COVID-19’s Impact on Education and Workforce Policy

Jan. 26, 2022

Children have more anxiety, challenging behavior, hunger, and mental health needs. Educators say they’ll need more support to succeed in kindergarten and first grade.

Early childhood educators at schools around the country say children are exhibiting more challenging behavior and more anxiety this school year. Children are quicker to cry, have trouble sharing, and need assistance problem-solving and waiting their turn, all of which causes disruptions in classrooms. In interviews, educators expressed concern these delays will impact children’s ability to successfully transition into kindergarten and first grade and that more interventions are needed.

Educators attribute these delays to missed opportunities for development and to trauma from the pandemic itself.

Oct. 29, 2021

For parents raising children in the immigrant neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles, getting their families through the early days of the coronavirus pandemic required hustle. When shopping districts closed, parents who usually worked the vendor carts sold masks on street corners. Families living together in one bedroom logged children into school on cell phones. And when shelves emptied of food and diapers, parents called Hope Street.

In one Los Angeles neighborhood, a model of holistic care run by a health system serves children by supporting adults and stabilizing the community. Schools should pay attention.

Oct. 18, 2021

Of the 33 states surveyed, enrollment data showed that 10,000 public schools lost at least 20 percent of their kindergarten students from the fall of 2019 to the fall of 2020. The decline was most dramatic for families earning below and slightly above the poverty line.

Pre-K enrollment fared even worse. According to an analysis of preliminary federal data by NPR, while kindergarten enrollment fell an average of nine percent over the past year, pre-K enrollment fell 22 percent, with the highest drops in enrollment reflected in families with the lowest incomes.

In response to this crisis, New America and EducationCounsel released a toolkit of policy recommendations that offer state and local solutions as well as available funding streams to support young children’s transitions to school this fall and to plan for future years.

Starting in preschool and kindergarten, chronic absence (missing 10 percent of the school year or just two days each month for any reason) is an indicator that students are off-track for learning. Chronic absence, starting with entry to school, is both a leading indicator and cause of educational inequity. Left unaddressed, high rates of chronic absence predict adverse consequences for learning. Chronically absent kindergartners are less likely to read on grade level, more likely to continue to be chronically absent, and more likely to be retained.

For the four-year-olds attending Oakland Unified’s summer pre-K program, this is the first time many of them are learning with their teachers and classmates together in the same room.

Oakland Unified closed for in-person instruction in March of 2020 and opened school buildings again over a year later in a hybrid model, with a few hours per day of in-person instruction. The schedule was difficult for most working families and attendance was low.

The district has been investing in its youngest students as part of an initiative to strengthen Oakland’s early childhood systems since 2015, and now, in the next phase of the pandemic, the district is leaning on those systems to make sure schools are ready to support young children when they return in the fall.

July 26, 2021

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlights the difficulties inherent in remote kindergarten and points out challenges facing schools as most children prepare to return to in-person learning this fall. While kindergarten is typically viewed as the formal entry into K-12 education, many children slated to attend kindergarten in the 2020-21 school year experienced a very different kind of kindergarten year, one in which hands-on learning with peers was replaced by laptops and video sessions. The article points out that such an unusual experience could have long-term consequences for young children since it’s in kindergarten that students typically learn important social skills, such as taking turns and cooperating with peers.

Such an unusual kindergarten year poses difficulties not just for the students themselves, but also for states and districts as they prepare to welcome students back to fully in-person learning. Some experts are predicting a surge of kindergarten students this school year as parents who decided to delay the start of school due to the pandemic are now enrolling their children.

July 22, 2021

This summer, state and local leaders are putting plans into action for transitioning into a new school year—after an extraordinarily challenging couple of years. Leaders should prioritize policies that address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children, families, and educators and support their transitions back into classrooms this fall and beyond. This is a moment not to “return to normal,” but instead reimagine early childhood through elementary school and be bold about the system changes and investments needed to ensure effective and supportive transitions.

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children, families, and educators and the importance of transition was the impetus for a new project and collaboration between New America and EducationCounsel.

March 26, 2021

K-12 school districts across the country are currently faced with a good problem: an unprecedented infusion of federal funding that needs to be spent quickly provided via the pandemic relief package. Districts must use at least 20 percent of this funding to address student “learning loss” through out-of-school time programming, like summer learning.

As districts sprint to design their summer programs, they would be wise to target investments beyond the group of older elementary and middle school students for whom we have data on learning loss and include young children transitioning into and currently enrolled in kindergarten…

Feb. 26, 2021

Congress is currently debating how much additional funding to give to struggling pre-K providers and elementary schools as part of a new coronavirus relief package. Current proposals primarily focus on support to keep early childhood programs open, to help public schools reopen, and to aid public schools with older students’ learning recovery. What gets overlooked in these discussions is the importance of investing in high-quality learning opportunities for young children during early childhood and in kindergarten…

As schools face enormous challenges, a new budget proposal in California brings the possibility of investment crucially needed for young children.

Like child care, public pre-K for three- and four-year-olds enables parents of young children to return to the workforce. A study of DC’s lauded universal pre-K program showed that it has resulted in more mothers in the workforce, which is particularly important given that this recession is being termed a “she-cession” for its outsized impact on women.

Special education pre-K teachers are trying everything they can to build connections with their students. Against all odds, some are succeeding.

Early childhood education at a distance is far from ideal. Since March, students, educators, and families have grappled with technology challenges, a lack of socialization, and a new structure of digital learning which, at times, is at odds with what decades of research has shown to be best for young children. Despite this massive interruption to children’s pre-K and kindergarten experiences, early childhood educators are taking innovative approaches to ensuring that their virtual classrooms remain developmentally appropriate, engaging, and joyful for their young learners.

Survey highlights how widespread the disruption caused by the pandemic has been for California’s young children, particularly DLLs.

Earlier this month, the Alliance for Early Success released Build Stronger: A Child Care Policy Roadmap for Transforming Our Nation’s Child Care System, a report based on findings from a workgroup of state early childhood policy advocates and national policy organizations. The report presents an ambitious, but doable path through the pandemic and for the future.

Six months into the coronavirus pandemic, many of California’s family child care providers have still not reopened. Experts wonder if they ever will.

Kindergarten entry assessments (KEAs), sometimes referred to as kindergarten readiness assessments (KRAs), have begun. KEAs gauge students’ skills in literacy, language, and math, as well as social-emotional and physical development, within the first few months of kindergarten. The ongoing, authentic nature of KEAs is among their greatest strengths, but both observations and direct assessments can be difficult to perform during a pandemic.

