider how you are learning from this crisis: What evidence can you collect that will help others now and in the future? Required federal testing affects schools’ ratings in state accountability systems, potential school closures, funding, and myriad other decisions affecting students and teachers. Many governments have ordered institutions to cease face-to-face instruction for most of their students, requiring them to switch, almost overnight, to online teaching and virtual education. Conducting employee performance reviews during the pandemic requires flexibility and communication to maintain morale and productivity in the workforce. According to analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 45 states adhered to ACIP guidelines for phase “1A” vaccination, focused on long-term care residents and health care workers. In addition, fall “count days” have long served as key moments in determining the amount of funding each school receives based on the number of students present on a statutorily determined-date. While you won’t be able to deliver your planned policies and interventions in the coming period, senior education leaders during past crises suggest that you need to ask carefully: What you can do, now, in this context, with your resources, to keep your country moving towards these goals? State approaches to instructional time include: State approaches to attendance collection and requirements for accountability systems include: State legislatures have also addressed attendance and instructional time through legislation. Learning Loss, Assessments and Accountability, COVID-19: Education Bill Tracking Database, general liability insurance would not include COVID-19-related claims, National Governor’s Association: State Reopening Plan Database, Center for Reinventing Public Education: State Response Database, Center for Reinventing Public Education: School District Response Database, CDC – Indicators for Dynamic School Decision-Making, COVID-19 School Response Dashboard (Case Tracker), Council of Chief State School Officers: Considerations for Teaching and Learning. CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices – Interim Recommendation for Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine, Rockefeller Foundation – State and Territory Alliance for Testing, CDC – COVID-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook for Jurisdiction Operations, Rockefeller Foundation – Taking Back Control: Resetting America’s Response to COVID-19, New England Journal of Medicine – The Missing Piece: SARS-CoV-2 Testing and School Reopening, NCSL Magazine – States Use CARES Act Funds to Address Digital Divide, NCSL Blog – Remote Learning Creates Tradeoffs for Education Policymakers, State Education Technology Directors’ Association - Priorities, Federal Communications Commission – E-Rate Program, Center for Reinventing Public Education – Pandemic Pods Database, RAND Corporation – The Digital Divide and COVID-19. EdTech businesses have flourished, and educational institutions have embraced B2B EdTech tools to deliver instruction through online learning. Even in the richer countries, schools provide social services that are difficult to replace—in Los Angeles for example, a majority of children rely on school meal programs; in New York, homeless children rely on schools for bathing and laundry. Pew Research has found that as many as 15% of school-age children lack in-home connectivity, and this number doubles for students in families with income below $30,000. Absenteeism is associated with other negative consequences for students, including worse performance in coursework and on standardized tests, lower college attendance rates, reduced lifetime earnings, and increased incarceration rates. UNICEF has issued guidance that provides a checklist with detailed information about how to preserve the safety of teachers and school leaders when calling them into active service. In the pandemic, they are arguing for performance- and project-based testing as opposed to the typically required exams. In California, the State Board of Education. These dedicated COVID-19 briefings for children recently held by the prime minister of Norway and the prime minister of New Zealand helped show students that their governments care about the effect this pandemic is having on their education. Clearly define the role of school leaders in crisis response. Fall studies suggest substantial variations, but clear losses across states: most students are behind where students stood last year, particularly in math, and student performance in schools with a majority of students of color may lag other schools by at least ten percentage points. As the FDA moved toward its December authorization of multiple COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use, discussion centered on plans for vaccine distribution and prioritization. These recommendations, and much public debate, also address whether states should hold schools and families accountable for student attendance during the pandemic. Some state legislatures have included additional funds for K-12 schools in order to support safer in-person instruction. A protective response is to allow for automatic promotion (in K-12 education) while ensuring earmarked places and remediation for disadvantaged populations in future admissions processes. Who can help you to do this? The COVID-19 “mess” for education is a unique one. These bills include: Other states have responded to concerns that school districts’ general liability insurance would not include COVID-19-related claims. Paycor provides an all-in-one solution focused around Human Capital Management. One silver liner that evolved during these uncertain times was the implementation of education technologies by institutions to revive and survive this pandemic. Educators responding to an October Education Week survey reported that unexcused absences doubled after the onset of the pandemic. Maintaining the standard instructional time requirement during distance learning (e.g. Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) analysis showed that more than half of school districts began the year with some form of hybrid or distance learning, but that students living in or near poverty were more likely than their higher-income peers to start the school year remotely. The process typically starts with a reading assignment from Modern Cabinetmaking, the … Analysis by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) found that fewer than half of districts were operating fully in-person in fall of 2020, with a significant rural-urban divide in mode of operation. The reasons behind that spike are varied, but there’s no denying that more applications mean more competition.. What will you do to ensure the health, safety, and wellbeing of your staff during the crisis? However, remote learning has not been deployed uniformly. For more information on testing and vaccination, please consult NCSL’s Health Program. It is difficult to predict when the next influenza pandemic will occur or how severe it will be. Another study found inconclusive effects of school reopening on COVID-19 in communities with high rates of transmission. Crisis leadership also means listening carefully to your people, to their concerns, and to their ideas and solutions, however small. illness or death is more likely to result than during seasonal flu. Exams across West Africa were cancelled last week in response to the