On Thursday, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham , which will lift the state’s minimum amount of instructional time for elementary students by the equivalent of 27 days and for middle and high school students by the equivalent of 10 days. 

Total time in class differs from district to district, but that younger children spend 5.5 hours per day in school, while older pupils spend six hours (lunch time is excluded from both figures). The existing minimums are being revised upward to 1,140 annual hours from the current figure of 990 hours for K–6 students and 1,080 for those enrolled in grades 7–12.

The new law will affect roughly three-quarters of New Mexico’s 89 school districts, the remainder of which already meet the new requirements. But some flexibility will be offered, both in terms of how districts use the time and what can be counted as “instructional” activity. In elementary schools, up to 60 hours of professional development, teacher collaboration, and parent-teacher interaction (whether in home visits or structured meetings) can be counted toward the state minimum. 

Democrat Mimi Stewart, New Mexico’s State Senate President Pro Tempore, said the deal was a difficult one to strike. Some teachers and parents grumbled about the prospect of a longer school day or year — districts will have the option of opting for either, or a mix of both — while the governor and some advocates had hoped for more stringent mandates on the amount of time kids spend in class. 

“It was really hard to get a bill together that was a compromise for everyone, and that’s really what HB 130 represents,” Stewart said.

Still, most local observers agreed that the need for action was dire. For years, New Mexico’s educational outcomes have , dragged down by dishearteningly high rates of child poverty and teen pregnancy. That long history of underperformance was highlighted from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed math and English scores for fourth and eighth graders slipping even further behind the national average.

But asking legislators to authorize more school time has proven a tall order. A review of major school districts conducted last year by Chalkbeat had added days to their school years, even with the looming challenge of reversing pandemic-era learning loss. A 2022 proposal in Los Angeles schools to allow staff to work five extra days on a voluntary basis was from the influential United Teachers Los Angeles union. 

Mandi Torrez, the education reform director for advocacy group Think New Mexico, said she had surveyed the damage from COVID and concluded that recovery would need to move “from the classroom-out.”

“We needed time for small-group tutoring and targeted instruction, time for enrichment, time to plan, time for addressing social-emotional needs, time for our students to catch up after the pandemic,” said Torrez, a . “Time was where we needed to start.”

‘It would really level the playing field’

New Mexico is not dramatically different from most states in how it regulates students’ time in school. a set amount of time — whether a minimum of K–12 hours per school day, hours per school year, or days per school year — typically increasing for older students. Many settle on 180 days in a school year or an hourly equivalent that approaches that number.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown University economist who has studied the use of instructional time, said that the number of hours children spend in classrooms “varies tremendously” depending on geography. In he co-authored with PhD student Sarah Novicoff, he found that differences between schools at the high and low ends of instructional time amounted to as much as 190 hours per year; that equates to roughly five extra weeks of instruction. Similar disparities persist in New Mexico, where 38 school districts (43 percent of all districts across the state) . In , one expert said he regarded the task of restoring foregone instructional time to be a “lost cause” for many students.

“There are huge inequities in access for kids to instructional time based on what state they live in, what school district they live in, and what school they attend,” Kraft said.

That assessment largely matched Torrez’s experience as an educator. One of her favorite methods of reinforcing lessons, she said, was to offer after-school tutoring to small groups of students. But significant numbers, including some who might have benefitted the most from supplemental teaching, were unable to access it.

“I would always have some kids who couldn’t stay after school, for whatever reasons,” Torrez remembered. “If we can build in the time so we can do that tutoring during the school day, it would really level the playing field for all of our students.”

Along with several other proposals that emerged during the 2023 legislative session, HB 130 is effectively an outgrowth of , which offers school districts additional funds to add up to 25 extra school days each year on a voluntary basis. A 2015 study of the program conducted by researchers at Utah State University that participants saw marked gains in academic performance. 

But from the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee found that the vast majority of districts statewide declined the opportunity to take part in K–5 Plus, often citing the difficulty of staffing rural, low-enrollment campuses for additional school days. Teachers’ unions and school leaders also against a 2021 attempt to make participation in the program mandatory, arguing that it would impinge too much on summer vacations for school staff. Stewart, a former teacher, said that teachers had complained to her of the “miserable” experience of transitioning between in-person and online instruction. 

“It really is pandemic PTSD that I’m seeing now,” Stewart said. “Before the pandemic, teachers would tell me all the time, ‘We just want to teach more and be paid for it.’ Well, that’s what this bill does, but they still had a hard time accepting it.”

