school education more advanced than elementary

Fight between ‘gifted’ and ‘advanced’ programs exposes deeper problems

There is a battle in American education over two loaded adjectives, “gifted” and “advanced.” It has raged behind the scenes for decades, but that may change.

The issue made an important appearance recently in a scholarly paper by a national panel of experts on education and other topics — some liberal, some conservative — that strongly argued we should get rid of “gifted” and replace it with “advanced.” Their reasoning provides an opportunity to assess where we are with school learning in America after decades of confusion about what works and what doesn’t.

“Gifted” means having exceptional talent or natural ability. “Advanced” learning, on the other hand, means going beyond others in progress or ideas.

Here is what the National Working Group on Advanced Education said in its report “ Building a Wider, More Diverse Pipeline of Advanced Learners ”:

“America should replace ‘gifted education’ with ‘advanced education’ or ‘advanced learning opportunities.’ Likewise, substitute terms should be found for ‘tracking’ and ‘ability grouping’ because of their relationship with the sordid history of tracking programs and because they imply differences in innate ability that suggest that a student who isn’t in advanced education programs at a given time will never and should never be in them. … Also, because it’s important to include students with high academic potential but not yet high achievement, we should describe advanced learning opportunities as being for students with ‘advanced potential,’ too.”

I asked Lauri Kirsch, president of the National Association for Gifted Children, what she thought of this. Should her organization change its name? She congratulated the study authors for giving “us a lot to think about” but quickly changed the subject. A more important question, she said, was “how can we better and more equitably serve all our children, so they can reach their highest potential?”

That sounds nice, but it provides no details on how this works. I share the working group’s discomfort with “gifted.” It suggests students do well in school because they have special talents, not because they work at it. They are blessed by God or inherited great genes. All schools have to do is put them in special classes and they will soar. What about the vast majority of students who aren’t so lucky?

Perspective: Gifted programs can slight minorities and don’t accelerate kids. So why have them?

In the last four decades, I have watched and listened carefully to teachers who have, against heavy odds, succeeded in raising achievement significantly for children NOT considered gifted. Their parents did not go to college. They live in poor neighborhoods. They don’t perform as well as children in areas with trees, nice cars and low crime rates.

But when exposed to great teaching, they have thrived. Here are some examples:

Los Angeles teacher Jaime Escalante turned hundreds of low-income Hispanic students into successful Advanced Placement calculus students. Middle school teachers Mike Feinberg and David Levin created KIPP schools for impoverished children who have made extraordinary achievement gains in what is now the country’s largest charter school network. International Baccalaureate programs have elevated writing and thinking skills for average and even below-average students. Inner-city public charter school systems such as IDEA, Uncommon and Achievement First have replaced affluent suburban schools at the top of my list of those with the most students participating successfully in AP and IB.

The National Working Group includes experts such as Nicholas Colangelo at the University of Iowa, Chester E. Finn Jr. at Stanford, Tarek Grantham at the University of Georgia, Paula M. Olszewski-Kubilius at Northwestern and Jonathan Plucker at Johns Hopkins. They have identified specific actions schools should take “to effectively serve all their students who have the potential for advanced learning.” Theirs are wise recommendations, but I wonder why such sensible approaches have not produced nearly as many great schools as we need.

The working group calls for “accessible front-loading from prekindergarten through fifth grade.” That means providing enriched academic experiences to a broad swath of students, especially in early grades. The working group cites programs in Elgin, Ill., and West Chicago, Ill., that have “provided enrichment experiences in early grades with demonstrated results, especially for children from underresourced communities.” It recommends after-school, weekend and/or summer activities as well.

Perspective: Some kids need harder lessons than schools are willing to give them

The working group wants “programs and practices for advanced students” in which districts “move toward a continuum of advanced education services that replaces binary gifted-or-not thinking.” The group cites 10 examples of this approach in elementary, middle and high schools in Fairfax County, Va., including AP and IB. The focus is on helping individual students from culturally different backgrounds or different achievement levels in different subjects. “Some students will realize their potential best by skipping entire grades, for example, while other will benefit from particular advanced courses,” the working group says.

The working group wants acceleration — moving through an educational program at a more rapid pace — in kindergarten through 12th grade. It says there are at least 20 forms of this, including grade-skipping, single-subject acceleration, AP courses and dual enrollment. Plucker called it “one of the most studied intervention strategies in all of education, with overwhelming evidence of positive effect on student achievement.”

The AP and IB programs I have studied in high schools are prime examples of acceleration that works, in part because they use challenging course-ending exams that can’t be dumbed down, as attempts at acceleration often are. Teachers don’t write and grade the final AP and IB exams. That is done by outside experts, usually very experienced teachers working in the summer who don’t know the students they are grading so are immune to usual high school pressure to go easy on such nice kids.

The working group concedes there is widespread resistance to acceleration because many educators and some parents “fear students’ social and emotional developments will be impaired.” The group also acknowledges when a student is accelerated into a different school, the receiving school puts up barriers, “particularly with students from racially underrepresented or low-income backgrounds.”

So why, with such advice from experts, are most students in America still not given the extra time, incentives and demands we can see working in successful schools? In most places, we don’t push students very hard. Parents want to see good report card grades but, in most cases, don’t understand how much better their children — particularly the average ones — could be doing with the front-loading, acceleration and advancement the working group is talking about.

Parents don’t understand the power of classes in which teachers check each child for understanding and keep things moving because most parents did not experience such teaching when they were in school. Many education writers have reported what happens in places where the best methods are applied, but such information gets around slowly.

We have made some progress over time. Parents and teachers as old as I am have witnessed big changes. There were zero Advanced Placement courses at my suburban public high school in the 1960s. Here in the 2020s, my eldest grandson just enrolled in the ninth grade at a similar suburban high that has 19 AP courses. But overall growth in advanced learning in all communities has been disappointing.

Big changes in student advancement in some low-income neighborhoods are the result of a growing corps of imaginative teachers finding ways to get students working harder and making those habits stick. The scholars who put out the working group report are enthusiastic allies of such teachers and probably taught some of them in college and graduate school.

The pandemic hurt efforts at advancement in many places, but accelerating even average children both as groups and individuals is making headway because word is spreading about what our best schools in low-income and average neighborhoods are doing. The most important gifts our kids are getting these days are not intellectual, but motivational. Pushy teachers are showing children, as well as parents and other teachers, how much more students can learn if they get used to doing more challenging work.

Jay Mathews can be reached at [email protected] .

What the Future of Education Looks Like from Here

• Posted December 11, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

After a year that involved a global pandemic, school closures, nationwide remote instruction, protests for racial justice, and an election, the role of education has never been more critical or more uncertain. When the dust settles from this year, what will education look like — and what should it aspire to?

To mark the end of its centennial year, HGSE convened a faculty-led discussion to explore those questions. The Future of Education panel, moderated by Dean Bridget Long and hosted by HGSE’s Askwith Forums , focused on hopes for education going forward, as well as HGSE’s role. “The story of HGSE is the story of pivotal decisions, meeting challenges, and tremendous growth,” Long said. “We have a long history of empowering our students and partners to be innovators in a constantly changing world. And that is needed now more than ever.”

Joining Long were Associate Professor Karen Brennan , Senior Lecturer Jennifer Cheatham , Assistant Professor Anthony Jack, and Professors Adriana Umaña-Taylor and Martin West , as they looked forward to what the future could hold for schools, educators, and communities:

… After the pandemic subsides

The pandemic heightened existing gaps and disparities and exposed a need to rethink how systems leaders design schools, instruction, and who they put at the center of that design. “As a leader, in the years before the pandemic hit, I realized the balance of our work as practitioners was off,” Cheatham said. “If we had been spending time knowing our children and our staff and designing schools for them, we might not be feeling the pain in the way we are. I think we’re learning something about what the real work of school is about.” In the coming years, the panelists hope that a widespread push to recognize the identity and health of the whole-child in K–12 and higher education will help educators design support systems that can reduce inequity on multiple levels.

… For the global community

As much as the pandemic isolated individuals, on the global scale, people have looked to connect with each other to find solutions and share ideas as they faced a common challenge. This year may have brought everyone together and allowed for exchange of ideas, policies, practices, and assessments across boundaries.

… For technological advancements

As educators and leaders create, design, and imagine the future, technology should be used in service of that vision rather than dictating it. As technology becomes a major part of how we communicate and share ideas, educators need to think critically about how to deploy technology strategically. “My stance on technology is that it should always be used in the service of our human purpose and interest,” said Brennan. “We’ve talked about racial equity, building relationships. Our values and purposes and goals need to lead the way, not the tech.”

