This past spring, the Center on Reinventing Public Education surveyed districts and charter schools nationwide, asking how they were running schools from a distance. How long did it take to transition to distance learning? Were they taking attendance?

At Silicon Schools, a nonprofit organization that I lead, we were blown away by the results of that survey and by how few schools and districts were truly meeting the needs of kids. It’s important to acknowledge how difficult it was for schools to tackle the job they faced this spring. Nonetheless, we can’t ignore the fact that from March through June of this year, more than half the students in this country essentially got no real functional education. For those students who did, we saw teachers breaking their backs trying to figure out how to do it well.

Our organization provides funding to launch or transform California schools that serve as laboratories of innovation. We decided to survey about half of the 50 schools in our portfolio, which serve more than 20,000 kids, to ask the same questions that CRPE used, and then some. We wanted to find out: what’s working, what’s not?

And the data from our schools told a very different story. The schools were immediately responding to the needs of families. They were taking attendance. They were offering several hours a day of instruction, both live and asynchronous. Our survey confirmed what we had thought, that many of the students were still thriving, despite the obvious challenges for them and their teachers. It got us wondering, what accounted for the differences?

We wanted to figure out how some schools had made the transition look so seamless. We had schools in our portfolio that literally closed on a Friday and opened the following Monday with 100 percent student attendance, five hours of synchronous instruction, and parents responding with glowing comments to the administrators saying, “My kids are happier than they were last week.”

That remarkable agility allowed them to rise to the challenge of adapting in this unprecedented time. The educators at these schools have such deep relationships with their students and such a strong sense of moral purpose, they would find it unconscionable to take weeks or months off and just see where the kids landed.

When we looked closely at what had enabled these schools to succeed, we found that it came down to two main factors—school qualities that had existed before Covid-19 struck. The first was a school’s overall comfort level with technology. Schools that already used a learning-management system, whose students were accustomed to logging in and checking homework assignments, and whose teachers knew how to record a video and send messages were positioned to keep doing that remotely. Schools whose staff and students were inexperienced with such practices, though, faced a huge learning curve.

The other main key to success was that schools that flourished had a highly positive school culture, flexible teachers and staff, and a can-do spirit among team members that allowed them to reinvent the school on the fly over the course of a week. In a highly rule-bound organization where there is no strong sense of teamwork, little trust, and no overall commitment to excellence, I would venture to say it would be impossible to make the jump to distance learning with any quality.

These two factors working together—school culture and experience with technology—were strong predictors of which schools succeeded with virtual learning and which ones got stuck.

I hope that schools will be able to return to in-person learning this fall, with appropriate safety protocols in place, but I think it’s likely that many schools and districts will continue to rely almost entirely on distance education. As a nation, the remote instruction we supplied from March to June will not suffice. In too many settings, kids were not getting enough real learning.

So, what can we do to get better at distance learning quickly?

First, teachers need to see examples of great distance learning, and they need coaching and feedback from their school leaders and peers to keep improving. Schools that embrace a culture of continuous improvement and make their teaching practice public get better.

Second, there’s something magical about live teaching, interacting in real time with a skilled teacher. Many students, especially those who are not already motivated learners, need someone checking in and keeping them engaged. As we looked at the schools in our portfolio that got it right, we found the “sweet spot” resided in giving students one to two hours a day of live synchronous teaching with their classmates.

Granted, it will be hard for parents to coordinate all of these live sessions, often for multiple children, while also dealing with their own work schedules and obligations. For that reason, schools will also need to offer some asynchronous activities and build in some flexibility for families. School leaders will have to be thoughtful about how they balance live and asynchronous methods, saving the live instruction for the most meaningful high-value interactions between teachers and kids, and shifting other tasks to independent study, prerecorded lessons, or online learning programs.

A third big takeaway is that it is still incredibly important that learning be active for kids. We observed one kindergarten teacher, who, every time she asked a question, had her students quickly mark down their answers on the little whiteboards she had mailed home, and hold the boards up to the screen. The engagement and the enthusiasm of these kindergartners were infectious. And everybody had something to do. Contrast this with classes we observed where teachers simply lectured or asked questions of the entire class. In those settings, we saw far fewer students engaged and active in their learning.

Fourth, this moment presents an opportunity to rethink some of our assumptions. Do we really need every algebra teacher in America sitting at home this summer recording a lesson for September 1? With distance learning, schools can leverage their strongest teachers to reach more students over a virtual platform, while other teachers focus on small groups and pay attention to students’ work. We’ve seen schools do this effectively and believe that such thoughtful models could improve learning. If we are forced to run schools from a distance this fall, let’s at least take advantage of some of the potential benefits. Let’s try to get effective lectures from the best and most accomplished teachers and more personalization from the teachers who know their kids well and whom we can free from having to design all their own materials for every second of the day. I’d advise school leaders to think carefully about how to use in-person time to build relationships, establish trust, and teach the material that can best be communicated face to face, while shifting tasks that can be accomplished independently to the remote setting.

Schools will also do well to pay special attention to new students. My heart goes out to incoming kindergartners. Can you imagine starting kindergarten either staring at your screen at home without classmates or, even worse, going to school wearing a scary and uncomfortable mask, with everyone else wearing a mask too, and the adults trying to keep five-year-olds six feet apart? My heart goes out to the kids, the families, and the educators. This is going to be the hardest fall we’ve had maybe in the modern history of education.

This extraordinary challenge, though, also gives us permission to experiment and try different things. It’s going to take creativity and determination. We could easily become overwhelmed by the job ahead, but we have no choice but to gear up and find that next level of energy to figure out how to do something that’s never been done. How do we welcome students back to the school building safely, or into a better version of virtual learning, or potentially hardest of all, some combination of those two?

Brian Greenberg is CEO of Silicon Schools, a nonprofit organization that has launched or transformed more than 50 schools in high-need communities in Northern California.

This essay is adapted from an episode of the EdNext podcast, available at educationnext.org.

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

This article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Greenberg, B. (2020). “This Is Going to Be the Hardest Fall We’ve Had Maybe in the Modern History of Education.” Silicon Schools CEO on how schools can make a high-quality jump to distance learning. Education Next, 20(4), 87-88.

This article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Greene, J.P. (2020). The Finlandization of New Orleans: Learning from the Big Easy’s success story is not so easy. Education Next, 20(4), 84-86.

The Institute of Notre Dame, a 170-year-old Catholic girls’ school in Baltimore whose graduates included Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senator Barbara Mikulski, announced in May that it would close.

“Sad news,” Pelosi tweeted. Mikulski called it a “treasured institution.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the number of urban Catholic and other private schools that are closing amid financial pressure and dwindling enrollment. Contrary to popular understanding, many private school students are from middle- and low-income families, and many private schools are expressly dedicated to serving them (see Figure 1). As of July 9, a Cato Institute tracker listed 97 private schools that had announced permanent closures attributed at least partially to the pandemic.

Such closures are an important part of the story of how the pandemic has affected private schools. But the tale isn’t entirely one of weakness. Other schools have used their autonomy, flexibility, and strong family and community relationships to deliver robust distance learning.

The right policy choices now can help ensure that private schools remain viable alternatives for families, even as all schools enter a period of newly constrained resources.

Responding to the Crisis

As the landscape rapidly shifted this spring, the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the American Enterprise Institute were fast out of the gate with data collection and analysis. CRPE began publishing data on school-district response plans in mid-March. AEI began conducting longitudinal surveys of districts a week later. EdChoice, Echelon Insights, Education Week, Pew Research, and others have also tracked student, teacher, and parent perspectives and experiences.

Several of these efforts provide insight into private schools. Morning Consult and EdChoice surveyed teachers across private, charter, and district schools. Hanover Research and EdChoice surveyed private school employees across the country. The Association of Christian Schools International surveyed their members in the United States. More recently, the Education Next survey gathered data from parents across district, charter, and private schools, and the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice published an analysis of 3,500 district, charter, and private school websites.

