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North Carolina lawmakers approved for Hurricane Helene relief on Wednesday, as the western part of the state continues recovery efforts.

The package, which legislative leaders called a “first step” in their response, will provide a needed transfusion of dollars to qualify the state for federal money and help officials prepare for the Nov. 5 election.

It passed both the and unanimously.

“The recovery that is going to have to be done is something that is going to be a herculean task,” House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) told reporters ahead of the vote.

The General Assembly is set to return on Oct. 24 to allocate more money, once lawmakers have a better sense of specific funding needs. A November session is also planned to “deal with other matters,” Moore said.

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) said their first priority was securing federal dollars, but that further state money was coming.

“As far as the total that the state is going to expend, no, this is not all of it,” Berger said. “Not by a long shot.”

The vast majority of the money will serve as matching funds to qualify for FEMA federal disaster programs. The federal government has pledged 100% reimbursement for six months following the disaster.

Another $16 million will help back pay salaries for nutrition staff whose schools have been closed in the storm’s aftermath. And the bill grants impacted schools more flexibility to adjust their calendars and add remote teaching as needed.

Lawmakers also expanded the resources and flexibility for western counties to conduct their elections. The State Board of Elections will get $5 million — more than they initially requested — and 25 western counties will be eligible to make changes to early voting and polling places. (A resolution from the state board originally included 13 counties.)

“While the Board of Elections made a good effort, we want to extend it to additional counties that were impacted,” Berger said.

Those changes could include more flexibility in appointing election judges, changing precinct locations, and “curing” of spoiled absentee ballots — all at the discretion of county election offices.

Throughout a press conference and debate Wednesday, lawmakers representing districts to the west , and emphasized that the road to recovery would be years long. Some, like Rep. Jennifer Balkcom (R-Henderson), fought back tears.

“People are trying to start their lives over again,” Balkcom said.

Moore and Berger said they met with Gov. Roy Cooper and Democratic legislative leaders in recent days to discuss the bill. Cooper, speaking at a press conference to discuss ongoing storm recovery efforts at around the same time lawmakers were voting, expressed appreciation for the legislation. The bill now heads to his desk for final approval.

Still, concerns among some Democrats lingered Wednesday — including Rep. Caleb Rudow (D-Buncombe), who filed a bill extending voter registration deadlines but failed to get GOP support to move it forward.

How education leaders, local advocacy groups want relief money spent

Ahead of the legislature’s return to Raleigh, officials and organizations across the state made funding requests as they continue to evaluate damages and look toward recovery.

The State Board Education has outlined more than $150 million needed to repair and recover public schools across the state. State superintendent Catherine Truitt said in a statement Wednesday that she was “really pleased and grateful” with the school-related funding in the initial relief package.

“I know the NCGA will appropriate additional funding in terms of building and equipment damage in due time,” Truitt said. “This is a great first step to helping our schools, staff and students recover.”

And in sent Tuesday evening to lawmakers, a network of faith, health care and civic groups called the NC Inclusive Disaster Recovery Network outlined a range of recommendations for how funding is used.

“Policies should ensure relief and rebuilding efforts reach all North Carolinians by minimizing barriers to access and stabilizing conditions,” the letter said.

They urged lawmakers to allow local governments flexibility to hire or expand communications as needed; to send funds “for public interest law firms,” and to create an eviction moratorium “similar to the response to COVID.”

A letter from the North Carolina Association of Educators called on lawmakers to, among other things, protect all public-school staff from pay and leave reductions for the duration of the crisis, ensure districts are not penalized for student enrollment declines due to temporary relocations, and provide meals for students in hard-hit counties.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

Such a classification is racist, sexist, classist, inaccurate and — worst of all, they say — lasting. Many Americans who absorbed such messages in their youth continue to define themselves this way decades later. 

And they those insecurities to their children, as if math competency is an innate trait and not a learned skill. This sort of old-school thinking has, for generations, sidelined students of all types, including girls, and those who come from impoverished communities, math equity advocates say. Pushed away from STEM at an early age, they learn to count themselves out of lucrative opportunities. 

“The highest point that they can reach is drastically diminished if they are put on these lower tracks,” said Marian Dingle, a veteran teacher and head of , a group that aims to boost mathematics education for all students, with a focus on Hispanics. 

Math experts are calling for a new mindset, saying teachers and parents should expect that some children might need extra time — or tutoring — to master mathematical concepts and that these accommodations do not reflect negatively on their overall ability or potential. 

“Research shows that when students are labeled based on perceived math aptitude, it risks negatively impacting the student’s self-efficacy and motivation, leading to long-term struggles with math and kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lasana Tunica-El, senior deputy director of campaigns for . “They’ve received and heard this labeling — and then they fulfill the labeling.”

Pamela Seda, president of the , which works to empower Black children by boosting their access and success in mathematics, said she would love to see a more progressive, flexible and inclusive mindset adopted in the nation’s classrooms. But, she said, American schools are quick to place students on one path or another, often influenced by the child’s race. Critical decisions are made early — and they stick.

“We use math as a means to sort kids by who gets to be at the top and who gets to be at the bottom,” she said. “Our systems have not changed.”

Seda, who spent 26 years teaching in public schools, isn’t sure why people’s notions around success in math have become so rigid. Children, she said, need individualized help. 

She recalled teaching her own kids — now adults — how to do their own laundry when they were young. Ranging in age from 5 to 9, she instructed each one on how to sort their clothes and operate the washing machine, she said. Her youngest needed a step stool to complete the task, but his mother was not deterred. 

“It never crossed my mind that he couldn’t do it,” Seda said of him. 

And that’s the same mentality educators must adopt when it comes to their students, she said. A math coordinator for three different school districts, she’s tried to create such learning environments and encouraged other teachers to do the same.

“The challenge is, they still work within schools and within systems that undermine that,” she said. “They are trying to do the best they can.” 

Math anxiety leads to another complexity, said Tunica-El. It impacts not only the general public but the . Many shy away from teaching mathematical concepts even in the early grades because they are unsure of their abilities. 

“And then some of that is superimposed onto students, unfortunately,” he said. 

Dingle, of TODOS: Math for All, noted that many math educators come into the field for different reasons: Some are fascinated with the subject matter while others are more interested in working with students. 

“So you’ve got all these different types of people thrown into the mix,” she said. “If we just start from a place of assets, I think it’s easier to lean into the normalization of the idea that learning is learning and it doesn’t matter the pace.”

Dingle said educators need to embrace the idea that certain skills are imperative to being human, including numeracy, mathematical skill and mathematical intuition. 

Josh Recio, systemic transformation lead at at UT Austin, said math is unusual in that the ultimate goal for many students is to take calculus in their senior year of high school — what might be considered as the ultimate signpost of whether they are ‘good at math.’ 

