In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press , relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia. 

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism , according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it . In Detroit, .

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year; 
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban , near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent. 

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market. 

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said , president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home. 

2. Death of caregivers

As many as in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said , a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences 

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”  

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory. 

“Kids don’t see why they can’t ,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm . In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’ 

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune . Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they : “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning . While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse. 

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.” 

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods. 

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

In response to the Republicans’ controversial parental rights bill, House Democrats plan to introduce alternative legislation Friday that will call for “inclusive” schools and oppose efforts to censor curriculum.

Led by Oregon Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, the resolution follows Wednesday’s marathon education committee session, which stretched 16 hours into Thursday morning and further clarified the partisan split over parents’ role in their children’s education. 

While the GOP’s approach emphasizes accommodating parents’ requests for information, the Democrats’ version focuses on ensuring schools provide a high-quality education and don’t discriminate against students. 

Republicans say their , which passed 25 to 17 and now moves to the full House, would increase transparency into curriculum, school funding and safety efforts. But Bonamici said during the committee meeting that it has “discriminatory undertones,” because parents could use it to remove materials about topics they oppose, and would “pit parents and families against their kids’ teachers and schools.” 

For a month, her staff has worked with the National PTA, the National Parents Union, an advocacy group, and others on the Democratic “Bill of Rights for Students and Parents.” The resolution says “students benefit from opportunities to learn in diverse, well-funded … schools alongside peers who have had different life experiences” and calls for schools to use materials that are “historically accurate” and “reflect the powerful diversity of the nation.”

The passionate debate this week, which at times turned argumentative, was likely a preview of what’s to come in the full House. Democrats characterized the bill as an effort to weaken public education and micromanage how schools operate. Republicans, however, said schools have silenced parents, excluded them from discussions of their children’s gender identity and prioritized teachers unions’ demands during the pandemic.

“This bill is about one simple and fundamental principle — parents should always have a seat at the table,” said Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow, lead author of the Republicans’ bill. “Rather than opening the doors to welcome parents as partners, [schools] would rather slam them shut and have government bureaucrats make all the decisions.”

Along those lines, the House Judiciary Committee is investigating a past incident that contributed to why the GOP thinks such legislation is needed. On Monday, committee Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio former leaders of the National School Boards Association to revisit the controversy surrounding a September 2021 letter asking for federal law enforcement’s help in addressing threats of violence against school officials. 

Republicans argue the letter prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to in assessing whether some parents — angry about school closures, masking and curriculum issues — posed a threat. The association .

Democrats said school districts were never trying to stifle parents’ legitimate concerns. They argued Wednesday that the Republicans’ Parents Bill of Rights is unnecessary because states and districts already have policies in place that allow for and welcome parent input. 

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx, New York, teacher and principal, described past situations when parents were uncomfortable with books taught in a course. He met with them and they opted to remove their children from those lessons. 

“Us sitting here, having this conversation is a waste of taxpayer time and money,” he said. “We are dealing with an issue that is already on the books.”

Other Democrats asked the majority how such a law would be enforced and whether it would lead to withholding funds from schools if there’s a violation.

Debate over curriculum

Members of both parties introduced a wide array of amendments that would significantly expand the bill — topics ranging from cyberbullying and teacher pay to third-grade reading and charging parents fees for copies of curriculum. Two of the 30 amendments Democrats proposed were accepted, one that supports all students having internet access and another prohibiting the federal government from getting involved in curriculum and school administration issues. All 15 of the Republicans’ amendments passed. 

An amendment from New York Republican Brandon Williams, which says it’s important for schools to teach students about the Holocaust, was among those approved. But Republicans rejected amendments from Democrats that would prevent schools from excluding Black, Latino, LGBTQ and Asian American/Pacific Islander history, saying that the federal government has no place in curriculum. Democrats called it a double standard.

“It is highly hypocritical that the argument can be made for the history that affects you and your family yet the history that affects me and my family is unwanted, unaccepted and oftentimes offensive on this committee,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, a one-time National Teacher of the Year. “If we are in fact saying that the federal government has no place in dictating curriculum, either we teach it all or we don’t teach anything.”

Democrats opposed other amendments that they said target transgender students, including one from Rep. Bob Good of Virgina that would require schools to notify parents if their student’s gender identity is inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth. 

