And the way the government has distributed the funds — through a formula that targets high-poverty schools — left some communities hit hard by the pandemic with insufficient funding to offset learning declines, wrote Kenneth Shores of the University of Delaware and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University in Virginia in by the American Educational Research Association.

The researchers push for greater accountability, calling a lack of reporting on how districts are using the funds a “policy failure.” When officials learned which districts participated in remote learning longer, they could have made adjustments, Steinberg said.

“There weren’t efforts in real time … to update the distribution of this aid in ways that would try to maximize its reach to the students and communities that would need it the most,” he said.

In order to build public trust, they recommend that the U.S. Department of Education at least collect data on how a representative sample of districts is allocating the funds. 

National test scores set for release later this month are expected to further drive home the impact of school closures on students’ academic progress and spark more debate about whether districts are making wise choices with the unprecedented windfall. The AERA report echoes growing demands from parents and policymakers for greater transparency from districts. have asked the department for “insight into how schools are using federal dollars to help America’s students catch up,” and parent groups are seeking training in school finance to track the money. The researchers recommend that officials add incentives to get districts to prioritize academic interventions over projects “such as athletic fields.”

The most recent round of funding, the American Rescue Plan, requires districts to spend a minimum of 20% of their funds to address learning loss.

“But nobody had to stop there,” said Heather Tolley-Bauer, co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a parent-led group monitoring spending in the Cobb County School District, north of Atlanta. The organization is among those that have received from the National Parents Union to track the funds. “When we look at the things they could have spent the money on and the things they did spend the money on, it’s frustrating.”

Her leading example is the $9.7 million the district spent on “Iggy” hand-rinsing machines that dispense a mixture of water and ozone. The company’s points to studies that say the machines kill COVID, but disagree and others say there’s . But even if the technology is effective at killing the virus, the devices at some schools are inaccessible, with plastic over the openings, Tolley-Bauer said. (A spokesperson for 30e Scientific, the company that makes the machines, explained that some of them have experienced “vandalism by unknown individuals.”) 

She understands the district was “in a hot hurry” to address the crisis, but said parents feel excluded from funding decisions. 

“I’m not surprised that the federal government didn’t put a lot of parameters around [the money],” she said. “It would help if the schools would …make very strategic decisions that would impact students positively for years to come.”

Some districts have participated in “halftime reviews” to assess spending patterns, said Jonathan Travers, managing partner at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts resolve budget challenges. In some cases, districts are waiting two to three months for approval of any changes to their spending plans. Districts were able to spend the money quicker on bulk purchases and HVAC upgrades, while tutoring and other student services have taken longer to implement, he said.

Phyllis Jordan, associate director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank that has been tracking the spending, argued that the department has held districts accountable by requiring them to submit plans for the third round of funds. 

“There is a level of oversight that you haven’t had before,” she said. “You at least have to articulate how you plan to spend it.”

And the department recently proposed that all states participate in a that previously was optional. While it won’t focus just on COVID funds, that spending will be included. 

Impact on Black students 

To reach the $700 billion estimate, researchers drew from multiple data sources and existing studies. One was a that used assessment data to pinpoint how much of a district’s budget would need to be replaced to make up for missed instruction. In high-poverty districts that were in remote learning for much of the 2020-21 school year, it would be over 40% of their budget.

The researchers on the earlier study, led by Dan Goldhaber of the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and Thomas Kane of Harvard University, concluded districts would need to spend all of their relief funds to address learning loss, not just 20%. 

But Shores and Steinberg think that estimate could be too low because it might not account for learning loss among students that weren’t tested and it doesn’t reflect how families and other “non-school inputs” contribute to student achievement. , Steinberg said, shows that student performance depends considerably on what is “happening outside of school.”

Their estimates range from a low of $325 billion to make up for missed instruction to a high of $930 billion, with $700 billion roughly in the middle.

Goldhaber said their estimates could be too high, but he noted that either way, the education system has never faced a challenge like this.

“We’re trying to do across the country what has only been done at a small scale,” he said. 

