How a pandemic exposed – and may help fix – inequalities in education

In the early 2010s, Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, began researching Americans’ perception of the “achievement gap,” mainstream lingo for the difference in educational outcomes between historically advantaged and disadvantaged students.

What he found surprised him.

As a scholar of education, he thought it was clear that systemic racism had long impacted the country’s school system. From the days of slavery, when it was illegal to teach Black children, to today, when researchers have found that school districts filled primarily...