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The COVID-19 pandemic has presented numerous challenges to students across the United States, particularly those who are parents enrolled in community colleges. California's community college system serves a diverse student population, including a significant number of non-traditional, working adults who are also parents. These students have faced unprecedented challenges due to the pandemic, including the difficulties of balancing childcare responsibilities with academic and professional obligations. This paper summarizes the preliminary findings of a study that intends to contribute to the crucial conversation around childcare needs among community college students. The focus of this study was understanding the experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) mothers with young children and the impact of COVID-19 on their educational experiences in community colleges across the state of California.

Most states responded to the onset of the pandemic by temporarily granting teachers Emergency licenses. These licenses allowed teachers to work in classrooms without passing the typical licensure exams. Since then, several states have extended their use of Emergency licenses, raising questions about how these policies impact the composition of the teacher workforce and student outcomes. In this paper, we examine the result of these policies using data on multiple cohorts of Emergency licensed teachers (ELTs) who taught in Massachusetts between 2021 and 2023. We find that ELTs were slightly more likely to remain in the same school and in the teaching workforce than teachers from other entry routes. However, ELTs' students scored significantly lower on standardized tests in math and science than other students in the same school and same year. Our findings are at odds with earlier, more positive assessments of Emergency licensure in Massachusetts. Our updated results appear to be driven by more recent cohorts of ELTs, rather than the teachers who received Emergency licenses at the start of the pandemic. Overall, this study suggests policymakers should be cautious when drawing sweeping conclusions about the impacts of teacher licensure based solely on the earliest cohort of teachers who obtained pandemic-era Emergency licenses.

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) was the largest onetime federal investment in K-12 schools in history, funneling almost $200 billion to states and school districts. We use novel data from Washington State to investigate the extent to which ESSER funding causally influenced spending on school personnel. We argue one cannot infer this directly from ESSER claims data because of the fungibility of school budgets. Thus, we rely on a more direct signal of district hiring decisions: public education job postings scraped from district hiring websites. To address endogeneity concerns, our preferred approach employs an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a formula mechanism used to determine Title I funding for 2020-21 (and thus ESSER allocations in 2022) based on the number of Title I formula-eligible children. We find strong, arguably causal, evidence that public school hiring increased in response to the availability of ESSER funding. Specifically, we estimate that each $1,000 in ESSER allocations caused districts to seek to hire $206 in additional staff, disproportionately teachers. These estimates suggest that roughly 12,000 new staff (including 5,100 teachers) were hired in Washington because of ESSER. In the absence of new funding, school staffing budgets will likely need to contract substantially following the sunset of ESSER.

It is now well established that the COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating and unequal impact on student achievement. Test score declines were disproportionately large for historically marginalized students, exacerbating preexisting achievement gaps and threatening educational and economic inequality. In this paper, we use longitudinal student-level NWEA MAP Growth test data to estimate differences in test score declines for students at different points on the prepandemic test distribution. We also test the extent to which students' schools and districts accounted for these differences in declines. We find significant differences in learning loss by baseline achievement, with lower-achieving student's scores dropping 0.100 SD more in math and 0.113 SD more in reading than higher-achieving students' scores. We additionally show that the school a student attended accounts for about three-quarters of this widening gap in math achievement and about one-third in reading. The findings suggest school and district-level policies may have mattered more for learning loss than individual students' experiences within schools and districts. Such nuanced information regarding the variation in the pandemic's impacts on students is critical for policymakers and practitioners designing targeted academic interventions and for tracking disparities in academic recovery. [Additional funding for this report was provided by Kenneth C. Griffin.]

Emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges make it difficult for many children and adolescents to engage and succeed at school. Research indicates that at least 20% of all children and adolescents have been diagnosed with one more mental health disorders. Behavioral problems, anxiety, and depression are the most diagnosed mental health issues, and they often co-occur. Moreover, these conditions are being diagnosed at increasingly younger ages. In the past several years there has been a rise in the number of adolescents and young adults with serious mental health issues such as major depression and suicidal ideation, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated mental health problems for children and adolescents. Schools offer promise for providing intensive clinical support to the most at-risk students, and schools are necessary environment to explore the implementation of multi-modal youth mental health services. This paper provides an analysis of an intensive, in-school mental health services model developed and implemented by Effective School Solutions (ESS), a New Jersey based provider of high acuity school based mental health services for K-12 students. We analyze this multi-modal model for its effectiveness in improving educational outcomes for over 3,000 students identified as requiring intensive clinical mental health support across the 2021-22 school year. This analysis reveals that those students receiving High- versus Low-fidelity programming (i.e., multiple sessions per week for at least half of the school year versus for less than half of the school year) had better educational outcomes. Students receiving High-fidelity programming had greater improvements in grade point average (GPA) and greater reductions in absences across the school year. A higher number of in-school clinical sessions per week significantly predicted a greater increase in GPA and a greater reduction in total disciplinary incidents (including out of school suspensions) across the school year. This report provides initial promising evidence that in-school intensive mental health clinical services yield positive effects on students' educational outcomes. Though future research is needed to validate and extend these findings, schools may consider implementing such services onsite to meet students where they are and to optimize students' mental, behavioral, and educational well-being. [This white paper report was published by the Yale Child Study Center."]

China's higher-education system has been shaped in recent years by a trio of factors: the COVID-19 pandemic, the ambitions of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to make his country into an innovation superpower that is loyal to the Communist Party, and western alarm about those ambitions. But a fourth development, the slowing of China's formerly super-charged economy, could play a more prominent role going forward. This article examines these four factors.

Since 2020, the federal government has distributed almost $2 billion to American school districts to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 pandemic school closures. Released in three separate tranches through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund, the Trump and Biden administrations outlined parameters for spending this unprecedented amount of money and ensured that most of it went directly to local school districts, with a comparative sliver going to state education agencies. This report gives an overview of the most common ESSER expenditures to date and assesses the factors that might influence whether district ESSER investments will make a difference for students. It also provides recommendations for how stakeholders should evaluate the ESSER experiment once it officially ends.

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on students' spring to fall progress, we find a positive impact for summer school on math test achievement (0.03 standard deviation, SD), but not on reading tests. These effects are predominantly driven by students in upper elementary grades. To put the results into perspective, if we assume that these districts have losses similar to those present at the end of the 2022-23 school year (i.e., approximately -0.2 SD), we estimate summer programming closed approximately 2% to 3% of the districts' total learning losses in math, but none in reading. [This research received funding from Kenneth C. Griffin.]

We leverage data on 1,857 families in 140 rural cocoa-growing communities of Côte d'Ivoire to report on child work activities and schooling decisions. We distinguish between unpaid domestic labor and unpaid agricultural child labor activities reported by children in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that more than 80% of children participate in at least one household work activity and more than 50% in at least one agricultural work activity, with differences between boys and girls. Older boys performed more unpaid agricultural work activities, and girls performed more domestic work activities. Thirty-five percent of children were engaged in unpaid agricultural child labor, a rate similar to a national estimate of child labor in cocoa-growing communities of Côte d'Ivoire in 2018/19. Agricultural child labor and schooling are predicted by a child's age and gender, household factors such as parental age, family size, multidimensional poverty, and community factors, especially community-level child labor rates. Social protection and education programs targeting older boys could improve their schooling outcomes and reduce agricultural child labor. Likewise, addressing acute poverty with multifaceted programs reducing consumption-based poverty, poor parental education, and improving community infrastructures could reduce child labor.

The onset of the pandemic in spring 2020 substantially disrupted routes into teaching and offered a unique opportunity to study this process with different requirements for initial entry into the classroom. We examine the impacts of the Temporary Certificate of Eligibility (Temporary CE), which allowed teacher candidates in New Jersey to enter the workforce before completing assessment and performance requirements. Relative to the novice teacher workforce before the pandemic, Temporary CE teachers were substantially more diverse without any significant effects on teacher performance or student test scores. However, Temporary CE holders were less likely to remain in the same school or in the New Jersey teaching workforce between 2020-21 and 2021-22. Although Temporary CE holders disproportionately entered through alternate routes into teaching, these patterns hold for both traditional- and alternate-route entrants.

"Reading for Life" seeks to provide a gateway to that research. Reviewing data on reading and literacy and their impact on the physical, mental, and social-emotional components of health, this paper will: (1) Review the current state of children's literacy and health, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) Explore the importance of early-childhood education and literacy interventions in preschool, and their roles in health outcomes; (3) Summarize existing literature on the relationship between literacy rates and physical, mental, and social-emotional health; and (4) Study successful collaborations between the education and medical fields to implement literacy interventions in pediatric healthcare settings. [This paper was prepared by Scholastic Research & Validation as part of the Yale Child Study Center-Scholastic Collaborative for Child & Family Resilience.]