“But the only way to do that is to accelerate at some point because it takes five math classes to get to calculus — and there’s only four years of high school,” he said. 

Students who wish to reach this goal must take algebra in the eighth grade.

“So, you start seeing students placed into actual advanced courses starting in sixth grade, but that identification happens prior to that,” Recio said, sometimes as early as second or third grade. 

Some believe that the only way to eliminate tracking is to place all students on an accelerated path, but Recio disagrees. 

“I don’t think doing it for every student is right,” he said. “There are students who are ready to accelerate and there are those who are not. We need to continue to create opportunities to get them to that point.”

Alan Garfinkel, professor of integrative biology and physiology and medicine at UCLA, isn’t sure that’s a worthy objective. He questioned the value of added time and tutoring because the math we are teaching inside America’s classrooms, he argued, does not meet the moment.

“What does it mean to be good at math?” he asked. “The standard answer back then — and the standard answer right now — is that ‘good at math’ means the ability to rattle off formulas. It’s stupid pet tricks to solve absolutely trivial problems. That whole attitude is the enemy.”

More valuable, he said, would be for students to see — and solve — real-world problems by formulating them in mathematical terms and understanding how they evolved in a systematic way. He cited stopping the spread of COVID through modeling or finding out why people still turn away from electric vehicles, despite their benefits. 

“If you gave me a magic wand that I could use to make the entire population earn A’s in AP Calculus,” he said, “I wouldn’t take it.” 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The Charles A. Dana Center and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Released Tuesday, from over 7.7 million students who took the widely used MAP Growth tests from NWEA doesn’t bode well for teens entering high school this fall. Finishing 4^th grade when the pandemic hit, many students not only lost at least a year of in-person learning, but also transitioned to middle school during a chaotic period of teacher vacancies and rising absenteeism.  

The 2023-24 results reflect the last tests administered before federal COVID relief funds run out. Districts must allocate any remaining funds by the end of September — a cutoff that is expected to cause further disruption as districts eliminate staff and programs aimed at learning recovery.

Older students don’t make gains as quickly as younger kids and will have to work harder to catch up, the researchers said. At the same time, the effects of the pandemic “continue to reverberate” for children in the early elementary grades, many of whom missed out on preschool because of COVID. On average, students need at least four extra months of schooling to catch up.

“It’s not fun to continue to bring this bad news to the education community, and I certainly wish it was a brighter story to tell,” said Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships for NWEA. “It is pretty frustrating for us, and I’m sure very disheartening for folks on the ground that are still working very hard to help kids recover.”

Thus far, only two states, California and Colorado, have asked officials for extra time to spend the diminishing relief funds that remain, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That means the question for most leaders is how to keep paying for extra tutoring and staffing levels for students still learning below grade level — especially those belonging to groups that weren’t meeting expectations before the pandemic.

Relief money “made a difference, but it certainly did not eliminate the learning loss,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the . A he authored showed that recovery linked to those dollars was small, in part because the federal government gave districts few restrictions on how to spend it. 

The American Rescue Plan’s requirement that districts devote 20% of the $122 billion toward reversing learning decline was “super loosey goosey in terms of what that actually meant, how it was measured and what programs counted,” he said.

Some districts that hired teaching assistants to give students additional practice in reading and math have now lost those positions. Dothan Preparatory Academy in Alabama, a seventh- and eighth-grade school, had several staff members who gave students “a few extra lessons” throughout the day based on their MAP scores, said Charles Longshore, an assistant principal. Now those positions are gone. 

He hopes a new sixth grade academy opening next month will better prepare kids for grade-level material. Two years ago, when he joined the Dothan City Schools, just north of the Florida Panhandle, he attended a districtwide administrator meeting where every school’s data was posted on the walls.  

He remembers looking at elementary school scores with “really low” student proficiency rates of roughly 20% to 30%; teachers have been trying to fill those gaps ever since. 

“We’re trying to go backwards to go forwards,” he said. “What third, fourth and fifth grade standards did you miss that are essential for your understanding of seventh and eighth grade standards?”

The NWEA results show achievement gaps continuing to widen. For example, Asian students are showing some growth, but made fewer gains in math last year than during the pre-COVID years. White, Black and Hispanic students, however, continue to lose ground. In both elementary and middle school, Hispanic students need the most additional instruction to reach pre-COVID levels, the data shows.

In reading, the gap between pre-pandemic growth and current trends widened by an average of 36%, compared with 18% in math. It’s possible, NWEA’s Lewis added, that districts focused extra recovery efforts on math because initial data on learning loss showed those declines to be the most severe. 

But that’s left many students without the reading skills to tackle harder books and vocabulary as they move into high school, said Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, a project of the nonprofit . The organization is funding research to find which literacy strategies work with adolescents, who are easily turned off by books intended for young kids.

The pandemic, she said, only exacerbated a longstanding literacy problem for older students.

“About 30% of American high schoolers for 30 years have been proficient readers, and that really hasn’t changed,” said Kockler, a former Louisiana assistant superintendent who oversaw a redesign of the state’s reading program. “It’s always the hardest to move middle school reading results, and even some of the success we would see in fourth grade didn’t always carry up into middle school.”

School closures were especially hard on students with learning disabilities. Both of Tracy Compton’s daughters, who are entering fifth and seventh grade this fall, have dyslexia and didn’t receive services during the pandemic when they were in the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. 

“The time they were learning to read was during the school board’s shutdown of schools,” she said. Under a , the Fairfax district still pays for makeup services with a private tutor. 

But Compton also moved to a Massachusetts district where she feels her girls are getting the support they need, like access to audio books and noise-canceling headphones during tests to help them focus. “They have made progress, but [have] not fully recovered,” she said.

She said too many parents don’t know their children are behind.

“They see the report card with A’s or whatever and think all is fine,” she said. “They don’t know where else to check and how to weigh things like standardized tests.”

That’s likely because different tests often tell different stories. The MAP results, for example, are worse than what many states have reported about student performance on their own assessments, which are used for accountability. 

Several states last year noted at least partial recovery, and a few showed students had even reached or were exceeding 2019 scores. Lewis explained that state tests measure the “blunt designation between proficient or not,” while MAP tests capture the full spectrum of student achievement levels during the school year.

Districts, particularly low-income districts that received the most funding, need to contend with the latest snapshots of students’ learning as they adjust to the end of federal relief funds, Goldhaber said. 

“How districts go about dealing with the fiscal cliff is going to have pretty significant consequences, particularly for the kids that were most impacted by the pandemic,” he said. If districts have to lay off staff — and newer teachers are the first to go — they should limit the impact on the neediest students. “They’ll be shuffling teachers within districts, and that shuffle itself is harmful for student achievement.”

