All significant harms. But then there’s the bottom-line figure that appeared last winter: $28 trillion.

�ճ󲹳�’s , to the children whose academic abilities were set back during the COVID-era, totalling about $70,000 per person over the course of their careers. The figure was reached by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, based on the cratering eighth-grade math performance measured by last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. And it could be permanent if schools don’t do something about those diminished skills.

One of the studying American education, Hanushek has spent over 40 years studying how schools lift kids’ achievement and whether test scores translate into later-life success. A longtime fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution, he won for Education Research in 2021, which brought a $3.9 million award for new projects. He is also deeply involved in some of the biggest ongoing debates in education policy, including whether the achievement gap between rich and poor students .

Above all other issues, Hanushek is tied to the question of whether spending more on schools will consistently result in better student outcomes. He has been both resolutely skeptical of the proposition and influential in the statehouses and courtrooms deciding whether to increase education funding. Over the last decade, a raft of studies have offered new evidence that increasing expenditures on schooling does, in fact, lift achievement — a in a lengthy review released this spring, while still insisting that the amount of dollars expended matter far less than the quality of the interventions they underwrite.

Money is also at the center of what the veteran researcher calls his “simple and complete” fix for COVID-related learning setbacks, detailed in . But rather than paying to lengthen school days or fund tutoring programs, Hanushek advises that districts spend remaining pandemic relief aid on incentives for the best teachers to take on extra students; he also proposes buying out the contracts of their least effective colleagues. 

In a conversation with �鶹��Ʒ’s Kevin Mahnken, Hanushek talked about how the most advanced economies reward skill (and punish the lack of it), why he believes voluntary learning initiatives tend to increase achievement gaps and what the United States could do with $28 trillion.

“The cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer,” he said. “We’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery.”

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Can you contextualize actually means? It’s a sum so large as to be almost mystical.

Sure. You know that we had a recession because of the pandemic, when businesses closed. The total cost of that is about 1/15th the same amount, maybe $2 trillion. The best estimates I’ve seen of the effects of the 2008 recession are something like $5 trillion. And if you want a third option, $28 trillion is a little more than one year of America’s GDP. So it’s as if you closed down the economy for a whole year. 

Am I right in thinking about this as essentially a huge number of deferred opportunities for growth, like businesses that don’t expand or innovations that are slower to arrive?

It’s everything about the economy. But a better way to think about it for most people is that everybody who was in school during the pandemic will experience 5–6 percent lower lifetime earnings. It’s almost like a 5 or 6 percent added tax, with this cohort earning less than the cohorts immediately ahead of it and immediately behind it, because they’re just less skilled. Unless we do something about it. 

But how confident are we that these test results are really measuring skills that are important in later life? Do we have proof that there’s an actual relationship between student scores on NAEP or state exams scores and their future economic activity?

Historically, people haven’t looked so much at the effect of test scores or cognitive skills on earnings because we just haven’t had much data. We’ve [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development], and it shows that the U.S. rewards economic skills more than almost any other country on earth.

But consider that in reverse. It also means that the U.S. punishes the lack of skills more than almost any other country on earth. What this is essentially showing is that employers really do pay attention to the skills people have. Those skills determine how well people can adapt to new jobs, and they help determine how capable people are in actually doing their jobs. Nobody objects to the idea that people who are smarter generally earn more. And while there is a lot of variation around that — from NBA players, who often don’t finish their degrees, to college graduates who find themselves driving taxis — that’s the kind of relationship we would expect to see.

Is that connection between demonstrated academic achievement and economic success just a result of the highly knowledge-based economies that prevail in rich, Western countries like the U.S.?

Precisely. One country is Singapore, and Singapore basically doesn’t do anything except for knowledge-based industries.

If it’s so clear that increased educational attainment is linked to better economic prospects, does it worry you that we’ve seen the last few years?

We don’t know if that’s going to last. But in the short run, it’s a potential concern that people aren’t going off to get more skills. Part of it is that in the current economy, it looks like you can get a huge reward from going straight into the labor market after high school. But it just won’t compare with the reward from going to college.

There are variations in the returns [to college]. You can go into some college programs that ultimately don’t pay off, at least if you pay the full tuition. But on average, college graduates are earning something like 75 percent more than high school graduates, and that differential is large enough that people who get fixated on the cost of tuition and debt cost are really making a huge mistake if they don’t go to college. The differential more than compensates for the cost of getting that college degree.

Could you please explain the “simple and complete” way of addressing learning loss?

Every time I mention my preferred strategy, people sort of turn away. [Laughs] People are much happier saying, “Let’s do exactly what we’re doing already, but just a little bit more of it.” And it boils down to lengthening the school day, lengthening the school year, trying some tutoring here and there. But even if you could implement that — which nobody knows how to do — the data suggests that it wouldn’t make up for the kinds of losses that kids have suffered. It’s just not a strong enough treatment.

Something everyone mostly agrees with is that teachers are really important, and that effective teachers are very, very valuable. People start to disagree when you ask, “What do you make of that?” My answer for dealing with the current learning losses of the COVID cohort is to try to get our most effective teachers to just work more intensively by taking on a few more kids. You can, in fact, provide incentives from the existing ESSER money — which will be around for at least another year — and provide them with help in grading, essentially lighten the load and make it possible for them to teach more kids.

The place where everybody stops listening is here: We know that our most ineffective teachers are just harming kids. If we could take some of the ESSER money and buy out the contracts of our least effective teachers, the combination of those things could be enough to make up for the learning loss we’ve seen. 

We’re almost completely back to normal schooling. But the cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer; we’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery. So we have to do something that’s quick — we can’t wait to hire and train a new group of teachers, or wait to figure out which kinds of instruction might help them the most. We just don’t have the time. But my point is that our current workforce is good enough to make up for this! We have, on average, a really good teaching force, though we don’t use the most effective teachers enough, and we overuse the least effective teachers.

The issue of urgency is obviously critical, but I wonder if it really supports your point. Given the logistical and political difficulties of that kind of approach, it seems much simpler to increase the quantity of instruction students receive — by providing tutoring and lengthening the school year, for instance — than by improving the quality through the strategy you describe.

The problem is that nobody is willing to actually make it mandatory that people stay longer in school. Los Angeles had a voluntary program to try to add four days to the school year, and . But even if they did, what would it mean? Say a quarter of your kids actually show up for two extra days: What do you teach them, and how do you integrate that with their normal classroom instruction? You could, at best, improve their soccer skills. 

Voluntary added days generally expand variation in academic performance because the kids who need [extra schooling] the least are the ones who tend to show up for voluntary learning days. It’s people at the top of the academic scale who take advantage of voluntary activities, and the people at the bottom don’t. That’s why I said before that we don’t know how to implement things like tutoring and supplemental instruction at scale. We have a few examples of it working, but we don’t know how to put it into 100,000 schools.

Does it surprise you that, in the five years since the Janus ruling, the organizing strength of teachers’ unions seems to have risen in much of the country? Teacher pay became something of a national issue during the summer of 2018, and now you see Republican governors excited to announce pay raises.

It’s a huge obstacle that you can’t get schools and teachers’ unions to agree to anything. We have a strike going on in Oakland Public Schools, where the union is trying to wring the last bit of money out of the pandemic; they’ve been offered over 20 percent pay increases over three years, but they don’t think that’s enough. [After nearly two weeks of school closures, on May 16.]

One of my favorite books on my bookshelf is called . It has a 1962 copyright. The thesis of the book is basically that if you pay all teachers the same amount, you’re likely to get either very underpaid math teachers or very overpaid PE teachers; you tend to see the former, and that’s where some teacher shortages come from. It’s a problem that certainly exists, and in my opinion, the biggest shortage is a shortage of highly effective teachers that we would like to keep in.

Do you think there’s something positive in the settlement we’ve reached in the U.S., wherein we hire lots of teachers but have largely deferred salary increases? I’m reminded of written by your frequent collaborator, Ludger Woessmann, which found that students earn better grades and stay in school longer when they have an adult mentor in school — that seems like something that small class sizes would foster, no?

