This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Education Next. (2022). Marcus Foster Raised Expectations for All Students: Historian John P. Spencer on one of the first Black superintendents of a large urban district. Education Next, 22(3), 79-80.

It’s hard to decide which recent “metaverse” headline has felt more unreal.

On one hand, consider Facebook’s rebranding itself as Meta—a nod to the shared virtual spaces where the company believes its future lies. In this vision, large groups of individual users will meet in an immersive, simulated, digital environment, where they’ll work, study, create, and form relationships that mix avatars and real-world elements to varying degrees. On the other hand, there was Meta’s subsequent 60-second Super Bowl commercial, which featured an animatronic dog reuniting in virtual reality with its animatronic friends, and which cost the company an estimated $13 million.

Either way, both showed that the hype behind the metaverse is real, even if the metaverse itself does not yet actually exist. Within two months of Facebook’s transition to Meta, Google searches for “metaverse” increased by roughly 20 times and the term was mentioned in 12,000 English-language news articles. The year before, it had been mentioned just 400 times.

Educators excited about the future of technology haven’t missed a beat, and they’ve jumped on the metaverse bandwagon too. The Brookings Institution released a policy brief warning that “when education lags the digital leaps, the technology rather than educators defines what counts as educational opportunity.” The authors recommend that researchers, educators, policymakers, and digital designers should get ahead of the trend while the metaverse is still under construction.

What is the Metaverse?

The exact definition of the metaverse is still up for debate. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash. The most widely used definition today is from venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has boiled it down to seven elements.

In this understanding, the metaverse:

• Is always present and has no ending

• Can be experienced synchronously by multiple people

• Does not have a population cap and can be shared by everyone, while each individual retains their agency

• Can offer a fully functioning economy

• Can span both the digital and physical worlds, as well as open and closed platforms

• Is interoperable, so digital tools and assets from one app can be used in others

• Contains content and experiences created by a range of contributors.

According to technology writer Ben Thompson, the Internet satisfies all these requirements. “What makes ‘The Metaverse’ unique,” he writes, “is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality. This, though, will take time; I expect that the first virtual-reality experiences will be individual metaverses, tied together by the Internet as we experience it today.”

There are active debates about this. Some wonder just how interoperable does the metaverse need to be. How important is it, for example, for a digital tool that works in one video game to be usable in a different application? Do we need standard protocols like those that apply to blockchain, or the open-source databases that form the foundation of the current “open web”?

As a result of the complexity, it’s easy to default to extended reality—virtual reality and augmented reality—when talking about the metaverse. But much as the mobile Internet has built upon the infrastructure of the Internet, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others argue that the metaverse will simply be the successor to the mobile internet.

More Than Web 3.0

This isn’t the first time educators have gotten excited about virtual reality—nor the first time I’ve written about it in these pages (see “Virtual Reality Disruption: Will 3-D technology break through to the educational mainstream?” What Next, Fall 2016). Remember educators’ short-lived obsession with Second Life, the online platform in which people create avatars to navigate a 3-D online world? That excitement faded fast, and Second Life was laid to rest alongside many other educational fads.

What’s different this time around?

For starters, interest in the metaverse is rising amid a long, deeply disruptive pandemic that kicked off an unprecedented, rapid-fire deployment of virtual learning around the world. According to the Digital Learning Collaborative, in the 2018-19 school year, 375,000 students were enrolled in full-time, statewide virtual schools. By the 2020-21 school year, the number had nearly doubled to 656,000 students. That count does not include virtual schools run by local districts, which also grew dramatically during the pandemic. And many students enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar schools now regularly learn online for parts of their day, either in school or at home.

That has smoothed over one of the main barriers to using virtual reality in class: the equipment. In the past, logging on to a laptop and wearing a virtual-reality headset were viewed as an intrusive ordeal. But the game has changed, according to Thompson. If students are doing significant amounts of work online already, why couldn’t they have a headset on for most of that time as well?

In this vision, a virtual-reality headset is just a workaday accessory, like a computer mouse. But with it, students can “walk” into different education seminars and co-working spaces for projects and experience a range of virtual-reality environments, learning applications, lectures, and more. Just as the rising popularity of now-familiar learning technology tools like laptops fueled the creation of online learning applications and environments, this dynamic, coupled with a broader interest in the metaverse, seems poised to spur the creation of more learning environments that take advantage of virtual reality and 3-D.

Under Development

There are dozens of metaverse-type experiments underway in K-12 education.

For example, American High School touts its virtual-reality offerings on its website. The accredited, private online school has operated since 2004 and enrolled more than 8,000 students in grades K-12. Later this year, students and teachers at Optima Classical Academy, an online charter school based in Florida, will meet as avatars in a social virtual-reality platform created for the school that its founder described as a “metaverse.” It is set to launch in August for students in grades 3-8, who will follow a great books curriculum. Women Rise NFT, a collection of unique pieces of digital art by artist Maliha Abidi, was formed with the ultimate goal of building a school in the metaverse to serve the 258 million children around the world who cannot access traditional schools.

Then there are plans to support educators through the metaverse. The company k20 launched the Eduverse, a “metaverse hub for educators,” to connect teachers and administrators in a shared virtual world, where they can learn, network, and advance in their careers.

Finally, there are an array of enablers and supplemental providers that provide virtual-reality experiences for students and educators. Companies like Labster offer virtual-reality laboratories and FluentWorlds allows students to learn English in a variety of virtual worlds. Kai XR offers “360 degree” virtual field trips and EDUmetaverse has over 35 virtual worlds that educators can use.

And consider Dreamscape Immersive, a virtual-reality company founded by computer scientists and former Disney leaders. While its main funders are from the entertainment world—major Hollywood studios, Steven Spielberg, Nickelodeon, and AMC Theaters, which is planning to co-locate Dreamscape virtual-reality experiences in some of its theaters—the company also has partnered with Arizona State University to create Dreamscape Learn. Its first offering, a series of virtual-reality labs called “Immersive Biology at the Alien Zoo,” was created by Spielberg and company CEO Walter Parkes as an alternative for conventional lab work in college-level Introductory Biology. A high-school course is planned for later this year.

And even Meta has a team dedicated to developing education applications in the metaverse.

Looking Ahead

As metaverse mania continues, three things appear true.

First, innovation theory suggests that the early successful instances that apply elements of the metaverse will be proprietary in nature. They will be optimized initially to maximize the performance and reliability of an immature technology at the expense of scale and interoperability. That immediately suggests a problem. Many of the instances that are called a metaverse won’t meet a key criterion of Ball’s definition: interoperability. Indeed, much of what passes for metaverse hype right now is still virtual reality clothed in new marketing language.

This may not be a bad thing, however, given concerns about whether the metaverse will be a safe and healthy place for children. Experiences in walled-off gardens—think Prodigy and America Online, not the whole of the World Wide Web—could be safer, at least initially, even though that might temporarily undermine the vision of innovating instruction or skill development through the blockchain or decentralized autonomous organizations.