As more time passes since the pandemic, Lewis added that school leaders might be tempted to stop comparing their students’ performance to pre-COVID levels, when states were in closing achievement gaps. 

“What keeps me up at night is this idea that these persistent achievement gaps are inevitable, that this is just how it’s going to be,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the case, but I do think it takes innovation and creative thinking … to get us out of this mess.”

Offering the yet at students’ recovery from pandemic learning loss, the report showed that students actually made impressive academic gains last school year. But achievement gaps grew wider during the pandemic, and students in some high-poverty districts performed worse than they did before COVID.Ěý

“There’s a whole generation of kids, especially in poor districts, that are half a grade level or more behind still and are going to need extra help,” he said.

The crowd, composed of some of the nation’s top tutoring providers and researchers, wondered what they should do next. 

His answer satisfied few. Despite the high stakes and the imminent end of federal relief funding, many schools still don’t know which interventions are working. As states and districts rushed to hire tutors and sign contracts, many failed to record which programs helped students the most.Ěý

“It is amazing that the systems that we entrust with managing our own children’s learning are terrible at learning themselves,” he bluntly told attendees at the event, organized by Accelerate, an organization that works to scale high-dosage tutoring. “It is so frustrating to hear those questions being asked now when the federal dollars are about to run out.”Ěý

Those dollars — $122 billion from the 2021 American Rescue Plan — expire at the end of September. At a time when the research shows many students are still far behind, the U.S. Department of Education is a chance to spread out use of remaining funds until March 2026, especially if they use it to reduce absenteeism, provide intensive tutoring and extend learning time. But Kane said states should also seize the opportunity to better track which recovery strategies are helping students the most.Ěý

“I don’t mean to complain about water under the bridge, but let’s try to think of this going forward,” he said. 

Education department officials say they’re trying. , all districts will have to provide more details on how the funds were spent. Previously, districts had to show whether they provided summer learning, afterschool programs or tutoring to address learning loss. Now they’ll how much they’ve spent on those areas as well.Ěý

Districts also have to report how many students participated in high-dosage tutoring and “evidence-based” summer and afterschool programs and whether they came from traditionally disadvantaged groups such as low-income students, English learners or students with disabilities. And if states want to apply for an extension, they’ll need to submit a letter explaining how they would use the funds to reach the neediest students.Ěý

“We do want to know more from states and from districts about how they’re putting these dollars to use to support academic recovery,”  Roberto Rodriquez, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “Are we investing in some of these evidence-driven strategies?”

‘Students won’t have caught up’

Kane cited a previous lack of “federal leadership” on collecting such information and said states were hesitant to impose additional requirements not mandated by the 2021 relief fund law.

“States were in the back seat, watching districts make decisions on how to spend the money. They’ve been slow to get in the front seat,” he told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. He urged federal officials to “publicly challenge states” to continue recovery efforts. “As the recovery dollars are tapering down, it’s clear students won’t have caught up.”

According to , states had about $53 billion remaining in American Rescue Plan funds last November. Rodriquez said the department has received a lot of interest from states on extensions, but no applications yet. 

Even if they don’t get more time to spend the funds, districts still have this summer to focus on students who are furthest behind, Kane said. He recommended that states require districts to inform parents whether their children are below grade level in reading and math and then serve all who sign up for summer school.

Most parents are “fairly removed” from discussions about relief funds, said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that explains achievement data to parents. But she said they shouldn’t be misinformed about whether their children are far behind.

“They often think that’s someone else’s child, not their own,” she said. The , she said, reinforces how important it is that “parents know exactly where their children are academically at the end of the school year.” 

The Harvard study was conducted in partnership with Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon. The district-level results show that students made up  a third of the learning they lost in math and a quarter of the loss in reading. This was more than students typically gained in a year prior to the pandemic. Alabama, for example, saw the most improvement in math and was the only state to exceed pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

Three states rebounded past 2019 performance in reading: Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi. Black students made more progress between 2022 and 2023 than white and Hispanic students, but the achievement gap between white and Black students was still larger last year than it was before the pandemic. 

Despite the growth, most students performed below 2019 achievement levels, especially in high-poverty districts. In six states, the gap between high- and low-poverty districts grew wider in reading between 2019 and 2023. 

Virginia was one. 

“We were struggling to catch up, much less get a step ahead,” state Superintendent Lisa Coons told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. She added that officials “expect persistent learning loss.”

To supplement declining relief funds, the state added last fall for tutoring, improving literacy and reducing chronic absenteeism. While she said her state would likely ask for an extension, she wants districts to move away from a “buffet” of initiatives and choose programs that fit the effective models outlined in a new state . The resource provides details on how to choose students for tutoring and fit sessions into the school schedule.

“We need to continue to prune,” she said, “and work on the things that we know are showing results for our students.”

That’s essentially unchanged from last school year, but significantly worse than before the pandemic, when only 36% of students started school off track, the National Center for Education Statistics has found. 

Additionally, over 80% of the 1,026 schools that responded to the the latest survey said they’re providing some form of tutoring to help students catch up. But the latest post-pandemic snapshot reinforces the sense that the pace of academic recovery remains slow.Ěý

“We’ve got a long road ahead of us,” said Rachel Hansen, a project officer at NCES. 

Districts have about a year and a half left to decide the best way to use their share ofĚý$189 billion in federal pandemic relief funds. And with the clock ticking, some whether districts will be able to have a measurable impact on learning loss. About half of the administrators who responded to the latest survey said they’re spending relief funds on providing students with extra academic support and training staff to become tutors. But the survey, conducted in December, showed that just 1 in 10 students nationally received high-dosage tutoring.

Students are “not the same level of ready” they were before the pandemic, said Beth Lehr, assistant principal at Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson. “We had a major world event that upended a whole bunch of different things.”

Some students in this year’s junior and senior classes missed entire semesters of a course during their early high school years, when the pandemic was at its peak. The district tweaked its existing credit recovery program to allow those students to learn the material and graduate on time.Ěý

The NCES data found that schools are employing a variety of recovery strategiesĚýto get students back on grade level, including using assessments to identify their needs (88%), covering material students missed (81%) and holding longer classes (29%). Schools were least likely to extend the school day (19%) or extend the school year (10%).Ěý

The latest installment also provided a detailed look at schools’ efforts to implement high-dosage tutoring, which Stanford University researcher Susanna Loeb called the “best approach that we know for accelerating students’ learning” because it offers students help from “an adult who knows them, cares about them and has the tools to address their needs.” 