… For teachers

Human connections and interactions are at the heart of education. At this time, it’s become abundantly clear that the role of the teacher in the school community is irreplaceable. “I think the next few years hinge on how much we’re willing to invest in educators and all of these additional supports in the school which essentially make learning possible,” Umaña-Taylor said, “these are the individuals who are making the future minds of the nation possible.”

Cutting-edge research and new knowledge must become part of the public discussion in order to meaningfully shape the policies and practices that influence the future of education. “I fundamentally believe that we as academics and scholars must be part of the conversation and not limit ourselves to just articles behind paywalls or policy paragraphs at the end of a paper,” Jack said. “We have to engage the larger public.”

… In 25 years

“We shouldn’t underestimate the possibility that the future might look a lot like the present,” West said. “As I think about the potential sources of change in education, and in American education in particular, I tend to think about longer-term trends as the key driver.” Changing student demographics, access to higher education, structural inequality, and the focus of school leaders are all longer-term trends that, according to panelists, will influence the future of education. 

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What If Schools Abolished Grade Levels?

Sorting kids by age or ability creates problems, according to our panel of education experts.

This is the sixth installment in our series about school in a perfect world. Read previous entries on calendars , content , homework , teachers , and classrooms.

We asked prominent voices in education—from policy makers and teachers to activists and parents—to look beyond laws, politics, and funding and imagine a utopian system of learning. They went back to the drawing board—and the chalkboard—to build an educational Garden of Eden. We’re publishing their answers to one question each day this week. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Today’s assignment: The Classification. What impact do students’ individual abilities have on their education?

Rita Pin Ahrens, the director of education policy for the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center

In an ideal school, there will be more diagnosis and detailed reporting on what students know and can do in relation to the academic objectives that are identified at their grade level, complemented with reporting on students’ strengths on social and emotional skills that are valuable for career readiness and civic engagement. This information will be readily available to the student, parents, and teachers at any time to allow all stakeholders involved to offer remediation and enrichment where necessary. There will be less emphasis on grading for specific subjects than there would be for accomplishing learning objectives. The key is to have a rich, detailed view of what the student knows and can do. Advancement will then be at the student’s pace, but there will be  expectations for how quickly a student should advance. With flexible scheduling and more time in both the day and the year for schooling, students will have more opportunity to catch up during, before, or after school.

Students will be required to start school at age 4 and continue through age 18, when they are considered adults and able to make their own decisions and live independently.

Nicholson Baker, the author of Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

The reality is that schools go by age, even when they claim they're embracing "performance-based" as opposed to "age-based" instruction: It just looks strange and embarrassing when one student is two feet taller than his classmates.

Everyone understands letter grades, and the fear of failure is a motivator. Some informal tracking is inevitable. But there's too much ranking and GPA-ing now—it makes the kids who are struggling miserable.

Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education

A synthesis of the research on multi-age and multi-grade classrooms (classrooms in which one teacher or group of teachers instruct students of two or more grade levels at one time) shows neither a positive nor a negative effect for this practice. Like block scheduling, a school may embrace the practice for philosophical or practical reasons, but there will likely not be learning or non-cognitive gains or losses for students.

Ability grouping, on the other hand, will be avoided. The research is clear: Ability grouping harms lower achievers while providing no academic benefit for average or higher achievers. Although there are some studies that show ability grouping slightly depresses the learning of higher achievers, the preponderance of studies across decades shows that higher-achieving students are not harmed by being in classrooms with lower achievers.

For 15 years, I worked with my faculty to eliminate ability grouping from our high school and provide all students access to our best curriculum—the International Baccalaureate. Not only did lower achievers benefit, but higher achievers did as well.  Mixed-ability classrooms, with a teacher skilled in differentiating instruction teaching an enriched curriculum, is the best possible way to group students.

Catherine Cushinberry, the executive director of Parents for Public Schools

Students will be grouped by age. Grades will be used as a measure of progress for parents and caregivers, and for students ages 13-18—particularly because college-admission requirements may not shift with the change in the school structure. Having age categories for classes will continue to give students something to aspire to as they matriculate. Students will be required to attend school as early as 3 years old. Pre-K students will not be “in class” all day. They need time to play and nap, but will stay in school for the full day.

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Michael Horn, the co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute

Students will learn in competency-based environments in which they make progress based on their mastery of knowledge and skills, not based on time. The traditional notions of grades will fall away as a result.

That said, because schooling performs an important social function, students will continue to be grouped with their peers. But with the rise of blended learning, students won’t be prisoners to the progress of those peers. If a student already understands something, she can move on to another concept or go deeper in her learning. If she needs more time learning, then she can learn more. Students will learn in mixed-age groupings—studies show there are benefits for all in doing so—and educators will take advantage by having students learn in both homogenous and heterogeneous groups depending on the objective. Students who have mastered a concept, for example, can fine-tune their understanding and bolster their confidence through teaching it to another student. A huge benefit of this shift will be breaking the age-old trade off between social promotion and holding a student back. In one case, the student doesn’t learn the material. In the other, there are social drawbacks. We won’t have to settle in the future.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation

Grouping students according to ability is one of the most challenging issues in education. On the one hand, strict tracking programs that poorly identify students and allow little fluidity between tracks can unfairly trap low-income and minority students into low-level groups that perpetuate inequality. On the other hand, individual students (as opposed to groups) do vary in ability, and it makes little sense to include in a single classroom a student ready for calculus and another who struggles with basic arithmetic.

A number of schools, however, are avoiding this Hobson’s choice by employing a hybrid approach. As Michael Petrilli, the president of the conservative Fordham Institute notes , Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) High School in Maryland, which educates the children of ambassadors alongside the children of maids, has eliminated tracking in biology and now teaches mixed-ability classes. Within these classes, particularly gifted students are given more challenging assignments that go into greater depth than others. This system works well, Petrilli says: “B-CC continues to excel academically while also making the most of its rich diversity.” Likewise, schools will be strategic about the use of ability grouping, employing the practice more consistently in high school than in elementary school, where differences in manifest ability are smaller, and more in certain subjects, such as mathematics, than in others, such as civics, where democratic accessibility is a key message of the curriculum itself.

Michelle Rhee, the founder of StudentsFirst and the former chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools

The education system of the future has universal, high-quality prekindergarten programs available for all three- and four-year-old children, absolutely free. From pre-K forward, students will advance based on their academic achievement and pace—with options throughout their course of study to test into more advanced placements or receive additional supports to ensure all children have access to school experiences that meet their needs. Children will be grouped broadly by age, but classes will be based largely on skill levels.  Access to qualifying entry for advanced classes will result in more age-diverse classes as students progress through the K-12 pipeline. Students will also be encouraged to pursue their interests more deeply through opportunities such as electives, internships, and apprenticeships.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers

Do we want to give every child a fair shot to pursue his or her dreams? How can we possibly expect kids to develop their individual abilities if we only offer them English and math, but never give them a chance to try painting, playing a sport, learning an instrument, or cooking a meal?

Children need a variety of opportunities—and we will start by restoring arts, music, physical education, and so many other subjects that have been squeezed out by test mania and austerity budgets. We will expand magnet, and career-and-tech programs to give kids pathways to explore their passions.

But helping kids discover their individual abilities takes more than options; it takes the capacity to meet kids where they are. It is imperative to be able to differentiate instruction and help draw kids out, to make the learning real.

For that to happen, classes will be small enough for educators to give kids individual attention. These educators will have the support and knowledge to engage students, and resources throughout the school—like libraries and counselors—to ensure kids are supported throughout the learning process.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment in this series.

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The Evolution of Technology in K–12 Classrooms: 1659 to Today

Alexander Huls is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in  The New York Times ,  Popular Mechanics ,  Esquire ,  The Atlantic  and elsewhere.

In the 21st century, it can feel like advanced technology is changing the K–12 classroom in ways we’ve never seen before. But the truth is, technology and education have a long history of evolving together to dramatically change how students learn.

With more innovations surely headed our way, why not look back at how we got to where we are today, while looking forward to how educators can continue to integrate new technologies into their learning?

DISCOVER:  Special education departments explore advanced tech in their classrooms.

Using Technology in the K–12 Classroom: A History

1659: magic lantern.

