Over the past few decades, that has generated a growing tension among parents and educators, who have begun questioning the .

But a new kind of funding scheme may turn that dynamic on its head: A finds that a different approach to buying classroom technology may not only be workable but, in many cases, produces results that traditional contracts don’t. Called outcomes based contracting, the model ties what companies get paid, at least in part, to whether students actually learn.

The findings, from the nonprofit groups and the , also come as school budgets are tightening after COVID relief funds dried up and district leaders find themselves under growing pressure to justify spending. 

The report examined a group of school districts piloting an outcomes based model. It finds that the arrangement offers a new way to determine whether tech is actually working for kids, since it dictates that a portion of vendors’ payments depends on meeting a set of agreed-upon student benchmarks. If students don’t reach them, vendors don’t collect the full contract amount. 

But the model also builds in a layer of shared accountability: Districts must commit to making sure students use the tools at the levels, or “dosage,” necessary to produce results.

Brittany Miller, the center’s executive director, said that forces everyone to take implementation seriously.

“What this model does is it tells everybody across the ecosystem: ‘Prioritize this,’” she said. “You have to get to this level of implementation integrity, which translates into dosage, in order to actually have a meaningful experience for a student.”

Kids ‘not getting the dosage they need’

Before looking at whether a tech product improves student outcomes, Miller said, there’s a more basic question that districts rarely ask: Are students using these tools at all?

The answer is often, “No.”&�Բ�����;

The report found that more than 65% of purchased ed tech licenses typically go unused, with school districts paying full price for products that sit idle. But districts participating in the outcomes based pilot met dosage requirements for as many as 95% of students. Overall usage rates were typically 10 times higher than under traditional contracts.

“We talk a lot about dosage, and kids not getting the dosage that they need,” Miller said. “And that, to me, is a proxy for being a responsible consumer of tech: Are our kids actually using it in a way that will drive outcomes?”

Miller said part of what drives the usage shift is that both districts and vendors share a direct financial stake in students actually using the products. Under the model, if a student falls behind on usage, the district must find out why and get that student back on track. If they don’t, there’s a record of that and the district is on the hook for payments, even if the student’s achievement didn’t improve. 

It’s only fair in cases like these, she said. “The provider wasn’t able to prove that their product worked because kids didn’t actually use it.”

Beyond usage statistics, the report found that districts in the pilot reported greater instructional coherence. Technology was being used with more intention tied to specific learning goals rather than as a general add-on to existing lessons. And teachers were more deliberate about how they integrated tech into their instruction.

Miller, who formerly led large-scale tutoring implementation in Denver Public Schools, said she has sat in classrooms and watched students working with these products, typically supplemental literacy and math tools. She said many of them can make a difference, but only if used properly. 

“We’re talking about technology that has the ability to help students pronounce words correctly, support their fluency and break down words for them,” she said. “In mathematics, we’re talking about students using technology to really try different ways of solving problems and getting them exactly what they need in the moment.”

The report also found that tech companies benefited from the model in unexpected ways: Because outcomes based contracts require detailed, real-time data on how students are using a product, companies got access to information about their tools’ effectiveness that most standard contracts never generate.

Fewer tools, better results

Perhaps most counterintuitively, the report found, districts that rely on outcomes based contracting actually end up buying fewer tech products.

That’s because the process of building such a contract requires district leaders to clearly define what problem they’re trying to solve, what success looks like and whether a given product is actually the right tool for the job. That level of scrutiny, said Miller, produces a kind of natural audit.

“We’ve seen in a lot of districts as they’ve taken this on, the number of ed tech tools they’re purchasing just [goes] way down at the district level,” she said.

In one district, Miller said, officials found they’d purchased licenses for more than 1,000 tools. As they examined the list they said, “If there is not a clear reason and purpose that we’re using this in the classroom that’s actually driving student learning, then we’re not going to pay for that tool anymore.”

She added, “It just shifts the mindset of the system to really say, ‘Let’s look at what we’re purchasing more carefully, figure out what is and isn’t working, and start to cut down on the noise.”

The center, based at the , grew out of research conducted at Harvard University’s under economist Tom Kane, who in 2021 a small group of tutoring providers and school districts to examine whether outcomes based contracting — already used in healthcare and workforce development — could be adapted for K-12 education. 