In 2008 and 2012, Pioneer Institute published reports documenting declines in enrollment in Massachusetts' public schools. At the time, enrollment had fallen by about 35,000 students over a decade, or roughly 0.5 percent per year, with especially large drops in western Massachusetts and parts of Cape Cod. This paper examines enrollment trends since that time in three main sections. The first section continues the analysis from the prior papers and describes changes in enrollment during the 2010s. The second section evaluates the impact of COVID, using data from 2020 through this school year that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) published in December 2022. The final section offers cautious predictions for the next decade.

This paper provides results from the randomized control trial project, Promoting Development and Home Reading of Supplementary Texts for Young Readers in Cambodia. One control and three treatment groups were assessed on how literacy and reading habits changed when households were provided a variety of high-quality and low-cost early reading materials along with varying degrees of encouragement toward building better reading habits. The findings show that providing books in isolation was not enough. Rather, books in conjunction with a network of reading supports was found to be an effective means to boost reading outcomes, including reading proficiency measures, frequency of reading, and attitudes toward reading. The results highlight the need for at-home reading materials in poor households as an integral step to improve early reading. [This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice.]

The paper presents a first global investigation of the longer-term inequality implications of COVID-19 by examining the effect of school closures on the ability of children from different countries and backgrounds to engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility in education. The analysis builds on the data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specific results of the learning loss simulation model using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February 2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence and quality of continued learning during periods of school closures across children from different backgrounds. Based on this information, the paper simulates counterfactual levels of educational attainment and corresponding absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility measures with and without COVID-19 impacts, to arrive at estimates of COVID-19 impacts. The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility in the absence of remedial measures. In upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than their parents (absolute mobility) could decline by 8 percentage points, with the largest impacts observed in the Latin America region. Furthermore, unequal access to continued learning during school closures across children from households of different socioeconomic backgrounds (proxied by parental education levels) leads to a significant decline in relative educational mobility. [This report was prepared by the World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice & Education Global Practice.]

Existing research has found that home visiting programs for families with young children can improve children's development and strengthen caregivers' and families' well-being. However, the pandemic created numerous challenges for home visiting programs, forcing them to deliver services online or in a hybrid format and to adapt the content of their program models to respond to pandemic-related challenges. Questions remain about the impacts of these programs when delivered at scale during this uniquely challenging time. The current study reports 12-month impacts from a randomized controlled trial of Child First--an evidence-based home visiting program that provides a psychotherapeutic, parent-child intervention embedded in a coordinated system of care--implemented across two states. After randomly assigning a racially and ethnically diverse sample of families (N = 226) from predominantly low-income backgrounds to receive the Child First services or typical community services, the research team surveyed caregivers (N = 183) about a year after program enrollment. Results from regression models with site fixed effects revealed that Child First reduced caregivers' job losses, residential mobility, and self-reported substance abuse, and increased receipt of virtual services during the pandemic. Child First also reduced parenting dysfunction (the name of the subscale within the Parenting Stress Index) among caregivers who reported clinical depression at enrollment. There were null impacts on caregivers' psychological well-being, families' involvement with the child welfare system, children's behaviors, and other indicators of economic well-being. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.

This paper studies the effects of differential exposure to COVID-19 on educational outcomes in Guatemala. The government adopted a warning index (ranging from 0 to 10) to classify municipalities by infection rates in 2020, which was then used by the Ministry of Education in 2021 to establish a "stoplight" system for in-person instruction. Using administrative panel data for all students in Guatemala, the study employs a difference-in-differences strategy that leverages municipal differences over time in the warning index to estimate the effects of the pandemic on dropout, promotion, and school switching. The results show that municipalities with a higher warning index had significantly larger dropout, lower promotion rates, and a greater share of students switching from private to public schools. These effects were more pronounced during the first year of the pandemic. The findings show differential effects by the level of instruction, with greater losses for younger children in initial and primary education. The results are robust to specification choice, multiple hypothesis adjustments, and placebo experiments, suggesting that the pandemic has had heterogeneous consequences. [This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice.]

