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It’s 3:45 p.m., an hour since the final bell rang at Ella Risk Elementary School, but Patricia Montalvo’s classroom is still full. She points to the white board, prompting the class of third and fourth graders — many of whom immigrated to the country within the last year — to read a word that’s broken down by syllable: ex | er | cise.

Public school districts still have tens of billions in federal funds to spend helping kids make up the learning they lost to Covid, but some experts worry that so far schools have spent too much of that money making long-delayed fixes to run-down physical facilities.

Summer learning programs remain robust heading into the fourth summer after the pandemic began, as they continue to be bolstered by federal COVID-19 emergency funds and heightened attention to academic recovery and mental well-being.

Gov. Jared Polis and lawmakers hope to reach 50,000 Colorado students struggling with math skills through after-school tutoring while also offering more training to teachers and even parents.

An infusion of federal COVID-19 relief funding is helping states expand high-quality tutoring initiatives, but the work has faced challenges in both quality and scalability, a new report from the Council of Chief State School Officers said.

The percentage of third graders on track in reading hasn’t budged since this time last year, new data shows — a reminder of the literacy setbacks experienced by kindergartners when schools shut down in 2020.

An overwhelming majority of school district leaders this year are eyeing the finish line for federal COVID relief dollars and pondering a future without them.

The air-conditioning gave out as students returned from summer break last year to Jim Hill High School in Jackson, Miss., forcing them to learn in sweltering heat. By Thanksgiving, students were huddling under blankets because the heat wasn’t working.

Last spring, as Chicago schools were grappling with how to recover from the pandemic, district CEO Pedro Martinez urged campuses to go big and bold on summer school without worrying about the price tag.

For the past couple of years, the Detroit Public Schools Community District has been able to tap its share of federal COVID relief aid to fund after-school enrichment programs that help students recover from learning lost during the pandemic.

When students returned to school in 2021 after months of virtual learning during the pandemic, Dallas ISD knew it would need to address learning gaps.

In March of 2020, just as district recruiters were ramping up for their peak season, in-person job fairs came to a grinding halt. What had long been the main method of attracting and vetting the upcoming year’s crop of teachers suddenly was no longer accessible.

The pandemic’s devastating impact on student learning provided an opportunity for community leaders in Indianapolis and around the country to think about summer learning differently. Rather than the traditional out-of-school program focus on remediation, students need access to grade-level content in order to truly accelerate their learning.

It was the first day of the 2021 fall semester and Ajah Johnson could not believe what her teachers were telling her. By the end of the course, the instructors said, she and her peers would get to choose how to spend $10,000 to upgrade their school however they decided was best.

The North Carolina House K-12 Education Committee passed a bill Jan. 31 that directs federal COVID-19 relief dollars to fund a new software program for remedying learning loss.

The Kansas Education Enrichment Program, once fully implemented, will give eligible families a one-time, $1,000 award per student meant to help pay for educational goods and services like tutoring and school supplies, as part of an effort to recover missed learning opportunities during the pandemic.

Why is it that some states, like Alabama, have more than $1,000 to spend on each student for each week of pandemic learning loss, and other states, such as Massachusetts have only $165?

As of last school year, the pandemic’s academic damage persists for students around the world—a loss equal to some 35 percent of a typical school year’s progress, according to the first meta-analysis of global learning loss, published this morning in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Clark County School District (CCSD) in Nevada, has made Lexia LETRS® (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) professional learning programs available to most elementary schools in the district with a plan to continue expanding the program to additional elementary and early childhood teachers and administrators. Offered by Lexia, a Cambium Learning Group company, LETRS professional learning programs provide educators with the deep knowledge required to be literacy and language experts in the science of reading.

The program, set up by the state education department in April 2021 with federal COVID-19 relief funds, aimed to personalize districts’ approaches to combating student absences by sending a school employee or community volunteer to families’ homes to help find solutions to problems getting their kids into the classroom.

One year ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona issued a charge to schools still reeling from months of remote instruction during the pandemic: Students who fell behind should receive at least 90 minutes of tutoring each week.