• Inventor:  Christiaan Huygens
• A Brief History:  An ancestor of the slide projector, the magic lantern projected glass slides with light from oil lamps or candles. In the 1680s, the technology was brought to the education space to show detailed anatomical illustrations, which were difficult to sketch on a chalkboard.
• Interesting Fact:  Huygens initially regretted his creation, thinking it was too frivolous.

1795: Pencil

• Inventor:  Nicolas-Jacques Conté
• A Brief History : Versions of the pencil can be traced back hundreds of years, but what’s considered the modern pencil is credited to Conté, a scientist in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. It made its impact on the classroom, however, when it began to be mass produced in the 1900s.
• Interesting Fact:  The Aztecs used a form of graphite pencil in the 13th century.

1801: Chalkboard

• Inventor:  James Pillans
• A Brief History:  Pillans — a headmaster at a high school in Edinburgh, Scotland — created the first front-of-class chalkboard, or “blackboard,” to better teach his students geography with large maps. Prior to his creation, educators worked with students on smaller, individual pieces of wood or slate. In the 1960s, the creation was upgraded to a green board, which became a familiar fixture in every classroom.
• Interesting Fact:  Before chalkboards were commercially manufactured, some were made do-it-yourself-style with ingredients like pine board, egg whites and charred potatoes.

1888: Ballpoint Pen

• Inventory:  John L. Loud
• A Brief History:  John L. Loud invented and patented the first ballpoint pen after seeking to create a tool that could write on leather. It was not a commercial success. Fifty years later, following the lapse of Loud’s patent, Hungarian journalist László Bíró invented a pen with a quick-drying special ink that wouldn’t smear thanks to a rolling ball in its nib.
• Interesting Fact:  When ballpoint pens debuted in the U.S., they were so popular that Gimbels, the department store selling them, made $81 million in today’s money within six months.

LEARN MORE:  Logitech Pen works with Chromebooks to combine digital and physical learning.

1950s: Overhead Projector

• Inventor:  Roger Appeldorn
• A Brief History:  Overhead projects were used during World War II for mission briefings. However, 3M employee Appeldorn is credited with creating not only a projectable transparent film, but also the overhead projectors that would find a home in classrooms for decades.
• Interesting Fact:  Appeldorn’s creation is the predecessor to today’s  bright and efficient laser projectors .

1959: Photocopier

• Inventor:  Chester Carlson
• A Brief History:  Because of his arthritis, patent attorney and inventor Carlson wanted to create a less painful alternative to making carbon copies. Between 1938 and 1947, working with The Haloid Photographic Company, Carlson perfected the process of electrophotography, which led to development of the first photocopy machines.
• Interesting Fact:  Haloid and Carlson named their photocopying process xerography, which means “dry writing” in Greek. Eventually, Haloid renamed its company (and its flagship product line) Xerox .

1967: Handheld Calculator

• Inventor:   Texas Instruments
• A Brief History:  As recounted in our  history of the calculator , Texas Instruments made calculators portable with a device that weighed 45 ounces and featured a small keyboard with 18 keys and a visual display of 12 decimal digits.
• Interesting Fact:  The original 1967 prototype of the device can be found in the Smithsonian Institution’s  National Museum of American History .

1981: The Osborne 1 Laptop

• Inventor:  Adam Osborne, Lee Felsenstein
• A Brief History:  Osborne, a computer book author, teamed up with computer engineer Felsenstein to create a portable computer that would appeal to general consumers. In the process, they provided the technological foundation that made modern one-to-one devices — like Chromebooks — a classroom staple.
• Interesting Fact:  At 24.5 pounds, the Osborne 1 was about as big and heavy as a sewing machine, earning it the current classification of a “luggable” computer, rather than a laptop.

1990: World Wide Web

• Inventor:  Tim Berners-Lee
• A Brief History:  In the late 1980s, British scientist Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web to enable information sharing between scientists and academics. It wasn’t long before the Web could connect anyone, anywhere to a wealth of information, and it was soon on its way to powering the modern classroom.
• Interesting Fact:  The first web server Berners-Lee created was so new, he had to put a sign on the computer that read, “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!”

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What Technology Is Used in Today’s K–12 Classrooms?

Technology has come so far that modern classrooms are more technologically advanced than many science labs were two decades ago. Students have access to digital textbooks,  personal devices , collaborative  cloud-based tools , and  interactive whiteboards . Emerging technologies now being introduced to K–12 classrooms include voice assistants, virtual reality devices and 3D printers.

Perhaps the most important thing about ed tech in K–12 isn’t what the technology is, but how it’s used.

How to Integrate Technology into K–12 Classrooms

The first step to integrating technology into the K–12 classroom is  figuring out which solution to integrate , given the large variety of tools available to educators. That variety comes with benefits — like the ability to align tech with district objectives and grade level — but also brings challenges.

“It’s difficult to know how to choose the appropriate digital tool or resource,” says Judi Harris, professor and Pavey Family Chair in Educational Technology at the William & Mary School of Education. “Teachers need some familiarity with the tools so that they understand the potential advantages and disadvantages.”

Judi Harris Professor and Pavey Family Chair in Educational Technology, William and Mary School of Education

K–12 IT leaders should also be careful not to focus too much on technology implementation at the expense of curriculum-based learning needs. “What districts need to ask themselves is not only whether they’re going to adopt a technology, but how they’re going to adopt it,” says Royce Kimmons, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University.

In other words, while emerging technologies may be exciting, acquiring them without proper consideration of their role in improving classroom learning will likely result in mixed student outcomes. For effective integration, educators should ask themselves, in what ways would the tech increase or support a student’s productivity and learning outcomes? How will it improve engagement?

Integrating ed tech also requires some practical know-how. “Teachers need to be comfortable and confident with the tools they ask students to use,” says Harris.

Professional development for new technologies is crucial, as are supportive IT teams, tech providers with generous onboarding programs and technology integration specialists. Harris also points to initiatives like YES: Youth and Educators Succeeding, a nonprofit organization that prepares students to act as resident experts and classroom IT support.

KEEP READING:  What is the continued importance of professional development in K–12 education?

But as educational technology is rolled out and integrated, it’s important to keep academic goals in sight. “We should never stop focusing on how to best understand and help the learner to achieve those learning objectives,” says Harris.

That should continue to be the case as the technology timeline unfolds, something Harris has witnessed firsthand during her four decades in the field. “It’s been an incredible thing to watch and to participate in,” she notes. “The great majority of teachers are extremely eager to learn and to do anything that will help their students learn better.”

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New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

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Mind the achievement gap: California’s disparities in education, explained

Few goals in education have been as frustrating and urgent as the effort to fix the deep, generational disparity in achievement between the haves and the have-nots in California schools.

It is an article of faith in the K-12 school system that every student — regardless of race, creed, wealth or color — can and should be academically successful. But in measures from standardized tests to dropout rates to college completion, the achievement gap has persisted in cities, rural communities and suburbs, a sign that opportunity is not yet equal for many children in California classrooms.

Since 2008, prompted in part by budget constraints in the aftermath of the recession, California has initiated sweeping reforms in an attempt to channel more resources to high-needs students and to better level the educational playing field. These and other efforts had, to some extent, improved academic outcomes — but Black, Latino and poor students still lag dramatically behind Asian American, white and wealthier students. 

But that was before the pandemic. When schools moved to virtual instruction in early 2020, parents with more resources were able to provide a softer landing. Low-income, Black and Latino families, however, were more likely to lack an internet connection and slip through the cracks completely. Some experts expect it’ll take some marginalized student groups a generation to recover. 

Nearly two years into the pandemic, there isn’t much data on how far students have been set back. California canceled standardized testing in both 2020 and 2021. The closure of schools and the subsequent inequities remains, not only a source of political tension, but also a looming economic problem for California.

What’s the national picture?

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Disparities associated with race and class have long vexed this country. But as the civil rights laws and school desegregation mandates took hold in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the academic performance of poor, Black and Latino students improved significantly. 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a longstanding standardized test measuring student achievement, showed, for example, that gaps in reading and math scores between black and white high school students nationally were roughly halved between 1971 and 1996, Harvard social policy professor Christopher Jencks and UCLA public policy professor Meredith Phillips noted in their 1998 book, “ The Black-White Test Score Gap .”

But by the late 1990s, as court orders to desegregate were lifted, schools quietly re-segregated, and test scores and metrics began showing diminishing progress. As the 21st century began, education researchers were baffled. When the “No Child Left Behind Act” was signed in 2001 by President George W. Bush, closing the achievement gap was its explicit aim — it was even in the title of the law . 

