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Vast disparities between and within American states' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have evoked renewed attention to whether greater centralization might enhance investments in subnational capacity and remedy subnational inequalities or instead erode subnational organizational capacity. Developments in American public education (1997-2015) offer perspective on this puzzle, which we examine by applying interrupted time series analysis to a novel dataset to assess the implications of centralization on subnational investments in administrative and technical capacity, two dimensions of organizational capacity. We find simultaneous subnational erosion in administrative capacity and growth in technical capacity following centralization, both of which appear concentrated in low-poverty areas despite centralization's explicit antipoverty purposes. Public education reforms highlight both the challenge of dismantling subnational inequality through centralization and the need for future research on policy designs that enable centralization to yield subnational capacity that is able to remedy inequality. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association.

The rapid transition to emergency remote teaching in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic altered public education as schools closed across the United States. Eighty percent of teachers reported interacting with students online, often utilizing free technology like Zoom and Google Workspace for Education. This article provides a comprehensive overview of state education agencies’ recommendations for emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 school closures in early 2020. Reviewing 337 publicly available documents from 50 state education agencies reveals a fragmented response: state education agencies relied on nongovernmental organizations to do the work of governance.