At the moment, school districts are essentially sitting on a gold mine of free money to spend at their discretion, as long as it’s used to provide relief in an area that was impacted as a result of the pandemic.

Over the past three years, the pandemic has transformed American society in ways that we’re still grappling with. Now you can add one more: It seems to have devastated Americans’ belief that K-12 education should prepare young people for college.

Tracy Compton knew her fourth-grader needed tutoring to make up for what she missed during the pandemic. But when the Virginia mother learned about the online program offered by her well-regarded suburban school system, her heart sank.

Districts’ struggles to implement widescale, academically intensive interventions stunted their ability to boost students’ academic performance, regardless of the recovery approach they used, according to new research.

About 43%, or $6.1 billion, of federal COVID-19 emergency funds that states have passed on to districts were used to meet students’ academic, social, emotional and other needs.

Pickford: These state leaders are following the evidence and the expertise of local educators to help schools make up for lost learning

One in three Illinois students missed at least a month’s worth of school last year.

Wakelyn: Tracking the same students from grade to grade makes clear the decline in middle school math is four times greater than the drop in English

Earlier this month, more than two years into schools’ attempts to spend an unprecedented $189 billion in COVID relief funds, federal officials released a 97-page document that “strongly encourages” districts not to spend the windfall on construction.

With $300 Million in pandemic funds, 50 recovery strategies and 2 years to tweak plans, district vows to gather data, evaluate, and pivot in real-time.

New research on post-pandemic student achievement presents a sobering picture, offering a reality check for anyone who might think recovery is proceeding apace. The study, from CALDER, an American Institutes for Research (AIR) program working with seven universities, suggests school districts should do more. “We need more kids to get more hours of interventions,” said CALDER’s Dan Goldhaber.

A new program wants to help Indiana teachers get licensed to teach the state’s growing population of English language learners. The Indiana Teacher of English Language Learners (I-TELL) program will pay for tuition and fees for current educators to earn the additional licensure they need to become teachers of record for students who are learning English. It’s a partnership between the Indiana Department of Education and University of Indianapolis’ Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning.

The pandemic hindered access to federally funded Head Start programs for young children living in poverty, exacerbating inequities in enrollment, staff salaries and quality of services, said a report released Thursday by the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Enrollment of homeless students dropped by 14% — from 1,280,886 to 1,099,221 — between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, according to data released Wednesday in one of the first official federal counts documenting how the pandemic impacted this population.

Most school districts adopted their budgets last spring, long before state and national test scores laid out the extent of pandemic declines, particularly in math. That’s why some school finance experts are urging districts to redirect some of their plans for federal relief funds toward learning recovery before that money is actually spent.

School systems are using tried-and-true, along with creative, approaches to add and keep teachers, the FutureEd research found. Using information that data services firm Burbio gathered from 5,000 district ARP spending plans, as well as documents from the nation’s 100 largest school systems, researchers found myriad examples of how the pandemic funding is influencing traditional models in the teaching profession. ARP funds must be obligated by Sept. 30, 2024.

Student recovery from the pandemic will come with a huge price—$700 billion, a new study finds—and, so far, federal COVID-relief aid isn’t covering it.

A new EdWeek Market Brief survey reveals shifts in school systems’ priorities for spending federal emergency aid, compared with a year ago.

Much of the conversation around academic recovery has focused on providing additional instructional time: strategies like one-on-one tutoring, or summer learning programs.

Recent trends indicate there’s been a significant shift in enrollment numbers among public schools since the pandemic. Unfortunately for many districts, declining enrollment is not something they can afford, and it encapsulates more than simply a decrease in student numbers.

Schools have been looking for ways to support student mental health needs, and COVID relief dollars made a lot of that possible. We look at what that looks like one school in Oakland, California.

Schools that closed their doors the longest due to COVID have spent just a fraction of the billions in federal relief funds targeted to students who suffered the most academically, according to an analysis by The 74.

