Join the RESTART Network, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), for the Actionable Insights from Research and Practice to Support Pandemic Recovery Forum, an in-person convening at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) headquarters in Arlington, VA.

During the 2024 National Network Forum, researchers, policymakers, leaders, and practitioners will join to discuss accelerating student learning, fostering student connectedness and social emotional learning, and emerging research related to pandemic recovery.

The evidence was clear: enrollment in full-day preschool had long-lasting benefits for students, especially students who started off the farthest behind. Beginning in 2013, Chicago Public Schools officials invested in new policies and programs that resulted in quadrupling full-day programs, most notably on the West and South Sides of Chicago in primarily Black neighborhoods with the lowest income levels.

Three years ago, schools across the country shut their doors and scrambled to continue student learning online, all with the goal of stopping the spread of COVID-19. This shift to remote learning had dire unintended consequences: lost learning time, chronic absenteeism, and losing students to drop out – for some groups of students far worse than others. In doing so, inequities in our public education system that were already glaring have now become far worse.