‘This is good policy’

Throughout the session, Stewart , an alternate measure that would have imposed the same minimum time requirements but not allowed districts to count non-classroom activities — such as lesson planning and teacher collaboration — as instructional time. That carve-out only applies to 60 hours for K–6 teachers, many of whom are now receiving , and only 30 hours for teachers in grades 7–12. 

The second bill was favored by Gov. Lujan Grisham, she said, but both local education officials and teachers themselves pushed for greater flexibility. In the end, she said, it was “a real effort to get the education community onboard with anything that increased [the length of] the school year.”

“We made the change to the hours to answer the local control cries that we get inundated with every session: ‘We want to decide ourselves! Just give us the money!’” Stewart said. “There’s always this tension between local control and state control, and HB 130 was designed to bridge that divide.” 

Legislators in other states are likely familiar with the political roadblocks. Even with extra funding attached to pay school employees for their additional labors, many teachers around the country of working longer hours after the learning challenges they’ve had to contend over with the past three years. After a pandemic-era dip in turnover, mounting frustration and burnout are being felt in higher teacher quit rates.

Consequently, even with documented learning loss posing a huge threat to the educational attainment of this generation of students, states have been slow to embrace increased instructional time as a solution. One exception is Kansas, where lawmakers are to lift the minimum number of annual school days to 195 — an enormous increase — but the measure’s chances for passage are unclear, and few legislatures are following their lead.

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institution, lamented the reluctance to expand hours spent in class, calling the approach a “no-brainer” tool to lift student performance.

“To be sure, some advocates chafe at the idea of ‘seat time,’” Petrilli observed. “But academic learning isn’t that much different from sports or music or anything else in life: If we want to get better at something, more time on task is an essential part of the equation.”

Kraft said that most research of the effects of extended learning time , when used appropriately, it reliably lifted outcomes for kids. Still, he added, teachers shouldn’t simply be corralled into working longer hours after the pandemic’s ordeal. Instead, districts should be thoughtful about the ways in which they lengthened the school day and year — perhaps by recruiting more tutors so that teachers themselves could have more time to work together and improve pedagogy. 

“This is good policy,” Kraft said. “It would be even better policy if we also think critically about how that’s going to affect the teacher workforce and how we can support schools to…make sure they use that time well.”

It was the year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent public health authority, declared that the country was “,” as COVID case rates plummeted from their Omicron highs. By the fall, President Biden was with that sentiment, noting that most people had laid down their masks and returned to something like normal. 

And around the possibility of winter surges in American schools, the most visible hallmarks of the COVID era have at last receded. The lurching progression from in-person to virtual classes is over, following an explosion of school exposures last winter. Mask mandates, social distancing, and endless disinfectant wipes are also predominantly a thing of the past, with virtually all children approved to receive vaccines. 

But in terms of the pandemic’s impact on education, it’s still only the end of the beginning. With each month, new findings emerge revealing more about what remote instruction did to learning and how families reacted. The potentially lifelong shadow the virus has cast over K-12 students — from how babies develop speech to what today’s adolescents will earn decades from now — is largely mysterious. 

Previous editions of this list have covered the wider world of education policy and research: issues like school financing, choice, accountability, and testing. This year, The 74 is focusing exclusively on the lessons of the COVID era — one that is now passing from the scene — and the questions that remain in its wake.

Here, laid out in charts, maps, and tables, are 14 discoveries that changed how we think about schools in 2022.

The scope of learning loss

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects. 

The unprecedented drop in math scores, which fell by an average of eight points for eighth graders and five points for fourth graders, was especially disturbing. But reversals in literacy were also notable, with sizable increases in the number of students testing below even the “basic” level of reading proficiency. What’s more, the results affirmed dismal findings from NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” test — an earlier version of the exam that has been administered since the early 1970s — showing that the pandemic set back nine-year-olds’ performance in math and reading to levels last seen two decades ago. 

“We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years,” said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington professor, of the long-term results.

As many experts warned, additional research has also made clear that the academic damage of COVID was not shared equally. NWEA, the nonprofit testing group whose MAP exam has proven an invaluable assessment tool throughout the pandemic, released a study in November indicating that already-wide achievement gaps in elementary classrooms have grown between 5 and 10 percent in the last few years. Those disparities grew, NWEA analysts specified, because of slumping achievement among struggling students. 

College entrance exams contributed yet another dispiriting perspective, with average scores on the ACT slipping below 20 for the first time since the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Only about one in twelve test-takers from low-income families met standards of college readiness across all of the test’s four subjects.