It can be very important to build close relationships [between students and teachers]. The problem is that everything we measure suggests that reducing class size is not the most important thing, and that having an effective teacher in a classroom is so much more important than having a slightly smaller class. 

People get excited if they can see anything positive in the data about smaller classes. But the impact is so small relative to the impact that great teachers have. As you mentioned, teachers are now concerned about low salaries. But has to do with hiring more people too; it’s just hiring more people and paying them more. There are demands for more ancillary people in schools, like counselors and nurses, and they want to put caps on class size as well. So no one’s given up on quantity, which is the thing that unions like. Unions make their money by having more people, so they’re always happy to push for smaller class sizes.

If I could change the subject slightly: We’ve , which radically changed the way it evaluates and pays teachers. It’s much more related to effectiveness in the classroom now than under the traditional salary schedule. The other thing they did was introduce an incentive scheme to get the best teachers, measured by prior performance, to work in the lowest-performing schools in Dallas.

We found two things from this experiment. One is that the most effective teachers were willing to do that for relatively modest average salaries. The second was that once they moved to the lowest-performing schools, the worst schools in Dallas began approaching the citywide average within two years. This is a policy that has been shown to work, and work at scale where you can turn around entire schools.

But the unfortunate thing they did was say, “Oops! Now that these schools are performing well, they aren’t eligible for the program anymore.” They took the incentives away, and the best teachers left because there are lots of easier places to work. And they will if they don’t get paid.

You’ve got on Dallas’s pay-for-performance reform. It reminded me of the debate over Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system, which people have said is really hard to replicate, in part because was so fierce.

There was a bit of blowback in Dallas as well. Mike Miles was the superintendent who devised the entire Dallas system, and a somewhat grumpy school board to put it in place. Then, just as it was starting to come together, he left. So there’s no doubt, this is politically difficult.

The question is, are you willing to give up $28 trillion and settle for having the 31st-ranked school system in the world because it’s politically difficult? I’m not somebody who needs to make my living by politics. But it’s clear that the rewards of adopting these policies are so, so large, even if there are also political costs. Someday I hope the teachers’ unions also see that it’s in their interest to make some marginal changes to the old “no differentiation” policy.

I realize that’s just your estimate, and it’s not as though it would be dropped as a lump sum in the national checking account; but if the value of restoring lost learning is anything approaching $28 trillion, it could fund all our K–12 schools many times over.

The cost of the current U.S. education system is about $750 billion, so you’re talking about potentially funding that system for decades with the money that you could get out of this. Frankly, we have to get some people who are willing to lead in this time of crisis.

Are there any useful lessons from the catastrophe of the pandemic — or perhaps technology, including advances in virtual and asynchronous learning — that we might use to improve schools going forward?

The thing I learned was sort of the opposite. 

It became very clear that having a teacher in the classroom is much better than hybrid instruction that only sometimes has a live, in-person teacher. And hybrid instruction, in turn, is better than fully remote instruction. There’s noy doubt that we gained a greater appreciation of the importance of the classroom teacher, even in these kinds of chaotic circumstances. We had other ways of trying to teach, but we couldn’t do away with effective classroom teachers. 

We did mobilize the tech industry to try to improve virtual instruction in a variety of ways, and maybe we’ll come out a bit ahead from that. But I worry that we won’t try to learn from when and where virtual instruction works best, and when and where it doesn’t work. 

Do you think the public sector, including federal entities like the Institute of Education Sciences, needs to take a more active role as a catalyst for breakthrough learning platforms and technology? Given the mixed record of ed-tech generally, I wonder if we actually have reason to be hopeful.

Sure, I like what IES has been doing. The amount of money we’re talking about there is pathetic, really, compared with the size of the problem. We have systematically underplayed any role of research and evaluation in education compared with other industries. But education is the base industry for most of this other stuff that we’re pouring money into.

The most recent NAEP release shows decades’ worth of progress — this time in civics and U.S. history — essentially erased since the beginning of the pandemic. I’m wondering whether you think the gains of the last 25 years or so, often characterized as the “education reform era,” were all that big to begin with.

Reform has been less reformist than many of us would have liked. It hasn’t accomplished what we wanted.

On the latest NAEP release, the thing that I thought was most important is that we really expanded the gaps in scoring. The top end of the scoring distribution did okay in social studies, but the lower-performing students fell further. What we’re seeing just reinforced these gaps, the spread-out distribution. At the bottom end, it seems that some eighth graders don’t even know what the separate branches of government do; they barely know the difference between the legislature and the executive. That’s very worrisome to me because the U.S. has thrived by having a common society. We might be losing some of that, and the polarization we see in our politics can only be heightened by these kinds of results.

The expanding achievement gap, which we’ve seen on other NAEP tests, is really concerning. Forty percent of eighth-graders scored below the NAEP Basic level in U.S. history, for example.

Yeah, and NAEP Basic is really basic. On subject-matter tests like these, kids scoring below that level really don’t know much at all; on math and reading tests, they’re kind of hopeless because they are not likely to be able to go on past eighth-grade knowledge. In the math test, it’s also roughly 40 percent of eighth-graders in the country scoring below Basic. That’s not a position you want to be in.

There’s been an enormous amount of newer research from scholars like and on the effects of education funding on school outcomes, with much of it suggesting that money really does matter. As perhaps the single figure most associated with the opposing view, are you getting ready to wave the white flag?

You get very different effects across these studies, and it’s not well understood when money has a big effect and when it doesn’t. There’s no reason to infer from some of this recent work that we can be assured of a great achievement gain, or a lifetime earnings gain, by simply putting more money into the existing system.

At a certain level, this is largely a political debate because Kirabo Jackson and Jesse Rothstein recognize that how you spend money is also really important. My view is that how you spend money is considerably more important than how much you spend. We’re currently spending something like $17,000 per kid on education, and an extra $300 is not going to make much difference unless you spend that money well. 

I’m reminded of that argued that the positive effects of school finance reforms are mostly driven by states that also adopted test-based accountability.

Yeah, it was very simple and straightforward that if you put more money into systems with good accountability for outcomes, you get much larger results. Part of the problem is that the current federal accountability law, ESSA, is loosening accountability all over the place and . What states have done since 2016 is backing off holding teachers responsible for student outcomes. This has negative effects on learning. 

The effects of spending have been argued endlessly over the last few decades. What are the biggest questions you’d like to see investigated going forward?

One of the developments coming out of the pandemic is that schooling is going to start becoming very different. It’s clear to me that just doing what’s called homeschooling is not going to be the answer, but parents have often looked for something different than what they got during the pandemic and even before the pandemic. You have lots of political fighting over education savings accounts and choice.

I don’t think any of these things is going to be the answer, but understanding the possible choices is important because choices are going to expand for lots of people. We don’t understand where they’re going to go and what the effects of those choices are going to be. 

If states continue to expand school choice, does it become harder to improve policy through the districts? It seems like the lever of traditional public schooling will just move fewer students in the future.

Well, if we had everywhere, we’d still see 80 percent of kids enrolled in traditional public schools. I like having more choice, and I think it’s important. It’s important to improve the charter sector as well. But the traditional public schools are still going to be there for the rest of my lifetime, and probably yours too. So we still have to be concerned about how we operate traditional public schools because they’re the backbone of our economy.

Jackson, a labor economist and , is far from a household name, but his work has made a significant impact on education policy over the last decade. In particular, he has been the most outspoken of a group of researchers arguing that higher spending on education can — a position at odds with the widely held political consensus of the 1980s and ‘90s. 

The Council is a three-member body that advises the president on economic affairs. While it shares that responsibility somewhat with other offices, including the Treasury Department and the National Economic Council, its influence as a kind of think tank within the Executive Branch has proven to be considerable. Since its founding in 1946, four former CEA heads have gone on to chair the Federal Reserve, including former Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who now serves as President Biden’s treasury secretary.