She has been tracking the implementation of large-scale tutoring efforts across the country as part of the and called the survey results “the most comprehensive information out there” on how schools are addressing learning loss.

More than a third of schools (37%) say they offer high-dosage tutoring, defined as at least a half hour of one-on-one or small group instruction three times a week with a trained educator. But less than a third of students in those schools participate, according to NCES.

Schools offering a high-impact model primarily lean on existing staff — teachers and aides — to provide it. And they’re more likely to schedule sessions during the school day, 64%, compared with 51% after school.

“Our teachers are our experts,” said Michael Randolph, principal at Leesburg High School in Leesburg, Florida, where about 150 to 200 students participate in tutoring sessions throughout the week. He said teachers have been willing to put in the extra time because they see the payoff. 

His school combines tutoring with twice-a-week remediation sessions added to the schedule the year COVID hit. He thinks those efforts contributed to the school ending last semester with the lowest number of D’s and F’s since he became principal six years ago.Ěý

But some schools responding to the survey faced ongoing barriers. Forty percent said they can’t find tutors and 49% said that even with relief funds, they lack the funding to hire them.

Lehr said it’s been hard to get teachers to add tutoring to their plate because they are “almost on empty.” If they’re “tapped out,” she added, it doesn’t make sense for them to tack two more hours of work onto their day for another $50.

Schools that are more likely to offer high-dosage tutoring, the data shows, serve elementary students, have high poverty rates and high minority populations and are located in cities. There are also regional differences, with schools in the South offering the most high-dosage tutoring (15%) and those in the Northeast offering the least (5%).

Fifty-nine percent of students receive what the researchers described as “standard” tutoring, which might still be in small groups, but not as frequent. And 22% have access to “self-paced” tutoring from an online provider. 

Those services are “useful supplements” for students who might need a little help in a subject area, Loeb said, but the less-intensive approaches are unlikely to “alter the trajectories of students who have disengaged in school or who have fallen far behind academically.” 

Randolph, at Leesburg High, said he thinks the best decision his district made with relief funds was to add a night school to accommodate students who still work jobs they took during the pandemic. The school has received $250,000 a year to run the program, but when relief funds run out, Randolph said he’ll have to find another way to fund it. About 50 students participate.Ěý

“A lot of our students took entry level jobs and became contributors to their households,” he said. When remote learning ended, he said, many students would have dropped out. “This has maintained students’ ability to stay in school.”

But the results from Curriculum Associates, which publishes the I-Ready assessments, also reveal how much work remains to be done: Fewer children in the early grades are developing essential phonics skills, they found. In fact, even more were below grade level in the spring of 2022 than there were a year ago — in third grade, 27%, compared to 24%.

The results in math reflect a similar trend. Performance for some students is not only below what it was in the years before schools shut down; it’s worse after a year of mostly in-person learning. In grades five through eight, for example, fewer students than ever are developing essential math skills like understanding place value, multiplication and fractions. 

“That first year back, they didn’t recover all the way,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates. 

Last year, teachers had more students below grade level than ever, Huff said, and the “whole classroom dynamic changed.” Foundational math and reading skills “are the two bridges where we’re seeing those gaps endure.” 

The findings follow the recent release of long-term achievement data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which revealed sharp declines in reading and math for the nation’s 9-year-olds. I-Ready, with results in first through eighth grade, serves a different purpose than the so-called “nation’s report card.” But the takeaways are similar: The pace of recovery is slow, and those who were struggling before the pandemic have the steepest hill to climb, particularly Black and low-income students.

Among I-Ready’s more encouraging signs, however, is that schools serving a majority of Black and Latino students saw the greatest gains in fourth grade in both reading and math. From a sample of almost 5,000 schools, over 300 exceeded expectations, despite serving students at least two years behind. Experts say the results show the need for well-targeted academic support.

“We don’t necessarily say everyone needs acceleration in all subjects for the next five years, but some kids will,” said Libby Pier, chief of staff at Education Analytics, a Madison, Wisconsin, nonprofit that monitors state data. “There are certain skills, certain students and certain schools where things are looking less or more dire.”

‘Wanted the data to tell us’ 

In the testing field, I-Ready is known as a diagnostic assessment — used to identify what students know and where skill gaps remain. After states canceled annual tests in 2020, schools relied more on I-Ready and similar assessments to better understand the pandemic’s impact. 

“They have continued to play an important role in providing more timely information to schools about recovery efforts,” Pier said. 

At Blakesburg Elementary School, among those s where students scored better than expected, Principal Tammy Davis began using I-Ready to monitor students’ reading comprehension skills and supplement a state test that focuses on fluency.

The school is located in a farming community in southeast Iowa. About 30% of students are low-income, and even though the school distributed Wi-Fi hotspots, many students lacked reliable internet during remote learning. After seeing “huge dips” in reading and math when schools reopened in the fall of 2020, teachers examined every student’s score on each category of the assessment. 

“I had a feeling where we were the lowest, but I wanted the data to tell us,” Davis said.

To build comprehension skills, teachers never stopped devoting time in the school day to social studies and science — even though many districts prioritized math and reading, said April Glosser, curriculum director in the Eddysville-Blakesburg-Fremont Community School District.

“If you’re reading something that you have nothing to connect to, it’s never going to make sense to you,” she said, pointing to a passage on the sport cricket. 

Teachers, she added, began to do more “think alouds” explaining  to students what to do if they ran into words or phrases they didn’t recognize or understand. The school’s sixth graders, who have always struggled, Davis said, saw significant growth, from 35% proficient in spring 2021 to  56% proficient last school year. Schoolwide, 74% were proficient, getting closer to the goal of 80%.

Emerging state results

Students at Blakesburg spent most of the 2020-21 school year in person, but that wasn’t the case in many other districts. Asstates begin to release test results from last school year, researchers plan to further examine links between remote learning and student achievement.

Also Tuesday, Brown University economist Emily Oster released of state test data confirming that learning loss was greater in districts that had more remote and hybrid instruction.

In Virginia, for example, just 5% of students attended districts with “high levels of in-person instruction” during the 2020-21 school year. In 2021, the percentage of students reaching proficiency in math and English language arts was 20.5 percentage points lower than in 2019. This year, it was still 12 percentage points lower.

In Louisiana, almost two-thirds of students learned mostly in person in 2020-21. Proficiency levels in 2021 and 2022 were 5.5 and 4.1 percentage points below 2019, respectively.

“Districts that had more remote learning during the pandemic have a much longer way to go,” Oster said in a statement.

Almost 90% of respondents to the latest School Pulse Panel survey from the National Center for Education Statistics blame pandemic-related disruptions, including quarantines and staff absences, for the lack of progress. But limited efforts to ramp up tutoring programs could also be a factor.

