This project is part of the American School District Panel (ASDP), a research partnership between the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (CRPE). This report concludes research on five school systems to reveal the academic, social, and political challenges…

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the U.S. education system in both immediate and long-term ways, calling into question how K-12 accountability will function in the 2020-21 school year and well into the future. States face considerable uncertainty about how to meet federal and state accountability requirements for this school year and beyond. It…

When public schools closed their doors in the spring of 2020, an estimated 3 million students went missing from formal schooling of any sort. During the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, a mixture of public confusion and mistrust of guidelines coming from state and federal authorities led to a churn of reopening and reclosing schools. However,…

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…

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…