Second, the metaverse seems more of a sustaining than a disruptive innovation for full-time virtual schools. Unlike disruptions, sustaining innovations improve the performance of an existing product or service to better serve users who already exist. Full-time virtual schools that have sometimes struggled to engage students would likely benefit from a more immersive, social experience. Combining their programs with the metaverse, as well as with in-person learning pods, could create a more robust and accessible schooling experience. Alongside the flexible models of learning that took root during the pandemic, such as pods and hybrid online and in-person programs, a socially rich, immersive metaverse could, eventually, disrupt traditional, brick-and-mortar schools.

Finally, metaverse applications can create educational experiences that are otherwise impossible in a traditional environment. Virtual reality can bring content alive with dynamic images and hands-on digital exploration. It can bring real people and knowledge from other parts of the world into classrooms everywhere. Consider the potential for science labs, language learning, internships, cultural exchanges, and field trips (see “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” research, Winter 2014).

When the metaverse comes to class, these are the areas where you’ll want to point your virtual-reality goggles.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of the upcoming book From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2022). Meet in the Metaverse: A new frontier in virtual learning. Education Next, 22(3), 76-79.

It was white supremacists and their allies, tweeted Gabriela López, who cost her her seat on the San Francisco Board of Education after city residents voted by a three-to-one margin to remove her from office. “If you fight for racial justice, this is the consequence.”

Alison Collins, who served as vice president of the board until the surfacing of anti-Asian tweets she had written in 2016, also saw herself as a political martyr in the recall vote. She’d fought to “desegregate” the city’s selective (and majority Asian) high school, Lowell, by ending merit-based admissions.

Shamann Walton, president of the County Board of Supervisors, blamed “closet Republicans.” (In a city where 86 percent voted for Joe Biden, that’s a very large closet.)

So, is bluer-than-blue San Francisco turning red? Well, it’s not Virginia. But the school-board earthquake of 2022 has shaken up the political reality.

What’s more, the recall effort was not a conservative cause. It was launched and supported by independents, moderates, and progressives who were infuriated by a toxic mix of incompetence, arrogance, and woke rhetoric.

Residents of nearly every neighborhood voted overwhelmingly on February 15 to recall López, Collins, and Faauuga Moliga, who was far less unpopular with the city’s residents but was unable to separate himself from his colleagues. The 36 percent turnout—47 percent for those requesting a Chinese-language ballot—was higher than expected for an off-cycle election. Low-income neighborhoods posted a low turnout, and the vote in these areas was split. Voters in the wealthier neighborhoods scored a high turnout and voted heavily for the recall, perhaps because of the board’s scrapping of merit-based admissions at Lowell High School.

“The voters of this City have delivered a clear message that the School Board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” said Mayor London Breed, who strongly endorsed the recall.

Moliga stepped down the day after the recall vote, but López and Collins stayed until March 11, when they were officially removed. That same day, the mayor replaced the ousted members with three parents, Lainie Motamedi, Lisa Weissman-Ward, and Ann Hsu, who will help choose a new superintendent in June. The three will have to win their seats in November to stay on the board.

Breed consulted with parents, community groups, and the recall organizers before making her choices for the board. Both Hsu, who campaigned for the recall, and Motamedi had served on school-district committees.

Lengthy School Closures

San Francisco’s coronavirus rates were lower than those in other cities, its vaccination rates higher. Yet the public schools remained closed longer in San Francisco than in any other major city. Elementary-school students were out for a year, and the city had to sue to force the district to reopen. Middle and high schools didn’t reopen until fall 2021. (Two high schools opened with “supervision”—but no teaching—for two weeks in May, to qualify for a state grant.)

Led by López, the board president, and Collins, the school board “put performative politics over children,” said Todd David, a father of three who created a parents’ group to support the recall campaign. “What really bothered me is that, early in the pandemic, the superintendent wanted to have a reopening consultant, funded by private donors, and the board said no because the consultant had worked for charter schools,” he said.

“There is no Plan B,” Super-intendent Vincent Matthews had warned the board. And there wasn’t.

When it was clear schools wouldn’t reopen in fall 2020, city staffers worked with community groups and nonprofits to open “hubs” where needy students could get supervised remote learning, meals, and recreation. Hubs opened in rec centers, YMCAs, Boys & Girls’ Clubs, and libraries—but not in public schools or on school playgrounds. In a study, researchers blamed resistance from the board, specifically Collins, and from the teachers union.

“The city did amazing work to open learning hubs,” said David. “The board . . . it’s rare to see a governing body so completely fail.”

While public schools were closed—and private schools were open—the board decided to rename 44 schools based on a muddled and historically inaccurate process that declared Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Paul Revere, Dianne Feinstein, and others insufficiently pure.

Mayor called it “offensive” to rename schools that weren’t open. Even San Franciscans who supported renaming some schools thought the board should have waited until the crisis was over—and until someone could figure out whether Roosevelt Middle School was named for Teddy or FDR.

Ultimately, the board dropped the renaming effort. It also failed in its quest to whitewash a historic mural at Washington High School.

But the board’s virtue signaling also signaled an indifference to the job of running a school district.

In January 2021, nearly a year into remote education, the district reported significant learning losses for Black, Hispanic, and Asian students and students from low-income families.

López waved off these results. Students “are learning more about their families and their cultures” and “just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

At a board meeting in March 2021, Collins reminded Ritu Khanna, the district’s chief of research, planning, and assessment, to use the term “learning change” instead of “learning loss.”

That infuriated Kit Lam, an immigrant from Hong Kong with two children. He saw his teenage son struggling with distance learning and knew the boy was not alone. As an investigator for the school district, Lam saw that “many students were falling way, way behind,” and others were just missing.

Lam Zoomed into school-board meetings, staying up late and hoping to hear about the reopening plan. There was no plan.

The recall effort was the brainchild of two newcomers to San Francisco, a high-tech couple with no political experience or contacts. Siva Raj’s two children were struggling with remote classes and had become frustrated, depressed, bored, and angry. Autumn Looijen’s three children were learning—happily—in person in suburban Los Altos, one of the first Bay Area districts to reopen schools.

Raj and Looijen put the recall on social media, and it caught fire. Lam reached out to them and volunteered to translate the recall site into Chinese and then to collect signatures on recall petitions and then to register voters. “At first, I wanted to be anonymous,” Lam says. “But I made a promise to my son: ‘I will speak for you.’ So I spoke out.”

When Lam’s union of school-district workers met to discuss the election, he argued in favor of the recall. He lost the first vote: staffers wanted to stand with the teachers union, he says. But, on a second vote, they decided not to contribute money or volunteers to the anti-recall campaign.

Fire in the Belly

At nearly every high school in America that admits students based on grades and test scores, hard-studying Asian-American students are well represented. For years, San Francisco has tinkered with Lowell’s admissions process to qualify more Black and Hispanic students but has made little progress.

The board used a lottery for admissions in 2020, arguing that the pandemic had disrupted grades and testing. Collins showed her disdain for the traditional test-based admissions process in a board meeting. “Merit, meritocracy, and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing . . . those are racist systems,” she said.

The next year, the board voted to turn Lowell into a comprehensive high school open to all students. Lowell alumni were furious. So were Asian immigrant parents (see “Exam-School Admissions Come Under Pressure amid Pandemic,” features, Spring 2021).

“People see the success of Asian students and think they’re advantaged,” said Lam. In Chinatown, “you can see a family of four living in a single room with a shared bathroom down the hall. We rely on good public education. We can’t afford private school.”

