The recent passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) is infusing America's K12 public schools with unprecedented, desperately needed relief funds to aid in the academic recovery of students in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The $122 billion allocated to K-12 public schools represents over seven times current annual Title I funding. As a…

The 2022 National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) data provide a window into how the landscape of American education has shifted over the past two years in response to COVID-19-related school disruption. Between 2020 and 2022--a period marred not only by the health and safety worries that COVID brought but also by the heated debates about…

Education officials have long hoped that the statewide academic assessments most students take each year could be used not only for accountability but also to guide instruction. Congress established the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) program in 2015 to help address this goal, offering up to seven states temporary flexibility…

This appendix volume supplements "Evaluating the Federal Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority: Early Implementation and Progress of State Efforts to Develop New Statewide Academic Assessments. Evaluation Report. NCEE 2023-004" analyzing the early progress of the first five assessment systems participating in the Innovative…

Education officials have long hoped that the statewide academic assessments most students take each year could be used not only for accountability but also to guide instruction. Congress established the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) program in 2015 to help address this goal, offering up to seven states flexibility from…

Regular attendance is essential to providing students with opportunities to learn. State and local education agencies (SEAs and LEAs) play a crucial role in tracking, measuring, and addressing student attendance. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic affected the way that many SEAs and LEAs collect attendance data. This resource highlights…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate the status of technology integration in K-12 music classrooms after the onset of COVID-19 across four states in the southeast. Music teachers in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi completed an online survey concerning their technology use, comfort levels with technology, training…

Employing phenomenology as a methodological framework, this study sought to capture and understand, from a first-person point of view, what parents, teachers, and administrators in U.S. high-needs K-12 schools experienced related to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual interviews were conducted on a video conferencing platform…

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way that families and policymakers view K-12 education. Learning loss is having an outsized impact on students who were furthest from opportunity before the pandemic. And families are increasingly looking for new educational options for their children. For decades, access to educational options…

In this study, researchers examined Louisiana public school teacher's perspectives to learn about their perceptions and experiences with remote instruction, including literacy education, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. Through an inquiry-based approach, researchers considered the role of technology and literacy education prior to and…

Research says that teacher diversity benefits all students, regardless of race or Ethnicity. However, while the majority of students in the U.S. are of color, only about 20% of teachers are of color. Increasing the racial and cultural diversity of the teacher workforce takes a statewide commitment to collecting and analyzing educator workforce…

Nutrition insecurity is especially seen among historically underserved populations, such as those with limited financial resources. Funded by the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and conducted by Cooperative Extension through land-grant institutions in all U.S. states and territories and the District of Columbia, the…

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's (SHEEO) "Communities of Practice" project builds upon SHEEO's ongoing efforts to measure the capacity and effective use of state postsecondary data systems and provides states with opportunities to develop solutions to common issues with those systems. The sixth Community of…

Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to "virtual learning" was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do…

This report evaluates the COVID-19 situation after the release of the report, "A Blueprint for Back to School," which offered a framework for safely reopening schools in the fall. The report reflected the insights from 20 former federal officials, state school chiefs, and superintendents, many drawing on their experiences leading…