A volcano erupts, and at first there’s just chaos and destruction. Lava flows down over the landscape, and ash chokes the air. Then the dust settles, the lava cools, the sky clears. Some ground that people once trod upon has been buried, and brand-new land is now underfoot.
In March 2020, COVID-19 erupted. The next fall was completely overshadowed by the virus’s destructive power and the reactions that followed. By 2022, the pandemic itself cast less of a shadow, but its effects, from struggling students to political movements kicked up in its wake, continued to make teachers feel as if the ground was unsteady beneath their feet. The smoke had not yet cleared.
But now comes the fall of 2023, and with it, the hope that schools can finally settle into a new normal.
Schools have been figuring out how to deal with learning gaps. Activists on the right have used the pandemic pause to aggressively push for school choice policies (particularly vouchers), while other conservatives have turned up the volume on the education culture wars. These are all now part of the landscape.
Maybe—just maybe—educators in the United States can start learning how to navigate the new terrain without having it shift every other day. So let’s consider what that new educational landscape might look like this year.
Dealing with the pandemic couldn’t help but be expensive. Schools shifting to distance learning needed to invest in technology. Struggling to fill the gaps in learning opportunities after the fact has required programs to be expanded or created from scratch.
The federal government handed out money to help states and districts deal with all of that. But some districts have already used their money, and on September 30, 2024, those funds will dry up. Districts will soon start to feel the pinch as they lose the federal helping hand.
The spread of school choice programs will have financial consequences. Sixteen states have either created or expanded school voucher programs in the past three years, and they are turning out to be expensive.
These programs serve as taxpayer subsidies for private schools. Universal voucher programs expand eligibility to wealthy families and families who were already enrolling their children in private schools, and that expands the costs for taxpayers.
Universal voucher programs expand eligibility to wealthy families and families who were already enrolling their children in private schools, and that expands the costs for taxpayers.
In Indiana, analysts expect that nearly 90 percent of the students who apply for vouchers are already private school students. In Arizona, 75 percent of the students who applied for the new universal voucher were already attending a private school.
This has a dramatic effect on the cost of these programs. Arizona’s legislature predicted that its expanded program would cost $33 million, but with the influx of families, it stands at $276 million. Twenty-five percent of that money will come from public schools; the rest will have to come from somewhere else.
The predicted costs of these programs balloon rapidly. A study by Public Funds Public Schools found that, in Florida, voucher programs carried a price tag of $241 million in 2008; by 2019, that figure had ballooned to $996 million. In Indiana, the cost of the state’s voucher program went from $20 million in 2012 to $181 million in 2019.
A 2023 report from the Network for Public Education outlines how the charter school industry is increasingly dominated by schools that adopt a Christian nationalist approach. Hillsdale College, the notably conservative and Christian liberal arts college, has pushed its far-right agenda hard, from its string of charter schools to its “patriotic” history curriculum.
Voucher-accepting schools also skew conservative, with states like Indiana and Alabama spending vouchers overwhelmingly on private Christian schools (many of them Catholic schools).
Meanwhile, egged on and supported by politicians like Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, activists like Christopher Rufo, and groups like Moms For Liberty, culture warriors have attempted the takeover of local school boards.
Reading restrictions have proliferated on the state and local level. These laws enforce a conservative approach to classroom instruction through direct enforcement. Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is, a year later, still pursuing the removal of a teacher’s license because she provided students with a link to the Brooklyn Public Library’s eCard program for teens to access books that were banned in their own school.
A South Carolina teacher’s AP lesson was yanked by her administration because it was set to include Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. One of the complaining students said they were pretty sure the discussion of systemic racism involved with that book was illegal in South Carolina. And in Florida, where just one parent’s complaint can result in a book being pulled, a mom has argued for banning Brad Meltzer’s children’s biography of Billie Jean King because it mentions that she is gay. The parent claimed that this description of sexual orientation violates her rights as a parent under the law.
While a dedicated researcher could track down every single similar story, no amount of research can quantify the chilling effect of these regulations. Many administrators and teachers can now be expected to shy away from anything touching on race, sexual orientation, or other political hot topics.
More than a few of the parental rights and culture war activists have aligned themselves with school choice advocates, but it has become clear that school choice is not really their goal. Anti-trans and “Don’t Say Gay” laws are clearly not intended to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ families and parents. Instead, their goal appears to be to either drive public schools to the right, or to replace them with schools that are already there.