Even though equity has become a hot topic, the pathway to making it a reality has not necessarily become clear. The national agenda on race, racial equity, and dealing with COVID-19 has pushed the challenge of equity to the front and center for schools. This pressurized moment in history has raised important questions: (1) What are the steps to an effective equity journey? and (2) What are the standards and targets to guide the pursuit of equity outcomes? What are the conditions for success in an effective, equitable district? What are the capacities and practices of equitable leaders and practitioners? This paper will highlight a few resources that may be helpful and will refer to many others. There are multitudes of resources available today to support equity development on a personal, organizational, institutional, and societal level. [The paper was prepared with the Center for Understanding Equity.]

In 2020, the federal government implemented the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) to provide financial support to employees, self-employed individuals and students directly affected by COVID-19. The CERB was available for individuals who stopped working or were working reduced hours because of COVID-19, and who met various other eligibility criteria. CERB applicants received $2,000 for an initial four-week period and could reapply for additional periods, eventually extending to 28 weeks, for a maximum benefit of $14,000. The benefit covered the period from March 15 to September 26, 2020. The CESB was available to students enrolled in a postsecondary educational program leading to a degree, diploma, or certificate, who were ineligible for the CERB or EI benefits, but met various other eligibility criteria. The benefit was active between May 10 and August 29, 2020. The CESB addressed a gap left by the CERB, which excluded students who were not employed at the start of the pandemic but would typically be looking for work during the summer of 2020. This paper provides insights into the differences in the rate of receipt of CERB and CESB of postsecondary students who received emergency benefit payments in 2020. Emergency benefit receipt is examined along various educational and socio-demographic characteristics to highlight some of the key differences. The analysis is limited to Canadian citizens and permanent residents who were enrolled full-time or part-time in a public postsecondary institution in the fall of 2019 in a program leading to a degree, diploma, or certificate.

Skilling Australia's current and future workforce is the theme for the 32nd National Vocational Education and Training (VET) Research Conference 'No Frills.' In keeping with the conference's theme, this discussion paper explores the resilience of the Australian VET sector and how it can continue to foster adaptability in the face of ongoing change.

In this paper we examine academic recovery in 12 mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states during the 2021-22 school year. Our findings highlight the challenges that recovery efforts faced during the 2021-22 school year. Although, on average, math and reading test score gains during the school year reached the pace of pre-pandemic school years, they were not accelerated beyond that pace. This is not surprising given that we found that districts struggled to implement recovery programs at the scale they had planned. In the districts where we had detailed data on student participation in academic interventions, we found that recovery efforts often fell short of original expectations for program scale, intensity of treatment, and impact. Interviews with a subsample of district leaders revealed several implementation challenges, including difficulty engaging targeted students consistently across schools, issues with staffing and limitations to staff capacity, challenges with scheduling, and limited engagement of parents as partners in recovery initiatives. Our findings on the pace and trajectory of recovery and the challenges of implementing recovery initiatives raise important questions about the scale of district recovery efforts.

In March 2022 a random sample of one third of Stride K12 families (37,856) were emailed a survey asking parents a series of questions about their families' experiences in their children's current Stride K12-powered online schools and their experiences in their children's former schools. 1,949 parents completed the survey, and of that total, 1,613 had Stride K12 students who had attended another school prior to attending their current online schools. These families reside in one of 28 states that have Stride K12-powered schools that were included in the survey. The purpose of the survey, and this report, are to learn more about what parents value regarding the education of their children, why they chose to enroll their children in a Stride K12-powered online school, their degree of satisfaction with various aspects of their current online schools, and their satisfaction levels with their children's Stride K-12 powered schools as compared with their former schools, when applicable. The survey results indicate that parents have overwhelmingly positive views of how their children are faring at their Stride K12-powered online schools and that their children who did migrate from other schools faced a variety of challenges in their former schools.