In 2022, researchers, educators, and the public discovered the full extent of what COVID did to K-12 learning. 2023 will provide a test of how quickly that learning can be restored — and how seriously we are approaching the problem.

The geography of remote learning

Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.

co-authored by experts at NWEA, the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research used data from over 2 million students to show that — whether in states that reopened schools relatively quickly, like Florida, or those that stayed remote much longer, like Virginia — schools serving the highest proportions of low-income students spent the most weeks remote during the 2020–21 academic year. Notably, however, the socioeconomic gaps in exposure to virtual teaching were much larger among the group of predominantly blue states that tended to reopen more hesitantly. In those states, high-poverty schools spent more than two additional months in Zoom classrooms than low-poverty schools. 

Harvard economist and study co-author Thomas Kane observed that the greater prevalence of remote learning among poor students, who are already less likely to succeed academically than their better-off peers, could be an additional driver of achievement gaps for years to come. In an interview with The 74, Kane said that the academic recovery interventions planned by school districts were “nowhere near enough” to compensate for COVID’s toll.

“Based on what I’m seeing, most districts are going to find that students are still lagging far behind when they take their state tests in May 2023,” Kane said.

But was the public convinced by the reams of detailed and well-intentioned research on the results of online learning? Public polling suggests that the answer is ambiguous. At least — albeit one conducted before much of the research on learning loss was released — indicated that Americans prioritized curbing the pandemic’s spread over keeping schools open.

Poorer districts lost the most

Few doubt that some amount of learning loss is linked to the hasty and unplanned adoption of remote instruction. How much is still ambiguous, however. released in October — devised by Harvard’s Kane and the eminent Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, among others — leveraged a combination of state test scores and federal NAEP results to deliver a granular, district-by-district overview of the pandemic’s academic impact.

While the researchers found that academic performance in predominantly in-person districts held up much better than mostly remote districts within the same state, they also stipulated that school closures were not “the primary factor driving achievement losses”; some states that spent much of the pandemic open as usual, such as Maine, sustained far greater score declines than those that saw widespread closures, such as California. And beyond the question of remote-versus-in-person, it is clear that districts with greater concentrations of poor students experienced the worst academic effects over the last few years.

In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer than 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost. Above all, the ultra-local look at test scores showed a startling amount of variation in how different school districts experienced the same event; in reading, almost 15 percent of all students were enrolled in districts where achievement actually grew during the pandemic.

Enrollment fell as families fled 

The pandemic left an impact on schools far beyond its blow to student achievement. Due to a combination of public dissatisfaction, increased mobility, and economic upheaval, families withdrew from their public schools in unprecedented numbers — as many as 1.5 million during the 2020–21 school year, or about 3 percent of all public K-12 enrollment, according to a 2021 report from NCES.

Further scholarly investigation has unearthed the important role that learning modality played in that flight. According to a comprehensive report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the districts that spent the most time remote throughout the first pandemic school year lost at least 500,000 more students than they would have if they had stayed open during that time. And in the period that followed, fewer students returned than did to districts where campuses mostly operated in-person. 

The findings suggested that widespread loss of students was not just “pandemic-related; it was pandemic-response related,” Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy, told The 74’s Linda Jacobson. 

Meanwhile, enrollment trends detected this spring by the data company Burbio showed that major urban districts continued losing students through the 2021–22 school year. Only a handful of states examined by the organization during that time saw an enrollment increase of more than 1 percent compared with the previous year.

The youngest weren’t spared

While we’ve gained a better empirical understanding of how K-12 students’ lives and learning trajectories were altered by COVID, it will be years before we fully grasp the ways in which the youngest Americans were affected. But a provocative study of child development and language acquisition has already given cause for alarm.

Using LENA “talk pedometers” — a that measures the number of spoken interactions occurring in the vicinity of young children, as well as their own vocalizations — researchers at Brown discovered that babies born after July 2020 produced fewer vocalizations and demonstrated slower verbal growth than comparable children born before 2019. The younger group of babies also experienced slower growth of white matter — subcortical nerve fibers that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain — perhaps the result of hearing fewer words spoken and engaging less often with their caregivers. 

If the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, it will produce unavoidable consequences for schools in the next decade.

Old before their time

Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.