Lowell alumni filed a lawsuit, which ultimately succeeded. The new school board will decide Lowell’s fate. Hsu and Motamedi support merit-based admissions at Lowell. Weissman-Ward did not commit herself but said she supports “academically rigorous programs.”

Not long after the recall campaign began, someone posted tweets by Collins from 2016, before she joined the board, in which she accused Asian Americans of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead’” and remarked that “being a house n****r is still being a n****r.”

In the uproar, Collins was ousted as vice president and was replaced by Moliga. She remained in office, but the majority of board members gave her a no-confidence vote. Collins sued the district and her board colleagues (except for López) for $87 million. Among other things, the suit charged “injury to spiritual solace.”

The suit, thrown out by a judge in August 2021, “cost the budget-strapped district some $400,000 to defend,” wrote Clara Jeffery in Mother Jones.

It would have been the last straw for San Franciscans, if there weren’t so many other last straws.

Chinese Americans, already angry about the board’s hostility to merit-based admissions, saw the tweets as proof that they were getting no respect.

“Education is a fire-in-the-belly issue” for Chinese parents, said Bayard Fong, president of the Chinese-American Democratic Club and the father of three children. His wife works for the district as an administrator.

The school board “acted as though some students mattered more than others,” said Fong. “We were being ignored or treated as though we were the problem.”

The club provided 100 volunteers to gather signatures for recall petitions.

Ann Hsu, one of the mayor’s replacements for the ousted school-board members, was a PTA president and former Silicon Valley entrepreneur who hadn’t been involved in politics before the recall effort arose. Then she saw her son languishing during 18 months of remote schooling. Unengaged by online classes, he “wasted his time all day, every day, playing video games,” she wrote in the New York Post.

Hsu helped form the Chinese/API Voter Outreach Taskforce to register voters for the recall. Many residents were not aware that noncitizen parents, empowered by a 2016 charter-amendment ballet initiative, can vote for school board in San Francisco. Volunteers signed up noncitizens too.

Chinese in America must “learn to speak up,” wrote Hsu.

“We Won’t Be Silent Anymore”

The board managed to anger a lot of other groups, too.

When the recall qualified for the ballot, Todd David, who runs the Housing Action Coalition, backed Raj and Looijen with his political savvy. He had political experience working for the election of State Senator Scott Wiener, another pro-recall liberal. “Siva and Autumn did a phenomenal job of grassroots organizing,” said David. “I knew how to do fundraising and a traditional campaign.” The recall raised an astounding $1.9 million, including large donations from high-tech investors and real-estate groups.

The “no on recall” side raised a small fraction of that, mostly from unions, and got some volunteers from the “Berniecrats,” but only Moliga really tried to fight the recall.

The school board’s defenders said wealthy “privatizers” wanted to destroy public education. One of the donors to the recall effort was the pioneer venture capitalist Arthur Rock, 95, a billionaire who has also supported charter schools.

But others say the recall was the only way to save San Francisco Unified.

“Parents who have choices are opting out,” said Patrick Wolff, a parent who runs Families for San Francisco, which launched Campaign for Better Public Schools to back the recall.

“The recall effort, while catalyzed by Covid, reflects deep discontent of the parent community with the state of the public schools,” said Wolff. “San Francisco has some of the worst achievement gaps in the state and one of the worst 3rd-grade reading levels.”

The state has threatened to take over if the district can’t balance its budget. To survive financially, the district must regain parents’ trust and stop losing students, said Wolff.

It won’t be easy.

San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any major city—more dogs than children—and a high percentage of those children attend private school. Before the pandemic, the school board tended to fly under the radar.

“During the pandemic, parents paid a lot more attention to the schools,” said Wolff. “Everything was on Zoom.”

Families for San Francisco will inform parents—and the whole city—of what public schools are doing, he said. The group already has challenged the district’s claim that “equity math” is working, citing missing, misleading, and cherrypicked data in the school system’s evaluations.

The Chinese-American community will have more clout going forward because of the landslide recall vote, Fong said. “We won’t be silent anymore. We’re standing up.”

School-board members will treat citizens with more respect, predicts Raj. They now know that people are watching.

The next political earthquake in San Francisco could come in June, when voters will decide whether to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who some blame for the city’s crime wave.

Despite a surge in school-board recall efforts across the country in 2021, most didn’t qualify for the ballot. Ballotopedia tracked 92 such efforts naming 237 officials. Ultimately, 17 officials were subject to recall votes, and only one was recalled. More recall efforts are in the works in 2022, often motivated by disagreements on pandemic policies and how to teach about gender identity and racism. In Loudoun County, Virginia, where school-board meetings have been very contentious, a conservative parent group called Fight for Schools is leading a campaign to recall some board members. It’s a liberal county—Republican Glenn Youngkin got only 44 percent of the vote there in his winning bid for governor—but anything is possible in 2022.

Joanne Jacobs is a freelance education writer and blogger (joannejacobs.com) based in California.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Jacobs. J. (2022). School Board Shakeup in San Francisco: Arrogance, incompetence, and woke rhetoric trigger successful recall effort. Education Next, 22(3), 36-43.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Finn, C.F. (2022). “It Felt Like Guerilla Warfare” – Student achievement levels in the Nation’s Report Card: a brief history of “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced.” Education Next, 22(3), 44-51.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Peña, P.A. (2022). End the Birthday Bias: Age allowances in high-stakes tests are a proven boost for fairness. Education Next, 22(3), 22-29.

Over the past two years, the nation’s school boards have had to grapple with one thorny controversy after another. Local news reports, op-ed pages, and viral social-media posts have featured outraged parents and advocates protesting the presence of armed police officers in schools, the use of entrance exams for selective programs, mask mandates for in-person learning, and allegations that Critical Race Theory was infiltrating the K–12 curriculum.

These displays of activism and acrimony took place at a time when local school officials were tackling two of the weightiest policy questions in recent memory—how to make up learning lost during the most prolonged and widespread instance of school closures in American history and how best to spend an unprecedented infusion of federal relief dollars. The apparent disconnect between the issues that adults seemed most riled about and what was at stake for students did not escape notice. In January 2021, the San Francisco school board voted to remove the names of presidents Lincoln and Washington (among other historical figures) from district schools because of their supposed roles in perpetuating slavery and racism, even as those same buildings remained vacant and students were still learning remotely. San Francisco Mayor London Breed pleaded, “Let’s bring the same urgency and focus on getting our kids back in the classroom, and then we can have that longer conversation about the future of school names.”

The events of the past two years underscore a question that has long been a subject of debate among education-policy researchers and reformers: Is our school-governance model—featuring decentralized control and locally elected school boards—the most effective and efficient approach to educating America’s youth? In a seminal book published 30 years ago, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, John Chubb and Terry Moe argued that it is not. Presaging many of the dynamics on display recently, Chubb and Moe warned that institutions of democratic control—meaning locally elected school boards—often fail in carrying out their core missions, instead empowering vocal and well-organized adults at the expense of the educational needs and interests of students, who do not get a vote in local elections.