At the conclusion of the 2021-22 academic year, I visited schools and districts in Tennessee that are a part of the statewide tutoring program, the TN All Corps. I observed many students and tutors working together in the pursuit of catching up in their math learning. At each I visited, I witnessed sparks going off. Kids were truly engaged in learning math. In the face of two-plus years of pandemic-era learning, this left me feeling hopeful.

When school buildings closed in March 2020 due to COVID-19, educators, sector experts and researchers all had their hunches: test scores would drop, gaps would widen, achievement would reverse. Since then, a plethora of surveys and anecdotal evidence have supported those theories. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education confirmed them.

Although the ARP funds, which total $121.9 billion, were meant to be a temporary boost to school coffers in response to pandemic setbacks, district leaders said more time is needed to provide additional support to students.

Two decades of growth for American students in reading and math were wiped away by just two years of pandemic-disrupted learning, according to national test scores released this morning.

National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.

Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades, according to the first nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later.

The district leaders’ letter focuses on the liquidation — or spending — deadline for $121.9 billion for pre-K-12 in the American Rescue Plan, also known as ESSER III. Districts would still need to obligate — or commit to spending — those funds by the Sept. 30, 2024, deadline, but the extension deadline could allow them to draw down those funds until March 31, 2026.

Even as COVID-19 infections continue to fluctuate, roughly one-third of the country’s largest school districts are ending their remote learning programs this fall, according to a new review by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

The Biden administration released a new tool aimed at helping parents hold districts accountable for their use of federal COVID-19 relief funds as the 2024 spending deadline approaches

Deirdre Pilch has spent much of her career as an educator frustrated. The superintendent of schools in Greeley, Colorado — a high-poverty district 50 miles north of Denver — has never felt she’s had the money to provide students the education they deserve. Remarkably, it took a pandemic to change this.

Students have begun to narrow pandemic-era learning gaps, but the delays in learning are significant and in many cases, the recorded progress is disproportionate, several data points from the 2021-22 school year show.

In Tulsa this summer, young people explored museums and grew garden veggies. In Baltimore, they built robots and learned Black history. In St. Paul, they immersed themselves in languages like French, Mandarin, Hmong and Dakota.

Education finance experts warn that school districts’ budgets are “headed for a wild ride” in the coming years. Due to an influx of federal pandemic relief funding, most school districts are currently experiencing an increase in spending that will last until approximately the 2023-24 school year.

Mississippi student test scores are exceeding pre-pandemic levels in two subjects after a decline the previous year, according to results released Thursday by the state Department of Education. The statewide results from the 2021-22 Mississippi Academic Assessment Program show a boost in test scores for English language arts and science. The percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced reached what the department said is an all-time high of 42.2% in English and 55.9% in science. Students scored 47.3% in mathematics, just shy of the pre-pandemic rate of 47.4%.

On Monday, the superintendent of a small rural school district in North Dakota picked up a teacher at the airport who was recruited from the Philippines. This sort of outsourcing has become more common among rural districts pushing to fill workforce shortages, something that does not often happen in the more urban, larger districts, said Laurie Matzke, assistant state superintendent of the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction.

The research included results from a variety of widely used national assessments, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and Long-Term Trend Assessment, as well as international assessments like the Program for International Student Assessment and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.

More than half of schools have implemented strategies to address mental health, meet students’ needs, and offer high-dosage tutoring. Specifically, 72% of public schools implemented strategies for mental health, 79% used diagnostic assessment data to identify individual needs, and 56% used high-dosage tutoring methods. That’s according to the latest data from the 2022 School Pulse Panel released by the Institute of Education Sciences.

The competition for labor has never been more intense. In the private sector, the percentage of workers quitting their jobs recently hit an all-time high, as millions of employees searched for higher pay and better working conditions.

Time for another confession: I was THAT kid in elementary school. You know the one who always raised their hand, even when they didn’t really have the answer? That was me – until around 5th grade, when that naive confidence faded and I started saving my moments for when I knew I was right.

But here’s the thing today: in the scramble to catch up from these past two pandemic-disrupted school years, we don’t have the luxury of waiting to be sure interventions are perfectly right. That’s why I’m so inspired by states and districts that are raising their hands with ideas and solutions during such challenging times.

