Relief funds eased COVID learning loss but could have done more

Pandemic K-12 public school closings disrupted learning nationwide, with the average student in grades 3 through 8 losing the equivalent of half a grade level in math achievement and a third of a grade level in reading achievement.

The federal government’s response was a K-12 financial relief package of three bills for states and districts totaling $190 billion. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief package was the largest one-time federal investment in K-12 schools, with a Sept. 30 deadline to commit funds for specific uses.

Are the relief dollars making a difference in the learning loss recovery effort? There is good and bad news as students and teachers return to school.

The good news is that these funds are having a positive effect on helping students catch up. The bad news is they are insufficient to return all students to pre-pandemic learning levels. Additionally, we don’t know which newly funded programs helped students catch up.      

Two independent reports, the Harvard and Stanford-led Education Recovery Scorecard and a report by the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, examine the relationship between learning loss recovery and the relief packages.

Both reports use the Stanford University Education Data Archive to analyze 2022-2023 math and reading test scores for grades 3 to 8 students from more than 5,000 districts in 30 states.

Using different research methods, they reached a similar conclusion: Federal dollars did accelerate academic recovery.

According to the Scorecard, every $1,000 received for a student typically added about six days of learning progress in math and three days in reading. These academic gains per dollar are akin to what other researchers have found for the effects of general revenue increases in school spending for improving test scores.

Per-student dollars varied greatly across districts with similar characteristics but in different states. This occurred due to significant differences in the per-student dollar amount districts received, as money was distributed using the Title 1 formulas that consider the number of students at or near the poverty level. Moreover, Title 1 rules and regulations have peculiarities, like giving large minimum grants to small states and more money to states that spend more per student.

But typically, districts with the highest poverty levels received the most money. For example, Detroit received $26,000 per student and often had significant learning loss recovery. However, since high-poverty districts usually experienced the most learning loss, their recovery to pre-pandemic academic levels was far below grade level.

“Recovery brings them back to a very low rung,” Jill Barshay wrote in The Hechinger Report. 

Conversely, wealthy districts received the least amount of money on average — often less than $1,000 per student — but are well on the way to academic recovery because their students did not experience as much learning loss as low-income students.

Middle-income districts are in between, as their students typically experienced significant learning loss and received per-pupil funds of $1,000 to $5,000. Other factors also affected the academic impact of federal dollars, including state and local policies on issues like testing and accountability, school spending and geographic location.  

The positive effects on academic learning will have positive spillover effects on long-term aspects of a student’s life, including improvements in lifetime earnings and social returns like lower rates of teen motherhood and fewer arrests. 

“These academic gains will translate into improvements in earnings and other outcomes that will last a lifetime,” says Harvard’s Thomas Kane, co-author of the Scorecard report, in an interview with National Public Radio.  

Neither study could determine which spending decisions made a difference in improving student achievement.

They could not link the academic recovery gains to specific strategies like tutoring or summer school because the government gave districts significant flexibility in how to spend the relief funds — only 20 percent had to be spent on academic recovery programs. Additionally, there were minimal reporting requirements for how the money was spent, so little is known about what recovery programs were used.

These reports offer three lessons for policymakers as they consider the next stage of financial support for learning loss recovery.

First, money does make a difference in learning loss recovery and more financial support is needed to complete the recovery effort. For example, the CALDER report estimates another $9,000 to $13,000 per pupil is needed.

Second, new federal and state recovery aid should focus on supporting academic recovery programs. This involves significantly raising the current federal 20 percent minimum threshold dedicated to academic recovery programs to a much higher threshold.

Third, new federal and state recovery aid should have stronger reporting requirements for how the money is spent and set a clear priority on schools using evidence-based academic recovery programs. Examples include high-impact tutoring, summer learning and expert teacher approaches using existing class time.

This good and bad news must rekindle America’s post-pandemic efforts to ensure our young people are fully prepared with the knowledge and skills they need to reach their full potential.

Thus far, the recovery effort is like “the first stage of a rocket, it got us going, but has a broad focus and was ultimately insufficient to get us all the way,” according to Kane.

The federal government along with states, districts, families, students, teachers and communities need to now recommit themselves to finish the learning lost recovery journey.

Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former U.S. assistant secretary of Education for Policy.