This synthesis report is based on a survey carried out during 2022 with Cedefop's reporting network ReferNet. It makes an important contribution to understanding the magnitude of early leaving from VET (ELVET) in those European countries where relevant data are available, and the mechanisms and support measures countries employ to measure and monitor the phenomenon at national and regional levels. The report puts special focus on the main factors leading to early leaving from initial VET as reported by EU Member States, Norway and Iceland. It details the support measures teachers, trainers, school principals and companies providing work-based learning received to overcome the challenges society faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. This research is part of Cedefop's pioneering work within the VET for youth team to support policy-makers and VET practitioners tackling early leaving from VET in Europe. For more than a decade, Cedefop has led research, promoted peer learning through its policy learning fora, and developed and managed online toolkits to benefit learners at risk of dropping out, early leavers from VET and young NEETs. The VET toolkit for tackling early leaving and the VET toolkit for empowering NEETs offer a platform of intervention approaches, good practices and interactive tools designed for both policy-makers and VET teachers and trainers. The community of ambassadors tackling early leaving from VET, created and coordinated by Cedefop since 2017, plays a vital role in enriching and disseminating the toolkit resources. The findings of this survey feed into Cedefop's project on Tackling early leaving from VET. It aims to support EU Member States and the European Commission in the implementation of the Council recommendation on pathways to school success (Council of the European Union, 2022) and the achievement of Education and training 2030 strategic target to lower the rates of early leaving from education and training (Council of the European Union, 2021).

This synthesis report, based on a survey carried out during 2022 with Cedefop's reporting network ReferNet, aims to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of early leaving from vocational education and training (ELVET). Such understanding is a necessary precondition for designing effective responses to help individuals to equip themselves with the appropriate skills to cope with future transformations and to thrive in life. The report has special focus on the mechanisms and support measures countries employ to measure and monitor the phenomenon at national and regional levels; the main factors leading to ELVET as reported by EU Member States, Norway and Iceland; and the support measures teachers, trainers, school principals and companies providing work-based learning received to overcome the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war of aggression against Ukraine. These challenges included carrying out distance learning during school and company closures and supporting Ukrainian refugees to integrate into the national VET systems of the host countries. It is anticipated that findings will inspire policy-makers to take actions to allow every single young student to celebrate successful learning and life pathways.

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Finland. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy-makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the research of the Cedefop study "Entrepreneurship competence in VET." It is part of a series of eight national case studies (Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Austria, Sweden and Finland) and a final report. [Dmitrijs Kulšs was responsible for the publication and research conducted under the project. Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini Srl SB (FGB) was contracted for research and services.]

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Croatia. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy-makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the research of the Cedefop study "Entrepreneurship competence in VET." It is part of a series of eight national case studies (Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Austria, Sweden and Finland) and a final report. [Dmitrijs Kulšs was responsible for the publication and research conducted under the project. Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini Srl SB (FGB) was contracted for research and services.]

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Sweden. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy-makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the research of Cedefop's study "Entrepreneurship competence in VET." It is part of a series of eight national case studies (Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Austria, Sweden and Finland) and a final report. [Dmitrijs Kulšs was responsible for the publication and research conducted under the project. Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini Srl SB (FGB) was contracted for research and services.]

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Europe. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the research of Cedefop's study "Entrepreneurship competence in VET" and eight national case studies covering Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Austria, Finland and Sweden. [Dmitrijs Kulšs was responsible for the publication and research conducted under the project. Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini Srl SB (FGB) was contracted for research and services.]

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Austria. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy-makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the research of Cedefop's study "Entrepreneurship competence in VET." It is part of a series of eight national case studies (Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Austria, Sweden and Finland) and a final report. [Dmitrijs Kulšs was responsible for the publication and research conducted under the project. Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini Srl SB (FGB) was contracted for research and services.]

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on students' spring to fall progress, we find a positive impact for summer school on math test achievement (0.03 standard deviation, SD), but not on reading tests. These effects are predominantly driven by students in upper elementary grades. To put the results into perspective, if we assume that these districts have losses similar to those present at the end of the 2022-23 school year (i.e., approximately -0.2 SD), we estimate summer programming closed approximately 2% to 3% of the districts' total learning losses in math, but none in reading.

We describe the extent and predictors of staffing challenges faced by school districts in Washington state throughout the 2021-22 school year using data collected from job posting websites for districts representing more than 98% of students in the state. These data suggest that school districts in the state faced considerable challenges filling paraeducator and, to a lesser extent, teaching positions at the beginning of the school year. When we focus specifically on teachers, we find that teacher staffing challenges were far more pronounced for special education positions and in schools serving more students of color, less pronounced for elementary positions, and highly correlated with teacher attrition from these types of positions after the prior school year. Accounting for these relationships, districts posted more teaching positions later in the school year when they had increasing student enrollments and received more Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds than nearby districts.