The project eventually moved to the foundation, with Denver among the early participants. Miller was a district leader at the time and got involved in the work that Denver was piloting on tutoring. 

As of February, Miller’s center had worked with 87 education institutions ranging from school districts to state education agencies and tracked results for more than 63,000 students.

In addition, six states — California, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Indiana and Louisiana — have launched initiatives around the model. Together they represent more than 28% of total U.S. K-12 education spending, constituting a potentially fundamental shift in how schools spend money. That shift, Miller said, could have a huge impact on children’s achievement if educators are asking the right questions. 

“There’s a student at the end of the day that’s being served by this,” she said. “How are you really humanizing their lived experience in the classroom and making sure that they’re achieving the outcomes that we know they’re able to?”

In March 2020, colleges were on the verge of a crisis. Students were dropping out en masse, and California’s public colleges and universities predicted they might lose billions of dollars within the year.

Enter the federal government. In three installments over the following year, Congress gave more than $8 billion to California’s public colleges and universities as part of a national rescue plan. For the California State University system, the stimulus money accounted for roughly a quarter of its annual revenue.

Suddenly, colleges and universities were scrambling to spend the money as quickly as possible, despite limited or inconsistent federal and state guidance. Experts worried , too fast. Campuses failed to take full advantage of the money, according to , and they made decisions that “prioritized students differently.”&�Բ�����;

Now, as the final deadline to spend the money approaches this June, the boom is turning to bust. Most schools have exhausted the money, often through major purchases, such as new laptops or tuition waivers for students. But maintaining those programs can be costly, and with the state facing a , colleges say it’s not clear where the money will come from next. 

For students, the boom was especially short-lived. Over three years, California’s colleges used the federal money to give cash to students, typically less than $1,000 each. For many struggling students, it wasn’t enough.

How pandemic relief funds ended up in students’ hands 

After graduating high school in 2020, Jose Castillo enrolled at Merced College, but he didn’t stay long. He needed money.  he dropped out in fall 2020 and started working 12-hour shifts, five days a week, at a food packaging warehouse. As long as he took a few overtime shifts, he could make nearly $2,000 a month.

He eventually quit and re-enrolled at the community college, where he’s studying animal science. Along with his regular financial aid award, about $10,000 a year, his college gave him an additional $2,000 over two semesters as part of the pandemic relief money. “I’m thankful for whatever I get,” he said. 

Castillo lives with his parents and younger brother on a dairy farm, about a half hour from the college. While he isn’t working anymore, his parents work 12-hour shifts at the farm. To help, he drives his brother to school and pays for gas. He also pitches in on groceries. 

Covering family expenses, school fees and textbook costs, the money “just goes away,” he said. “Right away.”&�Բ�����;

Of the $8 billion in federal aid, colleges were required to give about half directly to students. The money went to the poorest students, who often spent it on daily necessities, such as housing, food and transportation, according to 

But the criteria varied: the same student could qualify for COVID relief money at one school but not another. At Chico State and UC San Diego, for example, students applied for aid by submitting a simple form that only asked the amount of money they needed. Students at other schools, such as Cal State Long Beach State and Sonoma State, needed to write explanations justifying their need and some were denied, according to the 2021 state audit.

The other half of the $8 billion went to “institutional” needs, which colleges could define broadly, such as equipment or staff training. Compared to other federal relief, such as the Payment Protection Program for business loans, the higher education relief program had low levels of fraud, said Kevin Cook, who helps lead the higher education center at the Public Policy Institute of California. In 2022, the Institute released  on how California’s public colleges and universities used pandemic relief money. 

“It seems like these colleges, when given extra funds, were spending it on areas that were needed,” Cook said. “They didn’t build a new football field. They spent it on things that would make the campus safer or help students stay enrolled.”&�Բ�����;

Missing out on millions

Still, the federal relief program was far from perfect. The federal government bypassed the state and issued stimulus money directly to colleges and universities, allowing schools to spend the money quickly but with relatively little oversight.

In their reporting, schools often used vague terms to describe how, exactly, they spent the money they received for institutional use.  reported putting the vast majority of institutional funds towards recuperating “lost revenue” from tuition and dorms when students stopped attending. The university declined to specify what they used that revenue for.