“We have legislators who want to make trans kids a problem in this country,” said Rep, Primala Jayapal of Washington, who has a trans daughter. “Stop doing this to our kids.”

During the same meeting, the committee passed that would prohibit students identified male at birth from competing in girls sports.

‘More bureaucratic requirements’

Despite the committee devoting so much time to parental rights, some experts note that there’s no legal basis for the Republicans’ law in the first place because education is a state matter and is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

“This is not constitutional and would mainly create more bureaucratic requirements, not truly empower parents,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, who worked with Bonamici on the resolution, said parents could use such a bill to tie educators’ hands by suing in federal court.

“It’s going to make it incredibly messy for anything to happen in classrooms at all, because literally everything will be challenged,” she said. 

At the same time, she said Bonamici’s resolution would better define a high-quality education and offer a legal recourse for parents when states don’t adequately fund schools.

“The only way we have ever started down the path toward equity in education in large-scale, meaningful ways has been when parents have been able to sue for justice in federal court,” she said, naming desegregation cases Brown v. Board of Education and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education as examples. “We need to strengthen our federal laws to continue down that path.”

McCluskey said Republicans could more productively spend their time focusing on school choice, adding that states have made “great strides” in passing education savings accounts. Other parent advocates would like to see the federal government guarantee students a high-quality education, but argue the debate over parents’ rights misses the mark.

“Both parties have swung and missed on post-pandemic parent empowerment,” said Ben Austin, founder of Education Civil Rights Now, which has been working in states to pass laws requiring students to receive a high-quality education. “Transparency is necessary, but it’s far from sufficient. Just because [parents] can see a budget doesn’t mean [they] can do anything about it.”

Last Wednesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California joined fellow GOP members to introduce the , which calls for greater transparency into what districts teach, how much they spend and how they publicly report whether violence has occurred at a school. The next step is for education committee members to review and offer any amendments before it reaches the floor.

“It’s just so tone deaf to where parents are. How do you have a parent’s bill of rights in 2023 that doesn’t mention student progress or the right to read and write?” asked Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. McCarthy’s press conference, she said, lacked representation of minority parents and children. “I was like, ‘Do Republicans know any Black and brown people?’ “

She organized a gathering of several parent groups who plan to meet Monday with Democratic leaders in the House in an effort to defeat the bill.

Republicans pledged to introduce such a bill once they captured the House majority, arguing that schools ignored parents’ pleas to reopen during the pandemic and have pushed controversial lessons about race and gender. But with Democrats still in control of the Senate, it’s highly unlikely the bill would pass in its current form. In 2021, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri sponsored , but it never received a hearing. 

The House legislation echoes laws that many Republican-led states, including Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, . Some experts note that for a federal version, but that issue didn’t come up last week. 

“Parents are not going to be kept in the dark,” Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida promised during last week’s event. “Parents are going to be part of the educational process.”

He and other House members heard from a Fairfax County, Virginia parent who said her child was suspended 11 times for not wearing a mask when the district still had a mandate and from a parent who filed hundreds of public record requests with the in Rhode Island seeking information on how schools teach history and gender issues. The school board considered suing the parent, but ultimately did not. 

Rodrigues and — a nonpartisan organization — say such bills are an effort to keep the culture wars alive. They stress that federal and many state laws already give parents the right to examine curriculum and opt their children out of lessons they find inappropriate. 

Rodrigues said she wouldn’t feel comfortable proposing her own bill of rights until the organization consulted a broad mix of families. 

But based on the National Parents Union’s , she would like to see, for example, guarantees that students graduate ready to succeed in college without remediation, that parents have up-to-date information on their children’s academic progress and that schools offer free afterschool programs and tutoring as needed. 

Last year, Rodrigues pushed for the U.S. Department of Education to form a parent council so Education Secretary Miguel Cardona could regularly hear from parents involved in their children’s schools.

But the department nixed the idea after conservative organizations sued in federal court, saying that the proposed council lacked representation from their groups and didn’t follow proper advisory committee procedures.

National Parents Union members continue to bring their concerns to Cardona anyway. Several attended his January speech outlining priorities, such as multilingualism and higher teacher pay.

“They said, ‘We didn’t hear you talking about the regression that children with special needs faced,’” Rodrigues said. ‘They really held his feet to the fire.”

