September 12, 2022

"Emergency" Stimulus Money for Schools Mostly Unspent


KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Instead of urging schools to use the pandemic aid Congress provided in 2020 to reopen schools quickly and help students recover lost learning, Democrats piled on another $122 billion.
  • As of late August, nearly a year and a half after Democrats passed this “emergency COVID-19 relief” law, 85% of the money for schools is unspent.
  • Students are still behind in school; at the current rate it could take three years for the average elementary school student to recover, and longer for older students. 

Students are back to school this fall after repeated closures in the prior three school years that set them back academically and hurt their mental health. Instead of pushing schools to use the $67.5 billion that Congress provided in 2020 to help K-12 schools reopen quickly and respond to the pandemic, including by addressing students’ immense learning loss, Democrats piled on another $122 billion for schools in their March 2021 stimulus law. As of late August – 17 months later – just 15% of this “urgently-needed” money for schools has been spent. Students are still behind in school, raising questions about what’s been done to help them make up the learning gap.

Democrats’ “Emergency” Funds for Schools Are Largely Unspent

Unspent-School-Funding

When Democrats were passing their law last year, the Congressional Budget Office predicted it would take eight years to spend all the education money. With just a little more than $18 billion spent, and the end of fiscal year 2022 approaching, the money is moving even more slowly than CBO thought. When you include the money Congress sent out in the bipartisan aid packages in 2020, schools have spent only about $60 billion of the $190 billion total.

School districts have through September 2024 to commit the extra cash from Democrats’ stimulus law and then another 120 days, until January 28, 2025, to finish spending it. But in May, the Education Department told districts they could request another 18 months from the September deadline to spend the money. District leaders had asked for more time, saying supply chain disruptions and a lack of contractors were making it hard to do the building projects they wanted to do.

Under Democrats’ stimulus law, school districts have to put 20% of the money toward addressing students’ learning loss. The rest of it can be spent on a vast list of things, including any activity allowed under laws like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Schools are awash in money and in some cases are spending it on things far afield of problems like students’ academic struggles. The Associated Press reported last October on districts around the country paying for athletic projects like a new football field and weight room renovation, at the expense of things like providing extra tutoring. One school in Oregon reportedly planned to build a new gym, another intended to replace its grandstands. In other cases, there is almost no information about how the money is being spent. An analysis by the California School Boards Association showed that from summer 2021 to spring 2022, the largest share of schools’ spending in the state was for the vague category “other activities necessary to maintain operations” allowed under the law. A Brookings Institution report in March found that school districts in Washington have categorized most of their spending as “other” activities.

back at school, but way behind                           

Given the extent of the learning loss during the pandemic, it’s difficult to see exactly what school districts have gotten for the money they have spent. One high school teacher from Ohio told the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in June that, since his school returned to fully in-person classes in the fall of 2021, “I’ve had to ‘water down’ my curriculum because students can no longer dissect or comprehend the same complex concepts and ideas as before.”

A Harvard report published in May concluded that remote instruction in the first full school year of the pandemic made student achievement gaps worse. Schools where a large percentage of families are poor, described as “high-poverty schools,” fared worse than others. One of the authors of that report wrote in The Atlantic: “in effect, students at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks.” In schools that quickly reopened, student achievement gaps worsened some in reading but not in math, and kids lost less learning overall.

On September 1, the National Assessment of Education Progress reported on 9-year-olds’ reading and math achievement during the pandemic. From 2020 to 2022, math scores dropped seven points, the first decline in the assessment’s history, and reading scores dropped five points, the largest decline since 1990.

Another study found that, while student achievement was less than a typical year, students’ rate of achievement gains in 2021-22 suggested progress from the 2020-21 school year. This was more the case in math and for younger students. The researchers estimated that, at the current rate, it could take at least three years for the average elementary school student to recover, and even longer for older students.

As America came out of the worst of the pandemic last year, Democrats could have focused on what families needed, like reopening schools and helping students catch up. Instead, they chose to flood schools with more money. Democrats even rejected a commonsense Republican effort to prioritize schools that reopened for in-person learning for a full five days per week. Students have still not recovered from the pandemic-related school closures, so what exactly has Democrats’ mountain of spending accomplished?

Issue Tag: Education