More than half of public schools reported using high-dosage tutoring to help students make up for lost learning, and many offered tutoring as part of summer learning and enrichment programs this year. 

But experts, including one charged with leading the U.S. Department of Education’s new effort to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors, offered a degree of skepticism. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher overseeing the , said that many schools have made strong efforts to provide tutoring. But they also relied largely on teachers, who have been stretched thin because of staffing shortages. 

A June of spending plans in over 5,000 districts, from FutureEd at Georgetown University, showed that 1,258 districts planned to implement tutoring..

“I can believe that half of schools attempted to provide tutoring and did so, at some scale, for some period of time,” he said. “I think it’s unlikely that half of schools have and are sustaining high-dosage tutoring at the scale that is needed or beneficial.”

As schools begin a fourth year touched by the pandemic, the data from almost 860 schools provides a glimpse into what school leaders and families can expect as students return to class. Leaders report significant staff burnout and ongoing concerns about filling both teaching and non-teaching positions. But with many educators saying last school year was the hardest they’ve ever been though, some are choosing to adopt a positive outlook toward the months ahead. 

“I honestly think that when we can get the social element under control — routines … and  breaking cell phone habits — we can get more than a year of material taught at a time,”  Jay Wamstead, an eighth grade math teacher at Campbell Middle School in Smyrna, Georgia, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

The hardest part of last year, he said, was teachers’ sense of how far behind students were socially. 

“I’m not sure we’ll be back to 2019 levels of ‘normal,’ but last year was insane for me as well as everyone I talked to,” he said.

Six of his math team’s 16 teachers left after last year, including two who taught at the school for over a decade. That means a lot of new faces this fall, and for some school leaders, additional holes to fill. 

‘Urgent needs’ 

Schools have an average of three teacher vacancies, with shortages hitting larger schools and those serving more poor and minority students the hardest, according to the survey. Rodriguez said staff shortages “are acute and they pose urgent needs.” It’s a frequent concern he hears from school and district leaders. 

On average, leaders were also still trying to fill three non-teaching positions, with multiple vacancies in transportation and custodial services. 

But shortages were an before the pandemic. And based on recent Bureau of Labor Statistics , the Pulse Panel data seems high, said Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. If every school had at least six vacancies, that would translate to 600,000 openings nationally. According to the federal data, there were 300,000 openings for both K-12 and higher education in June. 

Regardless, 84% of leaders expect hiring mental health professionals for this fall to be somewhat or very difficult, at a time when educators continue to report greater needs among students.

“It’s clear that we’re facing a youth mental health crisis in communities across our country,” Roberto Rodriquez, assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education, said during a call with reporters.

According to the survey, the majority of respondents reported providing mental health services, with more than 40% saying those efforts have been very or extremely effective at addressing students’ needs. 

But the Biden administration aims to do more. Rodriguez touted last week’s White House announcement to make almost $300 million in competitive available for mental health services in schools. Efforts will include adding more counselors, social workers and school psychologists and funding partnerships with higher education to get more people into the field. 

Schools have positions for mental health professionals “that are open for an entire school year that don’t get filled,” said Sasha Pudleski, director of advocacy at AASA, the School Superintendents Association. She added that while schools have expanded telehealth options to address mental health needs, they “would prefer to have someone full time.”

Amanda Fitzgerald, assistant deputy executive director at the American School Counselor Association, said states in the northeast tend to have an oversupply of school counseling graduates, but needs are greater in states such as Arizona, Oklahoma and Colorado.

The new grant programs will be helpful, she said, if they can remove barriers for those who lack full credentials. Some professionals, she said, have a background in mental health, but don’t have a school counselor license, and a lot of high school educators focus on college and career transitions, but lack mental health expertise.

“They don’t want to go back to school to get a similar degree when their end game is to still help people,” she said.Ěý

‘Don’t know what to expect’ 

The survey also sheds light on what school leaders believe have been the most helpful strategies to address learning loss. 

Forty-three percent said high-dosage tutoring — 30-minute, one-on-one or small group sessions at least three times a week — has been very or extremely effective at addressing gaps in students’ learning. About a quarter of respondents said their school also provided a high-quality tutoring model as part of their summer learning programs.   

The majority of respondents said their schools used remedial instruction — covering material from a prior grade level — to address learning gaps, but they didn’t think it was as effective as tutoring. Only about a third found remediation to be very or extremely effective. 

Another aspect of last year that was overwhelming for many teachers was the wide range of student learning needs within one classroom, said Katherine Holden, principal of Talent Middle School in Phoenix, Oregon. 

Federal funds, she said, have made it possible to hire additional staff and purchase materials to give students the specific practice they need. She’s also relieved that she was able to fill all of her open positions and hire  full-time substitutes in case  teachers need to be out.

But she said she’ll have to continue to be “aggressive” about reducing absenteeism so students can benefit.

“We’re probably cautiously optimistic,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “But if these last two years have taught us anything it’s that you don’t know what to expect.”

When her daughter entered Huntington Park High School in Los Angeles this fall, Vega asked if tutoring was available, but was told only students with F’s or a teacher’s referral were eligible.

Vega picked up extra shifts cleaning offices on nights and weekends to pay the $470 a month to get a private tutor. She wonders, however, why that was necessary: The Los Angeles Unified School District is receiving in federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan — 20 percent of which has to be spent to address learning loss, according to the law. 

“The district is really …concentrating on people getting their vaccines,” Vega said in Spanish through an interpreter. “Let’s let doctors and pediatricians do their job and focus on that. The district needs to focus on learning loss and getting to a good academic level.”

Under the law, tutoring is just one way districts can address learning disruption caused by the pandemic. But with research showing that so-called can provide struggling students the academic boost they need, both parents and policymakers expected to see districts use relief funds on such programs.

Thus far, however, the enthusiasm over tutoring has not translated into widespread adoption. A from Burbio, which tracks schools’ responses to the pandemic, shows that out of 1,037 districts nationally, only about a third are spending federal relief funds on tutoring. The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s ongoing review shows that while 62 out of 100 large districts offer tutoring, most don’t provide details on their programs and how many students they serve. 

Some districts have addressed learning loss by lengthening the school day or providing small group instruction. Others that have launched tutoring programs either restrict services to specific students or limit the number of sessions available. A shortage of available tutors has only exacerbated the problem.

“There is good research that high-dosage tutoring has really transformative potential and it’s also true that school systems are struggling mightily to meet the demand,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change.

In October, another Los Angeles Unified parent, Ada Mendoza, was offered tutoring for her two youngest children twice-a-week at Manchester Avenue Elementary School. One hitch: It only lasted a month.