In this paper, we use NWEA MAP test data to examine variation in students' achievement and growth during the pandemic across multiple dimensions. Consistent with prior evidence, we find that students' test scores in fall 2021, on average, were substantially below historic averages. Moreover, the average scores of students of color, students attending high poverty schools, and students in elementary school were more negatively impacted, and more so in math than reading. We present novel evidence on the distributions of test scores and growth in fall 2021 relative to pre-pandemic distributions, finding disproportionately larger declines for students with lower previous achievement levels across districts. However, between districts, there was considerable variation in the extent to which their fall 2021 achievement and growth distributions shifted from their historical distributions by subject, student subgroups, and baseline achievement levels. Therefore, accurately targeting students and choosing interventions for pandemic-related recovery will require careful assessment by districts of their students' achievement and growth in the 2021-22 school year (and into the future): assuming that students in a district reflect the national trends of achievement will often lead to incorrect conclusions about the degree to which they suffered pandemic-related learning losses and the amount of support they will need to recover. [This research received funding from the Kenneth C. Griffin Foundation.]

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality.

'Transforming the future' can have different connotations in different contexts, but here the author focuses on the way in which the vocational education and training (VET) sector is adapting, anticipating and activating change in response to future skill demands. This discussion paper explores how the sector assists learners to skill, upskill and reskill, which in turn actively contributes to the Australian economy. Without a doubt, the past few years have been both difficult and unpredictable for many, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other natural disasters such as bushfires and floods. This paper therefore also considers how the VET system has been able to adapt to these unforeseen events and what can be learnt from these responses and adapted for the future.

Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus D.C.), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person (although there was some widening in reading gaps in those areas). We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.

As the COVID-19 crisis disrupted schooling, recovery efforts to ensure educational continuity in California included the adoption of Senate Bill 98, which mandated local educational agencies (LEAs) to complete Learning Continuity and Attendance Plans (LCPs). These plans act as critical snapshots of sensemaking in the midst of crisis; however, their details have yet to be explored statewide, concealing the potential trends that arise in local planning when traditional schooling is disrupted by crisis. Through a multiphase, mixed methods approach, this study examines the legislative requirements of an educational policy that orchestrated large-scale local planning. Results suggest that, during a crisis, equity is centered in both policy and the plans of public school districts, threaded through accessibility to instruction as well as academic and social-emotional supports. [For the Policy Brief, see ED624610.]

Calls are intensifying for workforce reskilling and a re-engineering of education and training to meet the demands of the future. Current policy in England focuses on technical, digital and green economy skills, underpinned by strong literacy and numeracy and a knowledge-rich school curriculum. National Foundation for Educational Research's Nuffield-funded research study, "The Skills Imperative 2035: Essential skills for tomorrow's workforce" investigates: (1) which essential employment skills will be most needed in 2035; (2) what will their likely supply be and where will the gaps be; (3) which occupations and workers are most at risk of not having these skills; (4) which skills will affected workers need to develop to transition into new employment opportunities; and (5) the role of educators and employers in helping to prepare young people and workers for the future labour market. This first report, a review drawing on a wide-ranging and growing evidence base, sets the scene for the wider research study by bringing together what the literature suggests about: (1) what the world of work will look like in 2035; and (2) which essential employment skills will be in demand and how what should be done to prepare.

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Italy. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy-makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the pilot research of Cedefop's study "Entrepreneurship competence in VET." It is part of a series of eight national case studies (Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Austria, Sweden and Finland) and the forthcoming final report.

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Latvia. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy-makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the pilot research of the Cedefop study "Entrepreneurship Competence in VET." It is part of a series of eight national case studies (Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Austria, Finland and Sweden) and a forthcoming final report.

This report finds that Massachusetts provides fewer options for students to be educated outside their assigned school districts than most other states do, and educational savings accounts (ESAs) offer an effective tool for giving students additional opportunities. Author Cara Candal proposes two potential ESA programs for Massachusetts.

Digital learning, the use of computers and the internet to study courses taught in the classroom, is viewed by many educators as a breakthrough to helping those at-risk students stay in school and earn their diplomas. The flexibility afforded by digital learning, with students working on their own time at their own pace, is a way for students to meet the requirements of their courses while handling pressing responsibilities outside of school, problems at home or personal issues. Yet parents should scrutinize digital programs closely. Their quality and effectiveness vary widely. Students are poorly served by point-and-click assessments with no engagement, virtual schools with videos instead of real teachers and programs without pacing and scheduling support. This report presents ideas and examples of how teachers and policymakers across the country are using virtual learning to improve educational outcomes for at-risk students.