The Collaborative for Student Success added 18 new promising educational practices to EduRecoveryHub.org today, as well as updates on education recovery efforts in Connecticut, North Dakota, and Tennessee. The additions strengthen the EduRecoveryHub platform and assist state and district leaders, educators, and advocates heading into the 2022-23 school year by identifying promising practices funded by federal recovery dollars—practices that can be emulated across states.

The local and regional nuances of teacher shortages mean there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to solving the problem.
“In reality, local context drives a lot more of the specific needs of schools and districts,” said Shannon Holston, chief of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit that works to improve teacher quality.

The hallways at Self-Development Academy in Mesa in July are abuzz. While many students across Arizona are enjoying their annual vacation, some remain in the classroom, meticulously forming handfuls of toothpicks into pyramids while others make their own traditional tunics.

“Our results show that schools, district leaders, and community groups should consider increasing their investments in summer programs as an evidence-based strategy to aid in pandemic-related educational recovery, particularly for children whose learning has been placed most at risk,” said study co-author Kathleen Lynch, an assistant professor of learning sciences at the University of Connecticut.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday announced Engage Every Student — a partnership with five leading organizations to bring information and research about out-of-school-time programs together into one “centralized, readily available location.” The department will seek applications from an outside organization for a $3-$4 million contract in next year’s budget to run the initiative.

With a third pandemic summer underway, the Biden administration’s new push to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors is getting a late start in helping students recover from academic and social-emotional setbacks. Organizers and experts say it could be 2023 before families and schools see the impact.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of adults surveyed say the country has given too little priority to the educational needs of K-12 students during the pandemic. Close to another third (31%) say about the right amount has been given, while a scant 6% say there’s been too much priority.

Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, said in a statement the organization is “thrilled” with the clarity the department provided to the timeline school systems have to complete “desperately needed” school facilities projects and HVAC upgrades.

The South Carolina Department of Education is partnering with South Carolina Afterschool Alliance to disperse $14.5 million of ESSER money into after-school programs across the state.

The District’s slow background check process is preventing critical tutoring and after school programs from operating at full-capacity, according to multiple education nonprofit leaders, who say they have prospective employees and volunteers waiting months for clearance to enter school buildings.

Clarksville-Montgomery County School System, in partnership with Austin Peay State University, launched the first registered grow-your-own teacher apprenticeship program approved by the U.S. Department of Labor to establish a permanent model in January. Tennessee currently has 65 grow-your-own partnerships, which include 14 educator preparation providers and 63 districts.

A few years after Heather Carll started teaching special education in Hawaii public schools, she called it quits. She needed a break from the meetings, paperwork and legal responsibilities that make teaching students with disabilities one of the toughest jobs in education.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear signed into law Wednesday a bill allowing students to receive excused absences from school for mental health reasons.

Tutoring is on the brink of a national inflection point. School districts are channeling big chunks of their federal COVID-relief money into tutoring programs, relying on research that shows that the strategy can be a powerful ally in completing unfinished learning. Billions of dollars—and millions of children—are on the line.

While the rest of the nation struggles to overcome pandemic learning losses and surmount the fractiousness dogging school districts everywhere, one very large school system that services 70,000 students is succeeding despite great tumult.

The Indiana State Board of Education this week approved initiatives aimed at increasing Indiana’s pipeline of special education teachers and addressing a serious shortage in the field.

Teachers’ job satisfaction levels appear to have hit an all-time low this year as the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage schools.

The state of Utah is investing $8 million into an early childhood education program with a local nonprofit called Waterford Upstart, a program meant to expand access to pre-k and kindergarten opportunities to rural families.

As South Carolina looks to address its growing teacher shortage, educators say the problem is not worsening solely because more teachers are leaving the classroom, though that is a driver.

The need for remote learning due to COVID-19 has caused disruptions to data collection and education research. Now that there has been a shift in the educational landscape, the priorities for research have fundamentally pivoted to the urgent need to help schools and students recover from the extended disruptions.