She signed them up, but had doubts that a month would be enough to make up for a year of distance learning. Eight-year-old Juan Jose was beginning to read when schools shifted to remote instruction, but now struggles with words of three or more syllables, reading comprehension and writing complete sentences.

Her children got the flu in October and missed some sessions. She said Juan Jose’s teacher told her he is still reading far below grade-level. “They lost a lot of learning, and they need a lot of help,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

According to the district, tutoring is available for children with disabilities, long-term English learners in grades three through eight, and foster, homeless and low-income students “based on performance indicators as identified by school sites.”

Mendoza said she can’t afford a private tutor, but some parents have gone that route. October from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that 3 in 10 families with at least one school-age child had spent their first three monthly child tax credit payments on school-related expenses, including tutoring and afterschool programs.

“Guess we’re not all spending it on getting our nails done and filet mignon,” quipped Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization. The group’s recent polling showed that more than a third of parents consider not having enough tutoring or to be a major or moderate problem.

The union has launched — or EPIC — a “watchdog campaign” to follow the $122 billion K-12 schools are receiving through the relief bill. And in Los Angeles, Vega has joined other Los Angeles parents taking part in the nonprofit , which monitors how the district is using relief money to help students get back on grade level.  

Parent Revolution, another Los Angeles advocacy group, wants the district to create an “ for every student. Even if students can get free tutoring, it’s often a “blanket approach” that might not target their needs, said Jay Artis-Wright, executive director of the organization. 

“We work with populations of families who have academic challenges that preceded COVID and now have a wider gap,” she said. “There is a surplus of funds that can support them, but only if we can agree that each child’s academic recovery is unique and should be treated as such.”

‘This giant puzzle’

Districts that have launched tutoring programs say they can’t serve everyone — especially as a tight labor market and quarantine requirements continue to fuel personnel shortages.

The Metro Nashville Public Schools, for example, has been able to sign up 500 tutors — a mix of teachers, paraprofessionals and community volunteers, said Keri Randolph, the district’s chief strategy officer. But that’s half the number they had planned to recruit, which means less than 1,000 students are receiving tutoring instead of the 2,000 the district expected to enroll through its $19 million Accelerating Scholars program.

The Delta variant, Randolph said, affected the size of the volunteer pool and she wasn’t as successful hiring retired teachers as she’d hoped. 

The program — 30-minute sessions, three times a week for 10 weeks — currently targets low-performing first- through third-graders in literacy and eighth- and ninth-graders in math. 

“It’s this giant puzzle,” Randolph said, adding that tutoring is “hot right now, but people have no idea how hard it is.” 

Staff members at the 46 schools now offering tutoring manage the schedule so teachers aren’t “overburdened,” she said. The district tries to schedule the tutoring sessions during the regular school day to avoid the need for extra transportation.

But there are exceptions. Kindall Maupin, who has a daughter in eighth grade at DuPont Hadley Middle School in the district, was only offered a 7:30 a.m. slot for math tutoring — a time that doesn’t work because her daughter has ADHD and can’t focus that early in the morning.

“I feel like if they can have football practice and cheerleading practice at the end of the day, why can’t we do this then,” Maupin said. She added that she’s even considered refinancing her house to afford private tutoring. “I have been there, literally sitting down to crunch the numbers to see how I could do this.”

Maybe next semester

Experts said the current pressures on local districts affect whether they can pull off a new program on a large scale. 

“Many educators are understandably exhausted from these past 18 months of school disruptions,” said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. “Implementing a new program — no matter how much funding is available for it or how much research supports its effectiveness — takes effort.”

Jonathan Travers, a partner with Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts address budgeting and staffing challenges, said many districts have contracted with vendors to give students 24-hour access to online homework help.

“We are trying to be clear that that is not the same thing” as high-dosage tutoring, he said, but added that with districts focusing on filling vacancies and managing quarantines, some are only now shifting to “actually putting canoes out in the pond around accelerating learning.” 

That doesn’t stop districts from adding tutoring programs next semester, he said. And he added that some who are frustrated with the pace of implementation may push for districts to reimburse parents spending their own money on tutoring.

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, alluded to Travers’s idea in an this week, suggesting that districts share some of those federal funds with parents who are spending their own time and money helping students catch up. 

“Given all the labor shortages, and the willingness to pay parents for , it is interesting that districts haven’t done more to go the route of paying parents to tutor their kids,” she said in an interview. “We thought we’d see some by now.”

Randolph, in Nashville, said she thinks her district needs to do a better job of communicating the other ways the district is to address learning loss, such as funding $18 million for summer school and $6 million for computer-based literacy and math programs.

“It’s not just tutoring or nothing,” she said.

Still, she said leaders plan to continue tutoring beyond this period of recovery. That’s one reason why the district decided to build the program in-house, instead of contracting with a private provider, which can cost per student for a year. That’s not a sustainable solution, Randolph said. The district is spending $400 per student for the 10-week period.

“We don’t think tutoring is just for a COVID response,” she said. “If it’s the right thing to do now, it’s the right thing to do later.”

In the COVID-19 Data Dispatch’s “Opening” series, we profiled five school communities that successfully reopened during the 2020-2021 school year. In each one, the majority of the district’s or school’s students returned to in-person learning by the end of the spring semester — and officials identified COVID-19 cases in under 5% of the student population.

Through exploring these success stories, we found that the schools used many similar strategies to build trust with their communities and keep COVID-19 case numbers down.

These are the five communities we profiled:

• Scott County School District 1 in Austin, Indiana: This small district faced a major HIV/AIDS outbreak in 2015, leading to an open line of communication between Austin’s county public health agency, school administrators, and other local leaders fostering an environment of collaboration and trust during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Garrett County Public Schools in Maryland: In a rural, geographically spaced-out county, this district built trust with its community by utilizing local partnerships, providing families with crucial supplies, setting up task forces to plan reopening, and communicating extensively with parents.
• Andrews Independent School District in Texas: This West Texas district prioritized personal responsibility, giving families information to make individual choices about their children’s safety. Outdoor classes and other measures also helped keep cases down.
• Port Orford-Langlois School District 2CJ in Oregon: In two tiny towns on the coast of Oregon, this district built up community trust and used a cautious, step-by-step reopening strategy to make it through the 2020-2021 school year with zero cases identified in school buildings.
• P.S. 705 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York: This elementary school brought 55% of students back to in-person class, well above the New York City average (40%), by utilizing comprehensive parent communication and surveillance testing of students and staff.

Here are 11 major lessons we identified from the districts that kept their communities safe.

1. Collaboration with the public health department is key.

In , an existing relationship between the local school district and local public health department, built during the town’s HIV/AIDS outbreak in 2015, streamlined COVID-19 communication. The district and public health department worked together to plan school reopening, while district residents — already familiar with the health department’s HIV prevention efforts — quickly got on board with COVID-19 safety protocols.