For students across the grade span, school is starting in front of a computer screen. But, what does distance learning mean for our youngest learners? To help answer that question, we spoke with Jamie Miles, Chief of Schools, and Natasha Parrilla, Director of Communications & Early Learning Initiatives, at AppleTree in Washington, DC

How Two San Antonio Schools are Navigating Reopening

A funders collaborative in Washington, D.C. came together in response to COVID-19 to create a new $1 million fund to provide four months of sustained support for 115 licensed home-based child care programs and small child care centers. We interviewed Marica Cox Mitchell who is the Director of Early Learning for the Bainum Family Foundation and was deeply involved in conceiving the reopening fund.

Sept. 7, 2021

Opponents of mask mandates for preschool and elementary-school children have expressed concern that wearing masks will impair children’s ability to learn language and socialize — or worse, that (in the words of one anxious parent in Utah) it will “rewire their brains.” Even parents who support mask mandates often worry about how a school year without smiles and frowns might negatively affect their children.

These concerns are understandable but unwarranted.

Oct. 4, 2021

The vast majority of students are now back in the classroom, and for some students, this is the first in-person schooling they’ve experienced in over a year (or the first ever for the youngest students). As schools begin the long process of helping students and families transition back to school, it can be helpful to understand how parents are feeling about the return to in-person learning to gain a better understanding of what schools can do to help families and students have a successful school year in 2021-2022 and beyond.

Sept. 14, 2021

Do you have concerns about whether students and families in your community or school have adequate, consistent access to the internet and digital devices? A new resource, Learning at Home While Under-Connected: A Toolkit for Parent Discussions and Data Collection in Your Community, is now available to help organizations get beyond the simple “yes or no” answers that come with typical surveys of internet access.

July 2, 2021

Roughly 62,596 years of instruction—or about 11 million days—were lost to out-of-school suspensions in the 2015-16 school year. By now, it is widely understood that this loss is disproportionately carried by boys, students of color, students with disabilities, as well as students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

While these trends predate COVID-19, education leaders caution that there may be a spike in behavioral issues that often lead to disciplinary action as students come back to the classroom with insurmountable levels of trauma and stress due to what they’ve experienced over the last year and half.

June 28, 2021

Too many lower-income families are under-connected, unable to get adequate, reliable internet service, and lacking the up-to-date devices and applications needed to help their kids in school. Second and perhaps even more important: These families greatly value and need connectivity of the non-digital kind as well. Local support from neighborhood organizations and schools was vital to them during the pandemic and continues to be so.

June 23, 2021

Back in April, Secretary of Education Cardona issued a letter to chief state school officers requiring each state to submit a plan outlining how they will allocate the nearly $122 billion that was provided under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) Funds. States had until June 7, 2021 to either submit their plan, or explain what precluded them from submitting a plan by that date and specify a date by which it will be able to submit its complete plan. Although 23 states and Puerto Rico have yet to submit a plan, 28 states (including the District of Columbia) were able to meet the deadline. Several insights can be gleaned from these plans and though they are still under review, an initial analysis revealed that, expenditures aside, states’ narratives included helpful details that bolster our understanding of the impact remote instruction has had on particular groups of students, such as English learners (ELs).

May 14, 2021

COVID-19 upended our education system and challenged schools to re-evaluate many long standing structures and practices. Suspension of standardized testing; free access to distance learning; distributing technological devices and wireless access to students and their families; exceptions to graduation and college entrance exams; extended graduation timelines; and pass/fail grading for an initial time period. These are just a few of the accommodations that have been implemented to soften the impact of COVID-19 on student learning, but to be sure, these ideas are not new.

Many of these approaches stem from instructional strategies used to support students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE)*, a subset of the English learner (EL) subgroup. Prior to the pandemic, SLIFE comprised relatively small numbers in the education system, and supports for these students were often both marginal and in the margins of mainstream education. However, educator and researcher Chris Chang-Bacon argues that COVID-19 has forced us to re-think how we conceptualize the ‘SLIFE’ label beyond our current narrow view. And in doing so, we are able to see that SLIFE policies and practices can be beneficial for other students as well, including the broader English learner population.

May 7, 2021

The 2020 and 2021 federal COVID relief investments are the largest single investments in public elementary and secondary schools in recent history (see graphic below for more details), and schools have wide discretion in spending the funds. And, as in 2008, we’re seeing product vendors directly pitch states and districts to adopt discrete tools to improve teaching and learning, from a kit to help students with “academic recovery” in science to an electronic platform to track instruction and student learning. There could be some value to adopting some of these tools. But to ensure this historic investment leads to historic-level changes and outcomes, states and districts need to think bigger and longer-term. And that means investing in and transforming their approach to the “front line” of public PreK-12 education: educators.

April 28, 2021

By now there is mounting evidence showing that English learners (ELs) have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and distance learning. ELs have been less likely to log-in to class than other students, and given this decrease in attendance, it is no surprise that there has been a sharp increase in failing grades assigned to these students as well. Additionally, a recent U.S. Department of Education survey found that ELs were less likely to be receiving in-person instruction, despite widespread recognition that they should be prioritized when school buildings re-open.

The federal government has approved $190 billion in relief funding for the K-12 education system. However, as our team recently wrote, we have yet to see how these funds will be put to use to help ELs get back on track. Here are key pitfalls to avoid and recommendations schools and districts should consider to ensure they are maximizing their ability to boost ELs’ learning…

April 8, 2021

As the anniversary of the nation-wide shutdown passes the one-year mark, many California school systems have taken steps to ensure English learners (ELs) remain prioritized and unforgotten. ELs in California represent 20 percent of the K-12 population and 60 percent of children 5 and under speak a language other than English at home. Teachers have been tasked with coming up with creative new ways to engage students virtually—a daunting assignment for even the most technologically savvy educator. District leaders are similarly rising up to the challenge and reinforcing their support of ELs, both in the virtual classroom and at home.

English Learners have been among the most vulnerable during this time of educational crisis…

March 30, 2021

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) was signed into law on March 12, 2021. The $1.9 trillion package is the largest stimulus package that’s passed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and includes $130 billion for elementary and secondary schools, $40 billion for higher education and $40 billion for early childhood education. It is also the first stimulus package to include funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), an additional $3 billion dollars.

It’s a win, but it’s still not enough…

March 19, 2021

Having incomplete scores for English Learners’ language proficiency seemed like the least of schools' worries, especially as the U.S. Department of Education (ED) waived testing and accountability requirements for the year. No one could have guessed that schools would still be closed well into the 2020-21 school year and that states would still be unclear about whether and how to proceed with administering ELP assessments.

It wasn’t until last month that the acting assistant secretary of education finally weighed in, directing states to move forward with statewide assessments (with considerable wiggle room to account for local context). Despite this directive, ELs’ participation in the ELP assessment this year is far from guaranteed…

March 22, 2021

As many local school districts in California move to reopen their doors for in-person instruction, parents and policymakers focus on the academic losses they fear kids have incurred after a full year of distance learning. There’s talk of extra summer school, increasing instructional time, and adding academic support services to make sure kids don’t fall below grade-level.

