School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Round 5, Plateauing Services in America’s Schools
American Enterprise Institute
May 22, 2020
Key Points
- This is the fifth report in the “School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic” series, covering changes that occurred in public school districts between April 24 and May 8, 2020.
- For the first time since we began collecting data for AEI’s COVID-19 Education Response Longitudinal Survey, many education-related services offered in schools have plateaued, meaning they were offered by similar percentages of schools two weeks earlier.
- Only 6 percent of schools in districts we surveyed changed the date of their last day of school—most of which moved up the last day of school by one or two weeks.
- To determine students’ final report card grades, 22 percent of schools implemented a pass/fail policy to replace traditional letter grades. Similarly, policies in more than a fifth of schools ensure student grades “can only go up” from when the pandemic started.
Introduction
Schools across the country are approaching the final weeks of the academic year. For many students and teachers, this will mark the end of one of the most unusual semesters in recent memory. The majority of the nation’s school buildings closed in mid-March due to COVID-19, and by late March, all school buildings closed.
These rapid and unplanned building closures left school leaders no choice but to create ways to offer educational services remotely. Most schools sprung into actions, developing and implementing remote learning plans by the end of March or early April. Some school districts took longer, waiting to develop plans until late April.
Now that schools are so close to the end of their academic year (indeed, the school year in some districts has already ended), few are implementing new educational services. Almost 70 percent of schools will have ended the academic year by June, and thus, attention will quickly shift to developing new operations for the coming fall. Many unanswered questions remain on how schools and teachers will rectify the lost instruction time during the pandemic—a challenge that educators will grapple with in the months ahead.