Shores and Steinberg also draw attention to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black and Hispanic students, regardless of whether they come from low-income families. 

The Education Department’s survey of schools, for example, showed that while the vast majority were open by the end of the 2020-21 school year, the rate of Black and Hispanic students attending full, in-person learning still fell at least 20 percentage points below that of white students. Asian students were the least likely to attend in-person.

Additionally, released last year from researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the racial unrest that broke out during the first summer of the pandemic contributed to higher levels of trauma among Black students and families and that schools were “ill-equipped” to support them.

Distributing the funds through the existing Title I formula, which some argue is across the country, resulted in less funding for districts where the disruption to learning may still have been extensive, Shores and Steinberg wrote. 

But Goldhaber cautioned that “it’s easy to be critical retrospectively. When you’re trying to get money out the door quickly, it’s reasonable to use existing vehicles.”

Shores and Steinberg compare COVID relief packages with the federal stimulus package passed to combat the effects of the Great Recession. There’s “not a single study,” they wrote, that demonstrates the impact of that 2009 stimulus package on student learning.

Shores said he’s been disappointed by the “lack of creativity” in directing COVID relief funds. But it’s not too late to change course, particularly when it comes to spending money from the American Rescue Plan, they said.

With roughly a quarter of the funds spent, Steinberg said there’s still time to redirect the money toward tutoring or other interventions that “seem to have potentially positive returns.”

“We’re asking you to take a pledge today,” he said during the May 20 Zoom session, providing a link for participants to sign. Other elements of Thurmond’s agenda include for 100,000 children, free access for families to ebooks and a campaign to deliver to children’s homes.

The event followed the work of a literacy task force Thurmond created last fall. But the superintendent, who is running for reelection, was clear that as long as he’s in charge, California won’t follow the lead of other states — adopting a statewide literacy policy that prioritizes phonics, the connections between letter sounds and written words.

“We are not promoting a one-size-fits-all approach in California,” he said. “That’s been tried before. Our state is too large, is too diverse.” 

Critics dismissed Thurmond’s plan to combat what they describe as a literacy crisis in the nation’s most populous state. 

District leaders, advocates and some lawmakers want all schools to screen for dyslexia, a learning disability, and adopt phonics-based instruction. While Mayor Eric Adams has mandated a phonics-based curriculum and Michigan lawmakers are that would require dyslexia screening, California, some argue, passed up an opportunity to address long-standing achievement gaps in children’s reading.

Overall, 37 percent of the state’s fourth-graders score below the basic level on . The average score for Hispanic students is 27 points below that of white students, and the gap between Black and white students is even larger.

“We keep applying patchwork solutions to a system that never worked,” said Todd Collins, a school board member of the Palo Alto Unified School District in Silicon Valley. He’s also an organizer of the , which last year issued a “report card” ranking districts on the percentage of high-need Hispanic students proficient in reading by third grade. “Library cards and e-books are not going to fix a system that doesn’t teach kids right in the first place.”

Some members of Thurmond’s literacy agree. Kareem Weaver, part of the Oakland NAACP’s education committee and leader of a nonprofit focusing on literacy, said the group produced “a grab bag” of solutions. 

But they “didn’t get to the root cause of why kids aren’t reading,” he said. “We’re not explicitly teaching them how to read and crack the code.”

Thurmond isn’t opposed to districts adopting phonics-based instruction but instead emphasized that because of relief funds and a budget surplus “California has more resources than we’ve ever seen” to provide teacher training and increase the number of reading specialists in schools. passed last year requires new teachers entering the field to know how to teach “foundational reading skills,” but the state isn’t pushing districts to adopt a specific curriculum.

During Thurmond’s online event, only Tyrone Howard, an education professor at the University of California Los Angeles and president-elect of the American Educational Research Association, emphasized phonics. 

“I’m old school,” he said. “The data shows that phonics instruction can go a long way in helping kids to develop the fundamentals around reading.”