But in at least one district in San Jose, they are taking a different approach—one that puts the well-being of students and the school community front and center. And they have evidence that it’s working…

March 18, 2021

On March 11, 2021 President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) —the third coronavirus relief package passed since the pandemic started— which included $123 billion relief funding for K-12 public schools. Combined with the previous two stimulus packages, the K-12 education system will receive an additional $190 billion one-time federal funds compared to the $55 billion it usually receives in a typical year.

COVID-relief funding will differ from school to school, district to district, state to state, but since English learners (ELs) are overrepresented in high-poverty schools, this formula will inevitably direct more to schools serving students with these intersecting characteristics…

March 8, 2021

When many schools across the nation moved online in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were new online learning programs to master, different methods needed to engage and assess students, and important access and equity considerations that education leaders needed to address. Most educators recognized they needed new skills to effectively teach in a digital environment…

March 2, 2021

In the past two months, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have made three strides toward addressing the digital divide—actions that are long overdue given how much students and families across the United States need adequate internet access from home during the pandemic…

One year into the pandemic, parents reflect on a full year of remote learning and pandemic parenting and look towards the future.

Crucially important to DLLs’ education entails providing children opportunities to use language in the context of their day-to-day lives, no small feat for educators utilizing virtual learning settings. While the challenges facing teachers and school staff during the pandemic are still ever present, inspirational educators across the state are rising above and beyond to meet these students where they are.

The era of remote instruction brought on by the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated many challenges that schools and families already faced, but perhaps none as widespread as the digital divide—or the gap between those with reliable internet access and those without. When schools around the country shifted abruptly to remote learning this past spring, the roughly 9 million K-12 students in the U.S. without stable home broadband—or the devices to use it—were left to fend for themselves. While some districts attempted to meet these needs for the short-term emergency, rising cases across the country indicate thata sustainable, longer term solution is critical to make remote learning possible for every student.

Teachers are being forced to adapt their typical classroom management strategies for a virtual classroom setting they never anticipated. Teachers and school leaders can and should insist on common-sense behavioral guidelines to help ensure a productive virtual learning environment for all students.

Months before COVID-19, the FCC voted to loosen broadcasters’ obligations to carry core “educational and informative” content across their networks. Little did they realize that in just a matter of months, schools across the country would morph into remote learning modalities, placing television and public airwaves in the role of providing educational content for many American families.

Seven months into the coronavirus pandemic, research and reporting continue to paint a grim picture of what English Learners (ELs) are experiencing during school closures. To turn the corner, schools and districts will need more guidance and resources from state leaders.

Our nation has a shameful history of discriminating against people with disabilities. The U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how unprepared our nation’s public health infrastructure is to serve the needs of people with disabilities.

ELs are a fast-growing group and the supply of teachers who are preparing to teach English as a second language (ESL) or bilingual education has long lagged behind the growing demand. This school year, the U.S. Department of Education reported that at least 35 states have a shortage of teachers who are prepared to work with the growing number of ELs.

As teachers around the country tackle distance and blended learning, one of the biggest challenges is making sure all students are supported and able to learn. Fostering a safe, inclusive, and productive learning environment is key to this type of success, but doing so virtually may look different than it does in the physical classroom. Digital technology, change of space, and being disconnected from peers or supportive faculty can be particularly challenging for LGBTQ students and the teachers supporting them. Luckily, Gender Inclusive Classrooms is here to help.

We sought to learn more about the guidance state plans offered specific to English learners (ELs), including identification, reclassification, assessment, instruction, communication with families and more. We read through each state plan and pulled out all of the information related to ELs in an effort to help identify trends and gaps and establish a baseline understanding of how states are addressing the needs of these students. We also identified EL-specific resources on state education agency websites to ensure we captured all of the guidance available to local education agencies and schools.

This guest post by Wendy Oliver, a senior technology integration specialist at Kamehameha Schools, provides a window onto a new type of professional learning that unfolded this summer: teachers gathering online and using remote digital tools to learn how to teach their students with digital tools and in remote settings.

A major part of the challenge in deciding back-to-school plans is the sheer number of factors states and districts must consider quickly, including student and teacher needs, safety, capacity, resources, and importantly, cost. Budget plans for the upcoming school year are typically finalized in the spring, and many districts must now contend with shifting funding priorities while not knowing exactly what costs will be. What does online learning cost in the longer term? Which expenses must be considered? Which resources are needed to ensure that online instruction is as useful, productive, and manageable as possible?

Feb. 15, 2022

Community college enrollment has significantly declined since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decline threatens educational equity and is particularly troubling for adult learners. A group of students disproportionately composed of people of color and people with low incomes, adult students have experienced enrollment declines that have been larger at community colleges than in any other sector of higher education.

To help address this critical problem, the Center on Education & Labor at New America has partnered with six community colleges to help re-enroll adult students who have stopped out of college since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sept. 13, 2021

Since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, thousands of students have dropped out of their community college programs. By spring 2021, enrollment was down almost 10 percent—the biggest decline in all of higher education.

These students, many of them adults with families, were forced to grapple with new childcare responsibilities, lost income and, in many cases, lost jobs. In the spring 2021, over half a million fewer students enrolled in a community college than in spring 2019.

To help address these economic shifts, our team is launching a project to increase the capacity of community colleges to engage or re-engage students whose educational plans were derailed by the pandemic.

July 19, 2021

Like much of the country, we were all in crisis mode. But our state’s higher education leaders and I knew that it would not last forever. We asked ourselves: What can and should higher education look like on the other side of the pandemic? How can we ensure that the pandemic — which has disproportionately impacted communities of color — does not stop students of color from getting a college education? And, in a world of climate change, wildfires, power outages and pandemics, how can we develop a higher education system that stands the test of time?

We did not have the answers to these questions, but we wanted to find out.

In spring 2020, New America and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) partnered on a year-long research project to understand the effect of the confluence of the pandemic, economic crisis, and racial reckoning on America’s colleges and universities. We interviewed over 100 college leaders from across higher education sectors, students, and higher education membership organizations to hear, in their own voices, about the difficulties faced by campus communities.

As we consider the near- and longer-term future of colleges and universities and the students they serve, New America and SHEEO have reflected on what we have learned over the past year. We believe there is an important role for federal and state governments and for institutions to ensure a robust recovery of America’s higher education system, which will be imperative to the growth of the economy. This report details several recommendations for federal, state, and institutional policymakers as we move from crisis to recovery.

June 30, 2021

The stress and strain of this past year fell disproportionately on Black and Latinx students, whose communities were hard hit both by COVID-19 and the ensuing economic crisis. Nationwide, enrollment declined about 4 percent at colleges and universities. Concernedly, that decline stood at 10 percent at community colleges—the open access institutions that serve a plurality of undergraduates in America.