The data paint an incomplete picture of how private schools have fared in the crisis so far, but they do suggest considerable variation. In the Morning Consult/EdChoice survey, 48 percent of private school teachers indicated they were providing e-learning, 32 percent said they were providing at-home assignments, and 16 percent said they weren’t providing either. The Hanover Research/EdChoice survey (to which about 3 in 10 responses came from private schools in Florida) also shows variation among private schools. Overall, 88 percent of private school employees reported that their schools had shifted to online learning with formal curricula, including 92 percent of Catholic private schools and 65 percent of nonreligious private schools. Schools responding to the survey by the Association of Christian Schools International reported differences in distance learning, as well. A majority of schools reported providing three to five hours a day of distance learning, though high schools often provided more and elementary schools often provided less.

Anecdotal accounts confirm that private-school responses to the crisis run the gamut. On one end of the spectrum are schools that have been unable to sustain operations past the current school year. Numerous media accounts have noted private schools that have closed not only for the school year, but permanently. In addition to the Institute of Notre Dame in Baltimore, these include All Saints Catholic School in Wilmington, Delaware; four schools in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston; at least 10 schools in New Jersey; and 20 schools in the Archdiocese of New York, among others. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston described how the pandemic influenced its decision to close schools: “In recent weeks, the reality of our budget challenges, drastically and negatively compounded by the Covid-19 protocols, forced a reassessment of these schools’ viability. . . . These dire circumstances have forced our hand.”

On the other end of the spectrum are private schools that entered the pandemic in positions of relative strength. Partnership Schools, a network of nine Catholic schools in New York City and Cleveland serving predominantly low-income students, found itself at the epicenter of the outbreak. Superintendent Kathleen Porter-Magee recalls the week of March 9 as a sprint to anticipate and adapt to conditions that changed by the hour. The network’s response pivoted quickly from procuring supplies and sanitizing buildings on Monday to, by Wednesday, planning to close their buildings for the foreseeable future. “We had war room meetings every morning and sent email communications every afternoon,” Porter-Magee said, “and sometimes that still didn’t feel like it was fast enough.”

In a process that involved pivoting on a daily and hourly basis and ascertaining families’ needs for devices and Internet access, as well as a few all-nighters, Partnership Schools was able to send students home on March 13 with a week’s worth of pencil-and-paper material. The week after, the schools rolled out a remote-learning plan that they continued to iterate and tweak through the end of the school year.

The majority of private schools likely lie somewhere between these two extremes, muddling through as best they can during an unprecedented disruption. In the words of Frank O’Linn, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Cleveland, “Like so many crises, it’s a test. It has revealed a lot of strong schools and some phenomenal stories . . . but not all are phenomenal.”

Transition to Remote Learning

What factors influence whether a school fails or flourishes under extreme duress? Common sense, as well as the literature on crisis management, suggests that a school’s ability to respond and adapt in the midst of a crisis likely depends on three broad
factors: autonomy and flexibility, family and community relationships, and financial resources.

Some have been quick to posit that private schools (and charter schools) have been nimblest in their response to the shutdown. There are some data consistent with this claim. On the 2020 Education Next survey, parents of nearly 70 percent of private school students said their children met virtually with their school or teachers and their classmates several times a week. Parents of only 43 percent of district students said the same. Private school students were also more likely to receive instruction that included new content, as opposed to all review material.

Other data complicate this narrative, however. The analysis from the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice suggests that charter and district schools did more to support some aspects of learning, such as “personalization and engagement outside of class.” Ultimately, assessing the effectiveness of school responses will require further research not only on how schools responded but on how much students learned (or didn’t learn) as a result.

In the meantime, it’s useful to explore how the autonomy and flexibility of private schools may have affected their ability to respond effectively. Leaders of private schools typically have direct oversight and authority over not only curriculum and instruction, but also human resources, operations, and finances. Many non-Catholic Christian and nonsectarian schools operate independently from any larger system. Even Catholic schools, which operate under the purview of the Church, benefit from a strong adherence to “subsidiarity”—the principle that matters are best handled at the most decentralized level possible.

However, autonomy and flexibility can also leave the leaders of individual schools adrift and isolated when a crisis hits. Frankie Jones of the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education Academies and Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program has seen “a lot of principals looking for help and guidance” and efforts from the Church to maintain school-leader autonomy while providing support. To help school-level leaders and staff, for instance, some dioceses have created virtual spaces to share ideas and challenges, trained teachers to use virtual-learning platforms, or provided guidance on how schools should prioritize family and student needs. Church policies impose relatively few regulatory burdens and governance structures on schools, thereby pushing decisions to the local level. But intentional efforts to inform, guide, and support local decisionmakers are necessary for this degree of flexibility to work.

When it comes to family and community relationships, private schools may also have a leg up. The religious orientation of many private schools often ties them to local churches or synagogues and includes theological principles that prioritize family engagement and service to the community. Family relationships are a central component of Catholic schools, for instance, because church doctrine establishes parents as children’s primary educators. Kathleen Porter-Magee describes Partnership Schools’ approach to the crisis: “We ramped up our academics, but we led first and foremost by connecting with families to figure out how they [were doing]. . . . That community-first approach is actually what paved the way for keeping learning going.”

Private schools also have an incentive to build strong relationships with families and the community because much of their revenue depends on families choosing to enroll their children and to contribute even modest sums to tuition. Mary Menacho, the interim executive director of the California Association of Independent Schools, said that the 2008 recession helped prepare private schools for today’s crisis. Since 2008, she said, “independent schools have had to look at what their value-add is, hone their mission, and clarify what sets them apart. That has been the basis for strong relationships with their families—clarity on what schools are offering and what makes them distinct.” It stands to reason that private schools that have invested in building relationships and communicating their distinct value proposition to families are positioned to partner with families to support students learning from home.

While private schools may well benefit from autonomy, flexibility, and strong family and community relationships, however, they mostly lack access to taxpayer funds and often operate on shoestring budgets. Even the nimblest schools with the strongest family and community relationships can find themselves on the ropes if they do not have cash on hand to purchase cleaning supplies, buy and distribute devices, print learning materials, or procure virtual-learning platforms. An effective response requires money, and many private schools—especially those dedicated to serving middle- and low-income families—were already on shaky financial footing leading into the coronavirus crisis.

In the Hanover/EdChoice survey, about 4 in 10 private-school respondents were “extremely or very worried” about collecting tuition for the remainder of the school year or about drops in philanthropic support, and roughly half were “extremely or very worried” about losing enrollment (see Figure 2). For some private schools, the financial effects have already begun. The survey conducted by the Association of Christian Schools International indicates that about one in five of their member schools has provided tuition discounts or refunds, and more than a quarter have furloughed staff. About one-third of schools have re-enrollment rates lower than those at the same time last year, and more than half report a decline in new student inquiries—an ill omen for the fall.

All told, the financial outlook for private schools is shaping up as a severe challenge. Economic turmoil may make even modest contributions to school tuition untenable for many middle- and low-income families (see Figure 3). Schools that rely on subsidies from churches receive less support when weekly in-person church services are canceled and offerings decline. Companies facing losses may cut corporate donations to tax-credit scholarship programs. Foundation assets are bound to take a hit, as well, with implications for philanthropic support for schools and scholarships. Finally, as states resize their budgets, it’s likely that funding for education will be cut—with potential implications for voucher programs and state education savings accounts.

Superintendent O’Linn of Cleveland put a fine point on the problem: “When you’ve got a system highly dependent on good will and philanthropy, and you have not just the medical crisis but also the economic crisis. . . . We’re very concerned about it.” Many predict the challenge will be greatest for schools that are already small or underenrolled. Laura Colangelo of the Texas Private Schools Association said she sees underenrolled Catholic schools and small Christian schools as the most vulnerable. But, she said, “independent schools and even more elite private schools are very cautious, as well.”

As the economic picture for the country worsens, the challenges of financial viability could easily outweigh the benefits of autonomy and family relationships. These issues are connected. Said O’Linn, “We need the government to help with the funding. But if we don’t provide the value proposition and the family atmosphere, families won’t choose us.”

Government Support

For all the uncertainty wrought by the crisis, it’s clear that many private schools serving middle- and low-income students will need financial support to survive. Financial support that maximizes autonomy and flexibility and leverages schools’ family and community relationships is even better.

The federal government has already taken steps to support private schools and students through the crisis. First and foremost, private schools can benefit from several aspects of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, including the $660 billion Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program. As of late April, many private schools—including 72 percent of schools that responded to the survey conducted by the Association of Christian Schools International—were planning to participate. It’s unclear how many private schools have actually accessed Small Business Administration loans. Some private schools were reluctant to participate because of concern that accepting federal aid would require them to demonstrate compliance with a host of federal regulations.

