Although the federal government is giving states and school districts billions of dollars to combat student learning losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, student achievement is declining across the country, and funding to fix it may not be enough, especially in high-need areas, according to A new study was published on Tuesday.
While federal emergency aid dollars were set aside to address student learning losses of up to $189 billion, schools needed about $500 billion, a new study from the American Educational Research Association found.
Although the need may be for more resources, the study’s authors are urging the federal government to look at recent developments in the country’s standardized test scores. to show decline in the success of students before they give the state and regions some money.
“The growth of learning loss in students is very large. We want to solve it immediately with the right intervention of the laws in the use of [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief] money to deal with the huge loss of learning,” he said Matthew P. Steinberg, one of the study’s authors, in an interview, talking about the epidemic aid given to schools in the past two years. Steinberg again is a professor of education and public policy and director of EdPolicyForward at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy & Government.
In their analysis, the authors compared the federal government’s spending during the pandemic to its spending during the Great Depression. In all these cases, they found that the way in which money was distributed and how it was determined, or not, for different uses has been problematic and has not met the goals of the law.
“Despite the different impacts that the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic have had on US society and the US K-12 education system, we can write parallels in the federal constitution during these two crises,” wrote Steinberg and his colleagues. -author Kenneth Shores, assistant professor in education and sociology at the University of Delaware’s College of Education and Human Development, wrote.
President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law in March 2021, to share $1.9 trillion in federal emergency funding in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The plan included funding for schools to address student learning loss, open safe schools, improve student mental health and address other needs related to the pandemic. Part of that money were set aside especially to reduce learning loss. The government has not yet given all the aid dollars to the schools.
“States and school districts have resources they need, and they need to address the pandemic’s impact on student learning…States need to address the needs of students affected by this pandemic, including students with disabilities, English language learners, and students experiencing homelessness,” the White House he said a year after Biden signed the legislative aid package.
While the federal government is holding on to what’s left of aid money, the Department of Education needs to consider spending on high-need students, Steinberg said.
“From a policy perspective, increasing the amount of federal aid may be politically difficult, but publicizing the money needed to repair losses (whether money in the case of the Great Recession or tuition in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic) can help. Also, although we do not recommend that government aid be directed to specific uses (e.g. , such as separate aid), the lack of consistent and comprehensive data collection forces accountability and can reduce political support for aid,” the report reads. .
The education ministry did not immediately return a request for comment.
What do students need to recover from?
The latest national report shows 9-year-olds have fallen sharply in math and reading during the pandemic. And while no student group has been left untouched by declining test scores on average, gaps in achievement have only widened between Black and Hispanic students compared to their white and Asian peers.
More:The ‘lowest score’ in reading for the nation’s 9-year-olds, the first to drop in math
Steinberg said the federal government should focus on students who are more likely to be victims of crime and give schools in the state more money to address learning loss.
“We need to do better at targeting federal aid to the states that need it most, and at being flexible in spending over time rather than continuing with appropriations and block grants,” Steinberg said, adding that federal funding may have increased. achievement gaps in districts for disadvantaged students. Some states with similar levels of student poverty are more progressive than others, and that can determine how much Title I funding — for schools with large numbers of children from low-income families — those schools receive.
What can the federal government do?
As school districts respond and try to reduce student learning losses, researchers are urging the federal government to change the way it distributes tax dollars to districts. And they said there is very little accountability for how the districts use those dollars.
“Policymakers should require, or provide incentives to, school districts to use federal aid to address student loss,” Steinberg said. “This is more important than using it, for example, to build new facilities – such as sports fields – which are related to addressing the needs of students.”
Increasing state-level transparency in spending during crises helps policymakers resolve conflicts, Steinberg and Shores wrote. There is no national database that tracks how aid is being spent, but groups including FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, have done so during the pandemic. they have checked some of the data available on the region and the use of government aid.
Another suggestion the authors made to the federal government is to require all, or a sample, of districts to report how their funds were spent to the National Center for Education Statistics.
And future use by the government during such crises should be less dependent on “allocation methods, such as state funding formulas or Title I allocations, and instead more closely linked to policy objectives” to adequately meet the diverse needs of student learning. loss across the country, Steinberg and Shores wrote in their analysis.
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter at @kaylajjmenez.