The act focused states on the gap, but neither it nor subsequent bipartisan reform attempts have had much success in moving the needle . President Barack Obama in 2010 tried “Race to the Top” financial incentives, states including California have initiated more rigorous Common Core standards, and Congress combined a number of approaches in 2015 with the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” but progress has been slow.  

What’s the California picture?

Massive and diverse, California struggles with formidable income disparities and complex demographics that don’t stop at its public school system. When former Gov. Jerry Brown took office after the last recession, he overhauled school finance policy to make decisions more local, and to steer more state resources to disadvantaged kids. 

The state also adopted Common Core learning standards ; a tougher standardized exam to measure growth in achievement; and an accountability system that gives schools not a one-dimensional grade, but a color-coded, report card-style dashboard that judges them based on multiple data points.

Since California students began taking the new standardized exam — known as “Smarter Balanced” — statewide reading and math scores have inched up an average of about 1 percentage point each year for the past five years. 

In 2019, about 51% of students who took the exam — administered to high-school juniors and students in grades 3-8 — had mastered the state’s reading standards. In math, about 40% of students who took the exam earned a passing score.

California’s gap demographics

UCLA researchers recently found that California was the most segregated state for Latinos , “where 58% attend intensely segregated schools,” exacerbating inequities in educational opportunities. More than half of the state’s Black students are concentrated in just 25 of the state’s 1,000 school districts. Of the students enrolled in K-12 public schools in California, less than 30% are white, the researchers found.

Black and Latino students significantly trail white and Asian American students in meeting the state’s reading and math standards. In some instances — say, performance in reading and math between white and black students — the difference in achievement is more than two-fold.

Poverty plus segregation

A recent study by Stanford researchers found student achievement gaps are mainly driven by school poverty — not a school’s racial composition. “Racial segregation appears to be harmful because it concentrates minority students in high-poverty schools, which are, on average, less effective than lower-poverty schools,” the study found.

Take, for instance, results in the key areas of third-grade reading and eighth-grade math. Smarter Balanced results from 2019 showed all groups doing better and some gaps narrowing dramatically when poverty wasn’t an issue, though some disparities remained.

Some metrics are improving …

Test scores aren’t the only achievement gap measure. Graduation and suspension rates have also reflected disparities, and the improvements there are more positive. 

Graduation rates have risen steadily in recent years — overall and for all groups — to 84.5% in 2019. The overall graduation remained stable in 2020 at 84.2%. Calculation of those rates has been controversial, but a 2018 study credited the uptick to school funding reforms. Suspension rates among students of color have also plummeted to record lows, in part due to recent legislation that tightened suspension and expulsion guidelines in an effort to reduce bias and disproportionate discipline for black and Latino students. 

… College and career readiness, less so

In California, about 44% of graduating seniors were deemed prepared for college or postsecondary careers in 2018-19. The state’s “college and career indicator” factors whether students passed the 11th grade Smarter Balanced reading and math exams or mastered advanced coursework, and whether students met the state’s A-G requirements to attend the University of California or California State University.

While overall college and career readiness is inching toward improvement, there remain yawning gaps in preparedness for the state’s most disadvantaged students. English learners (16.8% preparedness), foster youth (13.3%) and students with disabilities (10.8%) have the lowest readiness rates in California.

Achievement gaps in earlier grades also play out as students leave the state’s public school system. Researchers with The Education Trust-West in 2017 traced racial, ethnic and income disparities in which students had access and participated in advanced coursework, such as AP classes that let high school students earn college credits early. More black and Latino high schoolers were taking AP courses, Ed Trust-West reported, but fewer than half of them were passing.  

Successes are hard to scale, too

Some school districts are bucking the statewide trend, narrowing achievement gaps with higher-than-average outcomes among disadvantaged groups of kids. The Learning Policy Institute recently highlighted these “positive outlier” districts in which students of color are outperforming their racial, ethnic and socioeconomic peer groups.

In the Chula Vista Elementary School District, for example, reading and math scores have risen by double-digit percentage points for black, Latino and economically disadvantaged students. 

But California public schools educate more than 6 million students, so it’s difficult to scale successes. The state is home to the nation’s second-largest district (Los Angeles Unified), dozens of other large districts each responsible for educating tens of thousands of kids, and hundreds of small districts spread throughout the state’s urban and rural areas.

Would different teachers help?

California, like other states, is experiencing a persistent shortage of qualified teachers. This disproportionately affects students who are black, Latino, economically disadvantaged or who have special needs.

An analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California found that changes in California’s school funding law have lowered classroom sizes and added resources, such as extra teachers and support staff, for schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students. But those extra teachers, the analysis found , were still more likely to be inexperienced.

Research demonstrates the influence teachers of color have in lifting up academic achievement for students of color, and the effort has been a state focus over the last year. But while America’s teaching corps has become more diverse , recruiting and retaining qualified teachers of color has remained a challenge in California. 

What about preschool and transitional kindergarten?

In 2018, Stanford researchers emphasized the importance of expanding low-income families’ access to subsidized childcare and preschool, noting that while the state’s students are learning at rates similar to their peers nationally, they’re starting at a disadvantage. “California’s lag in academic achievement,” the report said, “arises before children even enter the schoolhouse door.” 

California became a pioneer in universal Transitional Kindergarten , the stepping stone between preschool and kindergarten, in 2021. State lawmakers agreed to spend $2.7 billion to establish the new grade level for all of California’s 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year.

Tweak the funding formula?

California’s 2013 Local Control Funding Formula was the linchpin of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s school finance overhaul. Under it, all school districts get a flat grant based on their enrollment. Districts with higher concentrations of low-income students, English language learners and foster youth then receive additional funding through “supplemental” and “concentration” grants. 

Legislators supported the law and its focus because they recognized that students with higher hurdles need more resources. Local school officials now have more authority to decide how to spend their dollars, and they widely say the formula is an upgrade over the previous school finance method, which doled out funding to schools through dozens of “categorical” programs that specifically dictated how districts could use each category of funds.

Some schools have seen significant progress under the new system, with low income kids, for example. But it’s been slow going, and with some groups, the extra money doesn’t seem to be making as much difference. In 2021, the state budget increased the size of concentration grants. One study, however, found that funding should be calculated for each school , rather than for each district.

The transparency debate

There’s another issue with the school funding formula: Following the money is hard. A 2019 state audit found it was nearly impossible to determine whether school districts are spending their supplemental and concentration dollars on services for the disadvantaged students for whom they’re intended. It reignited calls for transparency.

Supporters of stronger oversight say it’s necessary if the state is to effectively close achievement gaps. The audit also noted a loophole: Funding targeted for students in need loses its designation if it goes unspent in the year for which it’s earmarked, so that special needs money can actually be used for district-wide expenses if it rolls over into the following school year.  

Lawmakers unsuccessfully tried to enhance transparency and close these loopholes in 2020. The State Board of Education, however, has made changes intended to make school accountability documents easier to read for parents, and the state Department of Education is studying transparency.

Rising costs threaten reforms

Despite years of economic growth in California and record spending toward public education, study after recent study has warned that school districts are heading for long-term financial problems. The Local Control Funding Funding formula has increased spending by about $24 billion since 2013, but student enrollment has declined in California, and fixed costs such as healthcare, special education programs and employee pension obligations have dramatically risen. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom included $3 billion in pension relief for districts in 2019 in his inaugural budget. In 2020, the state provided an additional $1.6 billion for relief. However, districts’ contribution rates toward the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) have increased from 8% of their payroll in 2013 to 16% in 2021. These cost pressures compete with achievement gap initiatives on district balance sheets.  

What price equal opportunity?

In 2018, researchers with the American Institute for Research looked at California’s spending the prior school year and calculated that, to educate all the state’s K-12 students to California’s learning standards, the state would have had to spend an extra $25.6 billion over the $66.7 billion it spent that year.

That figure — essentially a cost estimate for closing the achievement gap — varied by school district. But overall, it worked out to about $16,800 per pupil, an increase of more than one-third.

In 2021, the budget for public schools and community colleges ballooned to a record-breaking $123.9 billion. But the governor, legislators, advocates, educators and experts agree that the state needs to commit even more to education, pointing to cost-of-living-adjusted rankings that place California 41st in education spending.

