It’s been almost one year since
schools first shuttered, and the debate on how they should respond to the
ongoing pandemic is as contested as ever. Education leaders face ever-shifting
demands as they attempt to gauge and accommodate the volatile and contradictory
opinions of parents, teachers, and the public at large. At the same time, the
information on how districts are operating remains in constant flux, making it
hard to keep up how schools are responding as the pandemic continues.   

The Return to Learn Tracker (R2L) we launched this week captures the instructional landscape each week, shedding light on how the pandemic continues to impact schools and students. The R2L tracker monitors over 8,000 public school districts’ instructional statuses on a weekly basis and presents the data by various district characteristics. This R2L tracker categorizes school districts with three or more schools according to whether instruction is available fully remote, full in-person, or in a hybrid format, providing a weekly snapshot of how districts are responding and insight into trends over time.

This week, the R2L published data that track how districts have changed from early-November to mid-February in response to COVID-19. For a comprehensive view of the R2L data, you can visit the dashboard. Here, I’ll focus on five trends in particular. 

Political lines draw stark differences in districts’ instructional
offerings. Districts in counties that voted for Biden are far more likely
to have been fully remote or solidly hybrid for most of the year. By contrast,
Trump districts are far more likely to have been fully in-person throughout the
school year. As of February 15, districts in counties that voted for Biden are
over three times more likely to be fully remote (30 percent of districts)
compared to districts in counties that voted for Trump (9 percent of
districts).

High poverty, urban, and high broadband districts are more likely to be
fully remote. High poverty districts have higher rates of offering fully
in-person instruction and fully remote instruction, whereas low poverty
districts are more often hybrid. Instruction also differs by urbanicity. Twice
as many rural districts offer fully in-person instruction (45 percent) than do
urban districts (22 percent). Infrastructure limitations also play a role, with
high broadband districts offering more fully remote instruction (21 percent) compared
to low broadband districts (12 percent).

Many districts are, in fact, open and a lot started the year that way.
More districts offer fully in-person instruction than may be assumed from the
media coverage, which often emphasizes remote-only districts. In fact, over one
third of districts were open with an option for fully in-person instruction
five days per week as of February 15. Just under one half of districts are offering
some in-person instruction in a hybrid model — where all students have an
option for part-week in-person instruction or where some grades return to
buildings for some in-person instruction while other grades don’t. This leaves
less than one in five districts that are fully remote. 

The New Year brings an increasing shift towards more in-person
instruction. Since early January, remote-only instruction has dropped by
almost one third. This trend is the reverse of what happened during the early winter
surge in COVID-19 cases. Over the course of November and December, when
holidays coincided with soaring COVID case rates, remote-only districts
increased from about 20 percent to over one quarter of districts.

Finally, states differ on how “aggressive” or “cautious” their
reopenings are, relative to COVID-19 rates. R2L categorizes aggressive
districts as those that are open fully in-person with a seven-day average of 25
daily cases per 100,000 population or higher in a given week. The states with
the top five most aggressive reopenings (in order) are Florida, Arkansas,
Texas, South Carolina, and Alabama. Cautious districts, by contrast, are those
that are fully remote in an area with a seven-day average of 12.5 daily cases
per 100,000. As of February 15, the top five states with the most cautious districts
are Oregon, Maryland, Alaska, Washington, and New Mexico.

As the pandemic and school year continue to unfold, so will districts’ instructional offerings. With fluctuating COVID-19 cases, growing vaccine distributions, and shifting policies, districts will continue to adapt and change. As such, we are busy now updating the data with the most recent changes. Follow along here to stay updated each week on the state of the nations’ schools as they complete this tumultuous school year.

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