Five years ago this month, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a historic upending of K-12 education that continues to reverberate.
Education Week selected nine facets of schooling to highlight some of the pandemic’s most consequential, long-term effects. Explore the charts below for a visual representation of those.
1. Enrollment
U.S. public school enrollment peaked at almost 50.8 million students in the fall of 2019. Enrollment declined sharply in 2020 and hasn’t recovered. Many factors are at play, including families choosing private schools (including through the growing number of state private school choice programs) and declining birth rates.
Read more about enrollment declines, and more on enrollment trends.
2. Head Start enrollment
Many low-income children begin their education in Head Start, the program created in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty. In the first years of the pandemic, more parents kept their children home instead of sending them to preschool or kindergarten. Missing those early years of academic skill-building and peer interactions may have contributed to a deterioration in self-regulation and behavior that elementary teachers are now reporting.
3. Teacher pay
Inflation has risen faster than salaries for teachers in the years since 2020, even as several states have approved teacher pay increases.
According to a fall 2023 survey of teachers conducted by the EdWeek Research Center on behalf of the education finance software company Allovue, more than two-thirds of teachers said their current salaries were unfair. Their desired median salary was $85,000, a roughly 30 percent raise over what they were making. (Jess Gartner, Allovue’s founder and CEO, serves on the board of trustees for Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week. The Education Week newsroom did not participate in the survey project, but is independently using the results.)
According to federal data, nearly 1 in 5 teachers have second jobs outside school during the school year.
4. School staffing levels
The federal government poured billions of extra dollars into the nation’s schools in response to the pandemic. Many districts used that money to invest in tutoring and other academic supports, and the staff to carry out those efforts. Schools were required to spend all their pandemic relief funds by Jan. 30, 2025, and some expected staff layoffs to follow.
5. School shootings that injure or kill
The shift to online learning in 2020 led to a dramatically lower number of on-campus shootings that year. But as more students were on campus in subsequent years, the number of shootings at schools and school-sponsored events rose.
For more on school shootings in the current year and since 2018, see the EdWeek shooting tracker and data page.
6. National reading and math scores
U.S. students’ scores on the test often called the “Nation’s Report Card” decreased on average in both math and reading to historic lows in 2022 and continued to decrease in 2024 in reading, while staying stable in math, despite the infusion of federal money meant to help schools recover from pandemic-related disruptions.
7. Chronically absent 4th graders
There is no formal definition for chronic absenteeism, but 4th grade students who took the NAEP exam were asked, “How many days were you absent from school in the last month?”
The percent of 4th graders who reported missing more than three days of school in the last month rose 12 percentage points from 2019 to 2022. Missing school can hurt learning for all students, not just those who are absent, as teachers must reteach content, possibly slowing the progress of learning for everyone.
One barrier to decreasing absenteeism is that many parents are not concerned about the days their children miss school, according to research published in 2024.
8. High school students’ well-being
Student mental health gained new attention during the pandemic, but a growing proportion of high school students had been reporting persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness for several years before COVID. In 2020 and after, many schools expanded their mental health resources, hiring more counselors, implementing universal mental health screenings, and more.
9. Teen and young adult deaths by suicide
The suicide rate for teens and young adults spiked from 2020 to 2021, rising from 10.6 suicides per 100,000 people, to 15.2.
The rate decreased slightly in 2022, but the need for mental health support for young people continues. In March 2024, 55 percent of schools participating in the National Center for Education Statistics’ School Pulse Panel survey said they did not have enough mental health staff to manage students’ needs.