A slew of surveys highlight newly elevated levels of student stress, the product of public health worries, economic anxiety, and even domestic abuse. But a recently published offers proof that those factors actually changed the neurobiology of some adolescents. Examining MRIs of 128 matched subjects — half measured before and half after the pandemic began — a team of psychologists found that the group assessed after COVID demonstrated higher “brain age” than their chronological age and experienced faster growth in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain that regulate fear, stress, and memory.

Such sped-up aging has historically been seen in cases of household trauma and neglect, and its consequences can include decreased capacity across a range of intellectual functions. Follow-up scans are already planned to assess whether the process has been remediated.

Teachers under strain

Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021. 

That figure almost certainly doesn’t betoken a future exodus from the profession; educators have historically been much more likely to say they intend to leave than to ultimately act on those plans. But it could mean that large numbers will stay in their jobs past the point of burnout, their effectiveness permanently dimmed. On average, the poll found that the teachers and principals were more than twice as likely to report experiencing frequent, job-related stress than other workers.

Teachers were also twice as likely as comparable adults to say they were not “coping well” with their stress. While the most commonly cited contributing factor was the task of addressing learning loss, some school employees also complained of staff shortages and the difficulty of managing their own childcare responsibilities. 

Social shuffle

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers. 

In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty. 

Somewhat surprisingly for a survey administered over two years after the emergence of COVID, nearly 20 percent of the teen respondents said they had not attended classes exclusively in-person during the spring of 2022 (a time of somewhat elevated virus case rates). About two-thirds said they would prefer a return to entirely in-person schooling in the future.

Future earnings endangered

The downstream consequences of thwarted or deferred academic success are destined to include financial disadvantages; after all, today’s underserved pupils are tomorrow’s underprepared workers. But until the fall release of NAEP, it was difficult to produce a broadly shared measure of American students’ stifled progress. 

With the arrival of those scores, Harvard economist Kane — him again — and Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger immediately calculated a projection of how much potential income could be lost due to diminished math learning among eighth-graders since 2020. Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, the figure they reached was astounding: $900 billion of future earnings, if the declines in learning were to remain permanent for all students in the United States.

“When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life,” Staiger told The 74. “And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

The paper was one of a series of analyses focusing specifically on the drop in math knowledge, which appears to have been particularly significant. But the extended disruption to literacy instruction left a substantial mark as well, particularly among students at the beginning of their reading careers. Amplify, a curriculum provider, released data this fall showing that 4 percent fewer second graders and 8 percent fewer first graders are reaching grade-level reading goals than in 2019; meanwhile, almost one-third of third graders were assessed as needing “intensive intervention.”

Those bleak findings echo the results of Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready assessment, which revealed that the percentage of elementary students reading below grade level grew between 2021 and 2022. That subgroup of students, sometimes called the “COVID cohort,” is running out of time to get back on track.

Costs of recovery

The havoc inflicted by the pandemic is now an inescapable fact for schools, families, and public authorities to deal with. But what’s it going to take to surmount the considerable educational challenges and get kids back on track?

The federal government has allocated roughly $190 billion in relief funding to states for that purpose. But , that amount won’t be sufficient to get the job done. The true cost, they say, will fall somewhere between $325 billion and $930 billion, huge sums that include not only the pedagogical resources to restore lost learning opportunities from the last several years, but also the out-of-school interventions that power so much of the academic growth that goes on inside classrooms. 

There is no indication that anywhere near that level of funding — or even any further money at all — is coming. In the meantime, school districts are only required to spend 20 percent of their federal aid on learning recovery. 

Latino students take a hit

Children of all backgrounds were bruised by the effects of shuttered schools, but among them, Latino students are notable for having recently enjoyed sustained academic momentum. As their share of the national student body has increased to nearly 30 percent, they have also seen rising achievement scores and post-secondary outcomes compared with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

COVID put that progress on pause, according to from the advocacy organization UnidosUS. After leaping from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade, the on-time high school graduation rate for Latino students fell slightly in 2021. Worse still, the rate of college enrollment for Latino freshmen shrunk by 7.8 percent between the spring of 2020 and 2021. That figure bounced back somewhat over the next academic year — along with rates of college-going for most Americans — but still fell below the pre-pandemic norm.

The particular stumbles experienced by Latino kids have explanations that both precede the pandemic and are directly linked to it, the report found. Long before 2020, Latino households were less likely to report having a computer or high-speed broadband in the home. Meanwhile, Latino students were disproportionately likely to be enrolled in low-income schools, which were themselves more likely to stay remote longer during the pandemic.

