This is the final installment of a three-part series examining the economic and social conditions that impact health outcomes in Southern states, and how these conditions leave communities underprepared to protect front-line workers and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the earlier pieces of this three-part series, we described what actions are especially needed in Southern states to protect public health and front-line workers and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we highlight action that is also needed in the South to address the threats the coronavirus poses to participation in our democracy at the expense of voter and poll worker health. The country witnessed this most recently during the Wisconsin presidential primary election last week. As we describe below, Southern states already face significant challenges to democratic participation. The coronavirus pandemic further heightens the need around the country and especially in the South to address longstanding barriers to free and fair elections, an accurate count for the once-a-decade census, and a legislative process that is accountable to the communities elected officials represent.

Free and fair elections and healthy voters

Today, voter suppression, which disproportionately impacts black and brown people, comes in the form of enforcing strict voter identification laws, disenfranchising people with felony convictions, purging registered voters from voter lists, closing polling locations, and failing to provide required language assistance. In Southern states, these barriers are layered on top of the legacy of Jim Crow, which as our colleague Jhacova Williams demonstrates in her research, continues to stifle rates of black voter registration today.

The coronavirus pandemic creates additional barriers, asking voters to choose between protecting their health and their right to participate in our democracy and compromising the health and safety of poll workers during presidential primary as well as state and local elections. Today, progress for fair and accessible election reforms remains mixed. In Kentucky, the legislature overrode a veto by the governor to create a new voter identification law at the worst possible time. On the other hand, Virginia policymakers have enacted the kinds of voting reforms necessary to strengthen democracy in the wake of the crisis.Virginia’s governor recently signed multiple bills that expanded early voting, repealed voter identification laws, made election day a holiday, expanded absentee voting, and implemented automatic voter registration.

Southern state policymakers and election officials have taken some useful steps to protect public health and limit the spread of the coronavirus by postponing elections. For example, though most states in the South have already had their presidential primary elections, officials in states such as Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and West Virginia delayed theirs until June. The North Carolina Board of Elections and Mississippi Governor Reeves postponed congressional runoff elections, and other officials in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas postponed local elections. In Oklahoma, the secretary of state will identify a new deadline for collecting ballot initiative signatures once the governor indicates that the state’s emergency declaration is over.

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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers, parents, school districts, and communities are doing their best to replace in-person with online learning. But as a recent Washington Post article notes, the move to e-learning prompted by school closures has “exposed the technology divides”—with K–12 students who lack the resources they now need to learn at home facing long-term academic disadvantages.

Although the Post article focused on the digital divide in the District of Columbia, this is a national problem.

EPI analysis of data from the most comprehensive study of primary and secondary education in the country illustrates a widespread digital divide based on family income. The data, from the National Center for Education Statistics’ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for eighth-graders, show that full access to online learning is far from universal and that students who are poor are less likely to have access to the key tools and experiences they need to attend school online. For example, nearly 16% of eighth-graders overall, and almost a quarter of eighth-graders who are poor, don’t have a desktop or laptop computer at home on which to follow their classes. About 8% of eighth-graders who are not poor lack access to these essential devices. The data also show that low shares of students have teachers with full technological proficiency to teach online. (Poor students are defined as students who are eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program.)

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These estimates were updated on May 14, 2020. See the updated estimates.

We estimate that 9.2 million workers were at high risk of losing their employer-provided health insurance in the past four weeks. To avoid prohibitively costly insurance options, the federal government should fund an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid to all those suffering job losses during the pandemic period.

Two weeks ago, when the two-week total of unemployment insurance (UI) initial claims was 8.7 million, we estimated that 3.5 million workers may have lost their health insurance at work. Since then, 11.4 million more workers filed claims for unemployment benefits, bringing the total of UI initial claims over the last four weeks to 20.1 million, currently the most comprehensive measure of the extent of job losses and furloughs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We estimate that across all industries where workers have filed UI claims, about 45.7% of workers had their own health insurance provided through their employer. As a result, of the 20.1 million workers who filed initial UI claims in the last four weeks, 9.2 million may have lost coverage through their own employer-provided health insurance (EPHI).

The analysis, described below, combines industry-specific UI claims data for 11 states, representing about 20% of national employment, with national, industry-specific health insurance coverage rates. Using these data, we provide a rough prediction of 9.2 million workers losing EPHI. We can’t say exactly how many people will lose insurance coverage altogether for several reasons. For example, some workers who lose EPHI due to layoffs or hours reductions that trigger UI claims may be able to obtain coverage through health care exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or through Medicaid. Some of this group may also be able to obtain continuing coverage through COBRA, paying out of pocket the full cost of their EPHI coverage. Some workers may be able to obtain coverage through other family members, or if only experiencing a temporary furlough or hours reduction, their employers might continue to pay for coverage. On the other hand, our calculations might understate the loss of health insurance coverage because they do not account for family members who are no longer covered because of the policyholder’s layoff. And, because not all layoffs result in UI claims, we will underestimate the actual magnitude of job losses.

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In the last three weeks, an unprecedented 17 million workers applied for unemployment insurance (UI), while millions more risk their lives to provide essential services. To mitigate the health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress has passed a series of bills aimed at providing relief and recovery measures. The Families First Coronavirus Relief Act (FFRCA) and the CARES Act included critical provisions to assist workers impacted by the pandemic; chief among those are an expansion of Unemployment Insurance (UI) and access to paid leave. However, rather than working to implement these relief and recovery bills efficiently and effectively, the Trump administration has instead looked for ways to narrow and weaken the worker protections included in the legislation.

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This blog post was originally posted on shelterforce.org.

The COVID-19 pandemic will take existing academic achievement differences between middle-class and low-income students and explode them.

The academic achievement gap has bedeviled educators for years. In math and reading, children of college-educated parents score on average at about the 60th percentile, while children whose parents have only a high school diploma score, on average, at the 35th percentile.* The academic advantages of children whose parents have master’s degrees and beyond are even greater.

To a significant extent, this is a neighborhood issue—schools are more segregated today than at any time in the last 50 years, mostly because the neighborhoods in which they are located are so segregated. Schools with concentrated populations of children affected by serious socioeconomic problems are able to devote less time and attention to academic instruction.

In 2001 we adopted the “No Child Left Behind Act,” assuming that these disparities mostly stemmed from schools’ failure to take seriously a responsibility to educate African American, Hispanic, and lower-income students. Supporters claimed that holding educators accountable for test results would soon eliminate the achievement gap. Promoted by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the theory was ludicrous, and the law failed to fulfill its promise. The achievement gap mostly results from social-class based advantages that some children bring to school and that others lack, as well as disadvantages stemming from racial discrimination that only some children have to face.

The coronavirus, unfortunately, will only exacerbate the effects of these advantages.

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