According to the department, Cardona also continues to meet with families during any school visits, and agency staff follow up with parents later, if needed.

“Parent partnership is not about giving in to the loudest voices or political grandstanding,” the secretary wrote in timed to Republicans’ bill. “It’s about welcoming the voices of all families, and inviting parents to be a real part of decision-making processes in education.”

The U.S. Department of Education on Monday abruptly disbanded a parent council created to include families in federal decisions about pandemic recovery efforts.

That action led conservative parent groups to drop a contentious lawsuit filed in July against Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, arguing members he picked to serve on the council only represented liberal-leaning organizations.

The department “has decided to not move forward with the National Parents and Families Engagement Council,” according to a statement. “The Department will continue connecting with individual parents and families across the country, including through townhalls, and providing parents and families with a wide array of tools and resources to use to support our students.”

One of the driving forces behind the council’s creation had harsh words for the department Monday, saying it “folded like a deck of cards in a moment that called for leadership.”

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, another group on the council, said both the plaintiffs and the department claimed to be acting in the interests of parents, “but in actuality neither have done anything tangible to prove it” and were using parents “as pawns in their convoluted culture wars.”

The department announced the council in June, with plans for an initial meeting before the new school year. Parent representatives were expected to share their experiences with remote learning and thoughts on how to help students get back on track academically and emotionally.

But plans remained idle after Parents Defending Education, Fight for Schools and Families and America First Legal Foundation filed their suit. The three plaintiffs argued that the council violated a federal law that requires official advisory committees to include diverse viewpoints and for the department to publicly announce meetings. Department of Justice attorneys countered that the council was meant to act more as a “sounding board” and was not intended to serve in an advisory capacity.

In September, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the plaintiffs on some points, but told the parties to gather more information on the council’s actual duties. If they did not meet a Monday deadline to provide that information, Lamberth promised to dismiss the case.

On Friday, five Republican senators joined the fray, sending Cardona that echoed the concerns expressed in the lawsuit. 

“The uniformly partisan members of the Council demonstrate this administration’s commitment to putting the interest of unions, teachers and non-education associations, and the radical left above students and parents,” according to the letter. It was signed by Sen. Bill Cassidy, slated to become ranking member of the Senate education committee, Sen Richard Burr of North Carolina, the current ranking Republican, and three others. 

The senators noted that President Joe Biden spoke at of the National Action Network, one of the groups chosen to serve on the council, and that LaWanda Toney, a former official at the National PTA, another organization represented, has been in the department.

They asked Cardona how the organizations were chosen, whether officials communicated with representatives over issues such as mask mandates and critical race theory, and if there was any requirement that participants have “human children.”

“Mitt Romney has met my children,” said Rodrigues of the National Parents Union, referring to one the GOP signers. She initially called the letter “a last gasp effort” to keep the lawsuit alive, but that was before the department abandoned its plans.

The administration had two options — “disband its parent council or allow for viewpoint diversity on the council,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said in a . “They chose to disband it. It’s telling but not surprising that they chose ideology and groupthink over a balanced representation of views.”

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The council will include representatives from 14 organizations that advocate for giving parents a voice in their children’s education — including families involved in charters, homeschooling and private schools.

In preparation for the 2022-23 school year, the council’s “listening sessions” are slated to explore what schools can do to help students recover from the pandemic, according to the department’s announcement. The meetings will emphasize finding “constructive ways to help families engage at the local level.” 

“Would I have liked to see it happen a year ago? Of course,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, one of the groups involved. She began advocating for such an initiative during the Trump administration, but added, “It’s the first time where we’re really getting … a group of folks representing parents and families at the table. It’s unprecedented.”

Other participating groups include the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, which supports families who have children with disabilities; Mocha Moms, a network of Black moms’ groups; and the National PTA.

In public comments, Cardona, the father of two teenagers, frequently notes that he’s a “parent first” and has made “roundtable” discussions with parents part of his visits to schools across the country. But his department has also faced criticism from parent leaders who say he’s been more vocal about the pandemic’s than on parents who had to endure months of remote learning and are still asking for tutoring to help their children catch up. Meanwhile, parents have gained new political power. Those who felt overlooked by unions and Democratic leaders who were slow to reopen schools helped tilt the 2021 Virginia governor’s race in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin.

