Top challenges in more than half of the country’s schools were students being unprepared or disruptive in the classroom, according to the Department of Education’s research arm in . 

For 40-45% of schools, student learning and staff morale was also limited by students’ “trouble” working with partners or in groups and use of cell phones, laptops, or other tech when not permitted. In 75% of schools, students’ “lack of focus” moderately or severely negatively impacted learning and staff morale. 

Fighting and bullying were also pervasive: In about one in five schools, physical fights occurred about once a month, while weapons were confiscated at 45% of schools. Thirty percent report cyberbullying is a weekly occurrence; for 11%, it is daily.

Researchers say while overall, key adverse student behaviors have been on a downswing compared to prior generations, such as illicit drug use, violent crime and teen birth rates, several forces are compounding for students and impacting their wellbeing: High rates of trauma, a fraught political climate, and feeling they are being left behind, or unseen in school.

“Look what these students have gone through … not only the pandemic, through wars. Through a tumultuous, divisive political environment in the last six or seven years that’s only intensifying between right and left, between Black and white, between immigrant and non-immigrant. [Those separations] are filtering into schools and classes, perhaps with an awareness that we have not had before,” said Ron Astor, UCLA professor of social welfare and expert on bullying, school violence and culture. 

Students are also witnessing state legislatures and local school boards limit what classrooms can and cannot teach, leading them to question whether they belong in their school, he said. The atmosphere is impacting families across the political divide: “If parents and society see the school as teaching the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, if you’re not reflected in that school – that’s going to impact your attention, too.” 

From coast to coast, districts are weighing phone bans amid rising concerns about bullying and distractions. But some researchers say solely nixing phones without boosting mental health supports or addressing overall school culture wouldn’t curb the negative attitudes students may be forming about school and the purpose of their education. 

Astor said some young people are experiencing conditions like ADHD, depression and PTSD, which can manifest in dissociation. Lack of focus can also stem from feeling irrelevance, either that the subject matter is not important to their future or that some part of who they are is not represented at school.

Framing students’ inability to focus as the cause for delay in learning recovery, “ignores the fact of why they’re maybe not motivated, why they’re not connected as they should be, why they don’t see themselves in the curriculum,” he added. “Why, when they did see themselves, they’re being taken out or not allowed to say or do things because they’re part of an oppressed group,” referencing book bans, history challenges, and restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion curricula and positions. 

Astor and Johanna Lacoe, research director with the California Policy Lab, point to several ways school leaders can address these behavioral concerns: stronger classroom management training for teachers and keeping counselor, nurse, psychologist and social worker roles filled. 

“Young people who are in the classroom and who are behind, frustrated and struggling are just so much more likely to check out,” said Lacoe, a commissioner on San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Commission. “For a teacher with 33 kids, who has maybe not that much experience managing a classroom, to teach to the range of abilities that present themselves with no support, is what we’re currently asking teachers to do.”

How schools handle disciplinary action after cyberbullying, violent behavior, and disruptions can greatly impact student perceptions of school. Lacoe pointed to several models that help students feel belonging after an incident such as in lieu of suspensions for low-level infractions, particularly as school leaders’ concerns about chronic absenteeism grow.  

In the , schools provide services such as healthcare, behavioral and housing support to children and families.

There are models at work where, “you’re always telling a student that they belong here even in the time of this [adverse] behavior – that they can make right what happened through a process, inclusive of the people involved,” Lacoe said. “You can figure out a way to resolve it that works for everyone and if possible, keeps the young person engaged at school.”

The vast majority of school leaders surveyed in late May by the National Center for Education Statistics – over 80% – agree the pandemic’s impacts are still lingering, negatively impacting the behavioral and socioemotional development of their students. At least 90% of public schools reported offerings for students since 2021. 

Students, including Astor’s own undergraduates, are asking, “‘Where do I fit in this world? How do I fit in society?’ … I think all of this impacts your ability to focus and your attention, including your motivation.”

The revelation comes from The Condition of Education 2023, the latest in a series of annual digests from the National Center for Education Statistics surveying the landscape of K–12 schools. Its contents offer a nuanced account of how COVID-19 affected student experiences both inside and outside the classroom.