With three decades of additional evidence and the pandemic still disrupting business as usual in our schools, now is an opportune time to revisit their arguments. Much has changed in the education world over the past 30 years, and new data sources and research methods have revealed the inner workings of local democracy in much greater detail than was possible when the book was written. Nevertheless, Chubb and Moe’s conclusions have aged surprisingly well. Their central thesis—that local democracy fails to incentivize pivotal policymakers to give priority to students’ academic needs—has been confirmed by a growing body of research on school-board elections. Indeed, increasing partisan polarization over educational issues and the changing demographics of American society have only exacerbated these governance challenges. The pandemic served as a worrying stress test of school governance in America, bringing popular attention to many of the issues Chubb and Moe first highlighted in their work.

Satan and the Origins of “Local Control”

Some critics of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools attacked the book for being “openly antidemocratic.” Presumably, these detractors believed that local democracy is the default or preferred mechanism for running public schools, but in much of the developed world, schools are typically overseen by centralized national agencies. In fact, our model is largely a historical artifact, dating back to the first public-education law adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. As evident from the law’s title, the Old Deluder Satan Act, it was the moral concerns of adults, rather than a desire to address the holistic educational needs of children, that mainly drove the public-school effort—not unlike some of today’s battles over sex education, intelligent design, and social-studies curricula.

The Massachusetts law, which charged local government with the responsibility for funding and operating local schools so kids would become literate enough to read the Bible, was copied across the country in one of the earliest examples of what political scientists now call policy diffusion. Over the course of the 20th century, this system underwent several important transformations. The shift from single-room schoolhouses to grade-banded schools necessitated consolidation into larger school systems, moving the locus of political control from boards overseeing individual schools to districtwide bodies. At least in theory, the emerging norm of appointing professionally trained superintendents to oversee day-to-day operations limited the influence of elected school-board members. Starting in the 1970s, lawsuits over funding inequities massively increased state-government investment in K–12 education, giving state lawmakers greater say in public-school policy. And over the past three decades, state and federal reforms greatly increased transparency over student outcomes and ratcheted up accountability pressures designed to improve student achievement.

As this history shows, our system of “local democratic control” was not intentionally designed with student academic outcomes in mind and has become less local (and perhaps less democratic) over time. Nevertheless, elected school-board members still occupy a central policymaking role, with final say over teacher contracts, curriculum choices, disciplinary policies, and many other important issues. Recent research shows that who serves in these positions is consequential for students. When voters elect more nonwhite school-board members, districts diversify their staffs, increase investment in facilities, and narrow racial achievement gaps. Similarly, school boards with more Democrats appear to decrease racial segregation, while greater teacher representation on these bodies leads to lower charter-school enrollments and higher teacher salaries.

Student Achievement and School-Board Elections

Although who wins a particular school-board contest can matter a great deal, there’s little indication that voters use elections to hold school boards accountable. A study by Christopher Berry and William Howell found that voters in South Carolina appeared to reward school-board incumbents for improvements in student test scores in 2000, when the scores first became public (see “Accountability Lost,” research, Winter 2008). However, media attention to test scores faded in 2002 and 2004, and so did electoral accountability. In an analysis focused on the introduction of “report cards” for schools in Ohio, which I conducted with Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz, we found little evidence that highly publicized performance indicators affected the outcome of school-board elections in the state. In California, voters do appear to hold school-board incumbents responsible for student learning—but only when school-board elections are held concurrently with presidential contests and turnout is high.

Even in the rare cases where student achievement does matter for school-board elections, the effects have been surprisingly modest, typically increasing or reducing the share of votes won by individual candidates by fewer than 5 percentage points. This differential is far lower than the margin of advantage enjoyed by incumbents in local races, and it appears to be a fraction of the electoral boost conferred by securing the teachers union endorsement. If school boards are asked to choose between a policy that improves student achievement and one that benefits teachers, the pressures of seeking reelection perversely encourage school-board members to prioritize adult employees over the education of students. These dynamics are likely amplified in large, urban districts, where teachers unions tend to enjoy stronger organization and access to greater political resources.

Some might argue that the interests of teachers and students are necessarily aligned, and perhaps this is true in many cases. However, the pandemic provided a clear counterexample. Fortunately, Covid-19 resulted in relatively mild infections for most school-aged children who contracted the disease—on par with seasonal influenza—but it was far more dangerous for school employees. Although few school-board members publicly acknowledged it, the decision about whether to resume in-person instruction in fall 2020 involved a difficult tradeoff between providing the best learning opportunities for students and minimizing the health risks for workers. There is little doubt that in cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., organized opposition from teachers unions delayed the return of students to their classrooms, although it is less clear how much of this was attributable to union political influence rather than the obstruction opportunities built into the collective-bargaining process.

Are Voter and Student Interests Aligned?

Parents account for a larger share of the electorate in even years, when high-profile national races appear on the ballot, which could be why school-board members seem to face more pressure to improve student outcomes in those years. The conventional wisdom is that off-cycle school-board elections—a practice established by Progressive reformers early in the 20th century—increase the influence of school employees and their unions because most other voters stay home. More recent research, which takes advantage of the growing availability of electronic voter-turnout records and big-data methods to link these records to other information (including teacher-licensure databases), suggests that such concern about off-cycle elections may be exaggerated. Even in exceptionally low-turnout elections, school employees account for a relatively small fraction of voters. Of course, unions influence election outcomes through mechanisms other than voting—including endorsements, campaign spending, and neighborhood door knocking. These strategies may well have a greater impact on lower-turnout elections, though there is no compelling empirical evidence that they do. But the research does suggest reasons other than union influence to doubt that the interests of school-board voters and students are likely to be aligned.

In several recent papers examining school-board elections in various large states, my coauthors and I found that voters who turn out in these elections typically do not have kids of their own and are generally much whiter as a group than the students that local schools educate. Indeed, we showed that most of the school districts with majority-nonwhite student bodies in these states were governed by school boards elected by majority-white electorates—in many cases, overwhelmingly white electorates. Particularly in low-turnout elections, elderly white voters without children appear to be the pivotal voting bloc, and there is little reason to believe that these voters are any more motivated to improve student outcomes than school-employee interest groups are.

The experience of the East Ramapo Central School District, which was profiled in an episode of the public-radio series This American Life, illustrates the downsides of a system in which education policy is dictated by voters who do not look like the students that the policies affect. The district is in a racially diverse suburb in New York state. While two thirds of its residents are white, Black and Hispanic students account for 92 percent of school-district enrollment. Orthodox Jews make up much of the population and tend to send their kids to private religious schools—which enroll far more students than the public district does.

According to recent litigation, white voters effectively control the East Ramapo school board, even though few of their kids attend the public schools. District court judge Cathy Seibel found in 2020 that the school district’s at-large election system was essentially “diluting” the Black vote. The district has advantaged the interests of white residents and the private schools their kids attend: keeping property taxes and instructional expenditures to a minimum, generously funding special-education services for private-school students, and selling off public-school buildings to private religious schools. Although this is an extreme example, the underlying representational problems and perverse incentives created by local democratic control in East Ramapo play out in a broad set of school districts—especially those serving mostly students of color—where the interests of voters and public-school students are likely to be out of sync.