Explosion of absenteeism

Along with the surge of full-on disenrollment from schools, a shocking number of K-12 students spent the last few years missing day after day of instruction. Just how many days of absence is difficult to know precisely, however, because of ambiguities in the way attendance figures were collected during the COVID era.

An released this fall indicated that over 10 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missing over 10 percent of the school year) in 2020–21. That would be an increase of more than 25 percent relative to the pre-pandemic norm, but from Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit group Attendance Works, it is also very likely a serious underestimate. Because of challenges in knowing which students “attended” all of their virtual lessons (versus simply logging into Zoom and then logging off, for instance), statewide absence counts in the NCES figures sometimes vary widely from district-level reporting.

Based on the early release of more detailed 2021–22 figures from California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, the authors wrote, it is reasonable to predict that as many as 16 million kids were chronically absent last school year, a doubling of the pre-pandemic number. 

The teacher exodus that wasn’t

Were American schools plagued with teacher absences this year, or not? It was a question that captivated news sources, but also divided education experts, because it contained an even thornier question within it: If the supply of teachers remains mostly steady, but demand for them spikes, are they truly at a deficit?

In spite of widespread fears that veteran teachers were quitting in huge numbers as a reaction to the pandemic, no mass departure ever took place, according to a paper by Brown economist Matt Kraft. Turnover actually fell slightly in the summer of 2020 and stayed within the typical annual range the next year. But weak hiring during the first few months of the pandemic may have contributed to higher-than-usual vacancy rates, perhaps triggered by fears of Great Recession-style budget cuts that never materialized.

In fact, a windfall of federal cash followed instead, leading districts to add new jobs in late 2020 and 2021, and the resultant hiring spree has indeed made candidates for teaching positions hard to find. But even that phenomenon isn’t true everywhere, since numbers differ widely across state lines. According to a paper released this summer, Mississippi’s rate of vacancies per 10,000 students is more than 68 times higher than that of Utah. 

Hopeful signs

As the long legacy of COVID grew clearer, research in 2022 gave the education world plenty of reasons to worry. But it has also contributed some hopeful signs of renewed progress in schools. 

The good omens aren’t popping up everywhere, but some are to be found in state-level testing, which has resumed around the country after being suspended for at least the first pandemic year. According to Tennessee’s state exams, the number of students meeting or beating grade-level reading standards rose from 29 percent in 2020–21 to over 36 percent in 2021–22. In all, more than three-quarters of the state’s school districts reported reading scores higher than were seen in the pre-pandemic period. 

“We are seeing this broadly across the state, and across district types — urban, rural and suburban,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn told The 74’s Beth Hawkins. “We are really, really proud of what our districts have done.”

Several other Southern states have begun to make their turnaround, with Mississippi a particular standout. This of 2021–22 testing data showed average scores in math, English, and science nearing or exceeding 2019 levels, while performance on the U.S. history exam skyrocketed compared with 2020–21 (the first in which it had been given). Just as notably, — a state-mandated test that students must pass to progress to the fourth grade — fell by only .6 percentage points between 2019 and 2022. 

, circulated Thursday through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, uses a combination of survey responses and statewide administrative records from Tennessee to create a framework for identifying how and where teacher shortages emerge. 

Those data principally come from school years leading up to 2019–20, anchoring the results in the pre-COVID era. But they will inevitably resound in debates over the pandemic’s effects on the education workforce, which have come to revolve around the central paradox of teacher shortages: Even as countless school and district officials say they’re struggling to fill positions, national labor statistics show only slight movement in teacher turnover rates the last few years. 

Matthew Kraft, a Brown economist and one of the paper’s authors, said that ambiguity around shortages arises from the decentralized nature of K-12 employment, which can bely the realities experienced by many teachers and administrators.

“Teacher shortages are real, period,” Kraft said. “Teacher shortages, however, are not universal. We’re trying to help people understand that it’s actually accurate for people to disagree about this because they’re answering from different perspectives.”

To conduct a comprehensive examination of K-12 employment, Kraft and his collaborators gathered response data from the Tennessee Educator Survey, an annual poll administered to thousands of teachers and school administrators by the state department of education. Tennessee offers a fairly representative setting, including several major urban districts along with substantial suburban and rural populations. 

Specifically, the study leveraged a survey item asking administrators if their school had a vacant teaching position at the beginning of the 2019–20 school year. Respondents at roughly 1,100 of Tennessee’s 1,740 schools answered that question, which provides a reasonable proxy for teacher shortages; while virtually all schools occasionally have to deal with unfilled jobs, classrooms that begin the academic year with insufficient or uncertain staffing may struggle to accelerate learning and establish relationships between students and teachers.

