Learnings from the Pandemic: Opportunities to Build Better Schools

A new Corporation vision paper focuses on the challenges and opportunities that system leaders face and what success might look like over the next few years

By Carnegie Corporation of New York February 3, 2022

Improving Schools & Systems

As educators are grappling with how to build stronger schools in the 2021–2022 school year and how to spend an unprecedented influx of federal funding to help them do so, a new vision paper by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Learnings from the Pandemic: Opportunities to Build Better Schools, focuses on the challenges and opportunities that system leaders face and what success might look like over the next few years.

The paper is an outcome of periodic meetings — convened by Carnegie Corporation of New York with grantees who are working closely with districts and charter management organizations — to share insights about how systems have been responding to schooling disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Among areas of concern and potential identified in the paper:

A Time of Uncertainty

Confusion and controversy over masking and quarantine policies, political fights over addressing racism and inequity in schools, and staff turnover and capacity challenges at all levels of the system are making it hard for leaders to see beyond tomorrow.

Though districts and charter management organizations everywhere are grappling with uncertainty, educators’ morale varies depending on the relationships between superintendents and their school boards, state politics and policies regarding COVID and anti-racism in education, and whether school systems were high functioning before the pandemic.

ESSER Spending

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Education Resource Strategies have been tracking districts’ plans for spending federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. In July 2021, Education First produced a report for the Council of Chief State School Officers that analyzed 35 state plans for spending federal relief dollars. The Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University also has been analyzing state ESSER plans. Both states and districts have broad discretion over how to use the funds.

State agencies, pressured to produce plans quickly for the U.S. Department of Education, generally submitted broad overviews of their strategies rather than detailed, comprehensive plans. Similarly, most districts submitted only broad outlines of their plans and near-term spending has largely focused on short-term needs.

Many districts are hesitant to do anything big and bold because of concerns about sustainability, staffing shortages, pushback from stakeholders, or fears that they’ll be ousted if their innovations don’t work out. Determining how to effectively spend the huge amount of money flowing into districts requires leaders to use a muscle they’ve never flexed before. Because states and districts have until September 2024 to obligate their federal dollars, many participants viewed the 2022–2023 school year as a make-or-break year for systems to move beyond short-term thinking to more transformative changes in teaching and learning.

Addressing Student and Staff Well-Being

The pandemic has heightened concern for students’ and educators’ overall well-being. It’s also led to a broader recognition of how supportive relationships contribute to students’ academic and life outcomes, an insight supported by a growing body of research on the science of learning and development.

While school districts and charter management organizations acknowledge the importance of relationship building and student and educator well-being to the learning process, they have yet to establish sustainable structures to support these aspects of students’ development.

Accelerated Learning

Addressing unfinished learning due to COVID-related school disruptions is a priority for system leaders, including through investments in tutoring and other interventions to provide individual support for students.

School and system leaders are still looking for strategies on how best to regain learning. Though the message to accelerate learning by focusing on grade-level content rather than reteaching everything that students might have missed seems to be penetrating, how that’s playing out in classrooms remains unclear. Too strong a focus on technical solutions could cause systems to overlook students’ immediate need to be reconnected, reinspired, and remotivated, which will also influence learning outcomes.

Addressing Race and Equity in Schools

The pandemic and the concurrent push for social justice have highlighted longstanding disparities in education and society by race and class. In response, many districts and charter management organizations have begun to focus more explicitly on addressing and teaching about racism and other forms of inequity in schools. Yet political attacks on critical race theory and state legislation seeking to ban educators from talking about issues of race and inequality have threatened to derail systems’ efforts to become more equitable and responsive to their students.

Leaders navigating an increasingly complex political context must be careful when it comes to the language they use. Experts suggest engaging communities in the conversation to address local concerns and contexts and steering free of education jargon.

Family and Community Engagement

Remote and hybrid learning — and families’ overwhelming food, financial, and housing needs during the pandemic — forced district and school leaders to pay more attention to the critical role of families and communities in children’s education. But as schools reopened for in-person learning in fall 2021, participants feared a bounce-back to business as usual.

The broadening recognition that family engagement matters could provide an opening for parent advocacy groups. Intermediaries and local government officials can play key roles in coordinating the work of schools with community-based groups. The large influx of ESSER funding could provide opportunities for systems to partner more closely with their communities and invest in community-based nonprofits that parents trust.

Human Capital Challenges

As leaders contemplate how to invest in their systems’ short- and long-term needs, talent challenges loom large, from shortages in noncertified staff, such as bus drivers and substitute teachers, to turnover and fatigue among superintendents and their teams.

Though many districts are using their ESSER dollars to try to address employee challenges — for example, by offering teacher bonuses or creating new teacher pipelines to diversify their workforce — they have yet to dramatically rethink the teaching role to make it more attractive and set teachers up for success.

Systems Support

Given the demands on school systems this year, a number of organizations are stepping up efforts to connect district and charter leaders with each other and outside experts to strategically address the issues they’re facing.

Next Generation Learning Challenges, with the support of Carnegie Corporation of New York, is launching the Thrive Network to support leaders working on system redesign. EducationFirst has published a guide to help leaders develop more coherent and equitable school systems. Through its various networks, Education Resource Strategies is supporting 71 districts to develop more strategic plans for how they use people, time, and resources, including offering ideas about where to start to build toward long-term change.

Read the full vision paper Learnings from the Pandemic: Opportunities to Build Better Schools.

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