Revisiting Chubb and Moe

The worrying findings documented in the research—that school-board members face minimal electoral pressure to improve student outcomes, that they are often cross-pressured by employee interest groups, and that they do not prioritize the interests of minority-student populations—is largely confirmed by school-board members themselves. In one recent survey, nearly 40 percent of incumbent school-board members reported running unopposed in their last election. In other surveys, school-board candidates identified teachers unions as some of the most active and influential actors in school-board elections. Another recent survey, using a clever design meant to elicit honest responses to sensitive questions, asked California school-board members to identify considerations important to voters. Forty percent of respondents said they felt no electoral pressure from their constituents to close racial achievement gaps. One can think of no stronger endorsement for Chubb and Moe’s critique of local democratic control.

In several important respects, the challenges of education governance have evolved over the past three decades. In identifying the mechanisms through which electoral politics can impede the provision of high-quality education, Chubb and Moe focused primarily on entrenched employee interest groups and sclerotic bureaucracies. They put less emphasis on two other factors—partisan polarization and identity politics—that have become much more salient in education-policy debates today.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a high point of bipartisan consensus on education reform. Elites from both parties supported standardized testing, holding schools and educators accountable for student performance, increasing school-choice opportunities for families, and the need for dramatic turnaround of chronically underperforming schools. This consensus began to unravel during the highly partisan debates over the Common Core standards, and divisions over reform intensified during the Trump years. The impact of this polarization was seen clearly during the pandemic, when local partisanship—rather than Covid case counts or hospitalization rates—emerged as the strongest predictor of whether local schools resumed in-person learning in fall 2020.

Chubb and Moe also arguably underestimated the importance of race in local education politics. Members of minority groups, who have historically faced discrimination in the private labor market, have long relied on government jobs. Especially for Black Americans, such work has provided an important source of upward economic mobility. In cities such as Baltimore and Washington, D.C., local school systems supplied well-paying, middle-class jobs for Black families. Sometimes, well-intentioned school-improvement efforts put these jobs at risk, undermining support for reform among not only the affected school employees but also other prominent Black community leaders, including clergy.

Such dynamics have played out recently in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina triggered a state takeover and a wholesale overhaul of local schools that created the nation’s first all-charter district. Rigorous evaluations have shown that these reforms dramatically improved student achievement and substantially increased rates of high-school graduation and college attendance and persistence, with the largest gains in educational attainment for low-income and Black students (see “Good News for New Orleans,” features, Fall 2015). However, the reforms also led to significant job losses for the city’s majority-Black teacher workforce, perhaps explaining why Black residents were ultimately less supportive of changes in school governance and were less likely than white residents to say that schools had improved as a result.

Public-opinion surveys during the pandemic documented similar racial polarization in opinion on schools, with parents of color far more likely to prefer keeping their children learning online and less likely to opt for in-person opportunities when schools did reopen in the largest cities. Although these racial gaps narrowed over time, some interest groups attempted to weaponize the racial disparities in the political battles over the pace and timing of decisions to reopen. When California lawmakers offered districts financial incentives to resume in-person learning, for example, the Los Angeles teachers union called the move “a recipe for propagating structural racism.” Race has also figured prominently in debates on issues related to school discipline, school resource officers, and selective-admissions schools.

On the other hand, Chubb and Moe arguably overestimated the extent to which market-based mechanisms could correct many of the school-governance problems they identified. Since the publication of their book, both private-school vouchers and charter schools have introduced important elements of market forces to the education ecosystems in many states. Particularly in urban areas, charter schools have posted substantial achievement gains, although charters continue to educate a relatively small share of students outside of a few cities such as New Orleans, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Competition from charter schools and private-school choice has also led to modest improvements among public schools, although competition has hardly proved to be a panacea for most underperforming school systems.

Without Reform, Things Will Only Get Worse

As discouraging as recent trends may seem, the governance challenges are likely to grow worse in the absence of meaningful reform. The decline of local newspapers will further erode watchdog journalism and oversight, perhaps reducing voters’ access to independent information on student performance. The nationalization of local politics will continue, making partisan polarization over local education issues even more intense. The growing diversity of public-school students—a population that became majority nonwhite in 2014—will likely further increase the demographic disconnect between school-board electorates and students. The aging of the general population will bring intergenerational conflict—sometimes described as the coming “gray peril”—over school funding. Finally, the substantial enrollment losses seen during the pandemic will likely accelerate the decline in public-school enrollment, exacerbating local political battles over school closures and distracting attention away from academics.

Fortunately, the pandemic may also help open the door to transformative change. If history is any guide, substantial test-score declines in the coming years will push educational concerns higher on the national policy agenda and help mobilize support for reform. The infusion of federal funding will provide a welcome defense against the oft-repeated argument that lack of resources and disinvestment are the main barriers to boosting student achievement in the most-disadvantaged communities. When the policy window opens, reformers should remain laser focused on improving school governance—to ensure that the reform process prioritizes the interests of kids rather than the demands and political agendas of adults. Such reforms should include holding school-board elections on cycle, when participation among parents is highest; reworking accountability systems to ensure that district-performance ratings emphasize each school’s contribution to student learning rather than the demographic mix of students it serves; and timing the release of school ratings to coincide with school-board election campaigns. Every crisis brings an opportunity, and we cannot afford to let this one go to waste.

Vladimir Kogan is associate professor at The Ohio State University.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Kogan, V. (2022). Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing: Pandemic stress-tested school governance, revealing many flaws. Education Next, 22(3), 8-13.

Applying for a federal grant to support the creation of new charter schools is about to get a lot harder. That’s the upshot of draft regulations for the Charter Schools Program that the Biden administration released for public comment in March. It is an unfortunate proposal at a time when new research confirms that charter schools are an asset not only to their students but also to the broader communities in which they operate (see “The Bigger Picture of Charter School Results,” features, this issue).

For nearly three decades, Congress has provided funds to assist charter schools with start-up expenses such as staffing, professional development, facility improvements, and community engagement events. The bulk of the money goes first to state education departments who, in turn, award grants of up to $500,000 to charter schools preparing to open, replicate, or expand. When Congress last renewed the program in 2015, it permitted successful charter management organizations to apply directly to the U.S. Department of Education for comparable support.

The program is modest by federal budget standards—Congress authorized $440 million for it this year—but over time it has been a major driver of the charter sector’s expansion. What’s more, the states, none of which wants to leave federal money on the table, often design and implement their charter school programs according to the criteria Congress uses to select grant applicants.

That’s one reason the administration’s recent proposal is so troubling. Among other new requirements, the regulation would force applicants to submit a detailed “community impact analysis” demonstrating that the number of schools they propose to open or expand “does not exceed the number of public schools needed to accommodate the demand in the community.” The language says nothing about the quality of available schools. It would effectively prevent charter schools from opening with federal support in the growing number of areas with flat or declining enrollment—often places where high-quality options are scarcest.

The regulation would also require applicants to collaborate with a traditional public school or district on “an activity that would be beneficial to all partners in the collaboration”—a nice-sounding concept that would effectively give districts veto power over charter expansion. Applicants would even need to provide “a letter from each partnering traditional public school or school district demonstrating commitment to participate in the proposed charter-traditional collaboration.” Charter entrepreneurs unable to find a willing partner would be out of luck.