Many community colleges were equally vague, though not all. At Yuba College, an hour north of Sacramento, administrators decided to give students additional cash by using the money designated for institutional needs. Because of low vaccination rates across the county, they also gave out nearly $700,000 worth of Amazon gift cards as incentives for students to get vaccinated. In East San Jose, Evergreen Valley College put most of its institutional needs dollars toward new technology, tuition discounts and waivers for students who had accumulated fines and fees. 

Often these expenses come with ongoing costs that the one-time federal funding can’t cover. At Evergreen Valley College, Vice President of Administrative Services Andrea Alexander has been scaling back how often departments get technology upgrades while searching for other funds to pay for future maintenance. She said the school will likely ask voters for a bond in the next five years to cover the ongoing cost of technology. The bond will also pay for cybersecurity upgrades, which are increasingly necessary as .

Amid the flurry of federal funding, the audit found that many public colleges and universities had neglected to apply for grants they were likely eligible for. Following the audit’s recommendation, the UC system found nearly $74 million in expenses that colleges could bill to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the president’s office. The same agency approved from the Cal State system, with nearly $20 million in expenses still pending review. 

A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Paul Feist, said it has not issued any formal guidance to schools about requesting such reimbursements and that it “does not monitor what claims, if any, districts made to FEMA.”

‘I wouldn’t say it lasted long’

On a per-student basis, community colleges received less money than UC or CSU campuses, even though community colleges educate the majority of low-income students in the state. That’s because the federal government initially prioritized giving money to schools with a higher percentage of full-time students and to schools that had more Pell Grant recipients. 

Federal Pell Grants go directly to low-income students. Though many community college students qualify, . Community college students are also more likely to attend part-time, since many work. 

Initially, some community college students didn’t qualify for any aid. In January 2022, Mikala Hutchinson began taking classes at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, north of San Diego. She was taking high school-level classes since she didn’t have a high school degree or equivalent. 

For decades, adult students without a high school degree or equivalent have been left out of the financial aid system, . When the federal government first announced the COVID-19 relief grants, it neglected to specify whether students like Hutchinson were eligible.

Since enrolling, Hutchinson said navigating financial aid has been “a massive headache.” It wasn’t until May 2022, when she was taking college-level classes, that she got any financial aid from MiraCosta College. Over the course of a year, she received just over $2,000 in COVID-relief funds, all of which she put towards child care.

Hutchinson has two young children. That year, she paid more than $20,000 in child care. The money “helped in the beginning for sure,” she said, “ but I wouldn’t say it lasted long.”

This was originally published on CalMatters.

Carvalho, who nearly two years ago assumed leadership of the nation’s second largest school district, said LAUSD is in relatively good financial standing and that enrollment declines are slowing.

But, he said, California’s most populous city “is not out of the woods yet” when it comes to tight budgets and closing schools.

The headwinds facing Los Angeles public schools are by no means unique to that city. Districts around the country are facing the expiration next year of more than $190 billion in federal funds meant to help schools remain open during the pandemic and aid in the recovery of students.

Carvalho, who previously served as Miami’s superintendent, said LA Unified has avoided the fiscal “Armageddon” he warned of more than a year ago. 

He said a reorganization of the district conducted over the past two years, to streamline school support services has netted LAUSD “dozens of millions” in savings, putting the system in good financial shape. 

But the district is still developing a plan for roughly 1,800 teachers, counselors and other staffers hired during the pandemic whose salaries have been paid for using the one-time federal aid. Carvalho said “strategically essential positions” will be kept. “We need to ask the question,” he said. “Is the need still there and is this the right position? 

To make up for the end of federal aid, he said, LAUSD has imposed a targeted hiring freeze, deciding on a case-by-case basis which of the employees who leave their jobs to replace. 

It will use the funds from jobs that are not filled to pay for those federally funded jobs it decides to keep. 

“We’re going to bank on [attrition] as a key solution” to make up for the loss of federal aid, he said.

A more complicated challenge now facing Los Angeles schools is a historic enrollment decline which has been ongoing for decades but was exacerbated by the pandemic.

While many school districts have experienced large enrollment declines since the pandemic began, several factors make the declines in Los Angeles more dramatic.  

