Struggles for educational equity in the United States (US) and South Africa (SA), particularly with regard to race, class, and ethnicity, remain significant and have become even more critical during and following the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. Many scholars have focused on the daily struggles of school-aged children, indicating that millions in each nation are homeless, food insecure, and without health care. Moreover, schools often serve critical social reproduction functions in addition to their primary role of advancing learning by providing feeding schemes, computers and internet connectivity, and, in many cases, essential childcare for workers. Since 2020, the pandemic and lockdowns negatively impacted the education delivery system in both countries by enhancing the socio-economic and digital divides. Both countries struggled to provide equitable access to quality education for all children, regardless of their socio-economic status (SES) or geographic location. Through a comparative lens, we analyze attempts by the US and SA to address racial and economic divides over the past decades, and particularly during the pandemic and its disruptions, to better understand the mechanisms education systems used to address stakeholder inequalities. After a brief overview of the historical paths to greater social and economic equality made by both nations the paper explores the significant roles that race, ethnicity, and SES continue to play in determining access to quality education, especially during times of disruptions such as the recent pandemic. It also asks if the economic divide has become the more powerful and consistent factor determining access to well-resourced schools. The paper concludes by asking if patterns of historical racial and ethnic inequalities are now being replaced by an even greater economic divide that continues to provide patterns of unequitable education for children based on their race, ethnicity, SES, and access to supportive resources. [For the complete Volume 21 proceedings, see ED629259.]