Private schools may also get relief from the CARES Act’s $31 billion Education Stabilization Fund, which includes $3 billion for the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund and $13.5 billion for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Under both programs, districts can receive funding to provide support to schools, including mental health services, technology, or cleaning supplies. Private schools can access these supports from the local school district but do not receive any funding themselves.

The distribution of money from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund depends on the priorities of governors, but states have less discretion over the distribution of money from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. On June 25, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a binding rule for how school districts must share this funding with non-public schools. The rule gives districts two options. The first bases private-school support on the total number of all private school students living in a district, rather than the number of low-income private school students. That approach contrasts with the way districts typically provide federally funded services to private schools, based on a Title I formula directing money to low-income students. This first option in the DeVos rule would end up directing much more aid to private schools, but districts have another choice: they can share the money based on the number of low-income students in private schools, but only if the district in turn directs its portion of the funding exclusively to low-income students. This second option, however, would limit districts’ flexibility in using the money. Several state attorneys general, led by California’s, have sued over the new rule.

Neither of these two funding programs is particularly well designed to fit the specific strengths and challenges of private schools. First, while school districts are required to consult with private schools, private schools have little control over how the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund money is used. This approach does not take advantage of private schools’ autonomy and flexibility. Second, the rule on the distribution of funds to private schools may provide disproportionate aid to private schools, but it does not target aid to the private schools most in need of that aid—those serving middle- and low-income families. In future relief legislation, federal policymakers can do more to ensure that funding is directed to high-need student populations, while also allowing the maximum flexibility for school-level leaders.

Alongside federal efforts to stabilize the education system, state policymakers also have an essential role. Financial support for schools will likely be an issue of significant debate in the next round of state budget negotiations. State policymakers will surely work to preserve as much funding as possible for public schools, but they should also consider the needs of middle- and low-income families enrolled in private-school choice programs.

Vouchers, tax-credit scholarship programs, and state education savings accounts are products of state law. Seventy percent of students who participate are in means-tested school-choice programs, available only to those with household incomes below a certain threshold. Many more participating students are in programs that are only accessible to students with special needs or circumstances, such as learners with exceptionalities or in foster care. State policymakers eager to direct support to middle- and low-income families can start by preserving funding for these programs.

In doing so, they will also help preserve institutions that, if lost, would send students flooding back to the public system—just as that system itself is navigating ongoing disruption and uncertainty. Following the Great Recession, student enrollment in private schools dropped by as much as 40 percent in the hardest-hit metropolitan areas. If even 10 percent of private school students returned to the public system, states’ education-funding liabilities would increase by $3.3 billion, EdChoice estimates. In the midst of an economic crisis, policymakers should resist efforts to scale back programs that generally produce higher levels of student proficiency, stronger educational attainment, and positive competitive effect on other schools in their vicinity—especially when they achieve those results with much less per-pupil public funding.

Policymakers might even be wise to consider raising funding caps on private-school choice programs to accommodate increased demand. Owing to declining household incomes, a growing number of families will be eligible to participate in these programs. Demand for private schools may also increase because parents have varying perspectives on how and when students should return to school. A USA Today/Ipsos poll in late May found that less than half of parents support students returning to school in the fall in the absence of a vaccine. Meanwhile, 58 percent of parents indicated they would support a hybrid in-person and distance-learning approach, and 59 percent said they would consider at-home learning options like online education or home schooling. A poll by the National Parents Union/Echelon Insights found that parents also differ on how schools should help students make up for lost learning time: 53 percent of parents support extending the school day, while 63 percent support extending the school year. Increasing access to private-school choice would allow middle- and low-income parents more options in selecting a school whose approach to reopening aligns with their own preferences.

Looking Ahead

In the coming months and years, schools across all sectors will need to assess and address learning gaps, support social-emotional needs, and protect public health. If state funding indeed declines and private-school enrollment drops, public schools will likely need to provide more services to more students with fewer resources. Public education systems will probably struggle to maintain student outcomes under these circumstances, and many students will backslide.

The long-term consequences of this decline are not hard to predict. As public schools struggle to meet student needs, dissatisfied families will look for alternatives. If more private schools serving middle- and low-income students close, those alternatives will narrow. And, if funding for private-school choice programs is cut, access to those alternatives will once again be limited by families’ financial means. Unless policymakers consider the needs of private schools alongside those of public schools, the sector could lose enormous ground in providing families with equitable access to choice.

To be sure, resources are finite, and the diversity and depth of needs are profound. But while protecting private-school choice will certainly force tough choices for policymakers today, it will preserve better choices for students and families in the future.

Juliet Squire is a partner on the policy and evaluation team at Bellwether Education Partners, where she concentrates on issues related to charter schools, private-school choice, and rural education. ACE Academies, EdChoice, and Partnership Schools have been clients of Bellwether Education Partners.

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

This article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Squire, J. (2020). In Pandemic, Private Schools Face Peril: Policy choices may help to preserve options for families. Education Next, 20(4), 20-27.

America’s private schools are not immune to the dangers posed by Covid-19. In fact, without prompt help from Uncle Sam, they may be among the institutions at greatest risk of succumbing to the virus.

More than 100 private schools have announced that they will be closing their doors permanently, at least in part because of the pandemic. That number is sure to climb as families hard hit by the crisis make enrollment decisions for the fall, as schools face the prospect of reopening below capacity because of safety concerns, and as fears of the coronavirus continue to depress church attendance and therefore the regular contributions from parishioners that help sustain parochial schools.

It is not the well-endowed private schools serving the one percent that face risk. Perhaps that is why the national media has paid so little attention to this crisis. According to the CATO Institute, which is tracking private-school closures nationally, the average annual tuition charged at the schools that have announced that they will close is under $7,000—less than half of the average per-pupil spending on public schools nationwide.

Widespread private-school closures pose problems not just for the students who attend them, but also for public-school budgets nationwide. Whatever one thinks of using government funds to expand school choice, there is no denying that the nation’s 5.7 million students who now attend private schools save money for taxpayers, who otherwise would have to pay to educate these children in public schools. The pro-school-choice American Federation for Children pegs the annual savings to state and local governments at $75 billion.

Nearly 50 years ago, fears about the budget implications of private-school closures sparked a series of bipartisan efforts in Congress to provide relief for this sector. One such proposal—a tax credit for K–12 and higher-education tuition expenses—even passed the House of Representatives in 1978. The measure’s champion in the Senate was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat from New York. The heterodox coalition that backed the concept in a series of votes that August included former Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Joe Biden, then Delaware’s junior senator and a product of Catholic schools.

The 1978 bill ultimately foundered in the Senate, owing in part to doubts about the constitutionality of using federal funds to support families attending religious schools. The U.S. Supreme Court has long since laid that concern to rest. Its 2002 Zelman decision upheld state-funded vouchers for religious private schools, and this term the court even ruled that state constitutions cannot be used to bar religious schools from participating in school-choice programs (see “In Supreme Court Case, a Far-Reaching Win for Religious-School Parents,” legal beat).

What’s also changed since the 1970s is the alignment of support for policies to sustain private-school choice. Like so many issues in American politics, this one has polarized sharply along party lines. Yes, current survey data show that school-choice proposals garner high levels of support from Black and Hispanic voters—core Democratic constituencies. Today, however, it is hard to imagine a prominent Democrat like Moynihan leading a charge to provide aid to private schools, even in times of economic distress, or a Democratic backbench senator joining that cause. The fact that the Trump administration has made a federal tax credit to support private-school scholarships its top education priority makes deviations from the party line all the more unlikely.

This political reality doesn’t change the fact that private schools need relief now—and that failing to provide that relief would only aggravate the financial challenges facing all schools. As Kirabo Jackson and colleagues demonstrate in this issue (see “The Costs of Cutting School Spending,” research), policymakers and advocates have a strong case for a new round of federal aid to support state and local education budgets. Cuts to school spending in the wake of the Great Recession helped cause the first nationwide decline in student test scores in a half-century, as well as a drop in the number of new college students. As the virus continues to spread, the additional expenses schools face in preparing to reopen, whether in person or virtually, only strengthen that case.