Spring 2021 stands in stark contrast to spring 2020. In just one year, multiple vaccines have hit the market in the United States, finally turning the tide of the pandemic and bringing the hope that we can enter a new normal over the summer and into the fall with college students returning to campus.

The road to recovery, however, will be long.

May 26, 2021

College students experiencing food insecurity often have to make many tough decisions, like choosing between paying rent or purchasing groceries, staying up to study or going to sleep early to suppress hunger, and skipping dinner to afford a meal tomorrow.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 1 in 3 college students faced food insecurity, which means they experienced inconsistent access to enough food. The pandemic has only exacerbated this problem.

May 5, 2021

The American economy is looking better and better. Growth is up, unemployment is down, stocks are rising, and jobs are coming back as more Americans are vaccinated.

But the recovery could be “K-shaped,” splitting into two paths where the more educated and wealthy do better, but the working poor, especially women and people of color, do worse.

Broward College is leveraging partnerships to offer free education and wraparound support for its most vulnerable community members. They believe their model is replicable across other community colleges.

April 5, 2021

Within two weeks, most colleges and universities across the country scrambled to transfer their courses and programs online. While online learning was no new terrain prior to the pandemic, the sudden modality change and the new normal created by the pandemic led many higher education pundits to predict significant enrollment drops. Not as serious as expected, enrollment did decrease this past fall and continued to dwindle in the spring, declining by 4.5 percent year-over-year. At community colleges, however, the decline was much more drastic: nearly 10 percent drop compared to last year.

To understand how the transition online impacted students’ decisions to enroll or stay enrolled at community college, we surveyed current, former, and would-be community college students in December 2020. Reviewing data about online learning, we found that while a majority of students still have doubts about the quality of online classes, they prefer to have a mix of both online and in-person classes.

March 22, 2021

Enrollment is down almost ten percent across community colleges. This spring, declining enrollment has continued disproportionately impacting Indigenous, Black, and Latino students. We wanted to know how colleges are working to bring students–who have left or decided not to attend college–back to school.

New America spoke with leaders representing over 20 community colleges, tribal colleges, community college associations, and state systems over the spring, summer, and fall of 2020…

March 17, 2021

At many colleges and universities, faculty and administrators recognized the unprecedented circumstances the pandemic brought and decided to invoke pass/fail grading policies. This meant that at the end of the semester students received either pass or fail for their work instead of a traditional letter grade. And some colleges continued a version of the policies into the fall semester. The decision to move to pass/fail was the right decision in many cases. Students were already facing increased stress; worrying about grades rather than just learning in a time of crisis would be an unnecessary burden.

But the decision has raised some questions about how it will impact students’ further academic pursuits…

New America and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) held focus groups, fielded public opinion surveys, and engaged in interviews with students, college leadership, and researchers to learn more about what students and colleges faced during the pandemic and how to move forward.

New America and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) have explored the financial impacts of the shift to online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes questions related to institutional financial preparation for an emergency, challenges to university budgets stemming from the transition to online education, and longer-term changes to the university financing model. To answer these questions, we interviewed representatives from professional associations, chief financial officers (CFOs) and senior officials from a diverse mix of public, private, and for-profit institutions and systems of higher education.

We were able to look at the challenges students face during the pandemic and the economic crisis, and why some enrolled or re-enrolled while others did not. First, we’ll explore the concerns that these groups have in common. Then we will look at why stop-outs and aspirants did not enroll and how they compare to our continuers and new students. Finally, we’ll explore what the future holds for enrollments.

As the country continues to face a raging pandemic, the lack of access to stable, high speed internet is having devastating consequences for college students. Luckily, Congress provided a lifeline to many of these students in the COVID relief deal passed into law in December.

A Tracker of Responses from State Higher Education Systems and Agencies

New American and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) partnered to track responses of state higher education agencies and systems on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected state funding for public higher education. The pandemic has depressed economic activity and led to increased costs for states, both of which can affect the availability of funding for public higher education. We will periodically update the tracker as situations change within states.

Predictions for the effects of the pandemic on students enrolled in education after high school were grim from the outset — and new survey data from the Census Bureau confirm that many students, particularly the most vulnerable ones, are struggling right now to continue their education.

Congress hit a stalemate in negotiations over another round of COVID relief early August and left millions of Americans without the support they needed, including the nearly 5 million students who attend Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs).

What happened to enrollment at community colleges this summer in the wake of COVID-19? We are starting to get a clearer picture and it is not pretty. A new report from the National Student Clearinghouse finds that community colleges saw a drop in summer enrollment, particularly for Black students whose enrollment declined by 10 percent compared to last summer. More data and what it will mean.

Many colleges have long been using student surveys to make informed decisions that can improve student learning and experiences. Since the pandemic, the urge for colleges to listen to student voices has amplified. But how should colleges treat student opinions in this case, when their favorability for reopening is at odds with public health evidence?

A Collection of Resources from New America and SHEEO on How to Support and Protect Students

For the 10 percent of college students without a computer, the virtual classes themselves could be inaccessible. Fortunately, all colleges and universities can enact a straightforward fix to get every student a hotspot and a laptop.

Here’s a recap of three aspects of Biden’s plan that focus on community colleges and the critical role they play in higher education access and economic opportunity.

Sept. 9, 2021

Retaining nurses is hard even in the best of times. A recent study found that approximately 17 percent of newly-licensed nurses leave their positions within just a year. Some folks simply move on to another nursing position, but many others leave the profession entirely. We were already seeing nursing shortages in many areas of the country before the pandemic. And after the havoc COVID-19 has unleashed on our health care workforce, a widening nursing shortage could have dire consequences.

Some good news is that we know what works to keep new nurses in the profession and on the front lines of health care, and it’s something long deserving of strong federal investment…

July 28, 2021

DC was recently described as one of the nation’s top cities for summer jobs, but it wasn’t always like this. Challenges and inequities for youth, particularly low income youth of color, have persisted even in the nation’s capital. The pandemic has worsened the conditions by disrupting work opportunities. The Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment program, or MBSYEP, is a six week paid program where youth are placed in industries including federal government, child care, health care, sports and education, and the performing arts. Approximately 10,000 youth ages 14-24 participate in MSYEP each summer, and over 700 employers participated in 2019. Through subsidized partnerships with employers and a well established reputation, MBSYEP is the largest summer youth employment program per capita in the nation and stands as a national model.

June 8, 2021

This week, the Senate is poised to vote on an expansive bipartisan research and development bill that, among other things, would expand eligibility for federal Pell Grants to postsecondary programs as short as eight weeks—down from the current minimum of 15 weeks or 600 clock hours.

Short-term training is an attractive proposition, especially after the massive and sustained levels of unemployment caused by the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis that have disproportionately impacted women and people of color.