pandemic. Most experts conclude that schools may not operate normally until next school year at the earliest. Denver, CO 80230 As Fernando Reimers and his collaborators note in their book Letters to A New Minister of Education, your job as an education minister is now to “make sense of the mess”—to turn a series of interrelated challenges into a series of organized and prioritized problems and then into a strategy for action. CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. Published announcements like this circular issued by a Canadian school board or these guidelines released by the Ministry of Education in Kenya are a good start. However, while there are new challenges, many of the issues you should consider have been well described in many different guidelines related to education in emergencies provided by INEE, the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies, and condensed into this simplified guidance by Harvard. This homework gap extends to the devices to which students have access: Black, Hispanic, and low-income students are more likely to try to complete schoolwork on a cell phone rather than a desktop or laptop computer. Think now about seeding plans for bringing those most likely to drop out back into school. Risk and risk management is something that we all face and all deal with every day, whether we own a business, whether we are part of government, or whether or not we even think about it in our daily lives. Public broadcasting and social media can help amplify your messages. CDC – When Vaccines Are Limited, Who Gets Vaccinated First? However, fully remote instruction has raised concerns that students without broadband access, students of color, low-performing students, and low-income students may fall behind their peers. Second: focus on things that are within your control, and make sure education has space within the government’s crisis planning. This blog has benefited enormously from a recent series by Harvard’s Matt Andrews, in the Building State Capability blog. In particular, policymakers debated how to balance prioritizing vaccines for essential front-line workers, including teachers and school staff, versus older adults who are more susceptible to severe outcomes from COVID-19. Later analysis showed that through the fall, urban districts with larger populations of students of color were significantly more likely to continue remote instruction. Allowing districts to determine their attendance policy (e.g. NCSL Blog – Leveraging Afterschool and Summer to Help Students Catch Up, Keep Up, NCSL Webinar – Pandemic Learning Loss and Approaches to Summer Learning, Northwest Evaluation Association – Learning During COVID-19: Initial Findings on Students’ Reading and Math Achievement and Growth, National Center for the Improvement of Education Assessment – Rethinking School Accountability for the 2020-2021 School Year, McKinsey & Co. – COVID-19 and Student Learning: The Hurt Could Last a Lifetime, McKinsey & Co. – COVID-19 and Learning Loss: Disparities Grow and Students Need Help, Center for Reinventing Public Education – Learning As We Go: Principles for Effective Assessment During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Attendance Works – Attendance Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic, National Governor’s Association – State Reopening Plan Database, Education Commission of the States – Instructional Time Requirements (50-state comparison), Education Week – Five Things You Need To Know About Student Absences During COVID-19, NCSL Database: State Action on Coronavirus Relief Funds, NCSL Database: State Education Legislation Addressing COVID-19, Higher Education Responses to Coronavirus, Education Finance in the Time of COVID-19, NCSL Blog: How States Are Using CARES Act Funds to Support K-12 Education, NCSL Policy Brief: Addressing Social and Emotional Needs During COVID-19: Emerging Themes in School Reopening Guides. We have limited information about the likely path of the pandemic. Tying the method of instruction that districts may use to coded levels of infection, without specifying the metrics used to determine those levels (e.g. As case counts have risen in rural communities, more rural districts have considered or moved to remote or hybrid instruction, prompting concerns that a lack of broadband access may affect students’ ability to learn. Duty of care to your employees. However, widespread school closures indicate more robust testing and contact tracing may be needed to curb the spread of COVID-19 in schools and return students to the classroom. Leading public health experts argue that states and local governments should prioritize opening schools ahead of bars, restaurants and other businesses. Many African ministries have extensive WhatsApp groups through which they communicate to school heads and staff. Among states that have established their phase 1B and 1C vaccination plans, approaches include: States also acted to develop testing plans, submitted to the CDC. Children with special needs often receive specialist care in school settings. The COVID-19 crisis continues to rattle K-12 education into 2021. Use the filtering options to narrow your search by resource type, or by subject area. Although increased availability of rapid tests may aid in detecting COVID-19 outbreaks and reducing the spread of the virus, public health officials warn that testing must be part of a broader strategy, including mitigation measures like masks, sanitation and, eventually, vaccination for school staff and teachers. Reports of districts, schools or student cohorts moving from in-person to remote learning due to cases of COVID-19 have been widespread, and with cases rising in much of the country such changes are likely to continue. In addition, the agency released a set of indicators based on local COVID-19 transmission and test positivity rates for district leaders to use in making reopening decisions. State plans include diverse approaches to making reopening decisions, including: Although state plans place requirements and provide recommendations to districts on many reopening-related topics, in much of the country closure and reopening decisions remain a localized, district-level affair. The CDC offers guidelines for in-person learning, including the use of masks, screening for symptoms, testing and protecting staff from exposure. It’s planned out. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions. Changing circumstances and competing concerns indicate a fluid and uncertain landscape moving into the spring semester. The tricky question of exams. Generous inputs were also provided by Luis Crouch, Barbara Bruns, Ben Piper, staff at Room to Read, and Professors Scott Davies and Janice Aurini. Prioritizing all individuals 65 and over prior to frontline workers, including school staff, for phase 1B vaccination (e.g. To decrease the spread of COVID‐19, restriction of antimicrobial agents changed from being paper‐based to an electronic process. In addition to keeping businesses running from home during the pandemic, they have to … On Dec. 22, 2020, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) updated its recommendations for vaccine distribution: frontline workers, including school staff, are included in group “1B,” along with individuals 75 and older. For now, just a few points to keep in mind: Address the needs of the most vulnerable children and youth. 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