Yet private schools face those same expenses, and failing to support them will only heighten the challenges for public schools. A bill introduced on July 22 by Senators Tim Scott and Lamar Alexander would provide a one-time appropriation of funds to state-based organizations that provide private-school scholarships. It would also create a permanent federal tax credit for donations to those organizations. The latter proposal seems like a heavy lift now, given the politics of the issue. But Republicans in the Senate may yet be able to use their leverage to ensure that America’s private schools do not become another vulnerable population left exposed.

Martin West

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

This article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

West, M.R. (2020). If Many More Private Schools Close, All Schools Will Suffer. Education Next 20(4), 5.

State budgets are in trouble due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with tax revenues in freefall and steep increases in spending on unemployment insurance, social-welfare programs, and emergency services. That spells budget trouble for schools, since states contribute about half of all public-school funding nationwide.

How might cuts to state education spending affect student achievement? We can learn something about what’s ahead by looking at education spending and student outcomes after the Great Recession, which began in late 2007 and ended in June 2009. The years immediately following that period represented the largest and most sustained decline in national per-pupil spending in more than a century. Spending fell by roughly 7 percent on average nationwide, by more than 10 percent in seven states, and by more than 20 percent in two states. The sheer magnitude of this historical episode allows us to examine whether large-scale and persistent education budget cuts harm students in general and poor children in particular.

We look at each state’s test scores and number of college freshmen from 2002 to 2017 to compare those outcomes before and after the funding cuts induced by the recession. To understand the causal effects of the cuts, we take advantage of the fact that the recession did not affect education spending in all states equally. Spending fell more in states where, prior to the recession, schools depended more on state funds. Yet those states were no more likely to experience high unemployment or poverty rates during the recession. This enables us to separate the effects of recession-induced cuts in school spending from the broader effects of the recession itself.

We find that, by and large, money matters. On average, a $1,000 reduction in per-pupil spending reduces average test scores in math and reading by 3.9 percent of a standard deviation and increases the score gap between black and white students by roughly 6 percent. A $1,000 reduction also lowers the college-going rate by about 2.6 percent. Declines in test scores and college-going tracked the recession-induced decline in per-pupil spending and did not abate as the economy recovered—providing further evidence that the declines are driven by spending changes rather than other effects of the recession.

Tracing the Impact of State Budgets

The relationship between education spending and learning outcomes has been a matter of debate for decades. In the search for a cause of the persistent gap in academic achievement between wealthy and poor students, budget disparities are a frequent nominee. Advocates for poor students have used this argument to overturn school-funding formulas that relied on local dollars in favor of state-based funding mechanisms, based on the assumption that state funding would direct more dollars to low-income communities and bring per-pupil spending up to equitable levels.

This move brought school spending in some poor communities in line with that of wealthier districts, and it has contributed to better outcomes for students, such as higher high-school graduation rates and adult wages (see “Boosting Educational Attainment and Adult Earnings,” research, fall 2015). But it has also made education budgets more vulnerable to overall economic conditions. State-collected revenues are based largely on income and sales taxes, which are more responsive to market fluctuations than federal revenues or local property-tax collections. In addition, more than half of all U.S. states have to balance their budgets every year. This means that when more residents qualify for state-funded assistance like Medicaid, education may get a smaller share of the budget.

These dynamics were evident during the Great Recession, when real pre-tax income fell by almost 7 percent and national consumption as a percentage of gross domestic product fell by 6 percentage points. This led to a historic decline in per-pupil spending, which coincided with the first nationwide declines in test scores in more than 50 years as well as a smaller number of first-time college entrants (see Figure 1).

These concurrent trends are highly suggestive, but they may not reflect causal relationships. A particular concern is that it is changes in families’ economic circumstances due to the recession, not reductions in school spending, that account for the decline in outcomes. Our analysis below aims to separate the effect of recession-induced school spending declines from that of the recession itself.

Data

We link information from several data sources. School finance data come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of School System Finances, which contains financial data for all 13,500 public school districts in the United States. On average, roughly 85 percent of all K–12 education spending goes to current spending—expenses for instruction and support services delivered that year. About 10 percent goes towards capital expenses, which include construction, land, and equipment. Employee salary and benefits are the largest single budget item, accounting for 67 percent of total spending.

The revenue sources for public education spending differ substantially by state, with varying mixes of state, local, and federal revenues. Between 2002 and 2017, some 48.7 percent of school revenue nationwide was from state funding, 41.7 percent was from local sources, and 9.5 percent was from federal funding. These percentages differ dramatically from state to state: the share of funding that comes from state sources ranges from 32 percent in Nebraska to 85 percent in Hawaii.

Test score data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” a test given every two years to a representative sample of students across the country. For our analysis, we use publicly available statewide average scores in reading and math, focusing on results for public school students in grades 4 and 8. These scores are based on the test results of 4.3 million individual students from 11,477 school districts between 2002 and 2017.

Our college-going data are from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, based on surveys submitted by postsecondary institutions. Institutions report on the number of first-time college freshman from each state in each year. We use these reports to count the number of first-time freshmen from each state in each year. To compute college-going rates for these years, we obtain population counts by age in each state in each year from the U.S. Census Bureau. Our college-going measure is the number of first-time college enrollees divided by the average of the number of 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds in the state the year before enrollment. We use additional data on postsecondary institutions to compute college-going rates by school type, such as two- and four-year schools.

We also consider rates of poverty, employment and unemployment, average wages, and average home values as additional variables. These data are from a variety of sources, including the United States Census Bureau Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Zillow. School district staffing and student enrollment information come from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Method

In order to determine the effect of school spending levels on student outcomes, we need to identify the effect of recession-induced spending declines separate from the effect of the recession itself. We do this by looking at states that relied heavily on state funding for local education budgets before the recession. Those states were more likely to experience declines in school spending for reasons unrelated to the intensity of the recession in the state or other policy changes that may have occurred at that time. This basic pattern holds true for two related, but distinct, reasons.

First, as the labor market worsened, demand for state-funded services such as unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. To cover these additional costs, many states cut their education budgets—a crowd-out effect. Before the Great Recession, states spent about 27 percent of their budgets on K–12 education. After 2009, that fell to about 23 percent, on average, where it remained through 2015. Looking back, we see a similar pattern during the recession in the early 2000s, when the share of state spending going to K–12 schools fell to about 27 percent from about 29 percent. This suggests that, even if state revenues were unchanged during the recession, states that were more reliant on state taxes to fund K–12 schools would be more likely to experience education budget cuts.

The second reason is related to the tax base for state funding. In general, state tax collections are more sensitive to economic conditions than local taxes. State taxes mostly come from income and sales tax collections, which are directly tied to residents’ paychecks and spending. By contrast, local tax collections are mostly from property taxes, which tend to be more stable even when market values fall. The greater sensitivity of state taxes to the business cycle suggests that, even if there were no crowd-out channel, states that were more reliant on state taxes to fund K–12 schools would experience deeper education budget cuts. We refer to this as the revenue effect.

Different states have different levels of vulnerability to these effects (see Figure 2). One example of a highly vulnerable state is Hawaii. In 2008, schools in Hawaii received 85 percent of their funding from the state, and 75 percent of state revenues came from income or sales taxes. Its education spending was therefore highly sensitive to both the crowd-out and revenue effects. By contrast, school spending in a state like Illinois is less vulnerable. In 2008, schools in Illinois received only 33 percent of their funding from the state. As a result, local school budgets were, on average, far less sensitive to the business cycle.

While overall school spending declined after the onset of the recession, revenues from state taxes fell most sharply through both the crowd-out and revenue channels. Because of this, states that were more reliant on state revenues to fund public education in 2008 due to the particulars of their school-funding formulas tended to experience larger school spending reductions during the recession.

In our main analysis, we compare the changes in outcomes after the recession across states that were more or less reliant on state revenues and therefore experienced larger or smaller reductions in school spending. To illustrate our approach, in Figure 3 we consider states to be “more reliant” if state revenues accounted for 48 percent or more of their K–12 education spending in 2008. We then examine how per-pupil spending in those states changed, on average, after 2008, relative to each state’s own pre-recession trend in school spending. Next, we conduct the same analysis in “less reliant” states. Figure 3a plots the difference in these changes in per-pupil spending between the two groups. The downward trend after 2009 confirms that states that were more reliant on state revenues to fund public education saw larger declines in school spending after the recession.

