The Role of Inequity in School Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 was an unprecedented crisis for educators across the world. In the United States, on or about March 13 of that year, virtually every school across the nation shuttered its doors in the face of the microbial onslaught. Never before had a singular event caused the entire education system to shift its core methods of functioning. How did schools respond to this extraordinary stress test? How did principals describe the inequities that surfaced? And what was the relationship between social inequity and school responses? To address these questions, we developed a crisis management framework to guide an examination of early school responses to the pandemic and examined the association between indicators of adversity and schools’ return to instruction. The data come from a unique mixed-method dataset featuring principal interviews and publicly available data from 120 public school schools in 69 districts in 19 states collected in the spring of 2020. The findings show how social circumstances factored into the adversity that educators faced and how inequity played a significant role in schools’ return to functioning.