First, Carvalho said, rising housing costs have forced many families to leave Los Angeles. The average price of a single-family home there is now nearly $1 million, according to Zillow, up by more than a third from five years ago. Local with rising costs.  

“The high cost of living has, over the years, pushed a lot of families out,” said Carvalho. “It’s not a function of individuals leaving the school system going to private schools or going to charter schools.”

Enrollment in LA schools for pre-K through twelfth grade from 566,604 in the 2012-2013 school year to 422,276 in the 2022-2023 academic year.

But Carvalho said the exodus may be slowing. show the number of students enrolled this year was down about two percent from the previous year.

The city’s has helped bolster enrollment, Carvalho said. LAUSD stats show 6,471 students are now enrolled in the district’s pre-K programs, up from 5,687 in 2021.  

Whether this is enough students to keep each of the city’s schools in operation, the superintendent said, remains an open question. 

The district is not “making decisions specific to consolidation or closure of schools based on a dire financial position,” said Carvalho.

But, at some point, shrinking schools may become too small to function, he said.   

“It has nothing to do with the finances,” Carvalho said. “It’s actually something to do with the type of offerings we provide our students. At a certain point a very small, secondary schools cannot offer the elective programs that kids need.”

“It certainly is a tool in the toolbox,” Carvalho said of closing or consolidating schools. “But it’s one that is used as a measure of last resort, and we are nowhere near that point.”    

Still the district is looking at high schools with less than 300 students as possible candidates for closure or consolidation, he said.  

High schools that enroll fewer than 300 students struggle to muster a variety of classes and extracurricular activities to adequately serve their communities, said Carvalho, adding that LAUSD has few schools of that size, and is still developing a plan for them.   

Decisions to close or consolidate schools are almost always unpopular. But for Los Angeles, it’s not a question of if, but when, said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education.

“People have these traditional attachments, but schools that serve 1,000 kids do much better than two schools serving 500 kids a piece,” Noguera said. “The challenge will be, not just to shrink, but to shrink and get better simultaneously, so people don’t feel like they’re losing.”

Noguera said he’s encouraged by steps he’s seen Carvalho take, but declining enrollments and the need to make academic progress systemwide are still the big issues facing the district.   

On the academic front, Carvalho said gains in math scores on state and show the district is making progress. He also pointed to rising attendance rates as a sign LAUSD is on the upswing. The system’s average daily attendance has risen from 83% to 93% during his tenure, Carvalho said. 

The superintendent also provided a few additional updates on the district in his exclusive interview with the 74:

• Carvalho said he has created a draft version of a controversial, new policy to limit the colocation of charter schools in certain buildings, and that next month he will present the policy as a recommendation to the district’s board. 

• He said LAUSD is working on a plan to reinforce its efforts to promote literacy after showed a third straight year of declining rates of reading proficiency. 

• Carvalho, who previously turned down an offer to lead New York City’s school system, said he intends to stay on as LA’s education boss for the foreseeable future. “There will be no additional superintendency for me… beyond Los Angeles,” he said.“There’s something to be said about stable, sustainable leadership.”

The Portuguese immigrant, who worked his way up from washing dishes and stints of homelessness to become one of the nation’s most celebrated educators, has already done much to earn the gratitude of his adopted home on the west coast, said Ana Ponce, executive director of GPSN, a local advocacy group.

“He’s earned the respect of educators and families,” said Ponce. “We’re all rooting for his success.”

Even before COVID, 9 in 10 middle schoolers in the shrinking city were below proficient in math and reading, many school buildings were structurally unsound and gaping budget deficits had landed the school system under the fiscal control of the state for the better part of the last two decades.

When relief funds began flowing, the challenges were great — a year of school closures and high absence rates had set students even further behind — but so were the means. The district scored nearly , over $23,000, as any other large system nationwide, thanks to a funding formula weighted for students living in poverty. Detroit has a median household income of $34,762, according to , and a childhood poverty rate roughly three times higher than the national average.

It was a test of the full power of federal relief dollars: Could $1.3 billion help get one of the nation’s most embattled school systems back on track?

