Despite funds, schools falling short
Stimulus money hasn’t helped all lagging students
WASHINGTON — When the pandemic shut down schools across the country, the federal government responded with billions of dollars to help districts support remote learning, serve free meals to students, and safely reopen schools.
In 2021, the Biden administration gave districts another $122 billion through its $1.9 trillion stimulus package, an amount that far surpassed previous rounds. Districts were required to spend at least 20 percent of those funds on helping students recover academically, while the rest could be used on general efforts to respond to the pandemic.
Yet, while most schools have since deployed various forms of interventions and some have spent more on academic recovery than others, there are ample signs that the money has not been spent in a way that has substantially helped all of the nation’s students lagging behind.
Recent test scores underscore the staggering effect of the pandemic, which thrust much of the nation’s students into remote learning for extended periods. Students in most states and across almost all demographic groups experienced major setbacks in math and reading after many schools closed their doors. In 2022, math scores underwent the largest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests a broad sampling of fourthand eighth-graders dating back to the early 1990s.
Education researchers and advocates say recovering from the effects of remote learning should be the top priority, but it is unclear how much of the funding is helping students across the nation fully catch up.
Plans for the relief funds have varied across the country. Some districts have invested more in extending learning time or offering intensive smallgroup tutoring focused on math or English, which research has shown to be among the most powerful interventions. Others have used much of their funds on facility upgrades, online tutoring services, across-theboard bonuses for employees, and other measures that education experts have argued are less effective for helping students catch up.
National data on how the money has been spent is scarce. The federal government does limited tracking of the relief funds, which were sent directly to states. Many states, which dole out the money to districts, do not provide detailed breakdowns of expenditures.
Some education experts who have closely monitored the relief money said the federal guidelines should have been more focused on addressing learning loss and were skeptical that many districts’ recovery plans were robust enough. Although schools were initially slow to spend the money, they are now on track to exhaust the funding by the September 2024 deadline for budgeting the money.
Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said the impact of the funding has been a “bit of a black box” and she expected to see different recovery rates across districts. Lake said giving across-the-board bonuses, completing maintenance projects, and plugging holes in budgets were less effective interventions.
“In some districts, I think we’re going to see that the money was well spent,” Lake said. “And in many — maybe most — it won’t have been spent as well as it should have been, in terms of addressing the urgent need right in front of us.”
She pointed to data showing that many students still did not have access to the kind of intensive tutoring programs that have proved effective, with demonstrated large positive effects on math and reading achievement.
A federal survey conducted in December found that most public schools offered some form of tutoring, but only 37 percent provided students more intensive “high dosage” tutoring, which is typically done in smaller groups, takes place for at least 30 minutes, and includes at least three sessions a week. Out of all public schools, just 10 percent of students participated in that type of tutoring.
Early reports show that schools have had difficulty setting up academic recovery programs. A recent paper from Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research found that schools struggled last year to carry out recovery programs at their intended scale because of staffing shortages and lower student engagement.