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Garrett County’s school district, in Maryland, worked with their local public health department on making tests available to students and staff. The Andrews County district, in Texas, also collaborated with the county health agency on testing and on identifying student cases in fall 2020 — though the relationship fractured later in the school year due to differing opinions on the level of safety measures required in schools.

“What the CDC basically said is that each school has to become a little health department in its own right,” said Katelyn Jetelina, epidemiologist at the University of Texas and author of the newsletter; but “schools don’t have the expertise to do that,” she said. As a result, public health departments themselves may be valuable sources of scientific knowledge for school leaders.

“What’s ideal — and I’ve only seen this happen a few times — is, if there is literally someone from the health department embedded in the school district,” added Robin Cogan, legislative co-chair for the New Jersey State School Nurses Association and author of the blog.

2. Community partnerships can fill gaps in school services.

In addition to public health departments, there are other areas where partnerships outside a school may be beneficial; partnering up to address technology and space needs was a particular theme in this project. In Oregon, the relied on the local public library to provide technology services, space for after-school homework help, wifi outside school hours, and even extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, in , the school district worked with churches, community centers, and other centrally-located institutions to provide both wifi and food to district families.

Both of these rural districts faced challenges with online learning, as many families did not have wifi at home. By expanding internet access through community partnerships, the districts enabled families to keep up kids’ online learning — while showing parents that school staff were capable of meeting their needs, building trust for future in-person semesters.

3. Communication with parents should be preemptive and constant.

Strong communication was one theme that resonated across all five profiles. In a tumultuous pandemic school year, parents wanted to know exactly what their schools were doing and why; the districts we profiled offered ample opportunities for parents to quickly get updates and ask questions.

For example, at , administrators held weekly town hall meetings — segmented by grade level — and staffed a “virtual open office,” available on a daily basis for parents to log on and ask questions. Jetelina said that such forums are an ideal opportunity for “two-way communication,” in which administrators could both talk to parents and listen to feedback.

Andrews County also held a town hall for parent questions prior to the start of the 2020 school year. In Garrett County, administrators updated (currently 22 pages) whenever a parent reached out with a question. This district, P.S. 705, and Port Orford-Langlois all gave parents the opportunity to talk to school staff in one-on-one phone calls.

Cogan pointed out that parents like to be reached on different platforms, such as text messages, Facebook, and Google classroom; by giving parents multiple options, districts may ensure that all parent questions are asked and answered.

4. Require masks, and model good masking for kids.

Mask requirements in schools have become , with some parents enthusiastically supporting them while others refuse to send their children to school with any face covering. But against COVID-19 spread, especially for children who are too young to be vaccinated.

And yes, evidence shows that young children can get used to wearing a mask all day. In the , Principal Krista Nieraeth credits responsible masking among students to their parents. Though the community leans conservative, she said, parents modeled mask-wearing for their kids, understanding the importance of masking up to prevent the coronavirus from spreading at school. Some parents even donated homemade masks to the district for students and teachers.

As Delta spreads, Cogan said, it’s important that districts require “properly fitting masks that are worn correctly” to ensure that students are fully protected.

5. Regular testing can prevent cases from turning into outbreaks.

leaned into the surveillance COVID-19 testing program organized by the New York City Department of Education. The city required schools to test 20% of on-site students and staff once a week, from December 2020 through the end of the spring semester; P.S. 705 tested far above this requirement during the winter months, when cases were high in Brooklyn. The testing allowed this school to identify cases among asymptomatic students, quarantine classes, and stop those isolated cases from turning into outbreaks.

School COVID-19 testing programs should test students frequently, Jetelina said. “But what’s even more important than regular testing is it’s not biased testing,” meaning the tests are required for all in-person students. Voluntary testing, she said, would be more likely to include only the families who are also more likely to follow other safety protocols.

More districts are now working to set up regular testing programs for fall 2021, using , Cogan said. If regular testing isn’t possible, it’s still crucial for a district to make tests easily available — with timely results, in under 24 hours — to a student’s close contacts when a case is identified at school. Both the Garrett County and Andrews County school districts worked with their local public health departments to make such testing possible.

6. Improve ventilation and hold classes outside where possible.

In addition to funding for COVID-19 testing, the American Rescue Plan for improvements to school ventilation systems. The Garrett County and Austin, Indiana school districts both took advantage of this funding to upgrade HVAC systems in their buildings and buy portable air filtration units.

In — where the West Texas weather stays warm through much of the year — the school district opted for more natural ventilation: opening doors and windows, and holding class outside whenever possible. The extra time outdoors was also beneficial to the mental health of students who had been cooped up indoors in spring 2020, administrators said.

Still, outdoor class may not be possible for districts in urban areas, Cogan said. In these schools, windows and doors may be locked down to protect against a different public health crisis: the threat of gun violence.

7. Schools may still be focusing too much on cleaning.

In July 2020, Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, : many businesses and public institutions were devoting time and resources to deep-cleaning — even though numerous scientific studies had demonstrated that the virus primarily spreads through the air, not through surface contact.

More than a year later, hygiene theater is alive and well in many school districts, COVID-19 Data Dispatch interviews with school administrators revealed. When we asked in interviews, “What were your safety protocols?”, administrators often jumped to deep-cleaning and bulk hand sanitizers. Ventilation would come up later, after additional questioning. At the Andrews County district, for example, custodians would clean a classroom once a case was identified — but close contacts of the infected student were not required to quarantine.

“Cleaning high-touch areas is very important in schools,” Cogan said. But mask-wearing, physical distancing, vaccinations, and other measures are “higher protective factors.”

8. Give agency to parents and teachers in protecting their kids.

Last school year, many districts used temperature checks and symptom screenings as an attempt to catch infected students before they gave the coronavirus to others. But , such formalized screenings proved less useful than teachers’ and parents’ intuition. Instructors could identify when a student wasn’t feeling well and ask them to go see the nurse, even if that student passed a temperature check.

Jetelina said that teachers and parents can both act as a layer of protection, stopping a sick child from entering the classroom. “Parents are pretty good at understanding the symptoms of their kids and the health of their kids,” she said.

, district administrators provided parents with information on COVID-19 symptoms and entrusted those parents to determine when a child may need to stay home from school. The Texas district may have “gone way overboard with giving parents agency,” though, Cogan said, in allowing students to opt out of quarantines and mask-wearing — echoing concerns from the Andrews County public health department.

9. We need more granular data to drive school policies.

The COVID-19 Data Dispatch has a on . The federal government still does not provide such data, and most states offer scattered numbers that don’t provide crucial context for cases (such as in-person enrollment or testing figures). Without these numbers, it is difficult to compare school districts and identify success stories.