But the report also represents the fullest record yet of the decade preceding that once-in-a-century jolt to learning, during which K–12 spending climbed, school choice blossomed and the teaching pipeline narrowed. Compiling surveys and other data collections from over a dozen federal and international sources, the report captures how trends dating back to the middle of the Obama administration were either accelerated or untouched by the emergence of COVID.

The number of pupils enrolled in charter schools leapt from 1.8 million in 2012 to 3.7 million in 2021, when they accounted for 7 percent of all public school enrollment. Over the same period, white students shrank from a narrow majority of the total American student body to a smaller plurality. Public school revenues grew by 13 percent — compared with a 3 percent increase in student enrollment — while the dropout rate (measured as the percentage of 16–24-year-olds who haven’t earned a diploma and aren’t attending school) fell from 8.3 percent to 5.2 percent.

“The condition of education, as one might expect, is a complicated picture for the United States,” Peggy Carr, the commissioner of NCES, told reporters. “The impact of COVID on our education system gives us…an opportunity to rethink where we were.”

One bleak and well-known phenomenon that came into focus in the 2010s was the worsening mental health reality for adolescents, many of whom have reported spiraling rates of depression and anxiety. Those problems were clearly aggravated by pandemic-related school closures, which separated tens of millions of children from friends and teachers for months at a time.

In survey findings gathered last spring, leaders at 70 percent of schools said that they were faced with higher proportions of students seeking psychological and behavioral support. But only 56 percent of respondents agreed (and just 12 percent strongly agreed) that their school was able to effectively deliver that support.

Overall, 72 percent of schools said they provided mental health trauma support during the 2021–22 school year, just one of the strategies employed to help children recover from pandemic-related setbacks to learning and social-emotional development. The same percentage said they were offering remedial instruction, while three-quarters said they had implemented summer enrichment programs before the school year started.

But such supplemental services were undoubtedly difficult to roll out during a time of spiking demand for school staff. Across a dozen varied academic disciplines and specialties, more schools said they had difficulty hiring for positions in 2020–21 than in 2011–12. In particular, during the first full pandemic year, substantial portions of public schools looking to hire said they had difficulty filling vacant roles in foreign languages (42 percent), special education (40 percent), physical sciences (37 percent), mathematics (32 percent), and computer science (31 percent).

Chad Aldeman, a school finance and labor market analyst, said in an email that the differences in hiring conditions between the two comparison years made it somewhat predictable that job candidates would be at a premium during the hottest jobs economy in decades.

“We were in a totally different economic environment in 2021–22 than we were a decade prior,” said Aldeman. “The ‘ was very low [during the Great Recession], and the unemployment rate was 8.3 percent in January 2012, compared to 4 percent in January 2022. It would be surprising if schools were bucking these trends and not struggling to hire in this environment.”

At the same time, however, a breakdown in the teacher training pipeline might have contributed to the apparent pandemic-era shortages in teachers and other school staff. Between the 2012–13 and 2019–20 school years, the report showed, the number of candidates enrolled in traditional teacher preparation programs shrank by 30 percent; the number of people completing such programs declined by 28 percent, from 161,000 to 116,100, during that interval.

On the heels of those developments, public school enrollment counts were profoundly changed by the impact of COVID and the switch to online learning. 

Longer-term trends show a steady increase in total students, from 49.5 million to 50.8 million, between fall 2010 and fall 2019; but over the next academic year, the entirety of that decade-long growth — 3 percent of all public school students — vanished as public school enrollment fell back to 49.4 million. (Notably, persistent growth in the charter school sector continued during the early stages of the pandemic, with charter school enrollment swelling by 7 percent between fall 2019 and fall 2020.)

As earlier reporting has indicated, drops in head counts were heavily concentrated among the youngest students. While 54 percent of three- and four-year-olds were enrolled in school in 2019, just 50 percent were in 2021. The percentage of five-year-olds in school also fell, from 91 percent to 86 percent, during those two years. 

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford who has carefully examined state enrollment figures during the pandemic, said the statistics were “a potent reminder” of the educational harms suffered since March 2020.

“The sustained declines in pre-K and kindergarten enrollment are important,” Dee wrote in an email. “Many of our youngest learners are missing important early learning opportunities, and it will be years before most age into conventional testing windows that will provide some indication of what this means for their learning.”