Education is already a massive line item, and lawmakers have been loath to make it bigger, given the traumatic cuts that had to be made during the last recession. In 2020 Californians voted down a ballot measure that could have raised billions of dollars for public schools by raising taxes on big corporations.

Overcoming the pandemic

After the pandemic first shut down schools in March 2020, most of California’s students didn’t come back for full-time, in-person instruction until the start of the 2021-22 school year. Because the state did not administer standardized tests in both the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, it’s hard to know exactly how far students have fallen behind.

But grades have plummeted across the state. More students received Ds and Fs during the pandemic. English learners and students from low-income families saw steeper grade drops.

But as students returned to campuses, educators were tasked with not only fostering recovery in academics but also in terms of mental and emotional health. To help students readjust to the classroom environment, the state allocated $5 billion across 5 years to expand after-school and summer school programs. 

And in a historic move to combat food insecurity, an inequity laid bare by the pandemic, the state spent $54 million for schools to give all students two free meals a day. The universal free meals will start in the 2022-23 school year.

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Want to submit a guest commentary or reaction to an article we wrote? You can find our submission guidelines here . Please contact CalMatters with any commentary questions: [email protected]

Ricardo Cano

Ricardo Cano covers California education for CalMatters. Cano joined CalMatters in September 2018 from The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, where he spent three years as the education reporter. Cano... More by Ricardo Cano

Joe Hong K-12 Education Reporter

Joe reports on the students, teachers and lawmakers who shape California's public schools. Before joining CalMatters in 2021, he was the education reporter at KPBS, the public radio station in San Diego.... More by Joe Hong

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How Well Are Schools Preparing Students? Advanced Academics and World Languages, in 4 Charts

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Corrected : An earlier version of this story incorrectly combined principals’ responses to their confidence in school preparation. Fewer than half of high school principals believe their school does a “very good” or “excellent” job of preparing students for higher education.

The vast majority of high schools have moved to align their courses with college admission requirements, but fewer than half of high school principals think their schools do a very good or excellent job of preparing their students for higher education, according to new federal data.

Small schools in particular struggle to offer the kind of advanced coursework students need to be competitive for college, and world language offerings, which are often recommended for college applicants, remain limited in most schools.

The data come from the January School Pulse Panel, a nationally representative bimonthly survey of more than 1,600 K-12 principals. The National Center for Education Statistics has conducted the survey since the start of the pandemic to track school practices.

Principals’ low ratings of their students’ college preparedness notwithstanding, a majority think their students will graduate ready for the workforce. More than 8 in 10 high school leaders reported that they have aligned their graduation requirements to meet local higher education admission requirements and offer at least some career and technical education.

The proliferation of career and technical coursework is a positive, said Chris Chapman, NCES associate commissioner. “Advanced coursework is not the only way that public schools or any kind of schools can prepare students for life beyond high school,” he said.

Seventy-three percent of principals reported their schools offer advanced coursework, including Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or dual-credit courses with a college or university. While low-income schools were less likely to offer courses than higher-income schools, neither was significantly different from schools overall, and student participation was often low.

However, only half of leaders of high schools with fewer than 300 students offered advanced courses—while nearly all schools with 500 or more students did so.

World language offerings are limited

While most high schools now offer at least one world language, only a fifth of elementary schools do so. Research suggests early bilingual education can improve long-term student fluency in both English and the second language.

Spanish remains the most common world language offered in high schools, NCES found, accounting for more language programs than all others combined.

Principals also reported that Latin is taught in more schools than modern Arabic, Japanese, or Italian.

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Education Rankings by Country 2024

There is a correlation between a country's educational system quality and its economic status, with developed nations offering higher quality education.

The U.S., despite ranking high in educational system surveys, falls behind in math and science scores compared to many other countries.

Educational system adequacy varies globally, with some countries struggling due to internal conflicts, economic challenges, or underfunded programs.

While education levels vary from country to country, there is a clear correlation between the quality of a country's educational system and its general economic status and overall well-being. In general, developing nations tend to offer their citizens a higher quality of education than the least developed nations do, and fully developed nations offer the best quality of education of all. Education is clearly a vital contributor to any country's overall health.

According to the Global Partnership for Education , education is considered to be a human right and plays a crucial role in human, social, and economic development . Education promotes gender equality, fosters peace, and increases a person's chances of having more and better life and career opportunities.

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." — Nelson Mandela

The annual Best Countries Report , conducted by US News and World Report, BAV Group, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania , reserves an entire section for education. The report surveys thousands of people across 78 countries, then ranks those countries based upon the survey's responses. The education portion of the survey compiles scores from three equally-weighted attributes: a well-developed public education system, would consider attending university there, and provides top-quality education. As of 2023, the top ten countries based on education rankings are:

Countries with the Best Educational Systems - 2021 Best Countries Report*

Ironically, despite the United States having the best-surveyed education system on the globe, U.S students consistently score lower in math and science than students from many other countries. According to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science. Discussions about why the United States' education rankings have fallen by international standards over the past three decades frequently point out that government spending on education has failed to keep up with inflation.

It's also worthwhile to note that while the Best Countries study is certainly respectable, other studies use different methodologies or emphasize different criteria, which often leads to different results. For example, the Global Citizens for Human Rights' annual study measures ten levels of education from early childhood enrollment rates to adult literacy. Its final 2020 rankings look a bit different:

Education Rates of Children Around the World

Most findings and ranking regarding education worldwide involve adult literacy rates and levels of education completed. However, some studies look at current students and their abilities in different subjects.

One of the most-reviewed studies regarding education around the world involved 470,000 fifteen-year-old students. Each student was administered tests in math, science, and reading similar to the SAT or ACT exams (standardized tests used for college admissions in the U.S.) These exam scores were later compiled to determine each country's average score for each of the three subjects. Based on this study, China received the highest scores , followed by Korea, Finland , Hong Kong , Singapore , Canada , New Zealand , Japan , Australia and the Netherlands .

On the down side, there are many nations whose educational systems are considered inadequate. This could be due to internal conflict, economic problems, or underfunded programs. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's Education for All Global Monitoring Report ranks the following countries as having the world's worst educational systems:

Countries with the Lowest Adult Literacy Rates

• Education rankings are sourced from both the annual UN News Best Countries report and the nonprofit organization World Top 20

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Which country ranks first in education?

Which country ranks last in education, frequently asked questions.

• Best Countries for Education - 2023 - US News
• Literacy rate, adult total (% of people ages 15 and above) - World Bank
• World Best Education Systems - Global Citizens for Human Rights
• UNESCO - Global Education Monitoring Reports
• World’s 10 Worst Countries for Education - Global Citizen
• International Education Database - World Top 20

Report | Budget, Taxes, and Public Investment

Public education funding in the U.S. needs an overhaul : How a larger federal role would boost equity and shield children from disinvestment during downturns

Report • By Sylvia Allegretto , Emma García , and Elaine Weiss • July 12, 2022

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Press release

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Summary 

Education funding in the United States relies primarily on state and local resources, with just a tiny share of total revenues allotted by the federal government. Most analyses of the primary school finance metrics—equity, adequacy, effort, and sufficiency—raise serious questions about whether the existing system is living up to the ideal of providing a sound education equitably to all children at all times. Districts in high-poverty areas, which serve larger shares of students of color, get less funding per student than districts in low-poverty areas, which predominantly serve white students, highlighting the system’s inequity. School districts in general—but especially those in high-poverty areas—are not spending enough to achieve national average test scores, which is an established benchmark for assessing adequacy. Efforts states make to invest in education vary significantly. And the system is ill-prepared to adapt to unexpected emergencies.

These challenges are magnified during and after recessions. Following the Great Recession that began in December 2007, per-student education revenues plummeted and did not return to pre-recession levels for about eight years. The recovery in per-student revenues was even slower in high-poverty districts. This report combines new data on funding for states and for districts by school district poverty level, and over time, with evidence documenting the positive impacts of increasing investment in education to make a case for overhauling the school finance system. It calls for reforms that would ensure a larger role for the federal government to establish a robust, stable, and consistent school funding plan that channels sufficient additional resources to less affluent students in good times and bad. Furthermore, spending on public education should be retooled as an economic stabilizer, with increases automatically kicking in during recessions. Such a program would greatly mitigate cuts to public education as budgets are depleted, and also spur aggregate demand to give the economy a needed boost.