Rodrigues said she pushed for bringing the “boldest, baddest and most beautiful parent organizers in the game” to council gatherings. Ashara Baker, a Rochester, New York, charter school advocate, and Lakisha Young, CEO of The Oakland Reach — which opened remote learning hubs and trains parents to be literacy tutors — are expected to participate in the council’s first gathering in July. 

The next step, Rodrigues said, is for the department to formally define “parent and family engagement” so it can hold districts accountable. 

“Right now, family engagement can kind of mean whatever you want it to be,” she said. “It can be, ‘We showed you a PowerPoint. We sent you an email. We sent a flyer home in a backpack.’ That’s not good enough to get big-time federal money.” 

Bibb Hubbard, president of Learning Heroes, which helps parents understand their children’s academic progress, said the American Rescue Plan’s requirement that districts include parent perspectives in planning how to spend relief funds was a significant development.

“I have seen this team step up and sincerely make an effort to figure out how to be representative of all parents as they look at their policies and guidance,” she said, adding that Cardona has joined the organization’s parent town hall for the past two years. 

But she added that she hopes the department “gives the council some specific authority to shape policy” and includes parents “traditionally not listened to.” 

Megan Bacigalupi, executive director of CA Parent Power, said that should include parents in California, “where schools were closed the longest.” State-level committees, she said, haven’t been as inclusive. A on enrollment loss, announced in April, doesn’t include parent representatives. 

Like Rodrigues, Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, a local advocacy group — and part of the — told President Joe Biden while he was still campaigning not to ignore parent perspectives. 

“Do they have the real-life stories of parents who are from struggling communities?” she asked about the new council. “I want to see real partnership. It’s really taking our feedback and using it, and not being defensive with it.”

Sixty-one percent assigned top grades for how their child’s school is “addressing any learning challenges related to the pandemic,” and 60 percent gave an A or B for “providing resources to support students’ mental health.”

Schools get higher marks, however, for keeping parents updated on school policies, assessing where children stand academically and even requirements regarding vaccines, masks and quarantines. Almost three-quarters of parents give schools an A or B in these areas.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, which conducted the survey, said the results suggest parents are “still in the trenches with teachers” but have less faith in the nation’s leaders to make bold improvements to schools. Thirty-eight percent of the sample of just over 1,000 parents give President Joe Biden an A or B on handling schools’ responses to the pandemic, and thirty-six percent give Education Secretary Miguel Cardona high grades on that question.

Over half of respondents said they’ve heard “not much” or “nothing at all” about federal relief funds or how they can be used for education.

“Why does everything look and feel the same?” Rodrigues asked. “[Parents] are not feeling the impact of this money.”

Conducted 20 times since the beginning of the pandemic, the advocacy organization’s poll captures parents’ opinions on the most pressing COVID-related issues facing schools and families — from parents’ willingness to vaccinate their children to how well they think schools are serving students with special needs. Over time, Rodrigues said she has seen parents consistently say they’re concerned about their children’s well-being, but that overall, schools “failed to listen to us.” 

Some district leaders say they’re hearing the similar concerns about students’ emotional and behavior needs from their staff. In the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, Superintendent David Law noted that focusing on students’ mental health needs is a top priority for teachers.

“Students are needier than they were in the past,” he said, adding that in his district of 37,000, the 20 percent that did not return to in-person learning last year are “really struggling with the transition” this year.

But even though schools now have the money to hire more counselors and social workers, “the personnel can’t be had,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. Addressing those behavioral and emotional needs is “falling more and more on the shoulders of classroom teachers.”

The latest results, gathered by Echelon Insights, which conducts opinion research, show 40 percent of parents consider staffing shortages to be a major or moderate problem at their child’s school. Almost the same percentage responded that student behavior issues are affecting learning, and about a third said behavior issues were serious enough to create safety risks. 

While parent protests and disruptions at school board meetings have dominated the news, just 16 percent of parents responding consider conflicts over masks, vaccines or quarantine policies to be a major problem in their children’s schools. More than half answered that disagreements over these issues are either a minor problem or non-existent.

But in some parts of the country, those debates are more intense, and Domenich said superintendents over mask mandates don’t view the issues as minor.

“In [the Houston Independent School District], we definitely saw the divide with parents on mask mandates after Superintendent [Millard] House and the school board voted for mask mandates,” said Wendy Gonzales-Neal, a National Parents Union delegate in Texas and the executive director of advocacy group My Child My Voice. “Parents are fighting with schools and our elected officials to keep our kids safe.”

