From the brief: "As the COVID-19 pandemic pushed schools across the country to adopt remote instruction during spring 2020, concerns about the implications for student learning mounted. Early projections of what months of remote instruction would mean for student learning were bleak, with the expectation that students would start the 2020–21 school year far behind where they should be. The outlook was even worse for students from low-income families and students of color. The National Survey of Public Education’s Response to COVID-19 provides more evidence of how student academic learning was hindered during the pandemic by describing how district leaders saw instruction and learning play out in their schools. Given the serious concerns about how the pandemic and remote instruction disproportionately affected traditionally underserved communities, this brief pays particular attention to how district leaders’ perceptions of student academic learning differed across districts that were providing primarily in-person instruction or not in fall 2020, as well as districts serving different communities."