This study examined the impact of COVID-19 on academic "redshirting" in kindergarten, the practice of holding a child back for a year and enrolling them in kindergarten at age 6, using student-level data on all Delaware kindergarten students from fall 2014 through fall 2022. The rate of redshirting declined by 40% in fall 2020, then…

The COVID-19 crisis caused the educational system's sudden and drastic upheaval as parents were forced to decide where their children would attend school and how they would get there. These decisions were complicated by the uncertainty surrounding what type of online or hybrid schooling districts would offer, the health risks of different…

In this paper, we investigate how student enrollment in public schools is different after the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the pandemic--between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years--about 12 percent of public elementary schools and 9 percent of middle schools experienced more than a 20 percent decline. This is a significant change from before the…

This article discusses how both Catholic schools and the teachers within them illustrated a commitment to living out tenets of the common good as a result of Catholic schools' choices during the COVID-19 pandemic era. Teachers in Catholic schools became adaptive leaders as a result of Catholic schools' choice to provide consistent in-person…

Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. students attend rural schools. Researchers report that at least half of public schools are rural in 12 states (i.e., Montana, South Dakota, Vermont, North Dakota, Maine, Alaska, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Mississippi) (Showalter et al., 2019). Providing quality education to all rural students is a…

Charter schools have continued to draw an increasingly larger share of the students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), such that as of October 2021, 23.6% (n=77,662) of the District's students attended a charter school (Urdegar, 2021). This growth can be accounted for by examining changes to the proportion of the students enrolled at…

"Making the Grade analyzes the condition of public school funding in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The current report presents a picture of school funding in 2020-2021, the first full school year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the most recent data available. The report ranks and grades each state on three measures to answer the…

This report focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic in the Kalamazoo Public Schools District in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which closed its doors to students from mid-March 2020 to June 2021. During this time, instruction transitioned from face-to-face to virtual, with students having three options for virtual instruction. In addition to individual KPS student…

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. We study changes in families' choices of school sector using longitudinal student-level administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative data from the…

To prepare for the future, state policymakers can learn from the past -- specifically, the Great Recession and the COVID-19 Recession. Drawing on lessons learned from both time periods, the authors of this brief set out to answer the following questions: (1) What lessons from past economic crises might help state policymakers and advocates prepare…

Nationwide, public schools began to experience a youth population decline prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. After 14 years of successively smaller U.S. birth cohorts, elementary public schools now face gradually declining student counts. The complex convergence of shifting age demographics, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing…

This completely updated edition of "The Almanac of American Education" helps users understand and compare the quality of education at the national, state, and county levels. Compiled from official U.S. government sources, this book contains historical and current data, insightful analysis, and useful graphs that provide compelling…

For more than a quarter century, Michigan public schools have been financed under a structure commonly known as Proposal A. This funding system's greater dependence on using state revenue to finance an enrollment-based funding formula has led to greater parity among districts over time and fueled more publicly supported schooling options for…

Background: This paper considers a new policy and statistical framework for evaluating K-12 schools and policies that aligns with diversity, equity, and inclusion values. The new approach broadens the standard approach to accountability and evaluation by combining features of evaluation and multi-level growth models with approaches used in systems…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has gathered highlights from a variety of data sources to provide a composite, high-level view of the complex American education landscape since the onset of the pandemic. In this first installment of the pandemic data hub, NCES provides findings related to: (1) changes in in-person instruction…