Despite districts’ increasing use of test-to-stay policies — which allow close contacts of students who test positive for COVID-19 to avoid quarantine — just over half of parents, 53 percent, still think students who have been exposed should stay home from school for at least 14 days. 

About a third said schools should allow students to come back to class as long as they test negative multiple times in a week, and 5 percent said schools shouldn’t do anything if students are exposed.

Parents just want consistency, Rodrigues said. 

“Quarantines are a toss up. They can change from school to school,” she said. “We can’t control COVID, but parents need to know what is going to happen.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation, the City Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to the and .

Two weeks later, after a hectic Election Day in which McAuliffe was denied his bid for a second gubernatorial term and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy barely survived his own brush with an unheralded Republican challenger, the poll’s findings offer one explanation of what went wrong for Democrats in their first electoral test of the Biden era.

David Paleologos, Suffolk’s chief pollster, noted that Democrats have traditionally been the party entrusted by voters to oversee K-12 schools. Healthcare and education have been “the two issue pillars” for the party in the minds of the public, countering Republicans’ traditional edge on taxes and national security. But in Virginia, at least, one of their supports had given way; while 75 percent of healthcare-focused respondents in Suffolk’s poll approved of Joe Biden’s performance as president, just 38 percent of education-focused respondents did.

“There’s a broader potential problem for Democrats when Republican candidates can even be competitive — forget leading — among those primarily concerned with education,” said Paleolgos. “I think that is something that should give Democrats pause.”

The results of the 2021 election cycle will take more than a few weeks to parse, as county-level returns are dissected by number-crunchers in both parties. And the importance of education must also be weighed against structural challenges that couldn’t have been avoided; dating back to the 1970s, the party holding the White House almost never wins the Virginia governorship, while no Democrat has been reelected as New Jersey’s governor under any circumstances. 

But two things have become clear in light of the Democrats’ dismal results. The first is that losing their advantage on a signature issue can cost them dearly, even in blue-trending states where they have nominated popular candidates. The second is that both sides now have an incentive to make education a major priority in 2022, when control over the U.S. House, the Senate, and 36 governorships will be at stake.

And the public’s discontent with school systems, ranging from their performance during COVID to their handling of controversial subjects like race and gender, shows no sign of abating. Joanne Weiss, an education consultant who served as chief of staff to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Obama White House, said that parents’ fear and anger had first been triggered by the disruptions of the pandemic. But the gradual decline in COVID cases and deaths won’t necessarily bring an end to their outrage, she added.

“COVID response required nimbleness and creativity that the education system was incapable of giving,” Weiss said in an email. “So while COVID was the spark that ignited it, that pile of kindling has been sitting there, unattended, for years. Even if COVID were to magically disappear tomorrow, the smoldering would continue.” 

McAulliffe’s political miscue

Virginia Republicans were talking about education throughout their gubernatorial primary and into the general election. But it took a Democrat to bring the issue to national attention.

McAuliffe, a longtime Democratic campaign operative who first served as the state’s governor from 2014 to 2018, infamously said in a September debate that he didn’t believe “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The tossed-off remark, made in response to several high-profile cases of Virginia parents objecting to the inclusion of controversial materials in classrooms and school libraries, quickly proved to be the decisive political miscue of 2021.

In a stroke, McAuliffe’s words helped consolidate multiple strands of public disapproval (in a , two senior Youngkin campaign strategists pointed to the moment as “the piece that tied it all together”). Many parents objected to Virginia’s generally deliberate pace of reopening schools to in-person instruction; others — instigated as much by local curricular debates as national messaging campaigns by Fox News and other conservative outlets — sought to ban instruction of race issues that has been grouped under the label of critical race theory. Both were invigorated by the former governor’s apparent dismissal of family concerns. 

Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., said that while McAuliffe’s campaign eventually attempted to clarify his meaning, the efforts were “too little, too late.” 

“It really became the core of the Youngkin campaign,” Farnsworth said. “The campaign almost entirely morphed into a conversation about parents’ rights in education once McAuliffe made his misstatement.”

