The COVID-19 Crisis and Teacher Layoffs: Research on How to Mitigate Harm

One of the unfortunate consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the sharp downturn in tax revenues, in the absence of a federal bailout, likely foretells unprecedented cuts in state and local budgets. This will in turn mean large cuts in teaching positions across the country; indeed, some projections suggest that the number of teacher layoffs in public schools could be in the hundreds of thousands.

This policy brief, developed by AIR's National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) describes some of the research on the effects of teacher layoffs, and what that research suggests about impacts on students. 

The brief is available here.