From the brief: "During the 2020-21 school year, COVID-19 forced Virginia’s school divisions to adapt to unprecedented circumstances, which led many divisions to deviate from the typical five-day-a-week pre-pandemic school schedule with all students attending school in person each day. In-person learning is superior to remote learning in promoting student achievement for the average student, according to the most rigorous research. [1] It is, therefore, vital to quantify how much in-person learning occurred if we are to understand COVID’s educational impact. A full understanding of these impacts requires that we document how in-person learning varied across grade levels, student demographics, and division characteristics.

Together this information is key to taking an essential step toward helping divisions recover from this extended period of educational disruption. To that end, we compiled and analyzed day-by-day data on the in-person learning of each grade level in Virginia’s 132 public school divisions for the entire 2020-21 school year. We use these data to describe learning and teaching in Virginia along four dimensions: (1) learning modality (fully remote, hybrid, or fully in person), (2) attendance rotation patterns, (3) days students learned in person, and (4) days teachers taught in person."