Yet the evidence on whether short-term training positions youth and adults to secure good, family-sustaining jobs is mixed.

April 9, 2021

Community colleges across the country have adapted operations to continue welcoming students during the pandemic, no matter the type of program offered. College-connected apprenticeships are no exception. Colleges, employers, and other apprenticeship partners took a variety of strategies to address safety concerns while also prioritizing apprentices’ progress.

On March 1, our CELNA team held a small convening of college-connected apprenticeship leaders who spoke to the challenges and successes the past year has brought them–as well as what they envision for the future in both policy and practice…

April 8, 2021

In January, among a flurry of executive orders from newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden, it was exciting to see a call for developing the U.S. Public Health Job Corps. It’s good policy to make the essential work of halting the COVID-19 pandemic a public service opportunity and to link our need for public health workers to existing national service programs. While the executive order frames this initiative as directly related to ending the pandemic, there is great potential to use such a national service program to strengthen our health care infrastructure for years to come.

Here are a few strategies that the Administration could use to make the Public Health Job Corps more effective at supporting our health care workforce…

April 5, 2021

For many, nursing seems like the perfect career pathway. It is all so logical. Someone with only a high school diploma can become a certified nursing assistant (CNA) in six to twelve weeks. Then, they can use that experience to become a licensed practical or vocational nurse (LPN) in about ten months. After that, with only another one to two years of community college education, they can become a registered nurse (RN).

It makes sense. And it just doesn’t work for the vast majority of people.

A study in California found that only about 20 percent of CNAs went on to get a higher level educational credential, and only around 10 percent became registered nurses within six years…

April 1, 2021

A tragic number of students have vanished from higher education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationwide, there was an almost four percent decline in college enrollment this fall. At community colleges, that decline stood at a steep 10 percent. This spring, declining enrollment has continued, disproportionately impacting Indigenous, Black, and Latino students.

These trends are continuing, compounding inequality and erasing our progress on college access. Across the country, high school students filing for federal financial aid to go to college is down nine percent. This trend is even worse in high schools with more low-income students (down 12 percent) and schools with high concentrations of students of color (down 14 percent).

For many students, the need to make money for their families is driving this exodus. Providing these students with subsidized work study job opportunities on campus, in conjunction with their studies, could bring thousands back to college.

The Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship is featuring profiles of our PAYA Network Members to explore how partnerships across the country are working to launch or expand high-quality youth apprenticeship programs.

This profile highlights GPS Education Partners, a youth apprenticeship program in Wisconsin that has built a sustainable program withstanding economic uncertainty through clear local and state partnerships.

Home care is a notoriously difficult – yet vastly undervalued and underpaid – job in the best of times. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how the work ofhome health aides is truly essential for the wellbeing of our communities.

Introduced last year, Sen. Kamala Harris's 21st Century SKILLS Act can't address the pandemic's employment impacts on its own. But coupled with infrastructure investments that prioritize reemployment in stable, well-paid, and upwardly mobile jobs, it could still help Americans get back on their feet.

In the absence of a large-scale federal workforce investment in response to the COVID-19 economic crisis, some crucial resources could fill a need. The lack of a much-needed COVID relief bill has also meant that our public workforce system is still waiting for the resources it needs to provide job training, career services, and other support to the millions of youth and adults that COVID has left unemployed or underemployed.

The bill currently being negotiated will almost certainly be the last relief bill passed prior to the November elections. However, there are several other bills related to child care that have been recently introduced in Congress that deserve attention and could be revisited after the election, depending on the outcome. Here is an overview of the content and status of several of these other important bills.

As part of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s economic recovery plan, Biden acknowledges that we have a long history of undervaluing care in our country and calls for an investment of $775 billion over 10 years.

An estimated 42 percent of the jobs lost during the pandemic are likely gone for good. While Congress remains rightfully focused on immediate relief, there are hints of what a federal jobs, education, and training recovery package could look like.

Communities across the country must get creative with how to ensure a smooth transition to kindergarten. This summer is a great time to ease the process with these online activities and planning strategies.

Institution-wide online communication strategies can support students during the pandemic.

In a recent report, How You Say It Matters: Communicating Predictive Analytics Findings to Students, we offer research-based guidelines on how institutions, academic advisers, or faculty, should communicate predictive findings to students. The guidance in the report can also be helpful to colleges trying to communicate effectively during this challenging time, as predictive system findings are also communicated online and can be sensitive in nature.

As colleges plan for the fall, they need to create a playbook for their campus housing that protects the most vulnerable first and provides financial assurances to their students.

The Racial Implications of Moving Forward with Collegiate Athletics this Fall

The resurgence of the coronavirus is seeding much controversy about college sports – boiling down to the ethical question of whether NCAA officials will choose wealth over health.

Schools, previously ill-equipped to handle health issues, will need significant support to re-open in person during the pandemic. Recent teacher and current fellow Joseph Hood explains what teachers are most concerned about this fall.

In Hawaii, English Learners (ELs) have faltered due to the pandemic. In California, teachers are concerned that opportunity gaps between ELs and their non-EL peers have grown. In Colorado, school districts have faced challenges in providing EL students with targeted English language development. And in New York, ELs have encountered obstacles to distance learning due to the digital divide.

English learners (ELs) represent 10 percent of K-12 public school students yet still face gaps in accessing high-quality instruction to support their language and academic development. It’s clear from recent headlines that these gaps have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With COVID regaining its spread in hotspots around the country, more than a million workers per week are still filing new claims. The effects on the economy will linger for years to come. So as Congress works toward the development of its next emergency package, how to reinvigorate the economy is at the top of lawmakers’ minds.

Community colleges are particularly well-positioned to help local job seekers and employers get back on their feet by providing high-quality training programs.

This tool meant to help students access emergency CARES Act funds only misleads with out-of-date statistics. Not only is it a waste of time for students struggling financially, it gives them false hope in a particularly vulnerable time.

A number of broadband experts and district leaders to talk through innovative approaches to addressing the 'homework gap,’ a term that refers to the educational disparities caused by inequitable access to home Internet among preK-12 students. Here are a few key takeaways from their conversation.

Based on interviews with eleven community colleges, CTE programs – with their labs, equipment, and clinicals – will need to be provided with social distancing to be considered safe. While most of the colleges we spoke to plan to keep academic programs online or hybrid, they plan to bring their CTE programs back to campus.

The obstacles of emergency learning and remote instruction have become nearly universal, compounding the existing challenges of access to materials through digital learning. Now, as the deadline approaches for CARES Act funding (state applications are due July 1), schools and districts are both looking to understand the best use for these funds and develop concrete plans for remote and blended learning over the coming months and year.

