Now, with the benefit of more data, the story of race and school reopenings is becoming clear. My colleagues and I conducted an online survey of 1,668 U.S. parents with school-age children, which we fielded through the polling firm Ipsos in December 2020. Looking at parents whose children had the option of attending school in person (i.e., at a physical school building for at least part of the week), we examined what predicted whether those families chose in-person or remote schooling (i.e., online instruction or homeschooling) and their accounts of the choices they made. We found, as we describe in a new working paper, that the biggest factor for many families was rather concrete: whether a parent or other adult was available during the school day to supervise kids. And because of racial inequality in America—and, specifically, because of racial inequalities in the layoffs that came early in the pandemic—whether such an adult was home varied greatly by race.

Among families in which no parent lost a job and all parents remained employed full-time, 64 percent chose the in-person instruction option when it was available to them. By contrast, among families in which either parent lost a job and did not return to full-time paid work, only 35 percent opted for in-person instruction when they had that choice.

Pandemic job losses disproportionately impacted workers of color, workers without university degrees, and especially women workers in both these groups. Black and Latina women faced particularly high rates of job loss, in part because they were more likely to have jobs that could not be done from home. Those job losses built on top of pre-pandemic inequalities in parents’ employment (even in normal times, Black and Hispanic parents were more likely to be unemployed than white parents, and Hispanic and Asian American mothers were more likely than white mothers to be home with their children full-time), and they left wide variations in families’ availability to support their children’s learning at home.