PRESS RELEASE: New DFI Study Finds Learning Loss Persisted Despite Massive COVID-19 Recovery Funding

Calls into question whether throwing more money at a broken K-12 system can fix it

WASHINGTON—As appropriations season in Congress hits full stride, the Biden administration has, once again, asked Congress for more federal money for public schools. Its recent 2025 budget request includes $18.6 billion in funding for low-income (Title I) K-12 public schools.

While the administration paints this funding request as “historic investments” that will put COVID-19-related learning loss recovery on a “faster track,” a new report from the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) finds that more federal money is not the answer. Despite the record-breaking federal spending on K-12 education post-COVID, students are still far behind. Higher levels of per-student relief funding did not correlate with faster learning loss recovery in states and major districts.

The report documents that many public-school districts used their COVID recovery money ineffectively:

• Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools spent nearly $119 million on staffing and plans to spend nearly $20 million more, even though district enrollment dropped by nearly 3,000 students since before the pandemic.
   
• Boston Public Schools used its COVID relief funds to hire at least 16 administrators, including a Staff Wellness Manager and an Ethnic Studies Instructional Coach and Coordinator. Enrollment in Boston Public Schools dropped more than 10% from 2019 to 2023.
  
• Milwaukee Public Schools created a four-person Department of Gender, Identity and Inclusion.
  
• Many districts across the country created a fiscal cliff for themselves by hiring permanent staff using the temporary COVID funding, often when student enrollment was declining.

At the same time, some districts spent money in ways that had nothing to do with helping students recover from learning loss:

• Clark County (Las Vegas) sent administrators to a beachfront hotel in Miami Beach for Fourth of July week, under the guise of a “recruiting trip.” They collected zero job applications.
   
• Milwaukee Public Schools used its relief funding to buy 2,200 ukeleles, fund a “race-conscious teaching” project, and create a new Gender Identity & Inclusion Department.
   
• Boston Public Schools budgeted $1.4 million for an “anti-racist assessment system.” It also used COVID relief dollars on athletics logos and scoreboards.
   
• 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.

Devastatingly for students, the favorite talking point of the teacher unions turned out to be false: Billions of dollars failed to solve America’s post-COVID education woes. In fact, learning loss still persists long after the COVID emergency ended. In the aggregate, learning loss according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Nation’s Report Card or NAEP) between 2019 and 2022 erased two decades of gains. This report shows that students in districts receiving more per student COVID funding did not experience significantly less severe declines in 4^th grade reading scores compared to districts that received less. The same holds true for 4th grade math, 8th grade reading, and 8th grade math.

“When the federal government shoveled nearly $190 billion in COVID relief funds to school districts, the unions and the education establishment got what they have always wanted: a massive injection of federal funds in a very short period of time,” said DFI President and Co-Founder Bob Eitel. “As this report shows, it’s a closed question that much of this money was simply wasted and that the unionized, centralized education bureaucracies that run much of public education in the United States simply aren’t up to the job.”

To read the full report titled “Billions of COVID Relief Didn’t Fix Learning Loss: Another Chapter in the Never-ending Story of Increasing Education Funding,” click here.