Fast-forward two years and experts question whether the influx has delivered the needed boost to students. With more than half the money already out the door, has gone toward bringing students back to classrooms, according to officials, despite two-thirds of the district’s 53,400 students last year missing school at a threshold researchers say puts them academically at risk. And the superintendent in March announced to come in June.

Meanwhile, the district is using $700 million of the relief cash on expenditures it normally pays for through its general fund, stockpiling money in its reserves for district-wide facilities upgrades over the next five or more years — a creative way to skirt the September 2024 deadline on the use-it-or-lose-it federal funds.

It would be “impossible” to complete the more than one thousand facility projects the district has planned in just a few years, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told �鶹��Ʒ in an email. “Our students deserve to have roofs that do not leak or schools that do not close because outdated boilers break down.”

Taken together, the Detroit spending decisions paint a picture of both the promise and the pitfalls of schools’ handling of stimulus money. And they serve as a sobering reminder of what researchers have emphasized for over a year: relief cash alone likely will not be enough to offset the damage wrought by the pandemic.

Nearly a year behind 

The scale of recovery efforts in Detroit and elsewhere falls short of the magnitude of learning losses, worries Harvard University education professor Thomas Kane, who researches COVID’s impact on education.

Comparing 2019 test scores to those in 2022, he calculates that students in Detroit fell nearly a year behind where they were previously. But he estimates the district’s key interventions — summer school for roughly 9,000 students and high-impact tutoring for about the same number — are only enough to spur about a fifth of the needed gains to get youth back on track.

“This is common in districts around the country,” the education economist said. “They can list the interventions that they’re fielding … but they’re not doing the math on the effect sizes that they should be expecting from those things.”

He suggests a quick sanity check: If students are a year back in their learning, catching them up will cost, at minimum, a district’s typical yearly operating budget. In Detroit, that would mean devoting roughly two-thirds of all relief dollars to academic recovery — a level the district is far from approaching.

District spokesperson Chrystal Wilson pointed out that the district is continuing to scale up small-group and one-on-one literacy and math help for struggling students. COVID money helped expand the effort initially, but now it’s built into the district budget so the support doesn’t disappear when relief funds dry up, the superintendent said. 

As a result, a higher share of Detroit’s lowest-scoring students are on track to make a year’s worth of growth in reading and math this year than pre-pandemic, Wilson said.

Stacey Young is a Detroit mother of six, including three youngsters at Davison Elementary-Middle School. Last year, the school advertised tutoring and all three children attended, but the program enrolled more than a dozen students per teacher, she said, and her kids’ grades, which had suffered on the heels of virtual learning, did not improve. This year, her youngest son continues to struggle in math.

“On his report card, they said, ‘You need to seek some support,’” Young said. But the school had “nothing to offer” in terms of additional learning options, she said.

Superintendent Vitti recognizes the problem, but explained hiring staff for afterschool programming has posed a challenge.

“Our teachers are burnt out after the school day,” he said.

The students who remain the furthest behind in their learning also tend to be the ones who have had continued attendance challenges, he added, meaning the learning recovery efforts laid out by the district often miss the students who need them most.

“The issue here is not funding. The issues here are student access, quality human capital and the ability to scale human capital,” Vitti said.

Bernita Bradley, a parent advocate in Detroit with the National Parents Union, is frustrated that the district has also cut back on summer enrichment programs. After opening summer learning to all interested students in 2022, the school system will offer programming this summer.

“There’s so much that’s needed for our children to catch up,” Bradley said. “This is the time for families to be getting more support … as opposed to canceling something.”

Fixing neglected facilities

It’s a delicate balance between shorter- and longer-term stimulus investments, because Detroiters — Young and Bradley included — acknowledge campuses across the city are sorely in need of repairs. The scale of efforts like tutoring or summer school are constrained in part because upgrades to buildings represent the single-biggest line item in Detroit’s COVID relief spending plan.

Capital improvements have long been on hold in the district because for most of the last two decades a state-appointed emergency manager controlled its purse, making budget cuts to close a longstanding deficit, explained Sarah Reckhow, associate professor at Michigan State University.

“An easy way to cut was simply to not spend money maintaining buildings,” she said.

It created a backlog of roughly a in needed upgrades to fix issues like leaky roofs and moldy buildings, Vitti told NBC in 2019. Michigan is among the bottom five states nationwide for equitable school funding, according to a from The Education Trust-Midwest, meaning the challenged district would have had to increase taxes on Detroiters to make facilities upgrades.