“Our bubbles are a little bigger right now.” That’s how Melissa Colagrosso, director at A Place to Grow Children's Center in Fayetteville, WV, explains social distancing to her little ones. They’ve managed to keep their doors open throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Colagrosso says the children are adjusting to their new reality, but “developmentally it’s not a good lesson because they need to learn to interact.

With the current public health crisis, funding priorities in California have shifted to address the fallout from COVID-19 and budget cuts are already looming.

Federal guidance for ELs clarifies policy mandates but lacks ideas to help shape EL instruction during the coronavirus pandemic.

New guide written by distance learning experts that lays out four possible scenarios (in-person ready for online, online ready for in-person, blended learning, or fully online) that could happen this fall related to schools reopening fully, partially, or not at all, and what school district leaders need to consider for each one. It has considerations for things like:

• Grading and assessments
• Technology
• Teacher professional learning
• Social and emotional support
• Special student populations, and more. 

For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer students, for whom school might be the only safe place, it’s devastating. Research shows that the majority of LGBTQ students depend on key support at school, even—and especially—if they’re not publicly out.

What is the best way to harness technology to support at-home learning for the littlest learners?

Over the past month, several organizations have hosted free webinars to help educators, administrators, and parents of young children figure this out.

As the weeks pass, posts now feature parents expressing their frustrations at trying to balance working from home full-time while supporting children learning at home full-time. Here are two education leaders (and parents) with some advice via video.

We need a strategy to quickly get vulnerable populations back to work. Transitional jobs are a form of temporary, subsidized employment that provides individuals with work that pays a living wage and allows them to gain valuable work experience, strengthen their resume, and build social and professional networks.

This week, as new unemployment numbers rolled in, the national total of people filing for unemployment benefits since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis rose to over 33 million. One program could help solve all three of these problems at once. AmeriCorps.

Bonczyk is Executive Director of Hopkins Early Learning Center in Hopkins, Minnesota. "Before COVID-19 we were full and had a wait list," she says, "We closed down completely for two weeks, [then] when we decided to reopen in a limited capacity we called in ¼ of our staff, ¼ used PTO, and ½ were furloughed. We did apply for Payroll Protection. The money ran out in round one before our application was processed."

Since COVID-19 hit higher education, the nonprofit-college lobbyists for all of higher education have pushed even further, not just against transparency–but against the rules of financial accountability, by asking Congress and the Education Department for a blanket, three-year waiver of the required financial responsibility scores calculated annually by the Department and all associated financial responsibility regulations.

If it seems like it would be short-sighted for policymakers to ignore those requirements,it’s because it would be.

Over 90 percent of Head Start programs have temporarily closed since the COVID-19 outbreak began. These closures include nearly all Migrant and Seasonal Head Start programs, which provide early education, nutrition, and health services to agricultural workers and their families. Agricultural workers, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus and many of whom were excluded from stimulus relief, now have the added strain of finding child care, while Migrant and Seasonal Head Start programs do their best to support families from afar.

Collection of new polling data on COVID-10 and higher education.

Teachers are using creative means to connect with young children and their families. But without school, teachers say children are suffering.

In higher education across the country, the data that predictive algorithms depend on has changed due to the pandemic.

As part of our Child Care and Early Learning Stories and Lessons During COVID-19 project, Kristina Ishmael interviews Lisa Luceno, Senior Director of Early Childhood Strategy for Briya Public Charter School in Washington, DC.

The critical role early childhood educators play has never been more clear. We are collecting stories from the field to uplift the provider/educator voice and elevating lessons from communities, school districts, and states.

The Department published a proposed regulation on distance education and other policies related to innovation in April 2020. On May 4, 2020, New America's Amy Laitinen and Clare McCann submitted public comments that urged the Department not to weaken important consumer protection requirements, noting that the quality of online education has never been more important as institutions and students are forced online by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plan calls for a federal investment of $50 billion to bail out the industry and ensure its long-term survival.

On May 1st, Congress introduced a stimulus bill that authorizes $15 billion for the nation’s public workforce system, which would provide more than twice the amount that was invested in response to the Great Recession.

COVID-19 has exposed deep flaws in the United States’ health system and social social safety net. Tens of thousands have died from the virus—and millions more are at risk of disease, death, and economic devastation.

We can point to countless examples of inequality, from income and wealth gaps to disparities in health care, job protection, and internet access. But alongside them is a growing, society-wide problem: inequality of risk.

When colleges decided to close their campuses this spring as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, among the students that were most affected, besides low-income and homeless students, were international students.

While there have been many stories of challenges in this transition with serious inequities making themselves known even more than before, there are also stories of districts prioritizing the healthy, safety, and well-being of those in their care long before continuous learning is started.

Community colleges are scrambling to adapt to delivering courses online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s not just the classroom that’s adapting.

As millions of Americans face the worst economic downturn of their lifetimes, the coronavirus crisis has laid bare the shortcomings of U.S. social insurance and labor policies—from unemployment to paid leave to health care. Several key reforms can help us come out the other side stronger.

This year’s report comes as states and cities face a looming fiscal crisis.

The federal government should increase funding to community colleges to help America recover from COVID-19.

Do all PreK-12 teachers have Internet access at home? When schools were forced to shut, we asked all the right questions about remote learning, but not enough about home connectivity among teachers.

Congress should act to help student borrowers and both current and prospective higher education students, with policies that will provide real, immediate relief. Here are some things Congress should do to help student borrowers and students in the next coronavirus relief package.

April 15, 2020

Kidango closed its centers in mid-March but has since reopened 10 centers in response to requests from county governments, First Five Santa Clara County, and large health care providers.

April 15, 2020

The 6.6 million new claims brought the total job loss from the COVID-19 crisis up to 17 million in just three weeks. For context, during the Great Recession, which lasted for 18 months, a total of 8.8 million jobs were lost. We cannot afford another sluggish, six-year recovery to get back to where we were earlier this year. This time needs to be different.

April 14, 2020

More help from the federal government is needed to ensure the survival of providers in the long-term.

April 13, 2020

Young people will be hit hard by the coming recession. Overlooking their needs would be a costly mistake.

April 10, 2020

Across the country, early childhood educators were preparing to engage families in conversations about the importance of being counted and teach students about the decennial tradition. Then, the COVID-19 crisis hit.

April 6, 2020

While some states are settling into the second full week of online learning, important questions remain about not only the best methods and tools for remote instruction, but also about who can connect at home and who can’t.

March 31, 2020

The impact of school closures on students with disabilities and their families will be immense and will test our capacity and commitment to serve one of our most vulnerable student populations.

March 31, 2020

Over 4.8 million English learners (ELs) have been impacted by school closures. ELs have unique learning needs and require specialized services to support their language development. As school districts across the country continue to develop strategies for how to best meet the needs of ELs, we have compiled a list of digital resources to help supplement learning at home.