The panel will face its share of fiscal and workforce problems over the next few years, principally the question of how to further suppress inflation without leading to job losses. But Jackson’s appointment signals that Biden’s team is keeping its eye on the president’s K–12 priorities. Those priorities have met with only limited success through the first three years of Biden’s term; an for school counselors last fall made some progress on his campaign pledge to double the presence of mental health practitioners in schools, but a corresponding commitment to triple the budget of Title I has .

Whether Jackson’s appointment, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, will jumpstart the White House’s education work is unclear. But it will bring an expert on education finance into even greater prominence, and likely put a spotlight on some of the issues he’s worked on throughout his career. 

Here’s a quick guide to four studies that have helped build Jackson’s reputation.

1. Money really does matter 

For decades, researchers have debated whether directing more resources to schools (i.e., spending more to raise salaries, hire more teachers, or buy better curricula) actually results in better academic results. Many economists — pointing to alongside modest improvement in standardized test scores — have voiced doubts.

But co-authored by Jackson, American University Professor Claudia Persico, and University of California, Berkeley, Professor Rucker Johnson has helped shift the views of the policy community to the opposite view. Analyzing the impact of court-mandated education finance reforms on children born between 1955 and 1985, the team discovered that boosting education funding by 10 percent annually for each of a student’s 12 years of public school produced the learning equivalent of an extra .27 years of schooling. The effects carried into adulthood as well; affected students were 3.67 percent less likely to be poor, and they received wages that were 7.25 percent higher than otherwise.

The paper was not the first or last to emphasize the importance of money to kids’ academic success. But as much as any over the last 10 years, it has helped shape the conversation around one of the most contested areas of American education.

2. Schools affect more than test scores

Another of Jackson’s fascinations has been the range of child outcomes that schools contribute to outside of purely academic ones. That perspective is somewhat unusual in the economics of education, where empiricists tend to focus on metrics that are most available and legible: grades and test scores.

In , Jackson went further, investigating the role of classroom teachers in developing students’ non-cognitive skills. Those traits — such as motivation and self-control — critical, if hard-to-measure, prerequisites to adult activities like finishing college and holding down a job. Relying on a set of proxies for non-cognitive skills, including suspension rates and absences, the study examined how ninth-grade teachers both fostered non-cognitive growth and test score trajectories over time.

In the end, he found that teachers sometimes generated significantly different effects on skills than they did test performance. What’s more, their influence on non-testing outcomes was associated with students’ high school graduation and plans for college-going “above and beyond” their impact on test scores; in fact, combining testing and non-testing measures of teacher quality was more than twice as predictive of student success as using scores alone. Particularly as some in the education world turn away from a perceived over-use of assessment, the findings demonstrate the depth of what’s still unknown about how schools help kids thrive.

3. Some kids get more out of great schools

Good schools are good for everyone, right? The building blocks of a superior learning environment, from great teachers to supportive peer relationships, lift all boats.

While those sentiments are true by and large, adds a bit of nuance. Co-authored by Jackson, Shanette Porter, John Easton, and Sebastián Kiguel, it looked at thousands of students in Chicago high schools, where inequality in educational opportunity is extraordinarily high. In total, the team found, less-advantaged students — those with lower eighth-grade test scores, more disciplinary incidents, and from lower-income homes — benefit the most from attending highly effective schools that improve both test scores and non-cognitive skills. 

Not only were those potentially at-risk kids more likely to graduate high school, they were also arrested less and saw better odds of enrolling in college than otherwise similar peers. In addition, the holistic index of school effectiveness used by Jackson and his co-authors was found to be more predictive of later-life success than simply using test scores alone.

4. Single sex schools might not be the way

In as a solo researcher, Jackson examined the effects of students being assigned to single-sex schools in Trinidad and Tobago. Proponents of sex-sorted schooling often point to the developmental and social differences between boys and girls, who reach maturity at different ages.

By exploiting the quasi-randomness of the algorithm that assigned students, however, Jackson was able to directly analyze the effects of attending all-boys and all-girls academies. In the end, he found, most students saw no academic advantage from being so assigned — though participants who expressed the strongest preference for that form of education (predominantly girls) did see some bump in learning. Strikingly, girls enrolled at single-sex schools also took fewer science courses on average.

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.” 

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.”

Howard, Baltimore and Frederick counties proposed double-digit hikes — above 2023 levels by 10.5%, 11.2% and 13.4%, respectively — according to an analysis by the school data service Burbio. 

Much of the funding for the additional spending is coming from the state, which will send over $7.5 billion to local districts in 2024 thanks to the Blueprint law, an increase of more than $600 million above 2022-23 levels, according to preliminary budget figures provided to �鶹��Ʒ by the State Department of Education. Some 21 of the state’s 23 school districts will receive more funds than they did this year.

Prince George’s County is set to get the largest bump with an extra $195 million from the state for next year, the data show. The smaller Caroline County will receive the greatest new windfall proportional to its student body with $1,680 added for each of its 5,600 students. Allegany County and Baltimore City are the only districts that will see a slight drop in funds compared to this year.

William Kirwan, who chaired the commission that drafted the legislation for the 2021 Blueprint policy, said the new budget plans are “absolutely” a marker of schools’ progress toward complying with the landmark law’s provisions.

The 10-year Blueprint plan is in its third year of implementation. Ultimately, it will inject an additional $3.8 billion annually into the state’s education system, some $4,000 extra per student. In return for the funds, the law compels districts to work toward improvement measures such as universal preschool, $60,000 minimum annual teacher salaries by 2026 and widened access to college and career-preparation courses for high schoolers.

“No state has ever undertaken anything like this,” Kirwan said. He describes the changes as a “total overhaul.”

School budgets have been swelling nationwide thanks to the federal COVID stimulus package delivering $190 billion for K-12 education in one-time funds. But the preliminary figures from Burbio show that growth is continuing at a faster rate in several Maryland districts than in comparable school systems in other states. And unlike pandemic stimulus cash, Blueprint funds represent a longer-lasting source of revenue.

���ܰ�������’s includes the projected budgets of large districts in four states: Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland. The Maryland districts accounted for five of the top six largest proposed spending increases out of the 15 included.

The Howard County Public School System it plans to use Blueprint funds to recruit, retain and train educators, including a grow-your-own initiative to help paraprofessionals become lead teachers. It also is devoting money to pay the tuition of high school students who take dual enrollment courses at a local community college, among other efforts.

In Baltimore County, the funds will help the school district raise teachers’ minimum starting salary to next year and cover the costs of AP tests for all students enrolled in those advanced classes, among other measures, spokesperson Charles Herndon said.

Each year, Blueprint funds will provide roughly 500 Maryland students pursuing a teaching degree with a full scholarship for tuition, Kirwan added.

Existing teacher shortages “will be short-lived in Maryland when word gets out,” he predicts.

The Blueprint’s formula adjusts funding levels using a measure for concentration of poverty, and delivers the most total funding per pupil to Somerset County and Baltimore City schools, the two districts in the state serving the highest share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch. Baltimore City’s slight drop in funding in 2024 is because it will go from receiving the highest per-pupil allocation to the second-highest.

Meanwhile, as funding flows to schools and as officials move to launch new initiatives, districts have until March 15 to submit formalized implementation plans to a newly created board overseeing the Blueprint’s rollout.

The decade-long policy is scheduled to be fully implemented by 2033.

“It’s a long process,” Kirwan said.

The approach, known as “balanced” literacy, has been dominant in U.S. classrooms for decades, but has come under fire recently amid and exposing its shortcomings. Criticism crescendoed this fall after the release of the influential podcast, which linked America’s “” to schools’ use of literacy materials that teach children to guess words they don’t know based first on pictures and sentence structure — a method called “three cueing.”

But actually ridding classrooms of these approaches may prove challenging. Since Oct. 20 when the podcast launched, districts have continued to make large purchases of materials that include the problematic three-cueing tactics.