The entire proposal seems to reflect the view, heavily promoted by teachers unions and their political allies, that charter schools are a drain on school districts’ resources to be tolerated, if at all, as pockets of innovation within expanding systems. That same perspective has informed key revisions to state charter-school laws in recent years, including California’s 2019 move to allow districts to reject charter school applications based not on the proposal’s quality but on its impact on their finances. The result was a dramatic slowing of charter growth nationally in the years leading up to the pandemic—just as charter opponents intended.

Yet the research case for the charter sector’s expansion continues to strengthen. In this issue, Doug Harris and Feng Chen of Tulane University offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of how charter schools affect the combined outcomes of both charter and traditional public-school students in the school districts in which they are located. Looking nationwide and comparing districts with a substantial charter presence to those without charter schools, they find substantial gains in both test scores and high-school graduation rates. A January 2022 study by David Griffith for the Fordham Institute, “Still Rising: Charter School Enrollment and Student Achievement at the Metropolitan Level,” similarly found greater charter enrollment associated with increased math achievement by Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

If Biden administration rule makers are not swayed by these findings, the reality underlying them is persuasive to many of the families who have chosen to enroll their children at charter schools. Despite an oddly short window for public comment, more than 25,800 members of the public, many of them charter parents, weighed in on the proposed rule before the April 18 deadline. A group of 17 Republican governors wrote to education secretary Miguel Cardona to register their objections to the proposed changes. When a similarly tone-deaf draft rule on civics-education grants prompted an uproar last year, the administration backed down and replaced the rule with something more sensible. Here’s hoping that pattern prevails again.

— Martin R. West

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

West, M.R. (2022). New Biden Rules Would Slow Charter Growth: Parents, governors protest. Education Next, 22(3), 5.

Over the past two years, K–12 schools have implemented a range of steps aimed at slowing the spread of Covid-19, including mask requirements, testing for both asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals, quarantining and isolation, contact tracing, open windows, air purifiers, plexiglass barriers, schedule changes aimed at “cohorting” or reducing building occupancy, and closures. With vaccinations widely available and the Omicron variant mostly waning, should schools now go back to normal? Which, if any, of these pandemic-response measures should be dropped, and which, if any, should be kept? When, and under what conditions?

Our forum on the topic features three essays: one by Paymon Rouhanifard, CEO of Propel America and former school superintendent in Camden, New Jersey, and Dr. Shira Doron, hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center; another by Gerard Bossard, a public school educator, and Dr. Douglas Rothman, professor at Yale University School of Medicine; and a third by John Bailey, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

 

Time for a New Normal

By Paymon Rouhanifard and Dr. Shira Doron

 

 

Tie Precautions to Community Risk Levels

By Gerard Bossard and Dr.Douglas Rothman

 

 

Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future

By John Bailey

 

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Rouhanifard, P., Doron, S., Bossard, G., Rothman, D., and Bailey, J. (2022). Covid-19 Precautions in Schools. Education Next, 22(3), 64-73.

For more than two years, school administrators and staff have strived to meet the needs of students and families in the face of enormous challenges wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, with nearly all K–12 schools open nationwide and the Omicron variant in retreat, educators must tackle the enormous job of helping students catch up on lost learning time.

People across the nation have endured loss, anguish, and anxiety during the pandemic, and Covid has killed nearly 950,000 people. School closures and other mitigation strategies have taken a huge toll on children and educators. Students are now in a state of crisis, significantly behind in their learning and suffering from acute mental-health challenges. At the same time, many educators report feeling overwhelmed, demoralized, and ill-equipped to handle these new challenges. Fifty-five percent of teachers say they plan to leave the profession sooner than they originally intended, according to a January 2022 survey by the National Education Association.

Children need in-person schooling if they are to thrive. And while the normal rhythm of schooling has resumed, some districts in historically “blue” communities have maintained restrictive Covid-19 prevention policies such as mandatory masking, asymptomatic testing, socially distanced lunches, and the suspension of certain athletics, performing arts, and other extracurricular activities.

Today, as the CDC has eased its guidance on some of these restrictions, we seem to have reached an inflection point in the pandemic. Administrators and teachers now deserve clear direction and resources to meet the needs of their school communities. At the same time, to ensure public-health plans are equitable and comprehensive, decisionmakers must recognize that immunocompromised staff, students, and family members bear a nontrivial risk that must also be addressed.

Over the course of the pandemic, public-health officials have learned a great deal about the virus and effective mitigation strategies. We believe that schools now have all the necessary tools to protect vulnerable staff and students, enabling the entire school community to experience the normalcy that has evaded them for two and a half school years.

Educating School Communities on a “New Normal”

Misinformation abounds in the media. News outlets may minimize or exaggerate the risks of the virus at any given time. As schools have returned to some semblance of normal operations, leaders should pay keen attention to creating a communication and information plan directed at staff, parents, and students.

Paramount to any policymaking is the clear and transparent communication of a defined goal. During the 2020–21 school year, before the vaccines were widely available, that goal was quite clear: minimizing instances of person-to-person transmission to flatten the hospitalization curve. In the current school year, with vaccination available to everyone over the age of 5, that goal is no longer necessary or feasible. A more reasonable goal would be the prevention of serious and widespread outbreaks that could once again strain our healthcare system.

School leaders should define their goal and clearly communicate it to staff, students, and parents. They should also explain how and why steps toward a new normal are not only possible but also essential—and that this transition can take place without compromising the health of the extended school community.

This effort should emphasize three foundational principles:

● Covid is here to stay. The Omicron wave has solidified our conviction that Covid-19 will exist in perpetuity. It cannot be eradicated, and it mutates, potentially into forms that evade vaccines. An ebb-and-flow of cases is unquestionably our new normal, and nearly all of us will become infected with a current or future variant at some point. Our objective must be to ensure that, when people are infected, they have as much immunity as possible.

● The vaccine is our best available tool. Vaccines remain our strongest weapon in the fight against death or serious illness from Covid-19. Although their effectiveness against infection wanes over time and has been weakened by the latest variants, all the currently authorized U.S. Covid-19 vaccines remain highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. Efforts to
get every member of the school community vaccinated must not cease. Vaccine education for families and staff is critical, as are onsite vaccine clinics for school communities.

● We must prioritize the holistic well-being of children. Children have shouldered a disproportionate burden from our efforts to limit the spread of the virus through school closures and other restrictions. The acute mental-health challenges and learning losses they have experienced cannot be overstated. It’s critical that we focus on the academic, mental, social, and emotional health of our students.

Proactive communication of these messages is vital to the successful phasing out of the more-restrictive mitigation efforts that still exist in some places. Ultimately, taking steps toward normalcy requires the trust and support of staff, students, and parents. School-system leaders and administrators will need to dedicate considerable time and resources to educating their respective communities on the benefits and costs associated with maintaining versus easing restrictions.

Protecting the Vulnerable

Thankfully, we now possess all the tools needed to maintain the public-health benefits previously achieved with more-restrictive mitigation measures, and at less cost. In addition to vaccination, other critical strategies include therapeutics (both for prevention and treatment), testing, and “one-way masking.”

Importance of therapeutics. In the early days of the pandemic, some leaders foresaw that effective therapies for Covid-19 would allow life to return to normal. That day has finally arrived. Antivirals and injectable medications are widely available, and in fact the supply of therapeutic agents and ability to administer them exceed demand. The pill nirmatrelvir/ritonavir has demonstrated an impressive efficacy of nearly 90 percent at preventing hospitalization in high-risk individuals and is authorized for ages 12 and up. Anyone with Covid who has even a single risk factor is eligible to receive this medication. It will be critical to maintain this access even if cases surge again in the future.

