Students in red states were offered 432 more hours of in-person learning vs. those in blue states

New data show that states that voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election “offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate of those in Democratic states,” reported The 74. This amounted to an estimated 66 additional days of in-person instruction — or 432 hours.

Averaged from September through May, states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election gave students the chance to learn in the classroom 74.5 percent of the time, compared to 37.6 percent of the time in states that voted for Joe Biden. Red states account for over 22 million K-12 learners and blue states account for over 28 million.

Burbio, an online platform that tracks school data across the country and where these numbers were pulled from, had data earlier on in the year showing that states not dominated by teachers’ union control also offered more face-to-face instruction. (Teachers’ unions greatly resisted school reopening efforts throughout the past school year, and several studies have linked school reopening decisions to teachers’ union power — not safety.)

While the full impact of school closures on students is still not fully known, “lost instructional time is likely to lead to lost learning,” Policy Director Chad Aldeman of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab told The 74.

Virtual learning schemes, says Aldeman, rarely offered as much live instruction as traditional schooling models, instead trading asynchronous opportunities like worksheets and practice problems for real-time teaching. He calculated that his first-grade son, a student in Fairfax, Virginia public schools, was scheduled to receive less than half a typical school year’s worth of face time with educators in 2020-21. Other districts provided even fewer hours of real-time teaching.

“This means a lot of kids are missing out on a lot of live instruction with teachers and live interactions with their peers as well,” said Aldeman.