Over that time span, at least 225 districts have spent over $1.5 million on new books, trainings and curriculums linked to three cueing, according to �鶹��Ʒ’s review of their purchase orders accessed through the data service . Two districts — Palatine, Illinois and Conroe, Texas — each spent over $170,000 on the materials and four others spent more than $50,000.

Previous analyses have highlighted sales going to the reading materials’ primary publisher, finding some large school systems had spent over the last decade. But this report is the first known to zero in on individual districts’ purchasing of the key authors in question, spending decisions made during a national re-examination of literacy instruction.

Along with books and worksheets, at least nine districts indicated that they had paid for new professional development in the flawed literacy approaches and schools made at least 85 purchases of an assessment system for early readers .

The numbers likely understate the total because school districts in many cases have not yet submitted their more recent purchase orders to the GovSpend database, a process which can take several months, GovSpend staff said. From Oct. 21 to Nov. 31, the database shows over $1.2 million in total spending on the curricular materials, and from Dec. 1 through Feb. 27, the date �鶹��Ʒ pulled the figures, under $350,000.

Matthew Mugo Fields, president of New Hampshire-based Heinemann, the publisher at the center of Sold a Story, said none of his company’s literacy programs are designed to prioritize guessing.

“Guessing at words in lieu of decoding is not the instructional intent of those programs,” he said.

In some cases, district officials stood by the literacy materials, saying their teachers swear by them. Others defended their purchases as one tool among many at educators’ disposal for teaching kids how to read, acknowledging that they were insufficient on their own.

Krissy Hufnagel, curriculum director for schools in Mason, Ohio, the state where balanced literacy first took root, said her district had to bolster their supply of books after losing some of the titles they sent home with families during the pandemic. She has followed along for years the debate over how best to teach literacy, she said, and “absolutely” agrees with her district’s $69,500 purchase in October of guided reading materials for first graders from the Fountas and Pinnell Classroom, one of the key curriculums whose efficacy has been cast into doubt.

“It’s just one piece of the puzzle,” Hufnagel said. “We purchased decodables, we purchased read-alouds and we purchased guided, leveled books.”

Decodable books encourage young readers to develop their skills in phonics by using words they can sound out and by excluding pictures that would give away challenging words. Schools are increasingly prioritizing phonics-based instruction thanks to a documenting its central role in how young children can become strong readers.

Heinemann says it is working to incorporate its stand-alone phonics materials into its other existing programs. In the Oct. 21 to Feb. 27 timeframe, 13 districts’ purchase orders mentioned phonics and totaled roughly $4,300.

Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago studying early literacy, described the mix-and-match approach as a “bandage.” The most common curriculums that incorporate cueing — the Reading Recovery program, Lucy Calkins’s “Units of Study” and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell’s “Leveled Literacy Intervention” — have a limited research base, he said.

“You’re actually teaching kids to read like poor readers rather than like good readers,” he said. Students may still make progress using those techniques, but their gains are “overwhelmingly” better when learning via a more structured, phonics-driven approach.

Vicky Wieben is a parent who said she’s seen the harms of three cueing first hand. When her son struggled to read in the early grades, their school in an affluent suburban district outside Des Moines, Iowa, sent home books from the Reading Recovery program along with laminated instructions for the parents. The sheet told her to prompt her son to look at the picture when he didn’t know a word, then use the surrounding words for context and, if none of that worked, see if he could sound it out using the letters, she said.

“Anything that took any kind of sounding out … he would just be silent,” Wieben said. His teacher joked that the child’s imagined stories were better than the books themselves. But the mother knew that was a red flag. “He would make up what he was seeing in the picture and hope that that was good enough,” she said.

Her son, now a seventh grader, still has “holes and gaps” even in elementary school content, she said, and tested at a third-grade level in sixth grade.

Millions of other youngsters have had similar struggles. In 2022, national exams showed two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders were below proficient in reading, the age by which educators hope young people will have finished learning to read and begun reading to learn. Scores dipped after the pandemic, but even before COVID, only 35% of learners notched at or above proficient.

In an effort to turn things around, more than half of states have promoting the “science of reading,” an approach that, compared to balanced literacy, places a greater emphasis on sounding out words.

Sara Hunton, curriculum coordinator for Portales schools in New Mexico, said her district had to purchase “supplemental materials” after the state’s 2019 law because the Leveled Literacy Intervention program they use isn’t on the state’s approved list.

Researchers like Shanahan emphasize that the debates are “not black and white,” and that studies show young learners need not just phonics instruction, but also lessons in vocabulary and access to challenging reading material, among other things.

In 2022, Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College once revered for her literacy program, updated her curriculum to give students more direct instruction in phonics. Fields, Heinemann’s president, said the Fountas and Pinnell Classroom is going through a similar update process and will be including more decodable books in its next iteration. Fields did not specify any elements of either program that the authors are removing and distanced their instruction from the three-cueing method.

“We don’t use, nor have we ever used, the term ‘three cueing,’ to refer to what it is that we do,” he said.

Michelle Faust, a literacy coach working in Lexington, South Carolina, was skeptical of the new Units of Study. Over a decade ago, she was trained in the Calkins approach, but soon saw its weaknesses in the classroom. Yet, she was pleasantly surprised with the updates.

“My kindergarten teachers have been working with the new Units [of Study] this year — and they are science of reading people — and they are happy with the revisions,” she said. “Lucy has taken the Sold a Story podcast to heart and revised accordingly.”

Updated or not, Terri Marculitis, director of curriculum and instruction for Middleborough Public Schools in Massachusetts, said her district will never again purchase materials from Fountas and Pinnell Classroom. The school system bought materials until last school year, she said, and the results were “poor at best.”

“We have students in high school who have significant gaps in foundational literacy,” she said. She attributes those holes to the flawed curriculum “100%.”

Fields did not respond directly when asked whether Heinemann’s sales had changed in the wake of Sold a Story, but said the company has had to have “clarifying conversations” with several school district customers in recent months.

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell declined �鶹��Ʒ’s request for an interview. Lucy Calkins sent a written statement.

“Our new publications are informed by the science of reading research, new research on comprehension and by ongoing classroom-based research,” she said. The professor, whose LLC through which districts hire her team for training is reportedly worth , added that she holds monthly office hours to help educators implement her materials on the ground.

Emily Hanford, the American Public Media reporter who created the blockbuster Sold a Story series, said she’s not surprised schools are continuing to purchase the materials her podcast warned against. Yes, reading instruction needs to change, she said. Yes, schools need to do better. But “no one changes a culture quickly,” Hanford said.

“There are people who have been using these materials for a long time. … These ideas have been entrenched in American education for decades now, so things aren’t going to necessarily change quickly.”

See the full list of district purchase orders marked Oct. 21 though Feb. 27:

Central Falls, Rhode Island 

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.

“I thought it was a lie,” Johnson said, figuring the classroom exercise involved make-believe money. “There’s no way they’re giving us $10,000.”

But to her delight, the cash was real.

Over the following months, she and her peers received lessons in budgeting, survey techniques and local government, then eventually designed proposals for how to allocate the money. It was the first time Johnson, who grew up in Virginia and had moved to Rhode Island the previous year, ever remembers getting a say in how her school was run.

“I feel like I got to make an impact,” she said. “We felt like we were valued.”

The then-high school junior didn’t know it, but her efforts were feeding into a wider movement revolutionizing democratic engagement far beyond her campus.

The elective, first offered in 2019, has served as proof-of-concept in Central Falls for a process called participatory budgeting, which gives stakeholders a direct say in how public funds are spent. Since then, the model has spread throughout the city and is beginning to take hold statewide.

“[The class] has triggered a lot,” said City Council President Jessica Vega, who helped launch the elective. 

She made sure local officials knew how successful the course was, inviting them to the school’s voting day at the end of the semester. Thanks to a partnership with the Secretary of State’s office, students selected a winning project — new bathroom mirrors to replace ones a teacher said resembled “tin foil” — by casting customized ballots using official voting machines.