When the $1.3 billion COVID windfall hit, the district carved off $700 million to finally address conditions that many deemed shameful.

It’s a tactic common across high-poverty districts, which are more likely to have unmet infrastructure needs. School systems serving mostly low-income students have been far more likely than affluent districts to spend emergency relief dollars on facilities or transportation, a February found — meaning less cash leftover for academic support.

But from a fiscal perspective, it’s a prudent choice, said Elizabeth Moje, professor of education at the University of Michigan. Detroit’s schools need “massive renovations,” she said, and because the expenses don’t recur, the investment won’t contribute to future budgetary issues when federal funds dry up.

Still, doing so requires creative accounting as the construction projects will extend years beyond the deadline for spending relief money, said Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Detroit is using COVID stimulus money to cover $700 million worth of expenses it typically pays for with its general fund, leaving the saved cash in its reserves with no spending deadline. The size of its general fund has swollen over 500% since stimulus funds began flowing and will be drawn down over the next five years, the district said.

“There’s a lot of that budget jiu-jitsu going on,” Jordan said.

Some 21 states, including Michigan, place no limit on the amount of money districts can keep in their reserves, allowing them to stockpile extra funds past the federal deadline so long as they first substitute COVID money for allowable expenses typically paid out of their general fund. 

Meanwhile, a recently announced round of layoffs in Detroit was an even more bitter pill knowing so much cash is waiting unspent, educators said.

Daniella Borum is a college transition advisor at the Detroit School of Arts who was told in early April that her position, which she’s held since 2019, would be terminated. Now she wonders who will help the high schoolers on her campus through the stressors not only of preparing for higher education, but of navigating daily life.

“It doesn’t have to be Ms. Borum here as a college advisor, but the kids need [someone],” she said. “They need support services, period.”&�Բ�����;

Re-engaging students

A key component of COVID catch-up, in Detroit and nationwide, has been luring students back to classrooms. Student attendance took a major hit in the pandemic’s wake and chronic absenteeism, which researchers typically define as missing at least 10% of school days, reached unprecedented levels across the country’s largest districts — 69% last year in Detroit.

The district deployed staff to knock on the doors of families whose children were absent, seeing if there were ways they could help get those students to class.

“Families wanted their children coming back,” said Gwendolyn Jachim, a Detroit elementary school teacher who signed up to knock on doors in the summer of 2021. Still the conversations were difficult, and many parents remained unconvinced. She recalls virus-wary parents who, after the nearby Flint, Michigan, water crisis left , said they didn’t trust the government on public health matters.

For its youngest students, the district also ran summer boot camps to help children prepare for the transition into kindergarten. Detroit educator Kristy Kitchen co-led a cohort of a dozen youngsters in six weeks of programming, including weekly field trips. While the program’s past iterations had sometimes required teachers to purchase supplies themselves, educators last summer were flush with markers, science experiments and backpacks for students, she said.

“It was a very good opportunity for the kids,” Kitchen said. “They’ve had kindergarten boot camp prior to that year, but they didn’t have all those resources that we had.”

The two campaigns, door knocking and kindergarten boot camp, together amounted to roughly $1.8 million, according to figures provided by the district — less than 1% of its total stimulus allotment.

This year’s chronic absenteeism rates have dipped slightly to 60%, which the district attributes to its efforts. Still, 6 in 10 youth are missing class at a level that researchers say puts their education in peril. 

Using stimulus funds, the district also invested in several fan-favorite activities aimed at boosting morale and engagement. The city paid thousands to vendors like Chuck E. Cheese, Top Golf, �鶹��Ʒ Game Mobile, Dave & Buster’s and Zap Zone Extreme, according to spending records obtained by �鶹��Ʒ through a Freedom of Information request. Some $47,000 went to field trips to Blake’s Orchard & Cider Mill, which Detroit Federation of Teachers President Lakia Wilson said is an annual tradition.

“These are city kids, so it’s good that they get to go out … picking their own apples, seeing pumpkins grow in a patch,” Wilson said. “You can’t live in Michigan and not go to the apple orchard.”