We then use the same grouping of states and method to compare changes in students’ average test scores (see Figure 3b) and likelihood of enrolling in college (see Figure 3c). If school spending affects outcomes, the trend in spending should correspond with the trend in test scores and college-going. This is what we find.

Our main analysis uses this same basic logic. We study the relationship between reliance on state funding, post-recession changes in school spending, and student achievement across states. We predict how much a state’s school spending would be expected to change based on its prior reliance on state funding and study the effects of those predicted changes on student outcomes. We find no evidence of a relationship between reliance on state funding and the severity of a recession. This reduces concerns that outcomes in these states would have declined for reasons other than a decline in school funding. Even so, we adjust for detailed measures of state economic conditions when estimating the effects of school spending changes on student outcomes.

Results

We find that a $1,000 reduction in per-pupil spending due to the recession led to a decline in student test scores of about 3.9 percent of a standard deviation, or about 1.6 percentile points. That $1,000 reduction also led to a decline in the college-going rate of first-time freshmen of about 1.2 percentage points, a 2.6 percent change. To better understand how these trends played out, we estimate the extent to which different budget line items shrank in response to recession-induced decreases.

On the whole, school districts responded to recession-era funding declines by cutting the largest percentage from their capital budgets. Capital costs make up about 10 percent of district budgets but account for as much as 47 percent of budget trims. By cutting more from capital, states may have been able to cut substantially less from core operating expenses, such as teachers’ salaries and benefits. Indeed, current operating costs account for 85 percent of overall spending but only about 51 percent of spending cuts.

Even so, districts still made substantial cuts to instructional spending. For every dollar in spending cuts, we find districts reduced instructional spending by $0.45, on average. Reductions in payroll costs for instructional employees account for roughly half of that amount, while reduced benefits make up most of the rest.

Districts trimmed their spending on payroll across the board, taking particular aim at the guidance office. We look at overall staff counts and find that, on average, a $1,000 decline in spending was associated with hiring 3.7 percent fewer teachers, 5.3 percent fewer instructional aides, 3.3 percent fewer library staff members, and 12 percent fewer guidance counselors. This led to roughly 0.3 more students per teacher and 80 more students per guidance counselor.

We also look at how cuts in state education funding affected students of color and students from low-income families. We first measure the relationship between a district’s poverty rate in 2007, before the recession began, and students’ test scores. On average, we find that a district where 30 percent of students are from low-income families has average test scores that are one standard deviation lower than a district in that same state that had zero poverty. We then see how the relationship between district poverty rates and test scores changed as spending fell. Our results reveal that, when per-pupil spending declines by $1,000, the test-score gap grows by about 12 percent of a standard deviation. In sum, the achievement losses caused by recessionary public-school spending cuts were disproportionately experienced by students in high-poverty districts.

In investigating the effects on students by race, we find negative effects from school spending cuts for both white and black students, and small and inconsistent effects for Hispanic students. The effects are largest for black students, suggesting that spending cuts may have increased black-white test score gaps. To test this directly, we restrict our analysis to states that enroll sufficient numbers of black and white students for their test scores to be reported publicly and compute the test-score gap in each state for each year. We find that a $1,000 spending cut would increase the gap in average test scores between black and white students by about 6 percent.

Finally, we explore how the recessionary spending cuts affected the kinds of colleges that students attend, focusing on first-time college freshmen. The decline in college enrollment caused by recessionary spending cuts was driven largely by two-year schools. Overall, a $1,000 decline in per-pupil spending reduced the rate of first-time enrollment at two-year colleges by 5.9 percent, while at four-year colleges it decreased by a statistically insignificant 1.2 percent. Enrollment at public colleges fell by 4 percent, compared to a small (and statistically insignificant) 1.7 percent increase at private colleges. We also looked at schools classified as minority-serving institutions, which include historically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, and schools that enroll large numbers of Hispanic or Asian students. These institutions experienced a 10 percent relative decline in attendance, although these estimates tend to be imprecise and are not statistically significant. Taken as a whole, these patterns suggest that the decline in college enrollment due to spending cuts reflected reduced enrollment at less selective and minority-serving institutions.

Since these college enrollment effects are driven by public institutions, one may wonder if our results reflect a tuition effect. Specifically, if those states that experienced the largest recessionary budget cuts were also likely to raise in-state tuition, it could partially explain our college-going results. To assess this possibility, we reviewed federal data on states’ higher education finances, college tuition charges, and financial aid and Pell grant receipts. We find that changes in per-pupil spending due to the recession are unrelated to states’ college tuition charges, in-state tuition, Pell grant awards, or private school tuition. In sum, we find no evidence that our college-going effects are driven by a tuition effect.

Spending Cuts Matter

Ever since 1966, when the Coleman Report first raised the question, policymakers and scholars have debated whether public school spending matters for student outcomes. There is a growing consensus that money can matter. But there has been no study to date looking at how schools respond to large funding cuts and how cuts affect student outcomes. Our results confirm that that money matters in education and provide new evidence that school spending cuts matter as well.

We show that declining state support and subsequent cuts in local school budgets can slow student progress with potentially lasting consequences. First, the spending declines that followed the Great Recession halted a five-decade-long increase in student test scores in reading and math, kicking off what some have called a “lost decade” in terms of student achievement. Second, those cuts also were associated with slower rates of college-going among students on track to become first-time college freshmen, possibly undermining some students’ momentum during a critical moment of transition from K–12 to higher education. These consequences are evident despite the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a stimulus program that partially offset education spending cuts. Its funds were insufficient to fully offset the losses, though they likely helped reduce the severity of cuts in the years immediately following the recession.

More than a decade later, some of the education spending cuts linked to the Great Recession have yet to be fully restored. In the pandemic era, as we face another impending recession and constrained state budgets, the years ahead appear likely to include further cuts. Federal stimulus funding may be necessary to help prevent similar detrimental effects on student achievement.

Further, given that the consequences of cutting public education spending are long-lasting, states facing a series of difficult financial decisions may wish to prioritize restoring education budgets as soon as possible after the recovery. Though the impact of tough economic times on public schools may be felt for years to come, the severity of the consequences for students can be minimized by maintaining support for instruction as much as possible.

C. Kirabo Jackson is professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, where Cora Wigger is a PhD candidate. Heyu Xiong is assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. This article is adapted from a study titled “Do School Spending Cuts Matter? Evidence from The Great Recession” forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

This article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Jackson, C.K., Wigger, C., and Xiong, H. (2020). The Costs of Cutting School Spending: Lessons from the Great Recession. Education Next, 20(4), 64-71.

Homeschooled students are isolated and at urgent risk of harm from maltreatment, under-education, and parental abuse. That’s the case Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet made in her recent call to ban the practice, which has been legal in all 50 U.S. states for more than a quarter-century. Ironically, Bartholet’s article in the Arizona Law Review appeared just as millions of parents were forced to turn to homeschooling temporarily, under stay-at-home orders that closed schools across the country.

It can be difficult to know precisely what, when, and how the nation’s homeschooled students are learning. After all, privacy and the freedom to explore education as families see fit, with limited government oversight, is a defining feature. But the best evidence we have indicates that homeschooled students are far from isolated.

By looking at a recent national survey of American households conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, I found that homeschooled students are more likely to participate in cultural and family activities than their public-school peers. They seem to spend less time on formal instruction in humanities subjects, but more time visiting libraries and museums and attending community events. If public exposure protects children and cultural knowledge is a major goal for education, concerns that homeschooled students are in danger appear, at the very least, overblown.

Who Homeschools Their Children?

Homeschooling is both a growing and changing practice. The number of families reporting that they homeschool their children grew to 1.7 million by 2016, representing 3.3 percent of all U.S. students aged 5-17, according to the National Household Education Survey (see Figure 1). On that survey, a nationally representative sample of families also answered a range of questions about their demographics and levels of education. Responses were collected from 14,075 families in all, including 552 homeschool families across the United States.