Following are key findings from the report:

Our current system for funding public schools shortchanges students, particularly low-income students. Education funding generally is inadequate and inequitable; It relies too heavily on state and local resources (particularly property tax revenues); the federal government plays a small and an insufficient role; funding levels vary widely across states; and high-poverty districts get less funding per student than low-poverty districts.

Those problems are magnified during and after recessions. Funding inadequacies and inequities tend to be aggravated when there is an economic downturn, which typically translates into problems that persist well after recovery is underway. After the 2007 onset of the Great Recession, for example, funding fell, and it took until 2015–2016, on average, to return to their pre-recession per-student revenue and spending levels. For high-poverty school districts, it took even longer—until 2016–2017—to rebound to their pre-recession revenue levels. And even after catching up with pre-recession levels, revenue levels in high-poverty districts lag behind the per-student funding in low-poverty districts. The general, long-standing funding inadequacies and inequities combined with the worsening of these problems during and in the aftermath of recessions have both short- and long-term repercussions that are costly for the students as well as for the country.

Increased federal spending on education after recessions helps mitigate funding shortfalls and inequities. Without increased federal education spending after recessions, school districts would suffer from an even greater decline in funding and even wider gaps between funding flowing to low-poverty and high-poverty districts.

Increased spending on education could help boost economic recovery. While Congress has enacted one-time education spending increases in difficult economic times, spending on public education should be considered one of the automatic stabilizers in our economic policy toolkit, designed to automatically increase and thus spur aggregate demand when private spending falls. Deployed this way, education spending becomes part of a set of large, broadly distributed programs that are countercyclical, i.e., designed to kick in when the economy overall is contracting and thus stave off or lessen the severity of a downturn. Along with other automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance, education spending thus would provide a stimulus to boost economic recovery.

We need an overhaul of the school finance system, with reforms ensuring a larger role for the federal government. In light of the concerns outlined in this report, policymakers must think differently both about school funding overall and about school funding during recessions. Public education is a public good, and as noted in this report, one that helps to stabilize the entire economy at critical points. Therefore, public spending on education should be treated as the public investment it is. While we leave it to policymakers to design specific reforms, we recommend an increased role for the federal government grounded in substantial, well targeted, consistent investment in the children who are our future, the professionals who help these children attain that future, and the environments in which they work. To establish a robust, stable, and consistent school funding plan that supports all children, investments need to be proportional to the size of the problems and to the societal and economic importance of the sector.

Introduction

The hope for the public education system in the United States is to provide a sound education equitably to all children regardless of where they live or into which families they are born. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed four interrelated, long-standing realities of U.S. public education funding that have long made that excellent, equitable education system impossible to achieve. First, inadequate levels of funding leave too many students unable to reach established performance benchmarks. Second, school funding is inequitable, with low-income students often and communities of color consistently lacking resources they need to meet their needs. Third, the level of funding reflects an overall underinvestment in education—that is, the U.S. is not spending as much as it could afford to spend in normal times. Fourth, given that educational investments are not sufficient across many districts even during normal times, schools are unable to make preparations to cope with emergencies or other unexpected circumstances. An added, less known feature is that economic downturns make all four of these problems worse. Downturns exacerbate funding inadequacies, inequities, underinvestment, and unpreparedness, causing cumulative harm to students, communities, and the public education system, and clawing back any prior progress. The severity of these problems varies widely across states and districts, as do the strength of states’ and localities’ economic and social protection systems, which may either compensate for or compound the problems.

The pandemic-led recession made these four major financial barriers to an excellent, equitable education system more visible, leading to serious questions about the U.S. education-funding model, which relies heavily on local and state revenues and draws only a small share of funding from the federal government. While public education is one of our greatest ideals and achievements—a free, quality education for every child regardless of means and background—the U.S. educational system is in need of significant improvements.

As the report will show, the core barriers to delivering universally excellent U.S. public education for all children—funding inadequacies and inequities that are exacerbated during tough economic times—were present in the system from the very start. They are the outcomes of a funding system that is shaped by many layers of policies and legal decisions at the local, state, and federal levels, creating widespread disparities in school finance realities across the thousands of districts across the country in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This complex funding puzzle speaks to the need for a funding overhaul to attain meaningful and widely shared improvements.

In this report, we first provide an overview of the characteristics of the U.S. education funding system. We present data analyses on school finance indicators, such as equity, adequacy, and effort, that expose the shortcomings of funding policies and decisions across the country. We also discuss factors behind some of these shortcomings, such as the heavy reliance on local and state sources of funding.

Second, we illustrate that recessions exacerbate the funding challenges schools face. We parse a multitude of data to present trends in school finance indicators both during and after the Great Recession, demonstrating that the immediate effects of federally targeted funds helped schools navigate recession-induced budget cuts. We also look at the shortfalls and inequitable nature of those investments. We explore how increased federal investments—in good economic times and bad—could help address these long-standing problems. We argue that public education funding is not only an investment in our societal present and future, but also is a ready-made mechanism for countering economic downturns. Economic theory and evidence both demonstrate that large, broadly distributed programs providing public support serve as cushions during economic downturns: they spur overall spending and thus aggregate demand when private spending falls. As we note, there are strong arguments for placing public education spending within the broader category of effective fiscal responses to recessions that are countercyclical—designed to increase spending when spending in the economy overall is contracting and thus stave off or lessen the severity of a downturn. Increases in public education spending during downturns work as automatic stabilizers for schools and provide stimulus to boost economic recovery. We review existing research on the consequences of funding in general and of funding changes—evidence that supports a larger role for the federal government.

Third, we discuss the benefits of rethinking public education funding, along with the societal and economic advantages of a robust, stable, and consistent U.S. school funding plan, both generally and as a countercyclical policy. We show that federal investment that sustains school funding throughout recessions and recoveries would provide three major advantages: It would help boost educational instruction and standards, it would provide continued high-quality instruction for students and employment to the public education workforce, and it would stimulate economic recovery. Education funding, in particular, would blanket the country while also targeting areas with the most need, making the recovery more equitable.

We conclude the report with final thoughts and next steps.

This paper uses several terms to refer to investments in education and to define the U.S. school finance system. Below, we explain how these terms are used in the report:

Revenue indicates the dollar amounts that have been raised through various sources (at the local, state, and federal levels) to support elementary and secondary education. We distinguish between federal, state, and local revenue. Local revenue, in some of our charts, is further divided into local revenue from property taxes and from other sources.

Spending or expenditures indicates the dollar amount devoted to elementary and secondary education. Expenditures are typically divided by function and object (instruction, support services , and noninstructional education activities). We rely on data on current expenditures (instead of total expenditures; see footnotes 2 and 30).

Funding generically refers in this report to the educational investments or educational resources. Mostly, when we use funding we refer to revenue, i.e., to resources available or raised, but funding is also used to refer to the school finance system more broadly, and in that case it could be either referring to revenue or expenditures, depending on the context.

For more information on the list of components under each term, see the glossary in the  Documentation for the NCES Common Core of Data School District Finance Survey (F-33), School Year 2017–18 (Fiscal Year 2018) (NCES CCD 2020).

A funding primer

The American education system relies heavily on state and local resources to fund public schools. In the U.S. education has long been a local- and state-level responsibility, with states typically concerned with administration and standards, and local districts charged with raising the bulk of the funds to carry those duties and standards out.

The Education Law Center notes that “states, under their respective constitutions, have the legal obligation to support and maintain systems of free public schools for all resident children. This means that the state is the unit of government in the U.S. legally responsible for operating our nation’s public school systems, which includes providing the funding to support and maintain those systems” (Farrie and Sciarra 2021). Bradbury (2021) explains that state constitutions assign responsibility for “adequate” (“sound,” “basic”) and/or “equitable” public education to the state government. Most state governments delegate responsibility for managing and (partially) funding public pre-K–12 education to local governments, but courts mandate that states remain responsible.

States meet this responsibility by funding their schools “through a statewide method or formula enacted by the state legislature. These school funding formulas or school finance systems determine the amount of revenue school districts are permitted to raise from local property and other taxes and the amount of funding or aid the state is expected to contribute from state taxes. In annual or biannual state budgets, legislatures also determine the actual amount of funding districts will receive to operate their schools” (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

A quick note on data sources

Some of our analyses rely on district-level data, i.e., the revenues and expenditures use the district as the unit of analysis. We rely on metrics of per-student revenue or per-student spending, i.e., taking into consideration the number of students in the districts. Other analyses use data either by state or for the country, which are typically readily available from the Digest of Education Statistics online. Sometimes the variables of interest are total revenue or expenditures, whereas on other occasions we rely on per-student values. All data sources are explained under each figure and table, and some are also briefly explained in the Methodology.

