The COVID-19 pandemic and recovery period is a unique opportunity to understand contemporary issues in high school reform. Evidence has clearly demonstrated lingering COVID impacts on adolescent students that have deepened pre-existing inequities and worsened teen mental health. There's a natural desire to regain normalcy after the pandemic. But…

In the summer of 2022, the Center on Reinventing Public Education convened a panel of education and youth development experts to take stock of recent efforts to address students' mental health and well-being and to reestablish core elements of social and emotional learning (SEL) in schools. The panel agreed that the pandemic's impact has been…

As stress and disruption have intensified for students over the past two years due to the pandemic, so has interest in and spending on social-emotional learning (SEL) in public education. Also mounting in some places is confusion about what SEL is and a lack of clarity about how, exactly, to implement SEL in sustainable, effective ways. In a time…

As the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools across the country in 2020, Washington state's emergent charter sector was growing. During this time, charter enrollment was growing by 28% each year, on average, and the number of schools in operation doubled from eight to 16. The new schools that opened were planned long before the pandemic. But even…

Since March 2020, Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has tracked remote learning trends in school districts across the country. In this brief, we look at how our nationally representative sample of 477 school districts attended to students' social-emotional learning and well-being in fall 2020. Students' social-emotional learning and…

This report is part of a series that aims to provide a definitive account of the best available evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected America's students. The series is part of a broader effort, the Evidence Project, which brings together researchers and policymakers to advance solutions-oriented analysis of the K-12 response to the…

In mid-June, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), in partnership with the Reinvention Lab powered by Teach For America, gathered a "change-maker" group of students, educators, and education leaders. The people who gathered were committed to a learner-centered, radically different future of education. The question posed to…

The COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures led to unprecedented academic setbacks for all American students. In this third State of the American Student report, attention is turned to how the pandemic impacted--and continues to impact--special or unique populations of students, such as those with learning differences, English language…

This report draws on data the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has collected and synthesized over the course of the pandemic. It outlines the contours of the crisis American students faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and begins to chart a path to recovery and reinvention for all students--which includes the essential work of building…

This paper draws from the Center on Reinventing Public Education's (CRPE's) study of pandemic pods conducted in 2020 and 2021 to understand what lessons can be drawn from the focused implementation of the whole-child approach in pandemic learning communities and to what degree these lessons are applicable to traditional schooling. The majority of…

Student surveys found that the educational experience in the first months of the pandemic was a mess. As schools quickly implemented remote learning last spring, many students experienced little meaningful online instruction and were unhappy with online classes. This brief from the Evidence Project synthesizes new student surveys that have come…

The pandemic affected the lives and social-emotional experiences of every student to some extent. Along with the unprecedented closures of schools across the country in March 2020, virtually all social activities ceased. Students were cut off from their teachers, with uneven access to live instruction and hands-on, collaborative learning. There…

When the pandemic forced schools to move online, no one was prepared. It was a true crisis, but out of crisis often comes innovation and discovery. That is exactly what a fall 2020 nationally representative survey from the American School District Panel, a collaboration between RAND, CRPE, Chiefs for Change, and Kitamba, found. A RAND report…