The federal government gave schools $190 billion in emergency funding during and after the pandemic. The extra money helped students recover some "lost learning" in reading and math, according to two separate studies, reports Kevin Mahnken on The 74. But not very much. On average, students have not caught up to pre-pandemic achievement levels.
"The per-dollar returns of ESSER, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, measure up poorly in comparison with those of previously studied efforts to boost achievement," writes Mahnken.
"The impact was small," said Dan Goldhaber, the lead author of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) study. “Only 20% of ESSER money was even earmarked for learning loss, and I don’t think there was a lot of oversight of whether that 20% was well spent.”
The Education Recovery Scorecard, led by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon and Harvard economist Thomas Kane, found very similar results.
High-poverty districts that got significantly more funding per student showed stronger gains, said Goldhaber. But there was no attempt to track what kinds of spending were correlated with higher performance. "There are pretty big differences across states and districts in the degree of catch-up," and we don't know why.
Goldhaber estimates "the government would need to spend an additional $450–$650 billion to fund a full return to levels of academic achievement last seen in 2019," writes Mahnken. "Reardon and Kane tallied a likely cost of just over $904 billion."
Remember that 2019 achievement levels were not all that great.
Chalkbeat's Erica Meltzer looks at how Birmingham (Alabama) City Schools spent the federal relief money to make significantly more progress than the national average.
Superintendent Mark Sullivan was looking at “horrific” state test scores in spring 2021 in his mostly-black, mostly-poor district, she writes. "The district had toggled between virtual and hybrid settings, eight staff members had died of COVID — including two at the same school within a week of each other — and students learning at home were caring for siblings while their parents worked."
Sullivan couldn't mobilize support for year-round schooling, but he was able to start the school year early and create four one-week "intersessions" for remediation and enrichment. Teachers were paid $60 an hour to work during the sessions, and students received free transportation, food, and after-school care.
It was voluntary, and only 1,800 of the district's 20,000 students showed up for the first session, writes Meltzer. "But by summer, fully half of students were participating" -- and outperforming classmates who'd started the year ahead but skipped the intersessions.
"The district also partnered with local universities to have college students do high-dosage tutoring; hired social workers, counselors, and instructional coaches; and invested in iReady assessment programs and trained teachers in how to use the data to adjust instruction," she writes.
With COVID aid expiring, the district will go down to three intersessions, cut some coaches and charge parents for after-school programs. Sullivan is seeking grants and community partners to maintain some programs.
The longer students were in virtual classes the worse they did academically, notes the New York Times. The Centers for Disease Control advisory calling for six feet of distancing -- based, we know now, on nothing -- persuaded school leaders they couldn't reopen in fall 2020, writes Tim Daly on Flypaper. Only 20 percent of U.S. schools were offering a traditional in-person schedule in mid-September 2020, while 60 percent were fully virtual and 20 percent were hybrid.
"It wasn’t until March 2021 that a majority of schools returned to full in-person operations," he writes. "A few districts — such as San Francisco — did not welcome all students at the same time until the 2021–22 school year."
It was not just a disaster for students. It was an unnecessary disaster.
Principal blame for America's poor educational response to the pandemic rests with local teachers' unions, who were resisting the urging of national leaders like President Biden and Randi Weingarten to reopen their campuses after the Democrats' victories in the 2020 election: Americans' traditional lack of effective moral education in basic health science (do you know of any other nation that responded by having its residents horde toilet paper?) led to the Americans -- uniquely for a developed nation -- being more than one year behind other developed states in being able to supply data for PIRLS 2021, leaving the extent of our children's losses in reading literacy due to the pandemic internationally incomparable.
Oh, this is nonsense. The vast majority of kids in remote were there because their parents wanted it. The percentage of parents who wanted in person but couldn't get it is about 15%, and they are an overwhelmingly white group whose kids aren't the ones getting low test scores.
""A few districts — such as San Francisco — did not welcome all students at the same time until the 2021–22 school year."
It was not just a disaster for students. It was an unnecessary disaster."
We had half the students for half the time from about January 21 to the end of the school year. Two week rotation, out of school at noon, facing forward, no group work.