The federal government seeks to use its limited but targeted funding to promote student achievement, foster educational excellence, and ensure equal access. The major federal agency channeling funding to school districts (sometimes through the states) is the U.S. Department of Education. 1

Figure A shows the percentage distribution of total revenue for U.S. public elementary and secondary schools for the 2017–2018 school year, on average. As illustrated, revenues collected from state and local sources are roughly equal (46.8% and 45.3%, respectively). Two other factors also stand out. First, revenue from property taxes accounts for more than one-third of total revenue (36.6 %). Second, federal funding plays a minimal role, providing less than 8% of total revenue (7.8%). As discussed later in the report, this heavy reliance on local funding is a major driver in the funding challenges districts face.

More than 90% of school funding comes from state and local sources : Revenues for public elementary and secondary schools by source of funds, 2017–2018

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The data underlying the figure.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020a).

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Key metrics reveal the four major financial barriers to an excellent, equitable education system 

Fully comprehending how school funding works and how it contributes to systemic problems requires drawing on key metrics and characteristics that define the education investments or education funding. Understanding these metrics is the first step toward designing a comprehensive solution.

The adequacy metric tells us that funding is inadequate

Adequacy, one of the most widely used school finance indicators, measures whether the amount raised and spent per student is sufficient to achieve a certain level of output (typically a benchmark of student performance or an educational outcome).

We use the adequacy data provided by Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber (2020). These authors, who use the School Finance Indicators Database, compare current education spending by poverty quintile with spending levels required for students to achieve national average test scores—typically accepted as an educationally meaningful benchmark. The authors’ estimates account for factors that could affect the cost of providing education, including student characteristics, labor-market costs (differences in costs given the regional cost of living), and district characteristics (larger districts for example may enjoy economics of scale).

Figure B reveals that spending is not nearly enough, on average, to provide students with an adequate education. As this figure illustrates, relative to the wealthiest districts, the highest-poverty districts need more than twice as much spending per student to provide an adequate education. As the figure also shows, the gaps between what is spent on each student and what would be required for those students to achieve at the national level widen as the level of poverty increases. Medium- and high-poverty districts are spending, respectively, $700 and $3,078 per student less than what would be required. For the highest-poverty districts, that gap is $5,135, meaning districts there are spending about 30% less than what would be required to deliver an adequate level of education to their students. (Conversely, the two low-poverty quintiles are spending more than they need to reach that benchmark, another indication that funds are being poorly allocated.)

U.S. education spending is inadequate : Per-pupil spending compared with estimated spending required to achieve national average test scores, by poverty quintile of school district, 2017

Notes: District poverty is measured as the percentage of children (ages 5–17) living in the school district with family incomes below the federal poverty line, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The figure shows how much is spent in each of the five types of districts and how much they would need to spend for students to achieve national average test scores.

Source: Adapted from The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems , Second Edition (Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber 2020).

The equity metric tells us that funding is inequitable 

An equitable funding system ensures that, all else being equal, schools serving students with greater needs—whether for extra academic, socioemotional, health, or other supports—receive more resources and spend more to meet those needs than schools with a lower concentration of disadvantaged students. Across districts, states, and the country as a whole, this means allocating relatively more funding to districts serving larger shares of high-poverty communities than to wealthier ones. While our funding system does allocate additional funds based on need (e.g., to students officially designated as eligible for “special education” services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and to children from low-income families through the federal Title I program), in practice, more funding overall goes to lower-needs districts than to those with high levels of student needs.

Figure C compares districts’ per-student revenues and expenditures by poverty level, and shows gaps relative to low-poverty districts. The figure is based on data from what was, when this research was conducted, the most recent version of the Local Education Agency Finance Survey (known as the F-33) (NCES-LEAFS, various years). As shown in the figure, on average, per-student revenue and spending in school districts serving wealthier households exceed revenue and spending in all other districts. In low-poverty districts (i.e., districts with a poverty rate in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution), per-student revenues averaged $19,280 in the 2017–2018 school year, and per-student expenditures averaged $15,910. In the high-poverty districts (i.e., in the top fourth of the poverty distribution), per-student revenues were just $16,570, and per-student expenditures were $14,030. High-poverty districts raise $2,710 less in per-student revenue than the lowest–poverty school districts, reflecting a 14.1% revenue gap—meaning high-poverty districts receive 14.1% less in revenue. Per-student spending in high-poverty districts is $1,880 less than in low-poverty districts, an 11.8% gap. 2 In other words, rather than funding districts to address student needs, we are channeling fewer resources—about 14% less, per student—into districts with greater needs based on their student population.

Districts serving poorer students have less to spend on education than those serving wealthier students

: total per-student revenues by district poverty level, and revenue gaps relative to low-poverty districts, 2017–2018, : total per-student expenditures by district poverty level, and spending gaps relative to low-poverty districts, 2017–2018.

Notes: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars and rounded to the closest $10 and adjusted for each state’s cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Extended notes: Sample includes districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both; districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students; and districts with nonmissing charter information. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost of living using the historical Regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021). Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; medium-low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the second fourth of the poverty distribution; medium-high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate (for children ages 5 through 17) is in the third fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution. Amounts are unweighted across districts.

Sources: Authors’ analysis of 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

Adequacy and equity are closely intertwined

In recent decades, researchers have explored challenges to both adequacy and equity in U.S. public education. For example, Baker and Corcoran (2012) analyzed the various policies that drive inequitable funding. Likewise, lawsuits that have challenged state funding systems have tended to focus on either the inadequacy or inequity of those schemes. 3

But in reality, especially given extensive variation across states and districts, the two are closely linked and interact with one another. At the state level, for example, apparently adequate levels of funding can mask disparities across districts that innately mean inadequate funding for many, or even most, districts within that state (Farrie and Schiarra 2021). 4

In addition, disparate levels of public investments in education are often made in a context that correlates positively with disparate levels of parents’ private investments in their children’s education and related support (Caucutt et al. 2020; Duncan and Murnane 2016; Kornrich 2016; Schneider, Hastings, and LaBriola 2018). Substantial research on income-based gaps in achievement demonstrates that large and growing wealth inequality plays a role. Parents at the top of the income or wealth ladders, who can and do pour extensive resources into their children’s human capital, constantly set a baseline of performance that can be hard for children and schools without such investment to attain (Reardon 2011; García and Weiss 2017). 5

The “effort” metric tells us that many states are underinvesting in education relative to their capacity

 “Effort” describes how generously each state funds its schools relative to its capacity to do so. Researchers measuring effort determine capacity to spend based on state gross domestic product (GDP), which can vary widely (just as wealthier neighborhoods can raise more revenues even with lower tax rates, states with higher GDP and thus greater revenue-raising capacity can attain higher revenue with a lower effort, i.e., generate more resources at a lower cost). The map ( Figure D ), reproduced from Farrie and Sciarra 2021, shows state funding effort from the 2017–2018 school year.

School funding ‘effort’ varies widely across states : Pre-K through 12th grade education revenues as a percentage of state GDP, 2017–2018

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Note: “Effort is measured as total state and local [education] revenue (including [revenue for] capital outlay and debt service, excluding all federal funds) divided by the state’s gross domestic product. GDP is the value of all goods and services produced by each state’s economy and is used here to represent the state’s economic capacity to raise funds for schools” (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

Source: Adapted from Making the Grade 2020: How Fair is School Funding in Your State? (Farrie and Sciarra 2020).

As Farrie and Sciarra (2021) note, states fall naturally into four groups:

• High-effort, high-capacity: States such as Alaska, Connecticut, New York, and Wyoming are high- capacity states with high per-capita GDP, and they are also high-effort states: They use a larger-than-average share of their overall GDP to support pre-K–12 education, which generates high funding levels.
• High-effort, low-capacity : States such as Arkansas, South Carolina, and West Virginia have lower-than-average capacity, with low GDP per-capita, but they are high-effort states. Even with above- average efforts, they yield only average or below-average funding levels.
• Low-effort, high-capacity : States such as California, Delaware, and Washington are high-capacity states that exert low effort toward funding schools. If these states increased their effort even to the national average, they could significantly increase funding levels.
• Low-effort, low-capacity : States such as Arizona, Florida, and Idaho are low-capacity states that also make lower-than-average efforts to fund schools, generating very low funding levels.

