White House’s push for equity tested as schools reopen
Experts fear disparities compounded by virus could have lasting impact on poor, minority students
It was one of the first proposals by the new White House to tackle what President Joe Biden has said is a central goal of his administration: promoting racial equity through federal policy.
The idea: a competitive grant program for schools that would give the federal government a more central role in combating long-standing educational disparities that have been worsened by the pandemic.
But as Biden signed a coronavirus relief bill into law Thursday, his proposed COVID-19 Educational Equity Gap Challenge Grant was missing from the $130 billion allocated for schools — the result of pushback from advocates who warned it would have the opposite of its intended effect.
Biden’s push to reopen schools within 100 days — one of the most politically fraught early promises of his administration — stands as one of the first major tests of his promise to infuse the goal of equity into policymaking across the government.
The $2 billion competitive grant program — first unveiled during Biden’s campaign for the presidency — represented only a small portion of the proposed school spending that was generally greeted enthusiastically by experts concerned about disparities in education.
But the proposal would have given federal officials greater say in earmarking some of the new funding for innovative programs specifically designed to promote equity. It generated vigorous opposition, touching off long-standing concerns about federal control of local school policy.
Its demise reflects the complexities Biden faces as he attempts to expand the role of the federal government in helping communities achieve lofty goals on race, even while addressing multiple national crises.
With millions of children still out of classrooms — a reality that has been especially damaging for minority and impoverished students — the president is under pressure to quickly reopen the country’s schools and ensure the most vulnerable communities are prioritized.
“The question that should be asked is: What is the impediment to opening schools for the benefit of kids, and how long are we going to wait to the detriment of the most fragile kids in America today — kids who are in poverty, children of color, children who are English-language learners, and children with a disability?” said Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, who has argued schools need to reopen more quickly.
Carvalho, whose district is the largest in the country to have opened all its schools, said he is particularly attuned to the challenges and learning loss students have experienced during the pandemic and the disproportionate impact on underserved students. The district, where 93 percent of students are minorities and nearly three-quarters qualify for free or reduced price lunch, is in the early stages of assessing and addressing the kind of educational disparities that were exacerbated by the remote-learning experiment that lasted from last March through October, he said.
The Biden administration touted the proposed equity challenge grants in a Jan. 20 news release that described how Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would help open schools in an equitable way. They were designed to encourage districts such as Miami-Dade to compete to come up with new ideas to combat those disparities, while giving the federal government a larger say in directing educational policy.
But senior administration officials now say they can achieve their goals without the grants. The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said other parts of the $130 billion schools package signed in the past week reflect Biden’s central focus on racial justice.
“We felt like the essence of what the president had proposed has been fully incorporated, frankly, and then some,” said one senior administration official involved in the process. Another official said there are other ways the federal government can help guide spending to address equity. The U.S. Education Department plans to release additional guidance soon to help schools decide how to spend new money.
“We think one of our biggest tools is the bully pulpit and being able to elevate research and best practices,” the official said.
Inequity is a defining feature of the nation’s school systems, a fact that persists nearly six decades after the Supreme Court outlawed racially segregated schools. Predominantly white school districts got $23 billion more in funding than did predominantly non-white districts in 2016, even though they served roughly the same number of schoolchildren, according to EdBuild, an organization dedicated to studying school funding disparities that disbanded last year. Because schools are both locally funded and controlled, students in a±uent communities learn in radically different conditions than students in poor ones.
These disparities touch nearly every aspect of education, from the condition of the buildings, to the number of computers and textbooks, to the amount of experience the teachers have. While students in the nation’s most a±uent communities learn in state-of-the-art facilities with veteran teachers, students in the most underresourced schools may be learning in buildings riven with asbestos, from a substitute teacher who may not even have a teaching certificate.
Experts fear the pandemic has compounded those long-standing disparities. Students who are poor, minority or from rural areas have struggled the most with remote learning during the pandemic, according to researchers, school administration officials and Biden’s Education Department.
A McKinsey study cited by the White House found that learning loss among students of color has been “especially acute” and Black and Hispanic students could be six months to a year behind academically by June, due to pandemic-related disruptions. By contrast, white students were expected to be four to eight months behind. Experts fear the impact could be lifelong for individual students.
“Even before this happened, there were many shocking and stark disparities that were happening,” said Titilayo Tinubu Ali, research and policy director for the Southern Education Foundation, which focuses on educational disparities among poor and minority students.
“So even when students are back in school, if we don’t reopen safely with the resources needed to make sure that schools are able to deliver high-quality education, those inequities that we were seeing will continue to persist.”