After schools closed in March of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students, families and teachers had to shift learning from in-class to online. But the switch to remote learning was hasty and disorganized in many school districts. Families struggled with the technology and coordinating schedules at home, while teachers tried to shift the in-person model to teaching through a computer. The dissatisfaction caused many families to believe that the remote learning they were experiencing was what takes place in full-time virtual schools. In fact the two are much different. This report includes information on how to distinguish between questionable and quality virtual programs.

The COVID-19 pandemic initially resulted in an unanticipated and near-universal shift from in-person to virtual instruction in spring 2020. During the 2020-21 school year, schools began to re-open and families were faced with decisions regarding the instructional mode for their children. We leverage administrative, survey, and virtual-learning data to examine the determinants of family learning-mode choice and the effects of virtual education on student engagement and academic achievement. Family preference for virtual (versus face-to-face) instruction was most highly associated with school-level infection rates and appeared relatively uniform within schools. We find that students who were assigned a higher proportion of instructional days in virtual mode experienced higher rates of attendance, but also negative student achievement growth compared to students who were assigned a higher proportion of instructional days in face-to-face mode. Students belonging to marginalized groups experienced more positive associations with attendance but were also more likely to experience lower student achievement growth when assigned a greater proportion of instructional days in virtual mode. Insights from this study can be used to better understand family preference as well as to target and refine virtual learning in a post-COVID-19 society.

This report, from researchers at ChildObesity180, an initiative of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, explores the impact of the Boston Foundation's investment in four nonprofits that provide structured physical activity to students. The report finds that investments in "Build Our Kids Success (BOKS)"; "Community Rowing, Inc."; "Playworks"; and "Sportsmen's Tennis and Enrichment Center" had a notable impact on the amount of physical activity students received in school. Once the pandemic forced a remote learning environment, the programs pivoted and innovated to take their work to the online space, with some success. However, the overall amount of physical activity students received in remote learning was, not surprisingly, significantly reduced.

This paper focuses on the increase in families who have chosen to homeschool their children in grades K-12 since the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. This update includes interviews with families who opted to homeschool their children in the conventional approach, rather than continue with the hasty remote learning that educators tried to transfer from the classroom in March of 2020 and then the blended approach of online learning/classrooms-with-masks format that many districts used during the 2020-2021 school year. This report follows a study authored in June of 2017, "Homeschooling: The Ultimate School Choice," also published by the Pioneer Institute. It covered the history of homeschooling, demographics on homeschoolers, the economics around homeschooling and legislation affecting homeschooling. The authors of this report include several recommendations on how policy makers and education administrators can accommodate the growth in homeschooling and assist families who chose this manner of education for their children. The authors also urge policy makers and education officials to do more to acknowledge homeschooling as a viable educational choice. Districts and states can do more to provide direction and information for parents who are considering non-traditional options. [Foreword written by Kerry McDonald. For "Homeschooling: The Ultimate School Choice," see ED588847.]

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, several unprecedented government interventions related to COVID-19--including the closure of non-essential businesses, travel restrictions and public health measures limiting public interactions--have been put in place. These measures, implemented by public health officials across Canada, had a clear impact on the Canadian labour market, as businesses and institutions in a variety of industries announced layoffs, reduced employment hours and halted many on-the-job opportunities. In response, to support Canadians facing the labour market impact of the COVID-19 economic shutdown, the Government of Canada introduced a temporary benefit, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). The CERB paid $500 a week to those who made at least $5,000 in the preceding 12 months and whose income was drastically reduced because of the pandemic. It was a temporary program introduced on March 15, 2020, and was replaced by Employment Insurance and other recovery benefits on September 27 of the same year. The COVID-19 pandemic had large impacts on many of those in the skilled trades, as these jobs often require hands-on and close-proximity interactions. However, journeypersons in different trades had different impacts. Some sectors deemed non-essential services were hit harder than sectors deemed essential services. In addition, geographic variations in easing and reinstating restrictions over time affected journeypersons and apprentices across regions differently. Using data from the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform, this study examines the proportion of journeypersons who received the CERB among those who certified between 2008 and 2019. By examining the proportions across trades, geography and population groups, this study can provide further insight into how the early months of the pandemic affected those in the skilled trades and the differing impacts across trades and groups.