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Low-income students and students of color are faced with pervasively lower levels of opportunity to learn compared with their peers, creating unequal opportunities for educational success. Textbooks, which serve as the backbone of the curriculum in most mathematics classrooms, present a potentially powerful tool to help mitigate unequal opportunity to learn across students. Using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum framework, we investigate the content of commonly used eighth-grade math textbooks in California and the extent to which they align with the Common Core State Standards. We also explore the relationship between the variation in content coverage and alignment and student characteristics. We find poor alignment between the textbooks in our sample and the Common Core State Standards and low overall levels of cognitive demand, but only limited evidence of systematic differences in alignment or cognitive demand coverage associated with student characteristics at the school or district level.

We use data collected between April 2020 and March 2021 from the Understanding America Survey, a nationally representative internet panel of approximately 1,450 households with school-age children, to document the access of American households to K–12 education during the COVID-19 crisis. We also explore disparities by parent race/ethnicity, income, urbanicity, partisanship, and grade level (i.e., elementary school vs. middle/high school). Results shed light on the vectors of inequality that occurred throughout the pandemic in access to technology, instruction, services (e.g., free and reduced-price meals), and in-person learning opportunities. Our work highlights the equity implications of the pandemic and suggests the importance of encouraging widespread in-person learning opportunities and attendance by the beginning of the 2021–2022 school year for addressing COVID-19’s educational effects.

Throughout the 2020–2021 school year, families’ access to—and desire to participate in—in-person educational experiences was highly unequal. Concerns about “school hesitancy” in light of COVID-19 have continued into the 2021–2022 school year, driven both by concerns about well-being and concerns about safety. Using a nationally representative sample of families, we tested a messaging intervention aimed at reducing school hesitancy. We found that targeted messaging to address well-being and safety concerns substantially improved parent reports of their likelihood of sending their child back for in-person learning for parents who were previously unsure. The findings suggest the importance of careful COVID-related communication from schools.