Testing and contact tracing. At the beginning of the pan-demic, it was reasonable to expend time and resources on asymptomatic PCR testing for schoolchildren and staff. However, that testing has often come at the expense of symptomatic testing. During the Omicron wave, while many districts were conducting weekly pooled PCR testing of asymptomatic school-community members, those who developed symptoms were often unable to find an appointment for a lab-based
test or a store with home-based tests in stock.

We cannot prevent every person-to-person transmission, and as schools adopt the goal of blocking serious illness and widespread outbreaks, families will need access to at-home antigen test kits that household members can use when a close contact develops symptoms. In-school rapid antigen testing should be available for those who develop symptoms during the school day. During periods of high transmission, schools might consider adding an asymptomatic screening program using PCR or home antigen testing, but such efforts should be targeted toward vulnerable individuals who would most benefit from an early diagnosis. Students and staff with Covid-19 should isolate according to public-health guidelines.

We believe the time has come to stop contact tracing and post-exposure quarantines, as well as school and classroom closures based on case rates. Monitoring for development of symptoms after a known exposure remains an important part of preventing outbreaks, but we are no longer in a containment phase of the pandemic. In-school exposures have consistently been shown to result in very low rates of infection, and post-exposure quarantines are unlikely to move the needle on case rates in the current climate.

One-way masking. This new approach to masking became possible with the recent upsurge in consumer access to medical-grade personal protective equipment. While healthcare workers have always worn medical-grade masks and respirators when caring for Covid-19 patients, others were urged not to purchase such items because of global shortages. With medical-grade masks now available for all, there is simply no need to mandate masks. Those who are at high risk by virtue of vaccination status, underlying disease, or age, or those who are simply risk-averse, can safely wear a high-quality mask or medical respirator and will be well protected regardless of what others do. Because medical-grade equipment costs significantly more than washable cloth masks, these masks and respirators should be made available for free to members of the school community who want or need them, accompanied by information on their effectiveness, how to wear them properly, and who would benefit the most from using them.

Equity Considerations

By targeting mitigation and education strategies toward our most vulnerable populations—chiefly those who are immunocompromised—schools can develop a plan that’s equitable and addresses the needs of a diverse community of staff, students, and families. Blunt, one-size-fits-all solutions are no longer needed. Schools can now deploy a toolkit of strategies to meet stakeholders where they are. Further, by allowing people to take personal responsibility for their health and educating them on effective practices rather than imposing mandates, schools can help lessen the polarization over Covid-19 protocols that is now so prevalent in schools and communities.

To be clear, the pandemic has exposed our country’s longstanding structural racism and systemic health inequities. Black and Hispanic populations continue to be disproportionately affected by Covid-19. What’s more, Black, Hispanic, and low-income individuals are less likely to be vaccinated, particularly within younger age groups. There is legitimate concern that any loosening of mitigation measures in schools could lead to an outsize burden of illness among those populations.

Ultimately, though, equitable solutions must consider the tradeoffs and unintended consequences of our most-restrictive measures. Students from historically marginalized communities, for example, are likely to be disproportionately affected by learning loss during school closures. English language learners are acutely impacted by mask mandates. And shutdowns place an enormous weight on working families. We believe our proposed approach could help center the pendulum after a period of extreme swings.

Beyond the New Normal

As schools consider easing restrictions, they should also consider how they will respond in the event of a new variant or surge in cases. Any plan to phase out mitigation policies should include contingencies to recognize when those prior restrictions will be necessary once again.

While we believe that a shift back to virtual instruction should happen only in the most extreme circumstances, we urge policymakers and administrators to develop criteria that would require schools to reinstate certain protocols, such as mandatory masking and quarantining for close contacts of infected individuals. Outlining such a plan would serve both to reassure those who are concerned that a return to normalcy is too dangerous and to forewarn proponents of such a return that the relaxation of mitigation measures might and should not be permanent.

We urge policymakers to deploy more-stringent measures not solely in response to case counts but only when a variant is causing a surge that is likely to strain hospital capacity. In some states, the rise in cases from the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron is already leading to the reinstatement of more-restrictive measures, even in the absence of high Covid-19 hospitalization rates. We believe this is an overreaction. Still, we must prepare for a scenario, however unlikely, where a new variant is vaccine-evasive and leads to higher death tolls.

Today, thanks to the many miracles of modern medicine and healthcare, including vaccines, therapies, tests, and personal protective equipment, we have an opportunity to relevel our approach to Covid-19 and ensure our mitigation strategies are proportional to the actual risks faced by students and staff. Our children and educators deserve nothing less.

This is part of the forum, “Covid-19 Precautions in Schools“. For alternate takes, see “Tie Precautions to Community Risk Levels,” by Gerard Bossard and Dr. Douglas Rothman, and “Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future,” by Jon Bailey.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Rouhanifard, P., Doron, S., Bossard, G., Rothman, D., and Bailey, J. (2022). Covid-19 Precautions in Schools. Education Next, 22(3), 64-73.

When the Omicron variant of the coronavirus cropped up in the United States in the waning weeks of 2021, public officials warned that it was the most infectious variant they had seen to date. By early January 2022, Omicron had become the dominant form of the virus in this country. And now, not surprisingly, the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron is causing another uptick in Covid cases.

At the same time, evidence was mounting that Omicron was less deadly than previous variants. Risk of hospitalization, for instance, is about 50 percent lower than it was with Delta, and studies indicate that Omicron does less damage to the lungs. Unfortunately, some people heard this news and latched on to a narrative that Covid was on a downward trajectory.

“There’s this story that we’re going to have variants that are progressively less severe,” Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, told NPR in January. “It’s comforting to think there might be some tendency for SARS-CoV-2 to evolve toward a milder form. That’s not what we’re seeing here.”

Dr. Bhattacharyya was articulating a common human foible—confirmation bias—the tendency to find support for beliefs that you want or need to believe, even if the evidence says you’re wrong. The fact is, no one knows for sure where Covid is going, whether it will end (or when), and whether future strains will be more or less severe.

So: Is now the time for schools to “go back to normal”? Can we safely drop some of the precautions we have put in place? No. Covid is still very much with us.

Here are some facts about Covid-19:

The United States leads the world in deaths from Covid-19. More Americans have died from this disease than in any war. In the Civil War, the deadliest in the nation’s history, 498,332 people died over four years, from 1861 to 1865. Covid has killed nearly a million Americans in half that time.

While evidence shows that the Omicron variant is less deadly than the Delta strain that preceded it, Omicron spreads more easily and therefore infects more people. As of March 9, 2022, an average of 1,350 Americans were dying from Covid every day, according to data published by the Washington Post. At the peak of the Omicron surge on February 4, 2022, an average of 2,647 people were dying per day; this is close to the pandemic peak of 3,328 deaths per day on January 29, 2021, prior to widespread vaccination. The Omicron death toll is staggering, given that the great majority of deaths from this variant have occurred among unvaccinated individuals, who comprise only about 23 percent of the population. Although newly reported cases are down to about 37,000 per day, some local regions are still experiencing large surges.