The “Opening” project also illuminated another data issue: Most states are not providing any COVID-19 metrics down to the individual district, making it hard for school leaders to know when they must tighten down on or loosen safety protocols. At the tiny Port Orford-Langlois district in Oregon, for example, administrators had to rely on COVID-19 numbers for their overall county. Even though the district had zero cases in fall 2020, it wasn’t able to bring older students back in person until the spring because outbreaks in another part of the county drove up case numbers. Cogan has observed similar issues in New Jersey.

At a local level, school districts may work with their local public health departments to get the data they need for more informed decision-making, Jetelina said. But at a larger, systemic level, getting granular COVID-19 data is more difficult — a job for the federal government.

10. Invest in school staff and invite their contributions to safety strategies.

School staff who spoke to the COVID-19 Data Dispatch for this project described working long hours, familiarizing themselves with the science of COVID-19, and exercising immense determination and creativity to provide their students with a decent school experience. Teaching is typically a challenging job, but in the last eighteen months, it has become heroic — even though many people outside school environments take this work for granted, Jetelina said.

Districts can thank their staff by giving them a say in school safety decisions, Cogan recommended. “Educators, they’ve had a God-awful time and had a lot more put on them,” she said. But “every single person that works in a school has as well.” That includes custodians, cafeteria workers, and — crucially — school nurses, who Cogan calls the “chief wellness officer” of the school.

11. Allow students and staff the space to process pandemic hardship.

About 117,000 children in the U.S. have lost one or both parents during the pandemic, . Thousands more have lost other relatives, mentors, and friends — while millions of children have faced job loss in their families, food and housing insecurity, and other hardships. Even if a school district has all the right safety logistics, school staff cannot truly support students unless they allow time and space to that they’ve faced.

P.S. 705 in Brooklyn may serve as a model for this practice. School staff preemptively reached out to families when a student missed class, offering support. “705 is just the kind-of place where it is a ‘wrap your arms around the whole family’ kind-of a school,” one parent said.

On the first day of school in September 2021 — when many students returned in-person for the first time since spring 2020 — the school held a moment of silence for loved ones that the school community has lost.

Betsy Ladyzhets is the founder and editor-in-chief of the , a publication exploring the state of COVID-19 data in the United States.

Enter American Rescue Plan’s Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, about $200 billion with $22 billion dedicated specifically to address learning loss using “evidence-based interventions” focused on the “.”

This historically large investment provides an unprecedented opportunity to learn what kinds of interventions work well for America’s students — but we will squander this opportunity if state officials don’t create the right infrastructure to make sense of what is taking place.

The U.S. has nearly 14,000 school districts making choices around COVID recovery. Districts are likely to try different recovery strategies, but we won’t be able to learn about these approaches without officials collecting the right information, including which students are getting them.Ěý

This requires a degree of collective action currently lacking among states. The window of opportunity is short to get this right. With loose federal requirements, states and districts need to assume the lead role in ensuring ESSER funds change the trajectory of students’ lives.Ěý

Our team recently analyzed state ESSER plans to better understand the level of guidance provided around recovery initiatives (described in more detail in a recent CALDER ). Most state plans call for programs that specifically target students who have been hit hardest by the pandemic. However, they’re often hazy on the specifics of how such targeting will take place.

ĚýThe plans tend to include little information on how students will be identified for interventions or how interventions will be matched to specific student learning goals. They are even more vague on data collection, with general language indicating they will collect data required for the ESSER reporting, but only about half the plans explicitly described concrete steps for how they will collect data on the impact of ARP ESSER funded programs.

How can states increase the likelihood that ESSER spending leads to collective learning? At a minimum, states should mandate reporting around three specific questions:

• What recovery interventions are districts using and what are their key features?
• Which students are targeted for recovery efforts?
• Which students are actually participating in and regularly attending recovery initiatives?

More broadly, states hold powerful levers they can use to increase the likelihood that districts will be equipped to support and learn from individualized intervention programs. These include, but are not limited to:Ěý

• Building Capacity for Local Data Use: Local data is more timely and detailed than state data, yet, many districts struggle with the capacity to analyze and use data resources effectively to target individual students’ needs. States can use their funds to increase districts’ capacity to identify and address students’ individual needs by, for example, creating opportunities for enhancing local data systems, for professional development, or for regional data supports.Ěý
• Contributing to a Culture of Learning and Continuous Improvement: Ultimately, states and districts have an incredible responsibility to help students recover from the pandemic and achieve their full potential, and should be held accountable for this responsibility. At the same time, it is likely some interventions and other ESSER-funded activities along the way will not work. States can create opportunities that focus on the importance of continuous improvement, while equipping districts to engage in that work too.Ěý
• Encouraging Student, Family, and Community Engagement: Fundamental to the idea of offering individualized support is student and family engagement, without which districts will have an incomplete picture of the interventions that are needed and will work. At the same time that states encourage evidence-based academic interventions and supports, they should help equip districts to foster authentic engagement opportunities that can help shape the use of ESSER funds.Ěý
• Peer to Peer Networking and professional development: Because states have cross-district data, they often have greater insight into which districts are struggling with similar challenges. States can use their data to connect similar districts who face similar challenges, creating opportunities for those districts to share knowledge, experiences, and resources.
• Using Cross-Sector State Level Data: States generally have extensive data resources that they can use to help districts understand where individual students are in their learning and identify students at-risk. States can enhance their reporting tools so that districts have access to actionable information about their students (e.g., Early Warning Systems, individual-level assessment reports tied to state curriculum standards).
• Grant Opportunities Requiring Individualized Supports: States may use state activity funds to create grant programs that target a high-need area (e.g., chronic absenteeism, math) and require districts to implement and collect data on targeted interventions as part of the grant program.Ěý

That this is an unprecedented amount of federal funding to be spent over just four years cannot be overstated. To consider both the urgent needs of today with what we will need to know in the next three to five years is a balancing act. If we focus only on the immediate needs of the moment, we will miss the opportunity to answer the key questions that could shape the next several decades of education policy. We urge state and district leaders to keep broader learning goals top of mind as they design, implement, and adjust learning acceleration efforts.Ěý

Heather Boughton, Ph.D., is director of research, evaluation & advanced analytics at the Ohio Department of Education. Jessica de Barros is director of policy, practice & outreach for the CALDER Policymakers Council at American Institutes for Research. Dan Goldhaber is vice president and director of research for CALDER for the American Institutes for Research. Sydney Payne is a research assistant for CALDER at the American Institutes for Research. Nate Schwartz is a professor of practice at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform.