As the education sector caught its collective breath this summer, FutureEd produced several analyses that reflect the magnitude of the challenges the nation’s schools face post-pandemic recovery and highlight ways to tackle the problems.
With schools beginning to reopen for the new year, educators are confronting student absenteeism rates that have risen sharply in recent years, exacerbating learning loss and threatening recovery efforts. Working with researcher Alan Ginsburg, we found a troubling relationship between missed days and lower scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress.
Associate Director Phyllis Jordan described a series of evidence-based strategies for countering the attendance challenge in a piece for Education Next. And state leaders and attendance experts will outline steps state and local policymakers can take to get students back to school in a webinar FutureEd is hosting next week. Register here.
ESSER Updates
While commentators sound alarms about how, how fast, and how well states and school districts are spending the unprecedented $189 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) aid that Congress has earmarked for Covid recovery, Barbara Duffield from Schoolhouse Connection wrote an insightful piece for us about how education leaders can spend an often overlooked aspect of federal Covid-relief aid: the $800 million for supporting homeless students.
And Senior Fellow Lynn Olson outlined in The 74 ways that states can use federal Covid funds to scale another strategy for raising student achievement: reading reform. The piece builds on her recent FutureEd report on a revolution underway in early literacy instruction.
Relatedly, FutureEd Policy Director Liz Cohen spoke with retiring Georgetown University professor Bill Gormley about the lessons he learned during two decades of work on preschool reform in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
As part of our ongoing tracking of state and local spending of the federal pandemic-response funding, we found that as of June 30, more than $109 billion of the federal aid had been spent, with 17 states exhausting more than three-fifths of their allotments. The deadline for earmarking the remaining money is about 13 months away.
We continue to follow leadership moves in the education sector in The Churn, and to provide a listing of upcoming in-person and virtual education events. Send your events and leadership news to [email protected], and we’ll be happy to post them.
Best wishes for the new school year,
Tom
Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University [email protected]
@thomas_toch
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