Vaccination provides considerable protection from Covid and especially from contracting a serious case of the disease, but it does not eliminate the hazard, particularly for individuals with other risk factors. Even among vaccinated persons, Omicron remains easily transmitted in all social settings, including schools and homes, and the disease occurs in all age groups. The same will likely be true of any future strains of Covid-19.

The facts are stark, and the risk is great, yet children face serious risks to their learning and social development when they miss time in school. It is imperative that schools be open as much as possible, but keeping them open safely will require effective mitigation and public-awareness strategies for some time to come.

Transmission in Schools

Schools are the ideal environment for spreading Covid-19. Studies have shown children can catch and spread Covid-19 as easily as adults do. Children of all ages can carry high viral loads that they can pass on to their parents, teachers, and others.

Symptom monitoring is not an effective strategy for identifying infected children, because nearly 50 percent of children do not exhibit symptoms. Covid-19 is rarely lethal for children, yet during the peak of the Omicron surge, on January 7, 2022, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that Omicron was causing more than 760 children to be hospitalized per day. The groups most affected were those under the age of 5, who are not eligible for vaccination, and children 5 to 11, of whom only 16 percent are fully vaccinated. Walensky said at the time that “pediatric hospitalizations are at the highest rate compared to any prior point in the pandemic.”

The CDC reported that in May 2021 an unvaccinated California teacher transmitted the Delta variant to her elementary-school students, leading to 26 Covid cases among the students and their contacts. Before getting tested, the teacher had experienced symptoms for two days and had continued to work. During that time the teacher read aloud to her class without wearing a mask, despite the school’s masking requirement. This instance illustrates that when schools are open without enforcing necessary precautions during a Covid surge, it is highly likely that teachers and children will play a role in transmitting the virus. It is therefore critical that we not let our guard down.

Everyone Should Know the Basics 

Students, parents, school staff, and anyone in the larger community who is connected to these individuals need to have basic information on Covid-19 transmission and how to reduce it through established procedures. Schools should provide multiple, mandatory information sessions for all the school’s constituents, and basic information about Covid should be posted widely—in schools and throughout the community. Students, staff, and parents should be asked to sign a statement saying they understand and will abide by all the regulations.

Everyone must know how the virus is spread, which situations are the most dangerous, and how to avoid those situations. Covid-19 spreads through human-to-human contact, whether people are in the presence of each other or leave remnants of the virus by touching objects or having talked, eaten, or simply breathed in an area in which others congregate or pass.

For schools, the areas that pose risk include not only school facilities but also the homes of students and staff and anywhere in the community that these people go, including stores, banks, gas stations, cars, buses, bus stops, cafeterias, hallways, classrooms, lockers, gymnasiums, locker rooms, bathrooms, and more. As has long been recommended, everyone should wear a mask outside of a completely safe environment, wash hands frequently, and safely socially distance. People should be reminded that these are effective mitigation strategies, as are disinfecting and ventilating schools and homes.

Tie Precautions to Community Transmission Levels

Increasingly, schools have faced public pressure to remain open even during the worst surges and to drop mask requirements and other precautions. Schools can counter this pressure by strictly tying the extent of their precautions to the level of transmission in the community. Information on these conditions is regularly reported by the CDC on the county level, with this data accompanied by the agency’s recommendations on which precautions schools should take at specific transmission levels. Linking precautions to the level of risk eliminates the guesswork for school officials and provides an objective rationale for the safeguards they put in place.

Given how fast cases surge when a new variant appears, we believe that even in low-transmission communities (labeled as “green” by the CDC) schools should continue to require masking for students and staff, use social distancing, and perform regular sanitizing of classrooms and other school surfaces. Although the most recent CDC recommendations do not require these precautions except in crowded classroom situations, we feel they should remain in place until there is a more reliable way to give advance warning of highly transmissible new variants. At higher levels of community transmission, the school should implement staggered schedules to reduce the number of students who are present at a time. In addition, schools should offer a full online option to all students whose families do not want to take the risks associated with their children attending class in person. This option will also reduce student density in school.

Finally, at the highest levels of transmission (referred to as “orange” or “red”), the school should switch to remote learning to protect students, staff, family members, and the community at large. For students for whom online learning is not an option, such as those who do not have access to reliable Internet connections, accommodations can safely be made at school, since plenty of classroom space will be available. And concomitant with these strategies, there must be adequate testing and availability of vaccinations to all children who are eligible.

Testing and Vaccination

We strongly recommend that federal, state, and local authorities provide the resources for schools to regularly test students at all levels of community transmission. Regular testing can help reduce transmission of the virus, even in environments as crowded as college dormitories, according to a study done at 18 Connecticut colleges and universities during the 2020–21 school year. Study authors Olivia Schultes and colleagues concluded that “twice-weekly Covid-19 testing of residential students may serve as an effective infection mitigation strategy at colleges and universities.” These results suggest that in K–12 schools that remain open in times of higher community transmission, frequent testing of students and staff is critical, and, even under green conditions, regular testing is a must. As the test shortage during the Omicron surge has shown us, schools should plan to have on hand sufficient test kits to last several weeks. Although testing and other mitigation strategies can be costly, the federal government has provided funding for this purpose, as have some states and municipalities. Because the virus spreads so rapidly, a community can quickly go from conditions of minimal transmission to high levels; it is critical, therefore, that schools be proactive in securing funds for testing.

Schools should have plans for dealing with outbreaks. When someone in the school community does test positive for Covid-19, the individual should go into isolation for a minimum of five days and then be retested. Furthermore, schools should do contact tracing and encourage CDC-recommended testing and quarantine measures for those who were exposed to a Covid-positive person.

Of greatest importance is that schools work with their local and state health agencies to make vaccinations widely available to students and to educate students and parents about the facts regarding vaccination safety and efficacy. As experience during the Delta and Omicron surges has shown, vaccinations prevent severe illness and save lives, with an almost tenfold reduction in deaths and a similar or greater reduction in hospitalizations. As of March 10, 2022, according to the CDC, about 76.6 percent of the U.S. population had been fully vaccinated, although there remain communities with much lower rates, and eligible children continue to lag behind adults). Covid may always be with us, but the more we can increase immunity through vaccines, the less opportunity the virus will have to spread.

In Sum

In this essay we have outlined the steps that schools can take to minimize transmission and keep students and staff safe. School officials can turn to the CDC’s website for specific information and advice on preventative measures, including how to educate the school community about Covid, how to implement mitigation procedures, safety practices for transportation to and from school, and recommended procedures for testing, quarantining, and tracing.

Ours is an extraordinary time—an era that demands that we educate ourselves about Covid and respect the facts. With unity of purpose, a commitment to clear communication, and proper precautions, we can protect students and teachers while providing the in-person learning that children need and deserve.

This is part of the forum, “Covid-19 Precautions in Schools“. For alternate takes, see “Time for a New Normal,” by Paymon Rouhanifard and Dr. Shira Doron, and “Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future,” by Jon Bailey.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Rouhanifard, P., Doron, S., Bossard, G., Rothman, D., and Bailey, J. (2022). Covid-19 Precautions in Schools. Education Next, 22(3), 64-73.