“Folks in power in that room came in and saw that. It helped them say, ‘OK, this does work.’ So we were able to expand and start thinking about what a citywide process looks like,” the council president said.

In 2020, when the school district received federal COVID relief dollars, the superintendent earmarked $100,000 for community members to allocate using the same method of direct democracy. After a months-long process, voters decided to invest the full sum into boosting the district’s afterschool learning programs.

Then again in 2021, the City Council set aside $50,000 for elderly and disabled people to choose how to make accessibility upgrades. 

Now, the Rhode Island Department of Health is using a similar tactic in Central Falls and two nearby cities, Providence and Pawtucket, allowing the communities to decide by vote how to spend a collective total of nearly $1.4 million to reduce health care disparities.

“The local success of participatory budgeting in Central Falls was a very encouraging example,” Department of Health spokesperson Annemarie Beardsworth wrote in an email.

Patricia Martinez, the school district’s chief equity officer, marvels at the swift progress.

“It’s really taken on a life of its own,” she said. “It’s a new wave of democracy, especially for underserved BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities.”

Hearing student voices

Over two-thirds of Central Falls’s 22,500 residents are Latino and 35% were born in another country. Some 45% of students in the district are classified as multilingual learners. At roughly one square mile in area, it’s Rhode Island’s smallest and most densely populated city. By measures of income, it’s the most impoverished metro area in the state.

However, by the less tangible measure of social cohesion, there’s an unmistakable richness to the community. Even on brisk days, neighbors lean over porch railings to chat with passersby; the receptionist in the district office calls the person on the other line “darling.”

The community’s interconnectedness has been key to the success of the participatory budgeting course, said Pam Jennings, who co-teaches the elective and whom City Council President Vega calls the “PB queen.” Members of the community are happy to volunteer their time to work with the class, which relies heavily on guest speakers, she said.

As students began brainstorming their projects and speaking to adults in the school about the issues they thought needed fixing — shabby gym equipment or lackluster cafeteria options, for example — a miraculous thing happened, Jennings and her co-teacher Emmanuel Ramos observed.

“As soon as students started making noise about things they wanted to see fixed, things started to get fixed,” Ramos said. Adults in the building heard what students were saying and responded.

Fresh new basketballs appeared in the gym, a salad bar popped up at lunch and the office supply company W.B. Mason offered to donate new furniture for the library, he said.

�ճ󲹳�’s actually a design feature of the model, explained Brown University education professor Jonathan Collins, who studies direct democracy in schools.

“The interesting thing about participatory budgeting is that the deeper you get into it, the more you quickly realize, it is not about the money,” he said. “[The process] is a tool that can really create and strengthen your civic infrastructure.”

Collins led an of the district’s decision to let community members allocate the $100,000 in COVID relief funding. After that deliberation, the predominantly low-income Latino participants reported double-digit increases in their likelihood to voice concerns to a local official, he found.

The results back up his , which showed that when school districts create meaningful opportunities for parents to make their voices heard, they’re more likely to speak up about issues related to their children’s education. 

For students more broadly, when they perceive their perspectives to be heard and reflected in school policy decisions, it can have a positive impact on academic outcomes like grades and attendance, according to a March 2022 published by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and Northwestern University.

Central Falls Principal Robert McCarthy recognized the participatory budgeting elective course as an opportunity to, quite literally, put his money where his mouth was on empowering students.

“Always kids are like, ‘You say that we have a voice, but what does that really mean?’” he said. “When you’re putting $10,000 behind something … it definitely speaks to this notion of, you have some power, but with power comes responsibility.”

‘My class did this’

The participatory budgeting model first launched in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It quickly spread to over 100 cities in the country, helping in those metropolitan areas. Several including Chicago, Seattle and New York have since employed the process and in San Jose, California; Phoenix, Arizona and Brooklyn, New York have brought the idea directly to students.

Only Central Falls, however, has ever made the process into a full-blown course offered within the school day, believes Jennings, who formerly worked for the a nonprofit organization that works to expand the model in the U.S. and Canada.

Other school districts that have used participatory budgeting typically hold sessions after school, which can exclude students who have evening jobs, athletics or child care responsibilities, she points out. As a semester-long, credit-bearing elective, the Central Falls class, on the other hand, has reflected the diversity of the school’s student body. 

“It’s been a very wide mix of students, including students from all different grades, too,” Jennings said. “The class is for everyone. Students of every ability, we can find a niche for them.”

On the first day, students try out a mini-version of their larger mission, collectively choosing how to use $50 to spruce up their classroom. Then, over the ensuing weeks, they receive training in budgeting tactics, survey techniques and then finally, develop project proposals. The class culminates in a school-wide vote to select a winning idea from among a dozen total proposals. 

Though the Omicron wave forced last year’s election online, the last live vote in the 2019-20 school year brought more than three-quarters of the roughly 800-person student body to the gym to cast ballots, Jennings said. This year’s live vote will take place in the spring.

Johnson, who took the course last year, said the experience was “once in a lifetime” and taught her several lessons she didn’t expect, like financial planning and what it takes to turn an idea into a reality.

“I learned so many different things about loans and investments,” she said. “A lot of the things that I learned in that class were brand new.”

Her group’s project sought to improve furniture in the library where previously, students would sit on the floor because the chairs were so uncomfortable, she said. Though her proposal came in second, $3,000 was left over from the winning project — a facelift for the cafeteria. That sum coupled with the W.B. Mason donation has revamped the library considerably, in her estimation.

Seeing the changes, the high school senior relishes the new sense of ownership she feels over her campus. Students linger in the library now, which they never used to do, she said, and the cafeteria has a new monitor to display the lunch options.

“I see it everyday. When I walk in the lunchroom, like, ‘Oh, my class did this.’ When I walk in [the library], I’m like, ‘My class did this.’ I see it every single day.”

Implementing the model

Though there’s now momentum behind the elective course in Central Falls, Jennings recognizes that getting participatory budgeting off the ground can be a difficult task.

“The hardest part is finding the pot of money,” she said. 

In 2019-20, the school district agreed to dedicate $5,000, with the other half coming from a private donor. In 2021-22, after losing a year to the pandemic, the full $10,000 budget came from outside fundraising, as dozens of community members pitched in. That allowed the district to save cash, which, in addition to COVID stimulus money the superintendent earmarked for the elective, means the course is now funded several years out, said Tatiana Baena, the district’s grant director.

“We’re trying to really sustain the program and make sure that it can be ongoing,” she said.

But even with the funds secured, students who dream of pricey upgrades like a new basketball court or state-of-the-art air conditioning get tough lessons in economics, said Ramos, the co-teacher.

“Ten thousand dollars, ultimately, it’s not that much,” he said.

But over time, the impact will compound, predicts Collins, who is closely following the efforts from nearby Providence.

“With the course, every year, there’s a new group of students who are coming in and gaining these skills and gaining this perspective and leaving with this feeling of empowerment,” observes the Brown University researcher. 

“In Central Falls in, maybe it’s 10 years, maybe it’s 20 years, if they keep doing this, you’re going to look up and you’re going to realize like, ‘Oh, wait, they’ve been able to solve some really, really major problems because they have this whole civic infrastructure.’ ”

And for some residents, the changes have been more immediate.

Baena, the district’s grants director who also serves as an elected councilwoman, helped spearhead the city’s recent participatory budgeting effort. The steering committee, she explained, felt it was important that “anyone in the community could have an opinion” and thus decided all residents could cast a ballot, regardless of whether they were registered state voters. One person from voting day in June stands out in her memory.

The woman was elderly and had lived in Central Falls for decades, Baena said, but as an undocumented immigrant, she had never voted in a U.S. election. After filling out the bubble sheet, she held the paper out to the councilwoman.

“You put it in the scanner,” the elderly woman asked Baena.

“No, no, no, señora,” Baena responded. “I want you to know how this feels. You’re going to put it into the scanner.”

