Report > K-12 Education, Federal Oversight
Billions of COVID Relief Didn’t Fix Learning Loss: Another Chapter in the Never-ending Story of Increasing Education Funding
By Paul Zimmerman and Angela Morabito | July 9, 2024
Key findings
Many school districts spent money on projects that had nothing to do with academics. Although these projects may have served the interests of adults, they did nothing to help students make up for lost learning while schools were closed. Here are some of the more striking examples:
- Milwaukee Public Schools purchased 2,200 ukuleles and paid for 30,000 students and teachers to have access to an online music mixing program. The school district has also committed to spending more than $445,000 on a ropes course and spent more than $153,000 on anti-racist “mini grants.”
- Clark County School District in Nevada used ESSER dollars for a five-day trip for more than a dozen staff members to a Miami Beach and a later trip for eight employees to Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, both under the guise of recruiting. The Miami trip yielded two attendees in as many recruiting sessions and zero job applications; the Waikiki trip garnered two résumés. The district also spent more than $30 million on retirement fringe benefits for staff.
- Boston Public Schools budgeted $1.4 million for an “anti-racist assessment system” and $2.6 million for teaching Ethnic Studies. The district also bought three new scoreboards, logos, and branding for school athletics programs.
- Baltimore City Schools allocated $57,000 for cell phones for administrators.
- Miami-Dade Public Schools spent $660,000 on “schools beautification,” a separate expense from school infrastructure improvements and cleaning.
- Cambridge City Schools in Ohio budgeted roughly $875,000 to replace its stadium field with AstroTurf.
- Big Horn County School District No. 3 in Wyoming budgeted $1.18 million for the same purpose.
- Pawtucket School District in Rhode Island budgeted ESSER dollars for “gender sensitivity” training for staff.
- Oakland Unified School District budgeted about $500,000 for “Black reparations,” a slate of projects that aim to address “structural societal racism” as it purportedly manifests in the district’s schools.
Introduction
In his 2025 budget request, President Biden asked Congress to spend another $8 billion to accomplish what $189.5 billion has already failed to do: Erase the devastating effects of school closures on American students.
An unnamed Education Department official claimed this new money would put learning loss recovery “on a faster track,” but there is little evidence that student achievement would bounce back as a result of more spending.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” bears this out. Measured for 4th and 8th graders in 2019 and 2022, reading and math test scores show that the COVID pandemic and related school closures erased two decades of progress in reading and math.
As of 2022, 30% of 8th graders scored “below basic,” meaning they cannot understand a basic, grade-level passage of text.4 This is an educational crisis that Congress tried to prevent, and later, fix, with its Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund that infused $189.5 billion into America’s K-12 schools.