March 30, 2020

How an early childhood education center supported its immigrant families amid sudden closures.

March 30, 2020

Five ways public and private sectors leaders can act now to make the most of the short-time compensation or “work sharing” programs to help blunt economic fallout from COVID-19.

March 27, 2020

New America joined the experts at American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and Creative Commons USA to write a brief entitled: Reading Aloud: Fair Use Enables Translating Classroom Practices to Online Learning. The brief offers reassurance: it explains that, as teachers adapt to new educational environments, copyright concerns about reading aloud need not be among the challenges they face.

March 27, 2020

Education, from early education on up through higher education and workforce training, has been drastically affected by the coronavirus crisis, and it has a big part in the emergency spending bill, including some funding for education technology. However, the bill includes relatively smaller amounts of funding to address needs.

March 26, 2020

As we transition from school to home, education leaders everywhere are scrambling to find and share resources for online learning. Here are ideas to think about honoring and reflecting the diversity of today's students as we move to online.

March 25, 2020

Our healthcare system is being stretched in ways that require creative workforce solutions. Here are a series of recommendations for leaders to get all hands on deck for the sake of our country’s health, mentioning veterans, immigrants, and more.

March 24, 2020

We are entering an unprecedented health and economic crisis and we need bold responses at every level of government. Mary Alice McCarthy offers lessons that policymakers can draw from the Great Recession to help guide our crisis response in the near-term.

March 23, 2020

Child care providers and early educators are facing an uncertain future. Aaron Loewenberg writes about the state of child care providers nationwide.

March 20, 2020

Monique O. Ositelu spoke with college-in-prison program to get a pulse on what is happening to our college students in prisons amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

March 20, 2020

Amaya Garcia, Elise Franchino, and Jenny Muñiz describe the uncertainty around how English learners will get access to resources to support their language development during school closures and identify potential issues with assessment and reclassification.

March 19, 2020

Clare McCann explains why it's necessary to proceed cautiously in placing borrowers into forbearance during an emergency.

March 18, 2020

If the NCAA continues with the Academic Based Revenue Distribution Monique O. Ositelu reveals an exclusive and accurate estimate of which schools are in limbo.

March 18, 2020

Lisa Guernsey, Kristina Ishmael, and Sabia Prescott share a series of resources that focus on helping students and parents gaining access to remote learning and on finding, choosing and using openly-licensed digital learning materials as a part of distance learning.

March 16, 2020

Kristina Ishmael and Laura Spencer analyze the consequences of the schools' migration to the digital space for vulnerable students in implementing home learning.

March 16, 2020

Aaron Loewenberg and Laura Bornfreund analyze the status of child care providers in regard to the increasing number of K-12 school closings because to COVID-19.

March 13, 2020

Hear from a panel of experts on leveraging open educational resources (OER) to meet student and higher educational institutional needs. Presenters will cover available resources and repositories of OER, how to identify high-quality resources, how to build college teams to support OER usage, and best practices for using OER in online or hybrid course environments. These resources and recommendations for institutions, faculty members, and other leaders can help colleges lower students’ cost of materials, provide tailored curriculum, and draw from a variety of existing course materials to achieve course goals.

Watch/Listen information from Thursday, June 4, 3:00-4:30 pm ET

Listen to a 30-minute interactive conversation about how the coronavirus pandemic is straining an already fragile child care system. The crisis is showing clearly how central child care is to a functioning economy and society. How are parents coping? How are early care educators, providers, and care workers surviving? How do we build a better child care system for the future? We’ll hear from care workers, providers, parents and Lillian Mongeau, west coast bureau chief of the Hechinger Report and author of "Our Fragile Childcare “System” may be about to shatter.”

Host:

Brigid Schulte
Director, Better Life Lab at New America

Guest:

Patricia Moran
Family home care provider in San Jose and member of SEIU 521

Rashondah Anderson
Lead child care teacher in Binghamton, NY

Lillian Mongeau
West Coast Bureau Chief of the Hechinger Report and author of "Our Fragile Childcare “System” may be about to shatter.”

New America Indy and The Indianapolis Recorder continued an online series on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the Black Community.

The Bipartisan Policy Center and New America recently convened experts from across the political spectrum to present “one big idea” for how higher education policy can respond to the rapidly evolving crisis of COVID-19.

Educational fair use in the COVID-19 emergency: yes you can scan (and more) for K-12 education.

Join us on April 16 from 2-3:30 pm ET to hear from community college leaders, healthcare education experts, and grant evaluators on how the lessons from past federal investments focused on healthcare can inform community colleges’ response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Join us on April 15 from 2-3:30 pm ET to hear from community college leaders, student advisors, and grant evaluators about how lessons from past federal investments are making a difference in our nation in the time of COVID-19 and informing the transition to fully online student support services.

What Does Quality Early Learning Look Like During the Coronavirus Crisis? This webinar and Q & A with early learning expert Lisa Guernsey, author of Tap, Click, Read and Screen Time.

Watch the recording here.

In recent days, as many teachers have faced an abrupt shift to online teaching, there have been questions about how copyright law applies to the translation of classroom-based practices of reading aloud to students to the digital environment. This webinar will explain how copyright law — specifically fair use — permits many classroom read-aloud activities to be translated to the digital environment.

Recording here.

How COVID-19 is affecting how we limit and encourage screen time for our children:

Hosts: Dan Kois (Writer and host, Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast for Slate); Lisa Guernsey (Director, Teaching, Learning, and Tech program, New America)

Recording here.

An interactive conversation to discuss how colleges and universities are handling the pandemic.

Recording here.

Summer transition activities help acclimate 5-year-olds to the classroom. Can a remote version even come close?

Clare McCann was quoted in Diverse Issues in Higher Education about theuncertainty for colleges this fall.

"Learning language is a dynamic process," said Amaya Garcia, deputy director for English learner education at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

"You need to be able to hear it. You need to speak it back," she said. "That speaking and listening part is being left out of the equation for students with limited (technological) access." 

Read the full article here.

If it doesn't happen, parents and the economy as a whole, will suffer greatly.

Public colleges and universities are in trouble. Campuses may not reopen this fall, potentially gutting tuition and dormitory revenues. Endowments have been hit by the falling stock market, and alumni donations may dry up. Institutions without a financial cushion will struggle to survive.

Overnight, high-speed, reliable home internet access suddenly became essential to the work of teaching—and most teachers are paying for it out of their own pockets.

Almost 80 years ago, America faced an enormous health crisis. So we created a program called the Nurse Corps. From 1943 to 1948, 124,000 nurses got expedited training to provide life-saving care to soldiers, sailors, and civilians worldwide. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic is creating another nightmare shortage of front-line health care workers. It’s time to revive the Nurse Corps for the modern age. Here’s how it would work. 