Overall, homeschool parents are more likely to be white or Hispanic and are less likely to hold college degrees (see Figure 2). Some 55 percent of homeschool families are white compared to 49 percent of public-school families, and 29 percent of homeschool families are Hispanic compared to 22 percent in public schools. Homeschool families are also more likely to have three or more children than families in public or private schools. Some 32 percent of homeschool households include an adult with at least one college degree, compared to 36 percent of public-school families and 64 percent of families whose children attend private schools.

The 2016 National Household Education Survey also asked homeschool families questions about formal instruction and participation in enrichment activities, pointing to some of the ways in which the practice has evolved. Thanks to the Internet, homeschool families have more resources and share larger communities than in decades past. Online clearinghouses, blogs, and social-media groups for families who follow particular educational philosophies are readily available. Casual parent groups pool resources, formal homeschooling cooperatives bring students together for hands-on science experiments and dance classes, and homeschool sports leagues give students the opportunity to play on a team. On the survey, some 30 percent of homeschool families reported children received some instruction through a homeschool organization or cooperative.

In addition, with ever-expanding access to online content and educational technology, the term “hybrid homeschooling” has emerged to describe families who combine home education with part-time attendance at a virtual or brick-and-mortar school. According to the Education Commission of the States, 26 states allow homeschoolers to participate in enrichment activities at a local public school, and states like Vermont and Nevada have allowed homeschoolers to enroll in classes at public schools to augment their studies. And that doesn’t include the sorts of virtual learning programs that have become commonplace during the Covid-19 pandemic: live group enrichment classes like Outschool, online community-college courses, video teaching tools like Khan Academy, and individual tutoring via text and video chats.

A Cultural Concern

One worry about homeschooling rests on the idea of “cultural capital,” the valuable constellation of cultural knowledge, behaviors, tastes, and physical markers of status that help adults navigate their communities and boost their likelihood of success. When French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced this idea in the late 1970s, he described cultural capital as a possession of the upper class, arguing that affluent individuals naturally transmit cultural capital to one another through rituals, practices, and values. Institutions, in theory, reward those who possess upper-class cultural capital, associating it with individual ability. Empirical research, however, suggests that cultural capital is not necessarily limited to the affluent.

In thinking about how to measure this intangible force, scholars have looked at exposure to various activities that may enable the acquisition of cultural capital, such as visiting an art gallery or museum, experiencing a live artistic performance, and visiting a zoo, aquarium, athletic event, or historical site. In looking specifically at children, scholars have also considered activities like visiting a bookstore or library and shared reading, as well as parent-child interactions like discussing books, music, or art.

Many traditional school experiences may impart cultural capital, such as participation in music and art classes, involvement in student clubs, and study of foreign-language and classical literature. So the concern for homeschooled students is that they lack access to these experiences at home. Supplies found in art rooms, books available in school libraries, and instruments accessible in music class could be cost-prohibitive for individual families to offer. A sole parent-teacher could struggle to be a multi-subject content expert in these many arenas. The common trope of the poorly socialized homeschooled student who knows little about the outside world is rooted in these assumptions.

However, what if this is not the case? The evolving nature of homeschooling could instead offer expanded opportunities for students to gain cultural capital. There appears to be a growing array of online education resources and part-time enrollment programs at postsecondary institutions. Homeschool days are common at child-friendly museums, as are references to homeschooling cooperatives. One-to-one instruction could progress at a faster pace than traditional group classes, freeing up more time for excursions and extracurricular activities (see “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” research, Winter 2014). The question is, how do homeschool families spend their time, and to what extent are they creating opportunities for students to obtain cultural capital?

The 2016 National Household Educational Survey offers a rich set of data to examine that question, though it has some limitations. First, the results are derived from self-reports, and respondents may overestimate their children’s participation in cultural and family activities. Given their unconventional decision to educate their children outside of formal education systems, homeschool families may be particularly susceptible to this social-desirability bias. Alternatively, their lack of regard for convention may make them worry less about what others think.

The activities covered by the survey also may not include the ways that families could provide different experiences for their children. For example, many if not most homeschool families are from conservative Christian households who report religious and moral instruction as key influences. This background may influence the types of cultural excursions they value.

Finally, the information the survey provides is relatively basic. For example, reports of formal instruction are based on a yes/no format and do not include the frequency or rigor of activities. Reports of family activities like arts and crafts or playing sports may simply capture the main activities of homeschooling rather than something above and beyond what students are doing for “school.”

What Homeschool Families Said

Families who reported educating their children at home were asked a range of questions about their homeschooling practices, including which adult primarily leads learning, how many days a week they homeschool, which subjects are taught, and whether their child receives instruction from a cooperative or school. All surveyed families answered questions about cultural and family activities. I compared reported participation in those activities by homeschool families and by families whose children attend public and private schools.

In terms of formal learning, 29 percent of homeschool families reported teaching all four main humanities subjects: art, music, foreign language, and literature. Another 29 percent reported teaching three of them, and 42 percent reported teaching two or less. This suggests that formal instructional opportunities for cultural-capital acquisition could be lacking for many homeschooled students. Even though only homeschool households report on the teaching of these subjects on the survey, other national data has indicated that students attending public schools tend to receive instruction in arts, music, literature, and foreign language at higher rates.

Homeschool organizations or cooperatives appear to increase the breadth of content to which homeschooled children receive exposure. Nearly three-quarters of families whose children receive group instruction report formal study in at least three humanities subjects. By comparison, among families whose children do not participate in homeschool groups, approximately half report formal instruction in three to four of the humanities subjects.

However, my analysis shows that homeschooled students are more likely to engage in activities outside the home that can contribute to cultural capital (see Figure 3). In comparing survey responses for homeschool and public-school families, I find homeschool families are 17 percentage points more likely to visit an art gallery or museum, 22 percentage points more likely to visit a library, and 17 percentage points more likely to attend an event sponsored by a community, religious, or ethnic group. They are also 8 percentage points more likely to visit a zoo or aquarium, and 7 percentage points more likely to visit a bookstore. These patterns seem to indicate that homeschooled students may gain exposure to cultural capital through excursions, alongside or in lieu of formal instruction.

I then investigate the likelihood of homeschooled students participating in family activities that may be associated with cultural capital and find similar results (see Figure 4). Compared to their public-school peers, homeschooled students are 17 percentage points more likely to do arts and crafts and 13 percentage points more likely to work on projects that entail building, making, or fixing an object with family. In addition, homeschool households are 9 percentage points more likely more likely to report playing sports or doing physical activities together.

In general, families where at least one parent has a college degree report greater participation in most activities, particularly culturally rich excursions like visiting museums and art galleries, going to bookstores and libraries, and attending live artistic performances. However, this well-documented association between parents’ education level and cultural activities is less evident for homeschool households. Homeschool families are the least likely to report having a parent or guardian with a college degree but are the most likely to indicate participation in cultural and family activities. Interestingly, less-educated homeschool families report more cultural and family activities than public- or private-school families where at least one parent has a college degree.

Looking Beyond Formal Instruction

While the practice of homeschooling seems to be undergoing a transformation, the debate and criticisms raised by Bartholet remain dominated by conventional assumptions and timeworn concerns. Worries about deprivation for homeschooled children do not appear substantiated by the survey findings I examine.

Homeschool families report higher rates of participation in cultural and family activities, suggesting that students have opportunities to acquire cultural capital outside of formal instructional time. Indeed, increased opportunities for hands-on learning may be a fundamental reason why some families opt to homeschool. Participation in these types of activities also may play a compensatory role, possibly offsetting what may be forfeited by not attending a traditional brick-and-mortar school. And it may offer a glimpse of the potential unique benefits to homeschooling, such as more frequent exposure to museums and art galleries and other community-based opportunities to engage with high culture.

This initial foray into the relationship between cultural capital and homeschooling underscores lines of inquiry for future research. Little is known about how homeschool parents attempt to teach art, music, and foreign languages. Furthermore, it remains uncertain whether a lack of instruction in humanities subjects among homeschool households signifies a rejection of conventional forms of instruction or is a consequence of unobserved barriers that these families face.

These findings cannot fully answer the concerns raised by Bartholet about child safety and homeschooling. Child neglect and abuse are urgent problems in some share of all families, and it is true that some children find refuge and access social-service supports through their schools. However, national survey data does not indicate that this is a concern for the majority. Critiques that homeschooled children grow up in cultural and social isolation may be overstated and mischaracterize the practice.