Contracts come under scrutiny

In a district with a past history of , Detroit’s emergency relief spending has not been without its share of expenses some saw as questionable.

For its tutoring contract worth over $3 million, the district chose a vendor led by Superintendent Vitti’s wife, Rachel Vitti, ex-director of the literacy nonprofit . Leaders disclosed the relationship when they discussed the contract in 2021 and said the provider was chosen because of its strong track record. Still, amid pushback, Rachel Vitti last summer from her role leading the nonprofit.

And the district’s $68 million COVID testing contract received scrutiny for a price tag twice as high as the nearby University of Michigan’s, which used the same provider and served a comparable number of students.

The contracts “cannot be compared apples to apples,” Rebecca Throop, a spokesperson for testing provider LynxDX Inc., said in an email. Detroit schools requested a higher number of tests and the university hired staff independently to assist collecting samples, she said.

LynxDX Inc. is now a to the Detroit Public Schools Community District, listed as providing support at the $20,000 to $99,999 level.

“As a company, we recognize the importance of giving back to the communities we serve and where our employees live,” Throop said.

But zooming out beyond individual contracts, Reckhow, at Michigan State, sees the Detroit school district’s position as inherently difficult. The $1.3 billion is a lot of money, she acknowledges, but doesn’t think the time-limited boost can erase all the problems of the last decades.

“There’s the assumption that you get a one-time infusion of money and you recover,” she said. “But when you’re talking about a district where the needs are as high (as Detroit’s) and where the pre-existing issues of inequality were already enormously pronounced, the timeframe of these relief dollars is just not really up to the task.”

The average increase was 10.8% from 2020-21 to 2021-22 and 16.5% from 2020-21 to 2022-23, according to a late August of 118 large school system budgets published by Burbio, which has tracked K-12 policy through the pandemic.

Nearly 1 in 5 district budgets within that group had grown by more than 25% since 2021.

In many cases, those investments translate to direct benefits for students, said Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. School systems have invested in tutoring programs and summer learning experiences to catch students up after many experienced significant delays in their learning due to COVID disruptions such as virtual learning and quarantines. Other districts have used the cash to make long-needed infrastructure improvements such as upgrading ventilation with or .

But with American Rescue Plan money set to expire in 2024, and with U.S. student enrollment projected to drop by due to slowed birth rates nationwide, the Georgetown K-12 finance expert warns that schools for a period of “bloodletting” by 2024-25 when budgets must adjust back down.

“You don’t have to look too far out to see pain coming,” Aldeman said. “That could look like flat or stagnant salaries, that can look like layoffs, that could look like closing schools. The federal money has deferred some of those tough choices or even made it so people can ignore them for a little bit. But they will come and it’s just a matter of when and how hard they hit.”

In Los Angeles, where enrollment has been , the school system released projections for total spending to drop nearly 20% from 2022-23 to 2024-25 — from roughly $11 billion to about $9 billion. Much of the difference represents the ending of stimulus funds.

L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has described that impending fiscal cliff, conjoined with enrollment drops, as a quickly approaching “Armageddon.”&�Բ�����;

Most school leaders have worked to avoid a 2024-25 economic catastrophe in their stimulus spending, said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

“Many superintendents have been careful, anticipating the fiscal cliff, not to use the dollars in ways that would create a problem for them down the line. For example, teacher salaries or the hiring of significant staff that then will have to be let go.”

For 20 years, Domenech worked as school superintendent in Long Island, New York over a period when the region lost 40% of its students.

“For all those years, I never built a school,” he said. “All I did was close schools.”

That’s a difficult task, the school leader acknowledged, because while families understand in the abstract the district must consolidate to prevent taxes from soaring, they usually want to see other schools close rather than their own. But cutting through the noise, school leaders can also understand the process of what Domenech calls “right-sizing” schools as an opportunity to “balance” student populations, he said, desegregating schools racially and socioeconomically.

Aldeman advises superintendents looking at enrollment declines not to kick the consolidation can down the road. Though school closings will inevitably cause disruptions, he said, policymakers can ease the pain with investments like more guidance counselors or improved transportation.

“Now would be a good time to start thinking about [consolidating],” Alderman said. “If we delay it, then the money will run out.”

