Unprecedented federal aid could help schools dig out of pandemic problems — if they can figure out how to spend it in time.
Credit…Illustration by Kelsey Dake
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Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, school superintendents and educators have faced impossible demands as state directives bounced between in-person and remote learning, with schools closing and opening week by week and often day by day. Once teachers’ unions, politicians and public-health advocates finally came to terms with the decision to reopen schools in the fall of 2021, battle lines shifted to whether in-person learning would require vaccinations and masks. Over the course of that school year, 18 states and the District of Columbia issued mask mandates, while 11 tried to institute bans. At least one state, Virginia, did both: Last fall, it required masks in school; by the spring, it banned requiring them.
Students, meanwhile, suffered. After the first two years of the pandemic, the average K-12 student in the United States has fallen five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, according to a report from McKinsey. In districts that stayed remote longer, largely in blue states, students fared worse; so did students of color and those from lower-income families across the board. On Sept. 1, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its latest assessment of 9-year-olds, showing the largest decline in reading in 32 years and the first decline in math scores since it started testing students in 1969. A study by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, the American Institutes for Research and NWEA determined that if students don’t gain back the lost learning in math, that will represent a loss of $43,800 in expected lifetime earnings for each student — a total of over $2 trillion.
But alongside all the chaos, something happened that kindled a measure of hope: The unprecedented crisis in education prompted an unprecedented wave of funding. In March 2020, President Donald Trump’s CARES Act set aside $13.2 billion for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund; in December 2020, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act added $54.3 billion (ESSER II). These first two investments, from bills passed during the first year of the pandemic, were designed to meet the needs of the moment: How can students learn from home? And then: How can they maintain social distance at school? Districts bought Chromebooks and hot spots; they installed plastic shields between desks and upgraded HVAC systems. In communities hit hard by the virus, they bought diagnostic tests and funded outreach to families about vaccines.
In March 2021, President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act added $122 billion (ESSER III), dwarfing the previous ESSER allocations and any previous federal investments in education. In a usual year, the federal government spends around $13,000 per student; in some low-income districts, the ESSER III funding alone allocates an additional $30,000 per student. “This is the biggest one-time infusion of federal dollars ever to come to schools,” says Phyllis Jordan, the associate director of FutureEd, an education-policy think tank. “It’s just an astounding amount of money.”
This third funding package was allocated once most U.S. school districts had already returned to in-person learning, and it focused on a far more diffuse problem: How can schools help students recover, academically and emotionally? The funding must “help safely reopen and sustain the safe operation of schools and address the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s students.” All the funding must be spent or allocated by 2024. In other words: District leaders, this money should help students move past the pandemic, fast. But how, exactly, to make that happen is up to you.
“We’re fortunate now that we have extra funds to address not only what was made worse by the pandemic, but some of these issues that were underlying in education,” says Miguel Cardona, the education secretary. “The system was disrupted for us, and we’d be failing our country if we didn’t look at this as an opportunity, now that we have more money than ever before, to level up education and make it better than it ever was.”
That’s a laudable goal, but it comes with little guidance on how to achieve it, especially for the students who suffered most, the ones who had already been left behind before the pandemic began. The states must disburse at least 90 percent of the funding to districts and local agencies, using Title I formulas to prioritize low-income students; districts must spend at least 20 percent on addressing learning loss through “evidence-based interventions” that “respond to students’ social, emotional and academic needs.” When states don’t take on the extra work of figuring out how to effectively spend these billions, the burden falls to overwhelmed, undersupported local district leaders.
These superintendents and school board members are already navigating one of the most challenging years in U.S. education, one that’s historic for all the wrong reasons: record rates of suicidal students, low test scores, shortages of teachers and bus drivers, inflated costs of school meals — not to mention parents trying to ban books, zealous new school board members planning to overhaul the system and state legislators proposing parental veto of class curriculum. And all that plays out under the constant, looming threat of a new coronavirus variant’s shutting down schools again. Cardona may be right about this windfall’s potential to remake American public education — but only if district leaders can conquer these hurdles and also design and implement ambitious plans to triage the needs of diverse student populations, under a tight deadline. And what becomes of any of those gains once the spigot goes dry in 2024?
As debates over masks and vaccines, gender pronouns and racism have grown hostile in the culture at large, education has become a fraught and sometimes physically dangerous field; administrators have received death threats, and school board members have asked for police protection. Combine that with a competitive labor market, inflation and historically low teaching salaries, and it’s not hard to understand why over half of the National Education Association’s members plan to leave or retire from teaching earlier than they had expected, according to a recent poll.