As a public school board member through the first two years of the pandemic, there was one word I heard more than any other in public comments about the health and safety issues before us: Science. And without getting into the politics of how that concept was tossed about, I was as focused as anyone on the need to use hard evidence for the difficult decisions we had to make.

When schools pivoted to virtual learning early in the pandemic, the National School Lunch Program was thrown into chaos. Millions of children rely on school meals to keep hunger at bay, so school nutrition directors scrambled to adopt new, creative ways to distribute food to families. Some of these changes were improvements on the status quo, they say.

It seems like a balanced equation: Schools need a lot of help, but they also have record sums of federal money to spend. If only it were that simple.

As school systems around the country were battening down for their first remote start-of-school in the fall of 2020, the Lewis-Palmer district here was embarking on another kind of experiment: Elementary students would be in class full time, sitting maskless at communal tables.

As the nation’s school superintendents gathered last month for their first in-person meeting since the pandemic began, Dan Domenech, the organization’s leader, pressed U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona about an urgent issue.

One silver lining of the pandemic’s impact on education is found in examples of collaboration between state leaders and local educators in dedicating federal relief funding to common goals.

For decades, many school districts with the largest share of students living in poverty have endured crumbling buildings, outdated textbooks and little support for students and teachers. Now, the infusion of billions in federal Covid-relief aid for schools over the next few years could change that reality.

How states and districts should spend their share of the $190 billion in COVID-19 funds targeted for K-12 education has dominated the education world at every level since the first distribution was announced in March 2020.

School districts across the U.S. are renovating their buildings and upgrading dilapidated ventilation systems with the help of $190 billion of federal COVID relief. But these improvements will take time, and some won’t be completed for years after the pandemic first disrupted schooling.

Amid the pandemic, Denver Public Schools have a new district-wide requirement of devoting 20 minutes a day to help students develop social and emotional skills. CNN’s Evan McMorris-Santoro reports.

When it’s all said and done, how should ESSER investments be judged? That depends on what we hope to get from the $123 billion pumped into public schools. Here’s the problem: No end goal, no focused objective, no common yardstick has ever been attached to this mammoth federal investment.

$190,000,000,000 is a tricky figure to wrap your head around. Not too many of us deal in that realm of zeroes. To put it in perspective, a person who lived 190 billion minutes would make it to age 361,492. If you traveled 190 billion miles, you could go back and forth to the moon 397,656 times.

The Covid pandemic can look different in a small rural school district than in a big city or suburb. Transportation challenges are often magnified with fewer students spread across wide areas. Internet access is frequently harder to find, and so are mental-health professionals to support students and staff. Such challenges —and shared priorities—are reflected in a new FutureEd analysis of how local education agencies are planning to spend the latest round of federal Covid-relief spending aid.

From lockdowns to remote learning, everyone from scholars to politicians will be debating and dissecting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on America’s students — and the federal government’s $189 billion response — for years to come.

At a Council for Exceptional Children conference, advocates promoted examples of staffing solutions and recommended partnerships to fill workforce voids.

High school graduation rates dipped in at least 20 states after the first full school year disrupted by the pandemic, suggesting the coronavirus may have ended nearly two decades of nationwide progress toward getting more students diplomas.

Schools should be open, pandemic or not, much of the public says. If only they all had what they need to function.

This post describes recent developments in the administration’s school infrastructure proposals, highlights areas of underinvestment, and summarizes recent research on how some of these failings might impact students.

The stimulus bill, known as the American Rescue Plan, will send $122 billion to schools over three years, and a sizable portion of that money will go toward tutoring.

As schools navigate another wave of COVID-19 related shutdowns, educators in rural areas are encountering resistance to precautions like masking and vaccination, sometimes exacerbated by conflicting or quickly changing guidance.

Pressure to address teacher demographics in Iowa is mounting as the state’s student population continues to diversify.

The number of schools that have announced closures or temporary virtual instructions is in the thousands and last week reached a high for the 2021-22 school year.