A richer understanding of homeschooling is especially relevant as families across the United States contemplate an uncertain return to full-time formal instruction in school buildings in the fall of 2020. Taking the activities of homeschool families as a guide, reduced classroom time or continued closures may potentially free up more time for different sorts of educational activities that parents and children can pursue at home. Even if museums and libraries remain closed, they have created rich online tours and educational programs in the wake of the pandemic, like those offered by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Louvre, NASA’s Langley Research Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Is the knowledge students gain from these sorts of activities equivalent to what they develop through experiences at school? What might be the benefits, as well as the limitations, of exploring education in this way on a broad scale? In the pandemic age, we may be about to find out.

Daniel Hamlin is assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma.

This article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Hamlin, D. (2020). Homeschool Happens Everywhere: Less formal instruction, but more family and community activities. Education Next, 20(4), 28-33.

This article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M. (2020). The New Accountability Assignment: Post-Covid, judge schools based on what they ask students to read, write, and do, in addition to how much students learn. Education Next, 20(4), 78-79

The soaring unemployment rate because of the Covid-19 pandemic may improve teacher quality. That’s the conclusion we draw from our study of more than 30,000 Florida teachers and their students. That group included teachers who entered the profession between 1969 and 2009, a period that spanned six recessions.

Our research explores how a dearth of job opportunities in the broader economy affects teacher quality—a key question, as teachers affect student outcomes during school and well into adulthood. It is a timely question as well, since jobseekers are likely to outnumber openings for some time. That may benefit U.S. schools and students in the long run, as we’ve found that individuals who choose to enter the teaching profession during a recession are significantly more effective at raising test scores. Weaker job markets offer a window of opportunity to hire stronger teachers.

The effects are most pronounced in math, where teachers who enter the profession during a labor-market downturn are 0.11 standard deviations more effective than those who start teaching when the economy is strong. That amounts to an additional $770 in lifetime earnings, on average, for each student taught by a teacher entering during a recession, or $13,000 cumulatively over a lifetime for the average class size of 17 students. The good news is that many of these teachers tend to stay in the classroom, providing high-quality teaching for many years to come.

The superior effectiveness of recession teachers does not reflect differences in their observed characteristics or teaching assignments. In comparing teachers who entered the profession during recessions with those who started teaching in better economic times, we find they do not differ significantly by gender, race, or age at career start, nor by the demographic makeup of the schools in which they teach.

The driving factor appears to be occupational choice. Economic downturns temporarily change the supply of potential new teachers, which grows to include adults seeking a more stable source of employment because of a lack of opportunities in other professions. That is why we find that the cohorts of teachers hired during recessions have a large share of exceptionally strong performers. 

With state tax collections in sharp decline, concerns over widespread learning loss due to school closures, and an uncertain return to in-person instruction, school districts face tremendous challenges in the months ahead. These findings suggest at least a hint of a silver lining and point to a strategy to improve teacher quality during good times, as well. Consider the overall labor market and increase pay for new teachers in particular, to attract more effective candidates into the profession.

Choosing the Classroom

The number of people completing teacher-education programs each year has been roughly double the number of newly hired teachers in the United States since at least 1987, when the earliest comprehensive data are available. This implies that at any point in time, there is a large pool of potential teachers nationwide who are eligible to obtain certification immediately, regardless of the rigidity of state certification regimes. It also suggests that for many potential teachers, the key decision about whether to enter the profession occurs when they enter the labor market rather than when they choose a degree program.

To explore how business cycles affect teacher quality, we use a simple framework of self-selection in which individuals choose an occupation based on the benefits they expect to receive in return for their work. The choice in this case is between working in the teaching sector and any other sector—in other words, all other labor-market options for potential teachers. Under typical economic conditions, if ability is valued in both sectors but teaching offers lower returns in terms of pay and prestige, fewer people will choose to become teachers. But when a recession hits, teaching becomes more attractive. Unlike private sector wages, teacher pay is rarely cut during recessions. The pace of hiring typically does not slow. (The Great Recession of 2008 was a notable exception in that regard.) And the job protections afforded teachers by tenure may become more salient in the minds of jobseekers. All this implies that the average ability of people entering the teaching sector during economic downturns may be higher.

Temporary fluctuations in economic conditions are most likely to influence selection into teaching when certification regimes permit as many individuals as possible to enter the profession without completing additional training. Traditionally, U.S. states required an undergraduate or master’s degree from a teacher-preparation program in order to be certified, which likely constrained any short-term supply response. In recent decades, however, shortages of certified teachers in specific subject areas led many states to create alternative teacher-certification programs, which allow adults with at least a bachelor’s degree to begin teaching immediately while completing requirements for certification. As of 2011, 45 states had approved alternative-certification programs, and one in five people completing teacher-preparation programs nationwide did so via an alternate route.

Our study focuses on Florida, where the certification regime is typical of those states that have created alternative entry routes into teaching. The state initially awards professional teaching certificates only to graduates of state-approved teacher-preparation programs who have passed tests of general knowledge, professional education, and the subject area in which they will teach. However, any college graduate may be eligible for a temporary teaching certificate if he or she has completed sufficient coursework or can pass an approved test in the relevant subject area. Such certificates are good for up to three years, allowing any college graduate to enter the teaching profession in Florida (at least temporarily) by passing a single exam.

Florida is not typical in another important way, however, because much of its teaching workforce is from out of state. Demand for new teachers has long outpaced the supply of graduates from local preparation programs; in the 1980s, the state estimated that as many as 45 percent of its new teachers had completed their preparation program outside Florida. More recently, in 2009 some 23 percent of individuals receiving their initial Florida teaching credential were prepared out of state, according to federal estimates. These statistics highlight the extent to which the pool of potential teachers for Florida public schools is national in scope, and therefore apt to be influenced by nationwide, not state-specific, economic conditions.

Data and Method

To measure the effectiveness of individual teachers, we create estimates of their value-added to students’ math and reading performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test during the 2000-01 through 2008-09 school years. Such estimates show whether each teacher’s students made more, less, or the same amount of progress in those subjects as their peers assigned to other teachers over the course of a school year. There are certainly dimensions of teacher quality not captured by their value-added to student test scores (see “The Full Measure of a Teacher,” research, Winter 2019). However, the weight of the evidence indicates that value-added estimates do capture important aspects of teacher quality, including their long-term impact on student success and wellbeing (see “Great Teaching,” research, Summer 2012).

We limit our sample to teachers in grades 4 and 5 who can be confidently associated with students’ test-score gains. We chose fourth- and fifth-grade teachers because these teachers typically teach all subjects, and we only include student-teacher pairs if the teacher accounts for at least 80 percent of the student’s total instruction time. This yields a total of roughly 32,600 teachers, 5,200 of whom entered the profession during a recession.

Our data also include information on teachers’ demographics and years of experience. We use the latter to estimate a teacher’s career start year by subtracting her total years of experience from the year she is observed in the classroom. Approximately 42 percent of the teachers in our sample started their careers during the study period; the other 58 percent were already working in the classroom.

To identify which career-entry years occurred during recessions, we look to the National Bureau of Economic Research. The bureau defines a recession not in strict quantitative terms, but as “a period between a peak and a trough” based on gross domestic product, employment, and income data. Using that definition, over the past four decades we find six recessions and eight cohorts of teachers who started their careers during a recession. For example, teachers starting their careers during the 1990-91 school year are classified as having entered during a recession, because the bureau dates the economic downturn of the early 1990s to have occurred between July 1990 (peak) and March 1991 (trough).

In addition, we also look at other indicators of weak economic conditions, such as changes in gross domestic product and various unemployment measures, which are highly correlated with the bureau’s defined periods of recession. Our data also include the demographic and educational characteristics of each student such as gender, race, free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, limited English proficiency status, and special education status. We use this information to adjust our estimates of teachers’ value-added estimates for the demographic makeup of their students.

Recession Teachers

Based on the logic laid out above, we would expect to find a positive effect of economic conditions on the effectiveness of teachers who start during a downturn, since recessions reduce the outside options of potential teachers as they are entering the labor market. Because a recession temporarily recasts employment prospects, with less-stable jobs in the private sector appearing to have more risk and less reward than typical, both the number and the average quality of applicants for teaching jobs should increase. That, in turn, should lead to higher average value-added estimates for teachers in recession cohorts.