The responses, along with a decade’s worth of state information on student and teacher demographics, paint a picture of shortages that are both widely distributed throughout the state and narrowly experienced among schools themselves. To begin with, just 609 of the sample’s more than 40,000 teaching positions were vacant in the fall of 2019, with secondary schools accounting for 73 percent of all vacancies. But while three-quarters of all schools reported no vacancies, and just 6 percent of schools said that more than two positions were vacant, schools in virtually all of Tennessee’s commuting zones  — — reported at least one teaching vacancy.

Secondary schools in a handful of areas, including Memphis and Nashville, stand out as sites of acute shortage, but vacancies were seen throughout Tennessee rather than concentrating within specific regions or counties. About 80 percent of the variation in vacancy levels, in fact, was accounted for by particular schools within districts, rather than across school district borders. 

What’s more, the existence of vacant positions was significantly associated with certain features of schools and school communities. In keeping with earlier research showing that K-12 teachers — to a greater degree than other professionals with a similar level of educational attainment — near where they grew up, the authors discovered that schools employing a higher proportion of early-career educators who themselves attended a nearby high school (another question included on the statewide survey) reported fewer vacancies.

Teacher compensation also played an important role. A 0.5 percentage point increase in teachers’ scheduled salary bumps was correlated with a 36 percent drop in vacancy rates, while increases in a combined measure of self-reported working conditions (e.g., better school culture, more administrative support, strong relationships among faculty members) also drove down teaching shortfalls at the beginning of the year.

But perhaps the strongest indicators of unfilled teaching jobs were school-level turnover rates. This result may seem intuitive — more vacancies are naturally seen in workplaces where more people regularly leave — but Kraft and his colleagues highlight the finding as a validation of earlier work on ; for state and district leaders hoping to identify and support schools that struggle to staff classrooms, it is an important observation that past turnover tends to predict future turnover, especially when real-time data on teacher quit rates are typically hard to come by. In all, turnover rates were found to be 39 percent higher in schools with fall teacher vacancies than those without.

“For 20 years, we’ve been seeing that revolving doors predict shortages,” observed coauthor Danielle Edwards, a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute. “There’s something important about that measure, [which] doesn’t include the past year’s turnover. It’s the idea that a particular school might always be losing teachers, and we need to identify those schools because it’s also going to make it hard for them to get teachers in the future.”

Certain academic specialities are also harder to find than others. While about 20 percent of school districts said they didn’t receive enough applications for open social studies positions, nearly two-thirds reported insufficient interest in math, science, foreign language, and special education roles. That unevenness suggests that standard salary schedules may be “ill-equipped to address the wide variability in…subject-specific needs,” Kraft said.

He concluded by arguing that the frequency with which teaching jobs sit open across different communities, and the commonalities between schools that see higher vacancy levels, shows that teacher shortages both before and after COVID are the downstream effect of policies that can be altered — whether by differentiating teacher pay to attract applicants with especially valuable expertise, or improving working conditions so that all school employees feel more valued.

“Shortages don’t just appear out of nowhere by some miraculous force; they are a function of decisions we make, and they can be influenced by macroeconomic patterns…like a global pandemic. But underlying them is an infrastructure that we’ve designed and have agency to change.”

Teacher turnover rates are actually about the same as they were before the pandemic, according to through the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. Flush with pandemic relief money and faced with the generational challenge of fostering learning recovery, school districts are hiring for more positions and leaving vacancies open for longer.

A wide-ranging analysis of employment trends from national and state-level sources, the brief does confirm that the K-12 workforce shrank significantly after the onset of COVID-19 and its disruptions to schooling. After roughly a half-decade of steady growth, total public school jobs decreased by roughly 9% through May 2020. The initial drop represented more than twice the number of positions erased during the financial crisis of 2008. 

But the data also suggested that those positions were disproportionately cut from non-teaching ranks. Occupational records from both national and state sources showed measured declines among nurses, administrative support staff, paraprofessionals and other predominantly non-instructional employees. Across all the states included in the study, there was actually generally less teacher turnover during the summer of 2020 — likely the residue of that year’s severe economic slowdown, which discouraged many from leaving their jobs. (During the summer of 2021, seven of those states saw an average turnover increase of 1.2 percentage points, effectively bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels.)