The woman fed her ballot, printed by the Secretary of State’s office, into the official voting machine. Smiling, she turned back to her councilwoman.

“Here, my voice matters.”

Correction: Story was changed to correct the spelling of Emmanuel Ramos’s name.

The “Blueprint for Maryland’s Future” had been in the works since 2016, when the legislature set up an expert commission with a humble charge: Develop a plan to remake Maryland’s schools into some of the very best in the world.

In a Sunday emergency legislative meeting just before the COVID shutdown, the landmark policy, all of it, passed with bipartisan support.

“We certainly weren’t gonna let that legislation go another year when we were so close … and [knew] how important it was,” Kaiser recalls.

Now, over two years later, Maryland has begun its decades-long, multibillion-dollar mission to transform its schools. One superintendent called the effort a “seismic shift” for education in the state. A researcher described it as a “radical reimagining” of schooling. 

But outside the Old Line State, the Blueprint has barely made a splash, garnering little national attention.

“It’s sort of passed under the radar,” said William Kirwan, who chaired the commission that drafted the legislation. 

As the policy rolls out, he suspects “the results will begin to get noticed and … we can be a bellwether for the rest of the country.”

The Blueprint’s highlights include: 

• Free preschool for all low-income families
• A revamped teacher pipeline to diversify candidates and boost minimum pay to $60,000 per year
• A new model of secondary school that prepares all students for college or careers by 10th grade, leaving the final years of high school for apprenticeships and advanced coursework

“The changes are so significant, we’re basically building a new system of pre-K through 12 education,” said Kirwan, who was the longtime chancellor of the University System of Maryland.

Districts will phase in the plan over a 10-year period and the policy will ultimately inject an additional $3.8 billion annually into the state’s education system. That shakes out to a 22% increase in overall education spending in the state, or about $4,000 more per student per year, noted Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab. 

Funding comes from taxes on casino revenues and internet sales, among other sources. A newly created , of which Kirwan is a member, will guide districts through the upcoming changes and approve or deny their improvement plans.

Closing opportunity gaps

Not only does the Blueprint aim to raise the state’s overall academic achievement, which Kirwan calls “mediocre” based on past results from the Nation’s Report Card, it also seeks to correct what many experts describe as a highly unequal school system with a regressive finance structure. 

Baltimore City and Prince George’s County schools serve the highest share of Black and Hispanic students in the state and for years have received among the of any district — $3,600 and $4,500 below the level recommended in the state funding formula, respectively.

“The most persistently underfunded school systems in the state disproportionately educate the most Black and brown kids,” said Shamoyia Gardiner, executive director of .

The Blueprint will vastly reduce that imbalance by infusing the largest share of funds to the neediest districts. Its formula adjusts funding levels based on a measure for concentration of poverty. The formula does not consider racial makeups after the state attorney general said doing so would be illegal, Gardiner explained.

“The promise of the Blueprint is that in a world-class system, most of our kids are going to succeed and we’re not going to be able to tell these differences along the lines of race or class,” she added.

Now in the wake of COVID, which hit vulnerable students such as those from low-income families the hardest, the stakes for faithfully implementing the Blueprint have only been elevated, said Education Trust researcher Robert Ruffins.

“The gap that already existed … has widened, but we have the opportunity to close it if we get this right,” he said.

Trepidation & promise

Some observers criticize the mammoth policy, arguing that while it heaps funds toward schools, it has no mechanism to guarantee that the proposed changes deliver their intended effects.

“It’s kind of a wish list of all the things we think will make Maryland schools better without a promise that when we spend all the money these things will be fixed,” said Annette Anderson, a Johns Hopkins University education professor whose three children attend Baltimore City Schools. “I don’t feel like we have the accountability. … How do we measure that we’re making progress on this?”

Kirwan counters that the nature of the policy mitigates that concern. Districts are required to submit their plans to an independent body “with real teeth,” the Accountability and Implementation Board, for review and possible amendments to ensure they roll out changes faithfully, he said. 

Rachel Hise, executive director of the accountability board, added that a quarter of each district’s annual Blueprint funding will be automatically withheld until the board decides to release it. Starting in 2026, that decision will include whether the school system has made sufficient progress to improve student performance measured, in part, by test scores.

Still, school leaders fret whether some of the changes will be feasible for districts already weakened by educator shortages and seeking to recover lost ground from the pandemic.

John Woolums, director of governmental relations for the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, describes himself as a “cheerleader” for the Blueprint, but acknowledges that some of the school boards in his network have trepidations about implementation. The policy requires schools to gradually reduce teacher caseloads so they can devote time during the school day to small-group tutoring and intervention.

“Just the math of that requires that you have additional staff to meet the needs of other students during that time,” Woolums said.

Another issue that will require “outside-the-box thinking,” said Hise, is physical space for expanded preschool programs. One possible solution she points to is running early child care centers within high schools. With more upperclassmen out of the building during the day for apprenticeships, some classrooms will be unoccupied, she anticipates. At the same time, the programs could give interested high schoolers new real-world learning opportunities.

“You’ve got 11th and 12th graders who are apprenticing within that child care center … learning a new field while they’re still in high school,” she proposed.

Michael Martirano, superintendent of the roughly 57,325-student Howard County Public School System, said he’s actively considering that option. It’s an example of how the different prongs of the Blueprint can reinforce each other and bring about innovative solutions, he said.

“There’s synergy and energy around all of these [components] to think differently about getting better results for kids with this infusion of dollars from the state,” the superintendent said.

Even in the early years of implementation, Martirano has seen how the provisions of the Blueprint have given him leverage to make changes he’s long wished for. 

For example, with the Blueprint’s mandate that teacher minimum salaries eventually reach $60,000, the leader proactively brought his district’s floor up to $56,000 last year, which he said largely insulated Howard County from recent teacher shortages affecting nearby districts. The school system hired a record 500 new teachers this year and had less than 1% vacancies for teacher roles, he said.

“Things that I may have wanted to advance before … that may have been difficult to implement in the past are now an expectation,” Martirano said. “These are not negotiables. These are things that now have to be done.”

‘In it for the long haul’

But even with early signs of progress, Hise, who penned most of the bill’s text as a legislative analyst, knows that the road will be long before the policy is implemented in full.

Alongside some of the top-performing international school systems, the 2016 legislative commission studied Massachusetts, which since the 1990s has adhered to a comprehensive school improvement plan and is now touted as one of the best U.S. states for education. It took decades of work to get to that point, Hise observed.

Still, there are shortcomings, she said.

“[Massachusetts schools] still have an achievement gap that they need to close,” said the policy expert. “The [Blueprint’s] goal is to raise all boats and also close the gap.”

Gardiner, of Strong Schools Maryland, hopes her state will stay committed to the policy’s provisions, which, to her concern, have already seen slowdowns. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed the original bill in 2020, forcing a veto override vote from the legislature in 2021 and setting the implementation process at least a year behind. Democrat Wes Moore will replace the term-limited governor in January, but further out, especially as several , she fears commitment could wane.

“The fact that we are already so delayed … makes me want to ensure that we don’t slide any further away from our original vision,” Gardiner said.

The policy finds a key ally in State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury, who has the Blueprint is one of the “main reasons” he took the top job in Maryland schools in 2021. The state has an opportunity to become a leader in high-quality, equitable education, he says.

The responsiveness to community feedback instills confidence in sharlimar douglass, leader of the Maryland Alliance for Racial Equity in Education. (She does not capitalize her name.) The accountability board has held a series of virtual working sessions that douglass, who has attended each one, estimates typically draw at least 90 people.

“The process by which the board is working to make sure that all stakeholders are heard from has been excellent,” the advocate said. “Everything that’s put in the chat seems to be responded to.”

Hise, for her part, is keeping her focus on the future.

“Systemic change takes time,” she said. “You can’t look at it in two- or four-year terms. You have to be in it for the long haul and you have to be committed to it across election outcomes and changes in leadership. It has to be above all of that. That’s the goal.”

