With billions of federal Covid-relief aid flowing to school districts and charter organizations, we’ve spent the past few weeks analyzing how local educators plan to use that money, tapping a database of spending plans for more than 3,000 districts representing 60 percent of public-school students and $67 billion in federal funding.
Our latest analysis breaks down $50 billion in Covid-reliefspending planned by local education agencies, the first large-scale analysis to identify proposed spending levels by category. We also produced:
A breakdown of spending priorities by district poverty level that reveals some surprising trends
An analysis of spending trends among rural, urban and suburban education agencies
A look at national and regional spending priorities
Deep dives on spending priorities in academic recovery, school climate, staff, facilities and technology
To help state and local policymakers use the unprecedented federal funding effectively, we published a series of research summaries on school staffing and other topics; we partnered with The Education Trust and Education Reform Now to release a report on promising tutoring initiatives emerging in several states; and we spoke with Johns Hopkins University researcher Bob Balfanz about an ambitious new initiative to keep students on track for high school graduation.
Harvard professor and former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville and colleague Lynne Sacks shared a strategy for reconnecting with students struggling to rebound from the pandemic.
To gauge where education policy (and politics) is heading in the states, we compiled governors’ 2022 state-of-the-state addresses and tracked state legislation restricting the teaching of racial history. Nearly 100 bills have been filed in the past year.
The FutureU higher education podcast series included an interview with outgoing University of Maryland, Baltimore County President Freeman Hrabowski and a discussion of how to measure the value of higher education with leaders from the United Negro Fund and Achieving The Dream.
We chronicle leadership changes throughout the education sector in The Churn and we post upcoming in-person and virtual education policy events in The Horizon. Send your events and leadership news to [email protected], and we’ll be happy to post them.
And if you haven’t taken our reader survey yet, please take a minute to respond.
Thanks very much and best wishes,
Tom
Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University [email protected]
@thomas_toch