Roughly 20 states have adopted so-called based on decades of that emphasize phonics, fluency and vocabulary development as the foundations of learning how to read. Some experts who previously embraced strategies that encouraged children to depend on pictures and familiar words to read ones they don’t know have since changed their views. Once an exemplar of this approach, Lucy Calkins updated her curriculum based on the research, according to a recent article that generated a . 

The question in California is whether a commitment is enough.

“We’ve been committing since ‘A Nation at Risk’ and we haven’t gotten there yet,” said Barbara Nemko, superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, referring to the landmark 1983 report that inspired education reform efforts. One of Thurmond’s task force co-chairs, she added that if the label has become divisive, “then call it something else.”

Policymakers and education groups in the state are also divided over dyslexia screening, even though over 30 states already have such laws in place. 

Thurmond promised to make a currently in development at the University of California San Francisco available to schools once it’s ready, possibly by the 2023-24 school year. But the California Teachers Association opposes that was introduced last year and never received a hearing. They said mandated screening “lessens the instructional time available for learning the required curriculum.” The California School Boards Association also opposes it.

Reading Recovery and Mississippi

Thurmond isn’t the only state leader whose response to what some have called a has come under fire. Some question the support of researcher and state board Chair Linda Darling-Hammond for Reading Recovery, a long-running tutoring program for first graders offered in about . In a , on pandemic recovery and a recent literacy task force , Darling-Hammond linked the program to successful schools. 

A , presented at a research conference, found that children who participated in the program scored lower on state tests in third and fourth grade than those who didn’t participate. Her comments, said Collins from Palo Alto, show “we have a dated and misguided understanding of what works.”

But Darling-Hammond, who also led President Joe Biden’s education transition team and recommended Miguel Cardona to be U.S. education secretary, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that her statements about the program have never been in the “context of an endorsement” and noted that Reading Recovery is listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s “clearinghouse” of . 

She underscored the limitations of the study, including the fact that the researchers collected follow-up results from just a quarter of the third graders and 16% of fourth graders who were part of the original sample. She noted that a on Reading Recovery, presented at the same conference, found positive results for students in England through age 16.

“I think different interventions work well for different students,” Darling-Hammond said â€œI hope we won’t get wrapped up in a silver bullet idea about any intervention.” 

She said California fourth graders’ reading scores have inched closer to the since 2013 and highlighted the state’s plan this year to spend $500 billion on literacy initiatives, including reading coaches and specialists. Those positions are necessary, she said, because the state hires too many teachers without full credentials.

“In the schools with the greatest needs, you might have half or more of the teachers without any training to teach reading,” she said.

She also pointed to gains in , which in 2019, made more progress in reading than any other state. But she said people often “simplify” the state’s approach by only highlighting teacher training in phonics-based instruction.

“It’s a very robust program,” she said. “Phonics is very important. Phonemic awareness is very important, but that is not all they do.” 

‘An equity issue’

With the state taking what Darling-Hammond called a more “decentralized” direction than Mississippi, some school and district leaders have moved on their own to revamp the way they teach children to read. 

In 2019, when Lilia Espinoza took over as principal of Hardin Elementary in Hollister, California, she found staff members who worked hard on student reading with little to show for it.

“Historically, this school has struggled to really pump out students who are on grade level,” she said. With a high English learner population — as is the case in many California schools — she said teachers thought if children couldn’t read a word, they just didn’t understand the vocabulary instead of not being able to sound it out.

She reached out to , a private school in Seaside, California, that offered training in structured literacy and using practices that have worked with struggling readers. 

Hardin teachers and reading specialists now devote 45 minutes to an hour each day to explicit phonics lessons as part of a larger English language arts curriculum. Children can get “antsy” during that time, Espinoza said. But despite remote learning, the number of students referred to special education has dropped from 21 in 2017-19 to three this year. She thinks the gains would have been stronger if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.

Now, she worries that other “budget issues” will lead the district to cut funding for reading intervention teachers. She started with four, is now down to two, and might only have one next year. She wrote a letter to state leaders asking for more specialists.

“It’s an equity issue,” she said. “Not being able to secure support for early literacy for all students is not OK.”