Confusion about the state of the education field has emerged due to a lack of consistently reported data on millions of school employees, the authors argue. In fact, the report was only made possible by combining several overlapping federal data sets — each with its own liabilities — with additional findings from 16 states that publicly reported annual statistics on turnover through the first year of the pandemic.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown economist and the paper’s lead author, said he was “very concerned” about the increased burnout teachers reported experiencing over the last few years. While a true mass exodus of educators hasn’t yet occurred, Kraft said that profession-wide exhaustion could someday trigger one. But he added that short-term instability in the education workforce has “obfuscated” longer-term issues of working conditions and public funding that demand more thorough examination.

“There’s no doubt that this story [of educator dissatisfaction and turnover] is catching our national attention, and it’s generating headlines,” Kraft said. “The problem is that most of those stories are asking a question for which there is a nuanced response, and nuance isn’t communicated effectively in our sound-bite world.”

Kraft and his co-author, Joshua Bleiberg, culled figures from four surveys conducted by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, each collecting regular reports from tens or hundreds of thousands of employers in both the private and public sectors. That information allowed them to not only generate month-by-month estimates of the total number of elementary and secondary education jobs, but also form a clearer view of the large swings in hirings, resignations and layoffs between March 2020 and May 2022.

The pair supplemented that picture with files from 16 state education agencies — though these additions were complicated by the states’ differing definitions of turnover. For the purposes of their study, Kraft and Bleiberg described it as the percentage of teachers in one school year who did not return to the same school or district in the next year.

One possible explanation for the vacancies that did linger was a period of weak job growth after schools were closed in spring 2020. According to one federal survey, K-12 and higher education institutions collectively hired 32,000 fewer educators per month over the first six months of the pandemic. That belt-tightening was likely caused by worries that the austerity measures of the last global economic downturn would be repeated, Kraft remarked.

“We had lived through the lessons of the Great Recession, which substantially cut education funding over multiple years and led to hundreds of thousands of teachers being laid off,” he said. “So schools were cautious, and I think rightly so, about filling positions even from natural turnover.”

After the slashed budgets of the 2010s, few if any observers predicted the federal government would allocate nearly $200 billion in pandemic relief to American schools. If that understandable misapprehension guided decisions during the early phases of the crisis, a general absence of accurate, real-time data has further clouded the picture ever since. 

The deficiencies of public data sources are several, Kraft and Bleiberg note. Some surveys don’t clearly differentiate among K-12 employees, such that job additions or attrition among non-instructional staff can be conflated with those affecting teachers. Others make it hard to differentiate between public K-12 schools and private institutions (or even colleges and universities). And as with virtually all data regularly collected by the government, figures are subject to serious revisions even months after their initial publication. 

Chad Aldeman is the policy director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, a research group that studies education finance. In an email to The 74, Aldeman called national teacher employment data “at best a patchwork quilt of federal, state and local databases, much of it several years old.” That disorganization makes it difficult to answer even basic questions, such as how many job openings exist throughout the nation’s K-12 schools and which specific positions principals and superintendents are hiring.

In normal circumstances, that kind of opacity paves the way to misguided policy choices. But at a time of unprecedented tumult in the labor market, it might come at the cost of critical, one-time resources that could otherwise be spent helping students climb back from years of lost learning. Aldeman said he was aware of cases in which districts were poaching from their neighbors, or even cannibalizing their own workforce, to fill specialist roles.

“I don’t think state and federal policymakers are taking these data gaps seriously,” he wrote. “Instead, states seem to be spending their own money blindly, and I don’t see many thoughtful plans to track the spending alongside student outcomes to make sure the increased staffing levels actually translate into better services for students.”

Kraft said that public confusion over the nature of teacher shortages is a serious concern, pointing to showing higher vacancy rates at high-poverty or predominantly minority schools. The difficulties those schools face in hiring, and the increased stress suffered by their staff, are persistent problems that call out redress through higher pay and better working conditions, he argued; misbegotten narratives based on incomplete information could only make them harder to solve.

“We are failing these communities by failing to understand the nature of the problem, Kraft said. “And by failing to understand the nature of the problem, we may well diagnose it incorrectly and prescribe remedies that fail to address the underlying, structural inequities.”

New research being released today aims to change that by focusing explicitly on the effects of in-school mentoring. The , circulated as a working paper through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, finds that high school students with mentors tend to earn better grades, stay in school longer, and make more money than peers who are otherwise similar to them. Unfortunately, the lower-income students who seem to benefit the most from mentoring at school are also the least likely to receive it.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The paper builds on that has detected significant benefits from providing mentors to kids. But that work has usually looked at structured and well-known programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters, which draws together adults and children who are both expressly looking to establish connections. Matthew Kraft, an economics professor at Brown and one of the study’s authors, said that the webs of “natural mentoring” in school environments represent a much more common phenomenon that needs to be investigated in its own right.