Eastern Michigan University appears to be distributing Cares Act student-relief funds to summer-school students in the form of tuition credit, a move that may violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the coronavirus-stimulus law.

College closures happen every year. Now, the pandemic threatens the financial health of more colleges and of low-income students and students of color. So we worked with the National Governors Association to release a guide for states in managing college closures.

The education secretary told colleges that congressional relief for students dislocated by campus closures cannot go to undocumented immigrants, even those under federal protection.

President Trump predicted at a news conference that “Harvard’s going to pay back the money” and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos urged institutions "with large endowments" to forgo funds from the CARES Act Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, the university announced that it would, indeed, do just that.

Harvard announced that it will not take the $9 million in federal stimulus money allotted to it by Congress.

Five years ago, Kevin Carey predicted the end of college as we know it. The end of college as we know it no longer seems like a pipe dream or a nightmare — but a looming possibility.

College financial aid offices are bracing for a spike in appeals from students finding that the aid packages they were offered for next year are no longer enough after the coronavirus pandemic cost their parents jobs or income.

April 17, 2020

Students are missing the normal “inputs” that support biliteracy, but experts say there are ways to amplify the second language at home.

April 15, 2020

"Since [the Higher Education Act] is more important than ever now, heading into a recession, I'm still hopeful that lawmakers will find the time before the end of the year to pass important legislative changes," Clare McCann said…

April 15, 2020

Professors, administrators, and staff on what the coronavirus will leave in its wake.

April 10, 2020

The uncertainty suggests campus-based colleges may need to offer online instruction at least through the fall. Some are already planning for it. It will be important to understand whether — and just how much —​ students are learning. That could require thinking differently about how learning is assessed online.

April 8, 2020

After varying amounts of struggle, universities across the country moved online for the spring semester in response to the coronavirus pandemic. But now the question is, what’s next? Clare McCann provides some input in this article.

April 7, 2020

Colleges and universities would have an easier time rolling out new models for online programs, while a wider variety of higher-education providers would have access to federal student aid dollars underregulations advanced Wednesday by the U.S. Education Department.

April 1, 2020

To achieve better success rates in online learning, we need to cultivate the sort of student engagement that's often the hallmark of great teaching and learning environments, writes Kathleen Ives.

April 1, 2020

America’s public libraries have led the ranks of “second responders,” stepping up for their communities in times of natural or manmade disasters, like hurricanes, floods, shootings, fires, and big downturns in individual lives. Here are some of the thingslibraries are doing now.

March 31, 2020

In a time of social distancing, it will be important for instructors to reach students who are angry about suddenly having to learn online, said Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy and knowledge management at the think tank New America.

“I think it’s going to be a real challenge,” Carey said. “Hopefully students will be able to engage from their childhood bedroom, or wherever they are.”

March 27, 2020

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s dialogue about appropriate screen time was so focused on time instead of substance, said author Lisa Guernsey, speaking during a “Social Distancing Social” hosted by Slate author Dan Kois.

Guernsey expressed hope that social distancing and the subsequent increase in dependence on technology will change the conversation in the right way.

March 27, 2020

On Tuesday, Kristina Ishmael was watching a webinar about how coronavirus will impact K-12 education policy, when the screen was suddenly flooded by pictures of pornographic images and racial slurs.

The moderator turned off the video—but to no avail. The perpetrator later took control of the audio, and Ishmael, a senior policy manager of education policy at New America, recalls a male voice spewing misogynistic epithets.

Holding Class on Zoom? Beware of These Hacks, Hijinks and Hazards

March 27, 2020

The Early & Elementary Education worked hard through the start of the pandemic to release a report about how important ample funding of childcare and early education is. This became more pronounced as working families began to lose their child care options in the crisis.

March 26, 2020

Understanding what drives or slows down e-learning can help school districts make smarter decisions about it.

Many school districts have been considering implementing e-learning for at least the past 10 years, says Kristina Ishmael, senior project manager of the teaching, learning and tech team for New America’s Education Policy program.

March 25, 2020

Clare McCann was quoted in Education Dive about how relaxed federal rules have helped schools adapt instruction to stem the spread of the coronavirus, but McCann advised them to be ready to show their work.

March 20, 2020

Kristina Ishmael was quoted in this EdSurge article about how across the country, districts, service providers and even the federal government are easing the burden for unconnected families in an attempt to bridge internet access gaps at breakneck speeds.

March 20, 2020

Elena Silva was quoted in the Economist about schools lack of preparedness to move to online learning.

March 19, 2020

Clare McCann was quoted in Education Dive about new guidance that lets agencies extend accreditation terms and develop or revise policies without going through the typical review process.

March 18, 2020

Kristina Ishmael was quoted in CNBC about student access to the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program, and the Child and Adult Care Food Program for their meals due to coronavirus school closures. Read full article here.

March 14, 2020

Nobody planned for an abrupt mass migration of traditional college courses to the internet. But because of coronavirus, that’s where we are. Read the New York Times article by Kevin Carey.

March 13, 2020

Kevin Carey was quoted in the New York Times regarding the obstacles to teaching remotely and on the schools limited expertise in providing instruction online on a large scale. Read the article here.

March 11, 2020

An up-to-date collection of New America's work on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With more than 21,000 victims, Italy has the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the world. The crisis has prompted the Italian government to adopt strict measures to prevent further spread of the virus—including freezing the entire Italian school system.

In the wake of COVID-19, there is an increased need for high-quality instructional materials to meet the needs of students. New America has curated this list of open education resources (OER) to provide you with a simple way to search and discover free and openly licensed resources.

For more info, reach out to Kristina Ishmael at ishmael@newamerica.org

The Better Life Lab team is tracking the corporate response to the COVID-19 pandemic in regards to offering paid sick leave.

Policymakers must act swiftly to address the gap that has left millions of American students at home for school without internet access using the FCC’s Universal Service Fund and E-Rate program.

Molly G. Martin explores why, with the spread of COVID-19, low-income Hoosier workers find themselves with heightened vulnerability with real health and economic outcomes.

Meegan Dugan Bassett, John Irons, and Margaret Streeter analyze the impact of the virus on service workers in the Chicago area.

Autumn McDonald examines the struggle and instability of low-income families in California during the Coronavirus crisis.

In an article for the New America Weekly, Meegan Dugan Bassett, John Irons, and Margaret Streeter provide recommendations for policy and decision makers to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on Chicago's service workers.

Kristin M. Lord and Elayne Deelen explore how building citizen resilience to misinformation will pay dividends not only in the current crisis, but for generations to come.

Sarah Jackson explores how the pandemic has forced families relying on informal child care—grandparents, aunties, friends, neighbors— and how to recognize the crucial nature of their work.

The nation’s educators are living through extraordinary challenges. New America, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and Brown School of Public Health give a series of recommendations to get students back for in-person learning in a safe environment.