States and school districts had until the end of September to commit the first tranche of funds — totaling just over $13 billion – that was approved in March 2020. They’ll have the next two years to spend the rest.

Two questions should be top of mind now that the first spending window has closed: What should taxpayers, families and the broader public look for now? And what should they look forward to?

The first one is easy: Now that the Sept. 30 deadline has passed, the public should reasonably expect every school system to demonstrate funding accountability and transparency by making clear how it spent these first vital resources (typically to meet the most urgent, immediate needs dating to the beginning of the pandemic), how students benefited as a result and how it plans to spend the rest. 

The second question is both more complicated and more important. 

With the fourth school year of the pandemic now underway, and despite educators’ often-herculean efforts, the work remains extraordinarily challenging:

The latest results show that the nation’s students lost two decades of progress in reading and math for 9-year-olds from 2020 to 2022, with the worst impact on children who were experiencing academic challenges before COVID.

in many school systems across the country, exacerbating earlier trends and risking instability for already-exhausted communities.

On top of all of this, the political environment is more polarized than ever, tearing communities apart, doing irreparable damage to children and their teachers, and making school and district leadership — which is challenging on a good day — nearly impossible. by my colleague Julia Rafal-Baer shows that recent leadership turnover has impacted districts enrolling more than a quarter of the nation’s students, and it’s hard to imagine the political climate isn’t playing a role.

The next two years of federal pandemic recovery funding will both be impacted by and, in turn, impact these crosscurrents. Having had the opportunity to work in the federal government leading the implementation of these funds and now working with colleagues supporting states and districts using them, it’s clear that this is the time for big bets in the nation’s education system.

If the first tranche of the federal pandemic recovery funds was about stopping the bleeding, the next phases need to demonstrate that schools and districts know how to make the patient healthy.

So, looking out over the next two years, what the nation has learned so far — and what and are already hard at work doing — can suggest whether the country is heading in the right direction.

First, look for change. Students certainly need more — more school counselors and nurses and more learning time, for example — but they also desperately need different. Getting real results, especially for students who have long been underserved, requires implementing clear, coherent, evidence-based and systemwide strategies, not just individual programs. Support for educators is imperative, but success cannot only rely on a single teacher in a classroom.

Second, focus on action (or inaction). Whether a particular community prefers the term “learning loss” versus “accelerated learning,” or “mental health” versus “social-emotional support” versus “student well-being,” the thing to look for is whether districts are addressing those very real priorities: ensuring that every student can achieve at grade level, meeting the needs of the whole child and directing the most resources to the children and schools with the greatest needs. If that’s not happening, terminology is not the problem.

Third, schools are part of communities, and funding needs to reflect that reality. Almost every district priority can be more successful with the support of community partners who can be part of creative solutions, including to address school staffing crunches. Schools can use their funding to engage neighborhood-based organizations in various areas, among them early learning, health services, after-school and summer programs, early and lasting career exploration, employer internships and apprenticeships, dual enrollment at local colleges and other partnerships that make learning relevant and rigorous. This is especially true as schools work to re-engage students who have been driven out of the education system and to reverse glaring chronic absenteeism rates.

Fourth, build stronger partnerships between school and home. One potential antidote to politicization of the relationship between families and schools is to do more to and to strengthen family partnerships. Funding can pay for family-focused technology that makes communication and participation easier; outreach workers and home visitation programs; resources for parents and caregivers to be partners in implementing the, and translators and interpreters to ensure that all parents can interact with their children’s schools. 

Fifth, if states and districts don’t tell their story, no one will. Communities need to see how resources are making a difference for students and families. That means building central office capacity to be able to consistently share real stories of impact alongside regularly updated and readily understandable data on students’ learning needs (and other opportunity gaps) and how they’re being urgently addressed. 

The best bet for avoiding a is not to revert to timid spending decisions. Just the opposite: A brighter future requires boldly showing how the educational and political cost of going back to the days of underfunding schools would be worse than providing the long-term resources students truly need.

Many public employee pensions, including those covering teachers, are significantly exposed to a Russian financial market that has taken a drubbing in response to Western sanctions this month. Within days of the Russian invasion, Colorado’s state pension fund removed over $7 million held in Sberbank, a substantially state-owned Russian bank. Legislators in Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey that would push state treasurers to liquidate Russian holdings, while governors and other officials in Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Washington State, California, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut have advocated either for full-scale divestment or reviews of their portfolios. Pension funds in and are following suit. 

In a letter to his state’s three largest retirement systems, that their fiduciary duties to beneficiaries “demand that you act to address Russia’s aggressions and immediately restrict Russian access to California’s capital and investments.”

The sudden push has been framed as a blow against military aggression. But disentangling public funds from foreign entities in countries like Russia may also pose further challenges to their short-run health of already stressed retirement systems. Given the ruble’s precipitous decline in value, states must decide whether to sell off their control over assets ; with the restrictions placed on stock trading of Russian entities, some investors are . And that’s without considering the logistical challenges of identifying and severing ties to foreign investments in the first place.

Chad Aldeman, the policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said that teachers might be surprised to learn that their retirement contributions were mingled with assets overseas.

“I would say that, through their pension funds, teachers are invested in far more exotic assets and investments than the typical 401(k) investor,” Aldeman said. “There are all kinds of different financial strategies they’re pursuing, and they’re more aggressive about finding different types of investments, like lumber or coffee or international avenues like Russia.”

The dilemma showcases . Increasingly, major American investors — including pensions, but also 401(k) plans and endowments — have tended to favor positions in “passive” funds that track stock indexes rather than paying managers to pick winners for them. The switch comes in response to the high fees and disappointing performance resulting from “active” investments in the past, such as the Alabama retirement system’s in a now-defunct chain of movie theaters. By contrast, Nevada’s public employee pension a few years ago, shrinking its investment office to just one man whose professed strategy was to do “as little as possible.”

But Aldeman observed that many public pensions still have considerable sums tied into such investments, including those in foreign markets.

“They’re stretching to hit an investment target, and to do that, they’re trying to find the absolute best investments out there,” he said.

Moving away from that posture, even in response to global condemnation of Russia’s actions, may come at a price. As a case in point, the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement Fund in late February for $12.4 million. That was over $3 million less than it cost to buy them in 2017. 

That figure recedes a bit in the context of . But the system is already , and such losses may contribute to the perception of mismanagement. Ted Siedle is a pensions expert and writer who has authored investigations into retirement systems in several states, including commissioned by the state teachers’ union. In an interview, he cited the example of Ohio’s pension fund, which lost over the last decade in a deal with a Texas private equity firm. 

“That’s not a whole lot for a $100 billion pension fund to lose, but the people whose money it is didn’t look at it that way,” Siedle said. “The teachers were pissed! That’s money that could have gone to their cost-of-living adjustments. And for some pensions, the Russian holdings could be a significant amount.”

A key problem, Siedle argued, is that the boards of pension plans are typically filled with laymen with insignificant financial expertise, like municipal leaders and retired public employees. They are also not governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, the main federal body of regulations over private pensions. As a consequence, the systems are viewed by Wall Street intermediaries like hedge funds as “the dumbest investors out there,” he said.

Even amid a wave of divestment from Russian industry, it may be difficult for teachers’ pension funds to distance themselves. For one thing, Aldeman noted, they could face “lock up fees” from their managers for canceling their investments early; those might come on top of financial losses from selling assets whose market value is plummeting.

Beyond that, , lower transparency requirements outside ERISA will mean that pension funds may find it difficult to even identify where their money is invested. In other words, not only are teachers unaware of the scope of their exposure to the Russian economy, but so are the pension systems themselves.

“There’s no accountability. Who’s even going to tell them? The money manager would have to honestly tell the pension fund, and then the pension fund would have to honestly tell the public. The chances of that happening are slim to none.”

Teachers are underpaid.

We don’t spend enough on public schools.