“Natural mentoring — when students and adults in school buildings develop relationships that go beyond the formal role of the teacher in the classroom or a coach on the athletic field — happens far more frequently than the ways in which we offer formal mentoring,” Kraft said. “So we need to understand the degree to which that matters for kids, where it’s happening, and where it’s not happening.”

But Kraft and his co-authors, University of Virginia psychologist Noelle Hurd and Anneberg research analyst Alex Bolves, faced a problem. Natural mentoring is, if not random, organic and difficult to replicate: You can’t design a research trial that will offer identical doses of care and attention to kids in schools and then compare them with a control group.

To help overcome those issues, the team turned to a huge data set, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Commonly called “Add Health,” the project was launched in the 1994-95 academic year to track a nationally representative sample of over 20,000 middle- and high-schoolers as they aged into early adulthood. Waves of in-home interviews with participants have revealed countless details of their home and social lives over nearly three decades, including their relationships with adults. All told, over 15 percent identified a teacher, coach, or school counselor as an important mentor, with 80 percent of those saying that their mentorship persisted past high school.

Determining the effects of all that mentoring required the researchers to use a variety of statistical methods. They studied the academic records of students from before and after they connected with their mentor; examined similar pairs of adolescents including 1,213 twins and triplets, 1,378 students who named one another as best friends, and 548 students who engaged in romantic relationships with one another; and they controlled for a host of demographic factors including race, gender, disability and immigration status, family structure and household income.

In the end, the data pointed to a clear, wide-ranging set of benefits resulting from mentorship. Students with mentors gained between .06 and .48 points of grade point average, were between 18 and 35 percent less likely to fail a course, and were 10 to 25 percentage points more likely to attend college. Turning to workplace outcomes, the authors estimate that mentorship may boost the annual earnings of students by between $1,780 and $5,337. Those effects compare favorably to some of the most effective education interventions that have been studied, including high-quality pre-K and lower class sizes.

Kraft cautioned that these associations between in-school mentoring and improved short- and long-term circumstances should not be regarded as clear causal evidence. But they offered the “most robust empirical evidence to date” of the importance of school-based mentoring, he said — and they fall in line with existing evidence, both from formal mentoring programs and the lived experience of many people.

“None of our methods are gold standard, and we can’t definitively say without a doubt that natural mentoring causes the outcomes we observe to improve,” Kraft said. “However, we are able to leverage multiple approaches to account for the biases we think might be present. And across all the approaches, we can’t make what appear to be the benefits of natural mentoring go away.”

‘Size of these effects is amazing’

Unfortunately, the Add Health data was equally clear that not all K-12 students benefit to the same extent from strong relationships with adults at school. Roughly 15 percent of white participants and 20 percent of Asian -American participants said they had experienced in-school mentoring; roughly 12 percent of African -American and Latino males, and about 10 percent of African -American and Latino females, said the same.

Class was also a noteworthy factor: Over 17 percent of students from more affluent families reported the existence of an in-school mentor, compared with just 12.5 percent of students from less affluent families.The divergence is especially damaging because the apparent effects of mentoring, including reduced course failures and greater college attendance, are significantly larger for children of lower socioeconomic status.

In this aspect, the study’s findings closely coincide with those of , this one examining a more formal mentoring system in Germany. That experiment looked at over 300 high schoolers from 10 cities who were paired with university undergraduates through a program called Rock Your Life! The younger students were drawn from schools in each city’s lower academic track, making them much less likely to attend college. But after years of collecting data, researchers found that receiving mentoring had delivered substantial improvements to their math grades, social skills and declared willingness to attain a workplace apprenticeship.

Ludger Woessmann, a professor of economics at the University of Munich and one of the study’s co-authors, told The 74 that those positive effects accrued almost exclusively to poorer students; in contrast with Kraft’s work, which found the benefits of mentoring to be universal, if weighted somewhat toward the economically disadvantaged, the German experiment showed that more affluent participants received almost no benefits.

“The size of these effects is amazing,” Woessmann said. “It’s somewhat hard to quantify exactly what they mean, but they are huge. And I think it’s a very gratifying result because we really see in all these dimensions — some of these are subjective things, but school grades come from official data — they are really improved, big time. So what we learn is that the life outcomes [of disadvantaged students] are malleable.”