Keri Rodrigues, a Massachusetts Democrat and former labor organizer who leads the National Parents Union, said the defeat that followed was proof that Democrats had “taken their legacy as champions of public education for granted.” Though of activists attempting to curb the influence of critical race theory, Rodrigues has also pilloried Democrats for their relationships with teacher’s unions (McAuliffe campaigned with American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten during the race’s final days) and argued that the party had failed to hold educational systems accountable during the pandemic.

“We saw the catastrophic failure of our nation’s public education system happen in our living rooms, and we were left to fend for ourselves,” Rodrigues said in an email. “Since that point, Democrats have outright rejected any criticism of the performance of these systems or recovery efforts — while parents and families have continued to be left struggling with their concerns unheard.”

Democrats running in both state-level and congressional races next year will benefit from the example of McAuliffe’s gaffe, and Farnsworth theorized that they could avoid similar missteps by calling for school governance to be led by a “partnership” between parents and education professionals. Moreover, the party will still have the opportunity to pass a host of family- and school-related initiatives through its Build Back Better legislation, including universal preschool, paid family leave, and a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Given a year to advertise those achievements and watch COVID’s threat to public health slowly diminish, Democrats could once again seize the initiative on a policy area they have historically dominated.

According to polling data provided by Gallup, Inc., the public has trusted Democrats more on education almost continuously for the last three decades. Election-year polls from 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2016 all found respondents favoring Democratic presidential candidates to manage schools, usually by double-digit margins. (Then-president George W. Bush took a late lead on the issue in his 2004 contest with John Kerry, and no data could be found for the 2012 presidential election at the time of publication.)

But Paleologos said that Democrats’ failure in Virginia had already consigned next year’s crop of candidates to answering press questions about whether parents should have input in how schools are run. Pointing to past Republican successes with pre-election platforms like 1994’s Contract with America, he predicted the GOP would seek to use education as a wedge to split liberal Democrats from the center.

“Even if you pass some really progressive education legislation, Republican candidates are going to force Democrats to” make some commitment to parental control over K-12 schools, Paleologos said. “Now, a smart Democratic candidate would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll sign a Contract with Parents,’ but then they’re going to be at odds with their progressive base.”

Push for a ‘red wave’

Youngkin’s victory served as a proof of concept for the notion that a deft Republican could win votes by crafting his closing argument around schools. But it also cast doubt on Democrats’ own campaign strategy of tying opponents to Donald Trump at every opportunity.

Paleologos observed that the first-time candidate’s template — one that could be exported next year to battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine, where Democratic governors will be running for reelection — was to win back middle-class voters in the suburbs while “one-upping Trump in rural areas, even without having Trump next to him.” It’s unknown how much Trump, who has supercharged Republican turnout in two national races, intends to campaign with GOP hopefuls next year, and that he remains a deeply divisive figure. But Youngkin enjoyed a surge in downstate support even in Trump’s absence, riding the former president’s endorsement to nearly half a million more votes than the Republican gubernatorial nominee received in 2017.

Republicans’ hopes for a red wave will rest on the enthusiasm of their base, which has shown itself to be extremely animated by K-12 issues. A released in August found that 73 percent of American parents were either somewhat or completely satisfied with the quality of their children’s education, roughly in line with previous years. But a detailed breakdown of the results provided by the organization found that 34 percent of Republicans described themselves as “completely dissatisfied” with schools, by far the highest level for that group since 2001. Twenty-five percent of independents said the same, representing a seven-point jump since before the pandemic began.

If the stage is set for a national push, the party seems ready to make one. In the immediate aftermath of last week’s elections, at the same time Democrats took steps to finalize the framework of their Build Back Better legislation, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that Republicans would soon introduce a “parents’ bill of rights” to promote transparency in curricular content and protect the participation of parents in school governance.

The question is whether such initiatives are the stuff that majorities are made on. The last midterm wave favoring Republicans came in 2010, when right-wing activists incensed over deficits, government spending, and Obamacare coalesced in an amorphous movement known as the Tea Party. A revival of that feat will require coordination and skilled messaging, Farnsworth said, but education could offer a useful conduit for conservative energies that exist already.

“In many ways, the critical race theory debate of 2021 is just the latest version of the death panel conversation from Obamacare, or the Willie Horton story of 1988. The question isn’t whether this is an accurate portrayal of what’s going on, the question is whether this can be weaponized to benefit Republicans. In 2021, as in 2010, as in 1988, the answer is yes.”