Video Replay: Where Are America’s Missing Students? Education Panel Brings Together Experts to Discuss Displacement & Disenrollment During the Pandemic

How many students in America have disappeared during COVID?

The 74 began asking and reporting on that question back in December, with an extensive series dubbed “COVID’s Missing Students” that looked at the thousands of kids who had vanished from school systems during the pandemic.

We continued that conversation today with an event organized in partnership with the Progressive Policy Institute — the convening of a special panel to look at “Dis-Enrollment in America.”

Moderated by Curtis Valentine, deputy director of Reinventing America’s Schools at PPI, and featuring The 74’s Linda Jacobson who has reported extensively on the issue, the panel also spotlights observations and discoveries from Keri Rodrigues, founding president of the National Parents Union; Colorado State Sen. James Coleman; Hailly Korman, senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners; and Ray Ankrum, superintendent of Riverhead Charter Schools.

If you found this conversation illuminating, you may also want to check out some of our other recent panels:

• Social-Emotional Development: Experts talk about boosting students’ resilience and mental health amid the pandemic (Watch here)
• Learning Pods: Could pods outlast the pandemic? School experts and founders talk about education innovations that could endure beyond COVID (Watch here)
• Teacher Diversity: What does the educator workforce, and our efforts to hire more teachers of color, look like post-COVID (Watch here)

And here’s some additional reading and reporting on disenrollment during the pandemic:

• House Calls: Texas teachers go door to door as kids disappear from remote classes (Read the full story)
• Chronic Absenteeism: The concerning case of Cleveland’s no-show students. More than 8,000 kids are missing as absenteeism rates double (Read the full story)
• Family Transfers: As families face evictions & closed classrooms, data shows ‘dramatic’ spike in mid-year school moves (Read the full story)
• School Funding: Phantom students, very real red ink — Why efforts to keep student disenrollment from busting school budgets can backfire (Read the full story)
• Student Discipline: How missing Zoom classes could funnel kids into the juvenile justice system (Read the full story)
• Family Engagement: Nashville’s ‘Navigator’ tries to keep students in remote learning from getting lost in the system (Read the full story)
• Go Deeper: Special Report — COVID’s Missing Students

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