School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Round 5, Plateauing Services in America's Schools

This is the fifth report in the "School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic" series, covering changes that occurred in public school districts between April 24 and May 8, 2020. Data for this report were collected on May 7 and 8. School districts' responses for this period were captured by the fifth wave of the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) COVID-19 Education Response Longitudinal Survey (C-ERLS), a nationally representative survey of public school districts.Findings show: (1) For the first time since the authors started collecting data for C-ERLS, many education-related services offered in schools have plateaued, meaning they were offered by similar percentages of schools two weeks earlier; (2) Only 6 percent of schools in districts we surveyed changed the date of their last day of school--most of which moved up the last day of school by one or two weeks; and (3) To determine students' final report card grades, 22 percent of schools implemented a pass/fail policy to replace traditional letter grades. Similarly, policies in more than a fifth of schools ensure student grades "can only go up" from when the pandemic started. [For "School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Round 4, Halfway through Closures," see ED606202.]