The state will divvy up more than $150 million, much of it from its American Rescue Plan funding, through a new grant program called .

Maryland Leads is “a choose-your-own adventure style program … with a curated list of options that only includes programs and strategies we know can effectuate positive results for children,” Choudhury wrote in a statement to �鶹��Ʒ.

“This is about Maryland doing the work, leading the way.”

The seven strategies that the effort highlights are:

• Grow-your-own staffing programs to develop teaching talent in-house
• Staff retention programs that improve teachers’ schedules, boost mentorship opportunities and give pay incentives for those who stay from one year to the next
• “Science of reading” approaches that systematize literacy acquisition
• High-quality tutoring during the school day for students that fell behind during the pandemic
• Restructuring schedules to allow for afterschool learning, summer programming and more effective family engagement
• Collaborations with industry leaders and higher education institutions to prepare students for college and careers
• Community school models that engage families and connect them with needed social services

Districts may invest in as few as two or as many as seven practices to receive funds. School systems that scale up science of reading approaches unlock an additional $2 million in funding, while those that build grow-your-own staffing programs receive an extra $1 million. Funds must be spent before the end of the 2023-24 school year.

“It’s a really ambitious approach,” Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank, told �鶹��Ʒ. “The issues that the state is singling out … are the evidence-based practices that are going to get you to make a difference for students.”

FutureEd has states’ and districts’ American Rescue Plan spending rollouts, and Jordan said that Maryland stands out for its effort at guiding districts toward approaches that have been proven effective. 

“Districts often like to make their own decisions. And this way, [Choudhury] is not dictating what they should be doing, but he is giving them incentives,” the researcher said. “Providing this sort of menu of options that can bring them extra money seems like a smart approach.”

“It’s exciting to see Maryland leading through this new program that aims to use American Rescue Plan funds in innovative ways,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the release. “I’m heartened that Maryland Leads will help districts and schools both respond to the challenges posed by the pandemic and seize the opportunity our current moment offers to reimagine education.”

The grant builds on an ongoing effort in the state called the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future to uplift schools and support historically underserved students. The 13-year plan seeks to boost teacher pay above a $60,000 starting salary by 2026 and convert nearly 1 in 3 schools into community schools that help struggling families access nutrition and health care by 2035, among a number of other goals. 

The funds provided by the new grant will remain a fairly small percentage of the total money many districts in the state received in COVID relief. Baltimore City Public Schools was allocated $443 million, according to FutureEd’s numbers, while Montgomery County received $252 million and Prince Georges County got $272 million.

Still, the state effort “gives [districts] some guideposts about the right sort of programs,” said Jordan.

Initiatives to help districts grow their own staff can help recruit a more diverse and qualified set of teachers, successful models show, and can help retain staff. Science of reading approaches have been hailed by educators and researchers alike. Community schools approaches, known to support students and families living in poverty, have been a key part of the Biden education agenda and recently made headlines when Mackenzie Scott donated $133 million to the nonprofit Communities in Schools. And high-quality tutoring can provide a potent academic boost to students who have fallen behind, research shows.

Districts may apply for grants through the Maryland Leads program through April 7, and grants will be awarded April 22. The grants will be non-competitive, with the possibility that each of the state’s 24 school systems, which serve entire counties (with the exception of Baltimore City), could receive funds. The Maryland Department of Education will hold sessions to inform school leaders on the slate of approaches throughout February and March.

“A return to normal is not good enough,” Choudhury wrote in a letter introducing the Leads grant. “Gaps existed then and they will persist now unless we do something differently.”

Go deeper on the some of the strategies specified in Maryland’s plan:

—Grow Your Own Teacher Programs: Efforts to train a more diverse, home-grown teacher workforce in Rhode Island and Colorado (Full RI story & full CO story)

—Science of Reading: Texas educators help students gain literacy skills through the pandemic (Read the full story)

—Community Schools: Inside MacKenzie Scott’s $133 million donation to America’s top organization focused on preventing student dropouts (Read the full story)

—Summer Learning: Tulsa returns 11,000 students to campuses in July by putting fun before academics (Read the full story)

—High-Quality Tutoring: As schools push for more tutoring, new research points to its effectiveness — and the challenge of scaling it to combat learning loss (Read the full story)