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because poor districts had lost more ground, their progress was not nearly enough to outpace wealthier districts, widening the gulf between them.

“We seemed to have lost the urgency in this crisis,” said Karyn Lewis, who has studied pandemic learning declines for NWEA, a research and student assessment group. “It is problematic for the average kid.

“But it’s an unevenly felt recovery,” Professor Reardon said, “so the worry there is that means inequality is getting baked in.”

When looking at data available in 15 states, researchers found that in a given district — poor or rich — children across backgrounds lost similar ground, but students from richer families recovered faster.

Even when schools offered interventions to help students catch up, lower-income families might have been less able to rearrange schedules or transportation to ensure their children attended. (This is one reason experts advise scheduling tutoring during the school day, not after.)

Take Massachusetts, which has some of the nation’s best math and reading scores, but wide inequality. The recovery there was led by wealthier districts. Test scores for students in poor districts have shown little improvement, and in some cases, kept falling, leaving Massachusetts with one of the largest increases in the achievement gap.

In states like Kentucky and Tennessee that have traditionally had more middling test scores, but with less inequality, poor students have recovered remarkably well.

74% of schools increased their technology budgets.[6] Thirty-six percent expect IT expenses to increase further in 2021-2022.[7] Other schools appear to be angling to attract and retain staff despite the cost: 43% increased salaries (compared to 21% who cut them), and 74% hired additional staff (though data from a different sample of NAIS members found that 30% had implemented a hiring freeze, while 19% instituted layoffs).[8] Additionally, 38% of schools have increased their general financial aid budgets, with 31% increasing it by more than 5%. Fifty-four percent have established a separate emergency grant fund for students needing additional assistance.

Despite the need for additional teacher training in online and hybrid learning, professional development budgets have frequently been cut to make up for additional spending elsewhere, with 41% of the schools decreasing the amount allocated (and 26% decreasing it by more than 16%).[10] Thirty-nine percent of schools are likely to continue to reduce professional development in 2021-2022, and 22% may freeze it altogether.

adding new degree programs was a common and successful tactic for boosting enrollment during the Great Recession and one that was also popular with faculty.

A parallel tactic for independent schools in markets that have seen increased demand for their programs, whether in-person or online, would be to add a part-time or afterschool component for parents worried about learning loss for their public school students.

49% of schools experienced a decrease in enrollment for the 2020-2021 school year, with 33% seeing a decrease of greater than 5%. At the same time, 47% of schools reduced their fundraising goals from the previous year.[2] Tuition revenue will only help fill the gap at some schools: 49% increased their tuition, while 41% kept it the same and just 5% of schools reduced it.[3] However, 70% do expect to raise tuition in 2021-2022.[4]

The goal of financial sustainability seems to have been superseded by the reality of teaching during a global pandemic

One-time revenue shortfall (with expected rapid recovery): This scenario is optimistic during the pandemic, but schools that were unable to hold a large revenue-earning event in 2020, such as an auction, community fair, or summer camp, but expect to be able to do so in 2021 can rely on endowment funds for the time being. One-time or short-term expenses: Schools may need endowment funds to repair the campus after natural disasters or offer emergency financial aid grants for families facing hardship. Short-term expense for long-term savings: Schools that haven’t already done so, or haven’t done so to as full an extent as they would like, can use endowment funds to upgrade technology or PPE infrastructures in order to attract and retain students in the long-term.

When making financial decisions, school leaders need to be honest about the challenges affecting their final choice.

The goal is to keep the basic reproduction number in a community below 1. That would mean that every person who gets coronavirus transmits it to, on average, fewer than one other person. Over time, that would lead to coronavirus cases falling closer and closer to zero. This number is typically calculated as the R0 or Rt, depending on the methods used. (Some websites, like Rt.live, calculate this figure for all states, and it’s at 1 or more in most states.)

schools likely carry some risk of Covid-19 transmission, as an indoor environment in which students, teachers, and other school staff interact for hours. But schools are also really important for day-to-day life — not just for kids’ education, but also for food, shelter, and child care while parents are at work. Knowing that, a community may decide to fit schools into its reopening budget. The trade-off would be that other places, such as restaurants, bars, or gyms, more likely have to remain closed.

What can we do? We can seek to decrease, wherever possible, the social complexity by slowing down, by working in the smallest groups possible, by building real community through meaningful work, by building expectations with students—keeping them simple and concrete—and then using those expectations to provide much-needed boundaries.

Administrators must seek to do the same: build appropriate, clear, simple, concrete expectations with teachers around expectations and routines for students and for one another and then present a unified front with the professionals in their classrooms.

We didn’t get here in a few months, and it’s going to take more time than that to get beyond it. We all must commit to actions and values that demonstrate a culture of support and above all flexibility. We’ve suffered a collective trauma—we’re still suffering it—and expecting business as usual or even more than that isn’t going to get us anything but anger, frustration, and hostility from those we seek to serve.