Teachers are retiring and leaving the profession in droves due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Approval of labor unions is at an all-time high.

These and other commonly held beliefs are part of the conventional wisdom of American public life. If you don’t think so, experiment by arguing the opposite on social media. But that’s not what I want to do here.

The question isn’t whether any of these statements is right or wrong, but what people actually know about those issues.

Americans are continually polled on all sorts of matters, but rarely are they asked to demonstrate their knowledge of the topic upon which they are being asked their opinion. On the occasions when it happens, we learn something important about how new knowledge sways opinions.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for �鶹��Ʒ Newsletter

Like many organizations and media outlets, Education Next conducts an . Unlike most organizations and media outlets, the publication includes one unique and laudable twist to a couple of questions.

On queries regarding teacher salaries and school spending in its 2021 survey, respondents were split into two equally sized, randomly selected groups. One half was told the current levels of teacher pay and school spending in their area; the other was not.

Fifty-seven percent of the uninformed group wanted increased school spending, and 67 percent wanted higher teacher salaries.

Support in the informed group was 39 percent and 53 percent, respectively.

In previous years, Education Next has used this respondent split on questions about charter schools and the No Child Left Behind Act, discovering each time that some people hold strong opinions on things about which they admit knowing very little.

The question of what we actually know has arisen regarding school reopening policies and staff vaccinations. Teachers union representatives have repeatedly stated that somewhere in the vicinity of 90 percent of their members are vaccinated.

This claim is based on self-reported surveys they have done, but when the about staff vaccination status, only 4 percent were requiring disclosure, and 28 percent were collecting no information at all.

The National Education Association commissioned a survey of its members at the end of August and disclosed that . But a previous survey the union conducted, in May, revealed that 86 percent were vaccinated. Have so few been inoculated in the last three months, or should we doubt either or both of those numbers?

A question on the recent NEA member survey leans into the dilemma of perception versus knowledge by asking, “Since the pandemic started, do you think you have seen more educators retiring or leaving education than before the pandemic?” Seventy-nine percent said yes.

This response tends to support the union’s message that teachers are quitting the profession, further exacerbating a national shortage. But we don’t have to ask NEA members what they think they have seen. We have statistics.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics collects job turnover data every month. For state and local education jobs for the 15-month period from January 2019 through March 2020, the average monthly “other separations” rate, which is mostly retirements, was 0.2 percent. For the 15-month period from April 2020 through July 2021, it was 0.3 percent. .

The average monthly quit rates for the same periods were 0.9 percent and 1 percent, respectively. .

The latest NEA survey tells us that 37 percent of respondents say they are more likely than they were before the pandemic to leave the profession or retire. But the actual numbers after 15 months don’t support that alarming claim.

Finally, every Labor Day, the Gallup organization conducts a public opinion poll on labor unions. Except for one year, a majority of Americans expressed approval of labor unions every year they’ve been polled since 1937. This year, , the highest since 1965.

A dive into Gallup’s demographic data reveals that of the people who approve of labor unions, only 10 percent actually belong to one. Among subgroups, the greatest amount of support (77 percent) came from those in the 18-to-34 age bracket. Only 5 percent of those young supportive respondents belong to a union. Half of the union members who responded to Gallup were 55 or older.

Obviously, you don’t have to belong to a union to support unions. But the Gallup survey suggests that public opinion of unions is not based on personal experience or knowledge of them.

The problem for policymakers is that they have to address both reality and perception. Balancing the two isn’t easy and might even be mutually exclusive. You can develop a school reopening policy based on the assumption that 90 percent of teachers are vaccinated, but if only 65 percent are inoculated, you might have to make some serious adjustments.

On the other hand, if you set school budgets based on the assumption that people know what you’re already spending, you may find yourself at political odds with the uninformed. Many will find it more expedient to just go along with public perception rather than take on the thankless task of setting the record straight.

It’s no secret that both the informed and the uninformed vote. It’s a rare, and likely unsuccessful, politician who will seek the approval of the former and disregard the latter. Usually, it’s the other way around. �ճ󲹳�’s how we get the policies we get.

Thanks to a surprisingly strong and courtesy of the federal government, school districts across California are now flush with cash. But if district leaders aren’t careful now, they could trigger a round of painful cuts in the very near future.

Consider the case of San Diego Unified (SDU). Student enrollment has been for years, and it suffered a in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In December, the district and, as one cost-cutting measure, spent millions on early retirement buyouts for highly-paid veteran employees.

One contributing factor to SDU’s budget crunch was its history of awarding out-sized raises to teachers. Next year, for example, a ten-year veteran in the district will earn $33,000 more than when she started out. �ճ󲹳�’s an 85% increase over ten years, in a period when inflation rose only 17%.

Temporary Funds, New Permanent Commitments

The latest infusion of state and federal relief dollars have bought the district a temporary reprieve. But rather than using the opportunity to re-evaluate its past decisions, the district is making big new commitments that could bring more financial troubles down the road. Last month it to hire more full-time workers and again boost teacher salaries.

The pay increase makes for a particularly abrupt swing once you consider how it will affect individual workers. News reports have it as a “4 percent raise for educators,” but that doesn’t do it justice. Most SDU teachers will actually get 7-8% raises next year.

Take a beginning teacher who was new to the district last fall. She earned the minimum annual salary of $48,792. If she returns next year, she’ll get the 4% raise and also advance a “step” along the new schedule and be paid as a second-year teacher earning $52,648. �ճ󲹳�’s a raise of $4,007, or an increase of 7.9%. Similarly, a 10-year veteran with a Master’s degree will get a raise of $5,557 by collecting both the 4% raise and the step increment, an increase of 7.8% year-over-year.

There’s more. Teachers can boost their pay even further if they enhance their academic credentials. While researchers have found in effectiveness between teachers with only a bachelor’s versus those with a Master’s degree, in San Diego, a teacher with only a bachelor’s degree tops out at $80,000, whereas a teacher with more college credits can earn up to $105,000.

In addition to the pay increases, SDU is also making an abrupt turn on staffing. Back in December, when the district was looking to cut its higher-paid veterans, it paid 370 employees up to $15,000 to leave mid-year. Six months later, the district’s with the union calls for hiring more of the same types of employees—teachers, nurses, and counselors—that were paid to walk away just a few months ago.

Of course, SDU is by no means unique in facing pressure to boost salaries and hire more full-time staff. But using temporary funds to hire more workers and raise base salaries across the board will ultimately worsen the district’s long-term financial problems.

Non-Traditional Compensation Strategies to Solve District Challenges

There are other ways to both raise pay and build capacity that don’t set up districts for financial stress down the road.

In contrast to SDU, are offering one-time, flat-dollar bonuses that don’t affect base pay. Those are more in line with the temporary nature of the federal infusion, and they don’t disproportionately drive money on the basis of seniority.

Some districts are going even further by using their state and federal windfalls to more directly address specific recruitment and retention challenges. is offering a $4,000 signing bonus to bilingual teachers, and is offering $15,000 bonuses to special education teachers. To combat higher turnover among junior teachers, in Michigan is offering an incentive package worth $10,000 to cover moving expenses plus retention bonuses after one, two, and three years in the district.

Some are tying pay to other district priorities. in North Carolina is offering $20,000 to recruit highly effective teachers who agree to teach in the district’s highest-needs schools for three years. And Austin ISD made a 2% bonus contingent on whether the district meets its student enrollment target or not.

Next to these initiatives, San Diego Unified’s recent agreement looks like a lost opportunity. Rather than using its windfall to tackle persistent challenges, it has added to its long-term financial commitments. And when the federal money runs out, will it have the operating funds to pay for all the new employees it’s planning to hire?

That will depend on what comes next. But by adding more full-time employees and giving existing staff large base raises tied only to seniority and master’s degrees, SDU increased its chances of another abrupt budget reversal in the years to come.

Correction: Jackson Public Schools is in Michigan.

This article was written and published while the author was with Edunomics Lab at McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.