Trouble recruiting and retaining teachers has been a much-discussed topic for more than a decade. During the pandemic, there was a fear that the exodus from the profession would accelerate, but it didn’t. In fact, in 2020, teacher turnover actually slowed down. But by this summer, the negative indicators were piling up.
While a variety of factors are at play, the short version of the story is pretty simple: Teaching used to be an empowering, stable, well-paying, and well-respected profession; now, it is not.
Pre-pandemic, teachers were already feeling the loss of autonomy and the emphasis on preparing students to score well on the annual test. The pandemic dramatically increased teacher workloads. Teachers were hailed as heroes, but that soon ended and was replaced with attacks. Culture warriors raised the specter of critical race theory, followed by panic over anything mentioning gender identity or sexual orientation, and teachers who tried to speak up were branded as pedophiles or groomers.
If much of what’s driving the toxic atmosphere around schools seems deliberate, well, it probably is. Speaking at Hillsdale College, Rufo, who spearheaded the critical race theory panic, said, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” Destroying trust in public schools is a calculated strategy, and teachers are bearing the brunt of that.
Meanwhile, teachers across the nation are reporting a rise in student misbehavior, from simple disrespect to acts of violence. It seems that during the pandemic, many students simply forgot how to “do school.”
Teaching used to be an empowering, stable, well-paying, and well-respected profession; now, it is not.
In some districts, the atmosphere has become deeply toxic. As one teacher who is leaving the profession after her district was commandeered by repressive Christian nationalist board members told me, “I can’t live and work where I’m not safe.”
Many teachers are dealing with the smoke and ash of the post-COVID culture wars by getting out. Many others are continuing, but without their previous joy and optimism.
When the Vesuvius of COVID-19 shook the foundations of public education, many people sensed an opportunity to rebuild a new structure. Folks on all sides of education debates thought that this would be an opportunity to create something new, to “reimagine education,” a slogan used at various points by folks on both the left and the right. But it appears they underestimated just how badly people wanted to get back to the normal and familiar.
Some pandemic experiments were largely failures. Very few parents, teachers, or students loved virtual school enough to want to keep using it. And we are still sorting out the mental health effects of school in isolation for students.
There were some shifts. In the fall of 2020, 240,000 students were newly enrolled in charter schools (a large portion of that was virtual charter—cyber school—enrollment), but according to the National Center for Education Statistics, that leveled out the following year. This fall, we’ll see how many students decide to return to their public schools.
One change that didn’t happen was a shift away from the annual high-stakes test. Testing was suspended briefly during the pandemic, and some educators tried to press the idea of permanently stepping away from it. When testing resumed, the results were completely predictable—with pandemic responses interrupting both regular education and test preparation, student scores were down. That drop, most recently noted in National Assessment of Educational Progress results, has fueled a panic that has raised the demand for testing. The refrain is, “Test scores are down! We will have to keep testing; otherwise, how will we know that test scores are going up again?”
The panic over lower reading and math scores has led to proposals for year-round school, longer school days, and intensive tutoring. No national wave of interest in these proposals has appeared.
At any point in the above, you may have thought, “Well, that’s not happening in my area at all.” And if you have, you’re probably right.
Since “A Nation at Risk,” the 1983 report set up to highlight inadequacies in the public school system, we have been encouraged to think of the American public education system as just that—a single national education system. No Child Left Behind and the Common Core Standards were two major policy initiatives that both presumed and pursued a national system. School choice advocates talk about a government school monopoly, as if the country has one single education system. The pandemic and its aftermath have underlined how erroneous that view is.
We discuss the pandemic responses in broad strokes as part of a bigger picture, but people did not live through the big picture—they lived through the immediate experience in their own communities. And that has continued to be true in the aftermath.
Some communities saw school buildings closed well past the fall of 2020, or even 2021. Some did not. Some communities have felt the exodus of teachers and the inroads of MAGA school politics, and others have not.
While states like Florida and Oklahoma have restricted students’ right to read, Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill that made it illegal to ban books in Illinois. Moms for Liberty supported 500 school board candidates in 2022, but only 275 of them won. Bright red Jacksonville, Florida, rejected a mayoral candidate supported by Moms for Liberty and DeSantis and elected a Democrat instead. There are districts that have recruited and retained teachers successfully, while sometimes being right up the road from others that haven’t.
The volcano hasn’t dumped lava, smoke, and ash everywhere equally, and not everyone has equal access to protection. After the eruption and its effects have subsided, it matters—now more than ever—where you live on the mountain. The new education landscape may not be the one we’d hoped for, but perhaps this fall we can get a clear view of what that landscape looks like so that we can move forward with a sense of how to make the journey.