For school-district leaders, this is the greatest hurdle to spending the ESSER III money: having enough staff members to do it. You can’t implement summer school or tutoring or counseling if you can’t hire enough teachers or tutors or school psychologists — and if the teachers you already have are wary of being caught in the political crossfire.
This isn’t a story about partisan stances getting in the way of positive opportunities. (The instances of political pandering hampering the distribution of ESSER III funds are notably rare. Though in Kenosha County, Wis., concerns over whether the funding would require adherence to C.D.C. recommendations led one district to refuse some $320,000.)
“They’re under pressure from the federal authorities and politicians, who say, ‘Look, we’ve given the districts all these millions and billions of dollars, and they’re not spending it,’” says Dan Domenech, the executive director of AASA, the school superintendents association. “They want to spend it, but they don’t have the personnel available to provide additional services.” In order to keep experienced teachers and recruit new ones, districts are spending money on raises and incentives like never before. So far, staffing costs make up just over a quarter of ESSER III expenditures, according to the school-finance data firm Burbio, which has analyzed plans from more than 5,400 districts.
Some have been pushed to take more inventive approaches to solve the staffing shortages. In Philadelphia, during a districtwide bus-driver shortage, the district paid families $300 a month to drive their kids to and from school. Atlanta Public Schools used nearly $2.2 million to provide on-site child care for 1,800 teachers to enable them to staff summer programs. Sometimes, retaining teachers has come at the cost of other planned investments: the Alamance-Burlington School System in North Carolina planned to spend $36 million on HVAC upgrades; amid severe staff shortages last fall, it put $10 million of that money toward teacher bonuses instead.
Once they’ve hired the staff, districts have tended to focus on three approaches to addressing learning loss: summer learning, intensive tutoring and extending the school day, often through after-school programs. According to Burbio, 62 percent of districts plan on summer learning or after-school programs, allocating $1.7 million on average; 23 percent are planning on tutoring, with average spending of $1.4 million. The cost and scale are often staggering. With $27 million, Baltimore created an enormous summer-school program, hiring over a thousand educators to teach 15,000 students at 75 different sites and conduct more than 3,000 home visits. Dallas will spend close to $100 million to extend learning opportunities for nearly 22,000 students, including reinventing the school calendar. Instead of an annual 10-week vacation, a fifth of the district’s campuses will add five weeklong “intersessions” across the calendar, during which students who have fallen behind can still attend school and receive more personalized attention.
But however much sense it might make to address lost learning by expanding time in the classroom, a longer school year or summer school often aren’t politically feasible. In their advocacy on behalf of exhausted, burned-out teachers, unions often protest proposals that require more work from educators, whether a shorter summer, longer school days or mandatory tutoring. Parents themselves often aren’t much interested in tutoring and summer school, particularly when they think their kids aren’t struggling. Many educators are still grading students on a pandemic-adjusted curve, which may be skewing parents’ understanding of the extent to which the crisis has hampered their own children’s educational progress. According to a recent Brookings Institution report, 90 percent of parents responded that their child was doing well academically; less than a quarter were interested in summer school and only 28 percent in tutoring.
Objections from educators and apathy from parents often dilute proposals to add school hours to the point that they become ineffective. In the spring, the Los Angeles Unified School District considered a proposal to lengthen the upcoming school year by two weeks. After opposition from the teachers’ union and lukewarm support from families, the Board of Education instead voted in favor of adding four optional days of school for students, citing the widespread exhaustion among educators. “Students in Los Angeles will have lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of typical math learning,” says Thomas Kane, the faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. “There is no way you can make up for 22 weeks of lost learning with four optional days.”
In 2024, two short school years away, the billions in ESSER III funding will expire. If districts haven’t allocated it by then, it will disappear. Even if they have allocated it, they won’t be getting any more. There will be no ongoing federal funding for recurring costs, like new teacher salaries and tutoring contracts. “We’re seeing districts concerned about a fiscal cliff, or an abrupt cutoff in their funding once the ESSER money expires,” says Melissa Diliberti, an assistant policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. In June 2021, when Diliberti first asked district leaders about this, just over a third were concerned, mostly in urban districts; in her survey this March, half of district leaders reported worry.
If districts can show how the funding directly improved outcomes for students, they may be able to successfully lobby for additional funding after ESSER runs out, either from state budgets or from nonprofits. Biden is pushing for more federal education spending on Title I schools, but about 90 percent of public-education costs are borne by states and localities. They will need to be the ones to carry the momentum forward. “Now, the work of leadership across our country is to ensure that the level of urgency around education funding and support is pervasive,” Cardona says. “It can’t be just the federal government addressing the pandemic with much-needed resources, and then we go back to business as usual.”
