Image: Penn State
Kristie Auman-Bauer
January 13, 2021
In 2020, as school boards around the country weighed the public health and education concerns brought on by COVID-19, districts developed vastly different reopening plans for the fall.
In this post, Penn State researchers Erica Frankenberg and Katharine Dulaney discuss comparing the proposed reopening plans for Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts in summer 2020 and the racial disparities they found. While the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s black and Hispanic students live in districts that chose to return to school in all-virtual formats, the majority of white students had the option of in-person instruction by way of a full or hybrid return to schools.