That’s just what we find. In looking at teachers who entered the workforce over the past four decades, those who started their careers during a recession are significantly more effective at raising students’ test scores compared to those who entered the classroom during better economic times (see Figure 1). Looking separately at each group of teachers who entered the profession during a recession confirms that this result is not driven by any one downturn. The recession impact reappears over time.

We looked for other differences, beyond effectiveness, in the groups of teachers who entered their career during recessions and the much larger group who did not. The share of teachers with a master’s or doctoral degree is slightly larger, the share of male teachers is approximately the same, and the share of white teachers is somewhat smaller. None of these differences rise to the level of statistical significance, however. The two groups of teachers also taught similar types of students, as measured by the share of students who are black and by the share of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. We look at each of these characteristics, and do not find any evidence they can explain why recession teachers are more effective.

In math, recession teachers have value-added estimates that are 0.11 standard deviations higher than non-recession teachers. In reading, recession teachers have value-added estimates that are 0.05 standard deviations higher than non-recession teachers. These differences are modest in size, amounting to no more than a week’s worth of additional learning each year for a student assigned to a recession entrant. Yet even small differences in teacher effectiveness add up when multiplied by the number of students a teacher instructs over the course of her career.

These differences in average effectiveness could result from fewer ineffective teachers in recession cohorts, more teachers who are highly effective, or both. To find out which explanation is correct, we compare recession and non-recession teachers across the full distribution of effectiveness. We find that recession teachers are significantly more effective than non-recession teachers among all but the lowest-performing 10 percent of teachers. The differences are particularly pronounced within the top 20 percent, however, where recession teachers are 0.2 standard deviations more effective than their colleagues who did not start teaching in a recession. In short, cohorts of teachers hired during recessions have an unusually high share of superstars.

More Evidence

We conduct additional analyses to confirm that it is the economic conditions at the outset of a teacher’s career that matter for her effectiveness, not the economic conditions at other times. For example, we find no evidence that a recession that occurs one, two, or three years before or after a teacher starts her career is associated with differences in effectiveness. Nor do we find any effects of having experienced a recession at ages that could be particularly important for other reasons, such as at age 18, 20, or 22. This reaffirms that job prospects drive the decision to become a teacher and therefore change the labor pool.

Of course, whether the economy is in a recession is not the only measure of economic conditions. Indicators like the unemployment rate, and year-to-year changes in that rate, provide a continuous measure of the strength of the national economy when each new cohort of teachers started their careers. We find that these indicators, too, are strongly correlated with teacher effectiveness (see Figure 2). Teachers who start their career when the unemployment rate among college graduates is rising are more effective, on average, than those who enter when that rate is falling. In fact, this relationship is evident even if we exclude from our data the eight cohorts of teachers who entered during recessions identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research. This again strengthens the case that our central finding does not reflect idiosyncratic patterns in hiring associated with a small number of recessions, but instead results from changes in prospective teachers’ outside options.

Finally, we investigate whether recession teachers, some of whom were prompted to enter the classroom by outside economic conditions, are more likely to leave the profession than their colleagues. Across all teachers, attrition is somewhat more common among low-value-added teachers than among high-value-added teachers. However, this pattern does not differ systematically between recession teachers and those who did not start in a recession. Controlling for teachers’ value-added, we find no evidence that recession teachers are more likely to drop out. This is an important finding, as it implies that some of the teachers who were pushed into the profession by a temporary shift in economic conditions decided to stay, even as economic conditions improved. It also confirms that our overall finding that recession teachers are more effective is not an artifact of a higher rate of attrition among recession teachers.

Supply vs. Demand

We have outlined a logic for how the effect of recessions at career start on teacher effectiveness would be driven by changes in the supply of new entrants into the profession. In theory, this effect could also reflect changes in demand. A demand-side explanation would require that two conditions hold. First, it would need to be the case that school districts, perhaps due to budget cuts or to reduced attrition of existing teachers, hire fewer new teachers during recessions. Second, school districts would need to be able to assess the quality of inexperienced applicants and hire those who are more capable.

Our data do not allow us to fully disentangle these two mechanisms. We argue, however, that the two necessary conditions for a demand-side explanation to hold sway are each unlikely.

First, in our data, the cohort size of teachers starting in any one year is unrelated to the business cycle. Unlike private industry, the number of teachers hired each year is driven mainly by student enrollment and regulatory limits on class size, not day-to-day cash flow. Second, it seems unlikely that school administrators are able to identify the best applicants since education credentials and college selectivity—typically the only ability signals of applicants without prior teaching experience—are at best weakly related to teacher effectiveness.

Furthermore, recall that we find that the recession effect is driven not by a reduction in ineffective teachers, but rather by a jump in the number of highly effective teachers—just the opposite of what would be expected from a drop in demand. Taken together, these patterns suggest that decreases in the demand for teachers during recessions are unlikely to be the driver of recession teachers’ effectiveness.

Rather, the pattern of results suggests to us that the supply-side explanation is more likely. In this case, increasing the economic benefits of becoming a teacher emerges as an effective strategy of improving student outcomes. When it comes to occupational choice, worse outside options during recessions are equivalent to higher teacher wages. As such, our results suggest that policy makers would be able to hire better teachers if they increased teacher pay.

What might the benefits of such a policy be? Research by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff finds that students whose teachers are a full standard deviation more effective go on to earn an estimated 1.3 percent more at age 28, which corresponds to an estimated $7,000 more in discounted lifetime earnings in 2010 dollars. We translate that into gains in lifetime earnings of $770 in 2010 dollars for each student taught for one year by a recession rather than a non-recession teacher. That amounts to $13,000 for a class of 17 students, the average class-size in grades 4 and 5 in Florida during our study period. This is equivalent to more than 20 percent of the average teacher salary in Florida, which was $46,583 in the 2012-13 school year.

Whether these benefits reaped by students exceed the costs associated with increasing teacher pay to attract better teachers is another question. To explore that, we assume the entire recession effect is driven by earnings losses in the private sector during recessions—and that one could achieve the same increment in teacher quality by raising teacher pay by the same amount. Estimates of the drop in median earnings for college graduates during a recession range from $2,379 and $7,140, well less than our estimate of the expected benefits to students.

This admittedly coarse comparison suggests that it may be efficient to increase pay for new teachers and thereby improve average teacher effectiveness. Yet this conclusion comes with the caveat that it may be difficult for policy makers to increase pay only for incoming teachers. Our evidence does not imply that increasing pay for those already teaching would yield benefits. Moreover, there are likely cost-neutral ways to make the total compensation package offered to new teachers more attractive. One such method may be to boost starting salaries while reducing spending on pension benefits that only a minority of teachers in most states persist in the profession long enough to receive.

An Unexpected Opportunity

For school districts dealing with the educational and budgetary fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, the prospect of hiring new teachers right now may seem far-fetched. Yet the fact that the U.S. economy entered recession in February suggests that districts now have a chance to strengthen their teacher workforces. While hopes of a “V-shaped recovery” remain, the record-setting unemployment rates in recent months—topping out in April at 14.7 percent nationwide, seasonally adjusted—indicate that plenty of talented Americans are looking for work. That likely includes some who, in ordinary times, wouldn’t give teaching a thought.

Given the health-related restrictions schools are likely to face when they reopen, school districts may have no option but to do some hiring. Class-size limits aimed at ensuring social distancing will necessitate additional teachers. And some unknown number of experienced educators—especially among the 18 percent of U.S. teachers who are over the age of 55 and therefore more vulnerable to Covid-19—will be unwilling to enter the classroom. Such teachers may welcome early retirement incentives, which would in turn free up space for new recruits.

Recessions may be painful in the short term, but they also can serve as an opening to hire more effective teachers. As districts and schools look to what may be a daunting fall, they have an opportunity to respond to short-term challenges in a way that benefits students over the long haul.

Martin R. West is the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Education at Harvard University and editor-in-chief of Education Next. Markus Nagler is assistant professor at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Marc Piopiunik is a researcher at the ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich. This article is adapted from a study published in the April 2020 issue of the Journal of Labor Economics.

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