Tennessee offers a model for how this can work. Even before the ESSER funding was announced, the state’s Department of Education had developed clear, research-driven recommendations for initiatives to catch students up from pandemic learning loss. “We did not want to do a ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach,” says Penny Schwinn, Tennessee’s education commissioner. Instead, leaders homed in on two strategies: extended learning over the summer and high-dosage tutoring.
When the ESSER funding arrived, Schwinn used a significant part of the 10 percent of the funds available for the state educational agency to create the Tennessee Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps model and the Best for All district-recognition program. TN ALL Corps provided districts with clear guidelines on how to implement state education priorities: Districts should maintain tutor ratios of no more than one to four; tutoring sessions should last 30 to 45 minutes each and take place two or three times per week. Best for All encouraged buy-in: If a district spent at least 50 percent of its ESSER III funding on state-recognized strategies and participated in TN ALL Corps, it would qualify as a Best for All district. Those districts then receive extra state support, recognition and funding, including $700 per year for each student who participates in tutoring. In 2021, the first year of TN ALL Corps, 83 districts participated; 67 were recognized as Best for All districts.
This approach is expensive. In Tennessee, the tutoring is budgeted at $1,500 per student per year; serving 50,000 students annually, the program will cost an estimated $200 million over three years. “This isn’t minimum wage: We’re paying full-time teachers at a salary on the salary schedule,” Schwinn says. “It’s an investment in students.”
So far, that investment is delivering measurable positive results. Not only have students caught up to prepandemic levels in English language arts, but they’re actually doing slightly better: 36 percent are meeting grade-level expectations in English in 2022, compared with 35 percent in 2019 and 29 percent in 2021. They’re not back up to prepandemic levels in math or science yet, but they’ve made significant gains, which is encouraging considering the enormous learning loss over the pandemic.
Perhaps most important, the measurable results of TN ALL Corps and Best for All added momentum to pandemic-recovery legislation in Tennessee: the Learning Loss Remediation and Acceleration Act, which requires local educational agencies to offer after-school and summer learning camps; the state’s 2022-23 budget includes additional funding to support these initiatives, including $125 million to increase teacher salaries. The State Legislature also passed the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act, a replacement of the state’s 30-year-old education funding formula that allocates more money per student and creates greater transparency into how districts are using funding; Gov. Bill Lee has pledged to put $1 billion into the new formula when it takes effect next year, the largest recurring investment in public education in state history. “The ESSER funding is, frankly, giving us the front-loaded amount of dollars that we need to have the proof point,” Schwinn says. Legislators “saw what the dollar amount was that led to this kind of results, and the quality level that it takes in order to get the meaningful growth that we were hoping for.”
Unfortunately, Tennessee so far is the only state that has successfully used the ESSER funding to help prompt changes in how the state funds education long-term. “Tennessee is an outlier,” says Marguerite Roza, the director of Edunomics Lab and a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “The stars aligned, and they got this thing passed.”
In fact, most states aren’t doing much to provide meaningful support to districts on how to spend the money or track whether initiatives are actually helping students. “Big industries would never make multimillion-dollar investments without checking in quarterly on what kind of effects they were getting,” Roza says. “But from some states, it’s just crickets.”
This means that over the next two years of ESSER III funding, most districts won’t be able to tell whether — or which — initiatives actually worked, so they won’t know to expand the effective ones and do away with the others. That’s particularly dire considering the unlikelihood of further such opportunities coming along. In 2024, not only will districts face the ESSER fiscal cliff, but they’ll most likely receive reduced state funding as public-school enrollment continues to decline. That’s happening across the country — more than 1.4 million students have left public schools since the start of the pandemic — and it’s especially pronounced in urban areas. Chicago Public Schools has lost almost 25,000 students, 7 percent of its student population, since the start of the pandemic; New York City has lost 9.5 percent, more than 80,000 students. (The New York numbers don’t include charter schools.) The Los Angeles district lost 6 percent of its students last year alone, and projects that it will lose 30 percent in the next decade.
And all that could be compounded by the purse-tightening effects of a potential economic slowdown. “The fiscal cliff is going to hit at about the same time that states will feel the pinch from a slowing economy, so there won’t be money sitting there to save them,” Roza says. “On my team, we say that the 2024-2025 year will be the bloodletting.”
Charley Locke is a writer who often covers youth, including for The New York Times for Kids, and elders. She previously wrote for the magazine about how Covid-relief funding will reshape American industry.
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