Evidence shows that districts and schools lack the resources to cope with emergencies

As the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, our subpar level of preparation to cope with emergencies or other unexpected needs reflects another aspect of underinvestment. As García and Weiss (2020) not about the COVID-19 pandemic, “Our public education system was not built, nor prepared, to cope with a situation like this—we lack the structures to sustain effective teaching and learning during the shutdown and to provide the safety net supports that many children receive in school.”

Whether due to lack of resources, planning, or other factors, districts, schools, and educators struggled to adapt to the pandemic’s requirements for teaching. Schools were unprepared not only to support learning but also to deliver the supports and services they were accustomed to providing, which go far beyond instruction (García and Weiss 2020). This lack of preparation was the result of both a lack of contingency planning as well as a failure to build up resources to be ready “to adequately address emergency needs and to compensate for the resources drained during the emergencies, as well as to afford the provision of flexible learning approaches to continue education” (García and Weiss 2021).

A lack of established contingency plans to ensure the provision of education in emergency and post-emergency situations, whether caused by pandemics, other natural disasters, or conflicts and wars (as examined by the education-in-emergencies research), prevents countries from being able to mitigate the negative consequences of these emergencies on children’s development and learning. The lack of contingency plans also leaves systems unprepared to help children handle the trauma and stress that come from the most serious events. This body of literature has also shown that access to education and services—and an equitable and compensatory allocation of them—helps reduce the damage that students experience during the crisis and beyond, since such emergencies carry long-term consequences (Anderson 2020; Özek 2020).

Public education’s over-reliance on local funding is a key factor behind the troubling funding metrics

The heavy reliance on local funding described above is at the core of the school finance problems. Extensive research has exposed the challenges associated with this unique American system for funding public schools. 6 The myriad factors that drive school funding—politics and political affiliation, state legislative and judicial decisions, property values, tax rates, and effort, among others—vary substantially from one community to another. Thus, it is not surprising that this system has contributed to institutionalizing inequities, especially in the absence of a strong federal effort to counter them.

It is well understood that the local sources of revenues on which school districts heavily rely are often distributed in a highly inequitable way. Revenues from property taxes, which make up a hefty share of local education revenues, innately favor wealthier communities, as these areas have a much larger capacity to raise funds based on higher property values despite their lower tax rates. 7 These higher property-tax revenues in wealthier areas lead to greater revenues for their districts’ schools, since property-tax revenues account for such a significant share of the total.

State and federal funding are insufficient to compensate for these locally driven inequities

State funding of public education is the largest budget line item for most states. 8 Along with federal funding, state funding is expected to make up for local funding disparities and gaps. 9 Federal funding, in particular through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is specifically designed to compensate low-income schools and districts for their lack of sufficient revenues to meet their students’ needs. 10 Similarly, state funding is intended to offset some of the disparities caused by the dependence on local revenues. However, in reality, state and federal sources do not provide enough to less-wealthy school districts to make up for the gap in funding at the local level, as shown in Figure E .

As the figure   shows, the U.S. systematically funds schools in wealthier areas at higher levels than those with higher rates of poverty, even after accounting for funding meant to remedy these gaps. On average, local property-tax funding per student is $5,260 lower in the poorest districts than in the wealthiest districts.

Federal and state revenues fail to offset the funding disparities caused by relying on local property tax revenues : How much more or less school districts of different poverty levels receive in revenues than low-poverty school districts receive, all and by revenue source, 2017–2018

Notes: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars, rounded to the closest $10, and adjusted for each state's cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate for school-age children (children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate is in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Extended notes: Sample includes districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both; districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students; and districts with nonmissing charter information. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021). Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rate for school-age children (children ages 5 through 17) is in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution for that group; medium-low-poverty districts are districts whose school-age children’s poverty rate is in the second fourth (25th–50th percentile); medium-high-poverty districts are districts whose school-age children’s poverty rate is in the third fourth (50th–75th percentile); in high-poverty districts, the rate is in the top fourth. Amounts are unweighted across districts.

Sources: 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

While state revenues are a significant portion of funding, they only modestly counter the large locally based inequities. And while federal funding, by far the smallest source of revenue, is being deployed as intended (to reduce inequities), it inevitably falls short of compensating for a system grounded in highly inequitable local revenues as its principal source of funding. As such, although states provide their highest-poverty districts with $1,550 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, and federal sources provide their highest-poverty districts with $2,080 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, states and the federal government jointly compensate for only about half of the revenue gap for high-poverty districts (which receive a per-student average of $6,330 less in property tax and other local revenues). That large gap in local funding leaves the highest-poverty districts still $2,710 short per student relative to the lowest-poverty districts, reflecting the 14.1% revenue gap shown in Figure C. Even though high-poverty districts get more in federal and state dollars, they get so much less in property taxes that it still puts them in the negative category overall.

Disparities shortchange states’ (and districts’) ability to access and allocate the resources needed for effective education

Given the heavy reliance on highly varied local funding, it is no surprise that there is similarly significant variation across states with respect to almost every aspect of funding discussed here. Table 1 reports federal, state, and local funding for each state and for the District of Columbia, with local funding broken down into three categories.

Revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, by source of funds and by state : Share of each source in total revenue, 2017–2018 

Source: National Center for Education Statistics' Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020b). 

Nationally, in 2017–2018, local and state sources accounted for 45.3% and 46.8% of total revenue, respectively; just 7.8% comes from the federal government. However, these averages mask substantial variation in the shares of revenue apportioned by each source across states. Local revenue, for example, ranges from just 3.7% of total public-school revenue in Vermont and 18.2% in New Mexico, on the lower end, to a high of 63.4% in New Hampshire. The same is true with respect to state revenue. The state that contributes the smallest share to its education budget is New Hampshire at 31.3%, with Vermont contributing the largest share (89.9%). There is also quite a bit of variation in the share represented by federal funds—from just 4.1% in New Jersey to 15.9% in Alaska. (The cited values are highlighted in the table. We omit the District of Columbia and Hawaii from these rankings because of the unusual composition of their funding streams, but we provide their values in the table.)

As shown earlier in the discussion of the map in Figure E, there are also large disparities in funding effort—how generously each state funds its schools relative to its capacity to do so, based on state GDP. High-effort, high-capacity s tates such as Alaska, Connecticut, New York, and Wyoming use a larger-than-average share of their overall GDP to support pre-K–12 education and they generate high funding levels.

As a result of funding and effort variability across states, the levels of inequity and inadequacy across states also vary substantially (Baker, Di Carlo, and Weber 2020; Farrie and Sciarra 2021). Notably, funding variability translates into significant disparities in overall per-student revenue and per-student spending levels, as shown in Figures F and G . In Wyoming, for example, where effort is relatively high (4.36%; see Figure E) and there is a higher-than-average contribution of state funds to total revenue and a lower-than-average contribution of local funds to total revenue (56.8% and 36.8%, respectively, versus 46.8% and 45.3% averages across the U.S.), per-student revenue is among the highest of any state, nearly $21,000. In contrast, Arizona and North Carolina—which are among the lowest in effort in the country (2.23% and 2.28%, respectively), but where state funds account for 47.1% and 62.1% of the state’s total public education revenues, respectively, and local funds account for 40.4% and only 27.0%, respectively—collect about half of what Wyoming collects per student. (Data accounts for differences in states’ cost of living; see the appendix for more details on our methodology.)

Public education revenues vary widely across states : Per-student revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, by state, 2017–2018

Note: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021).

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020b).

Public education expenditures vary widely across states : Per-student expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools, by state, 2017–2018

Note: Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021) and rounded to the closest $10. Amounts are adjusted for each state’s cost-of living using the historical Regional Price Parities (RPPs) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA 2021).

Source: National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020c).

These substantial disparities in all the school finance indicators, and in per-pupil spending and revenue across states, are mirrored in capacity and investment patterns across districts and, within them, individual schools.

As such, these systemic and persistent inequities play a decisive role in shaping children’s real school experiences. As Raikes and Darling-Hammond (2019) note, “As a country, we inadvertently instituted a school finance system similar to red-lining in its negative impact. Grow up in a rich neighborhood with a large property tax base? You get well-funded public schools. Grow up in a poor neighborhood? The opposite is true. The highest-spending districts in the United States spend nearly 10 times as much as the lowest-spending, with large differentials both across and within states (Raikes and Darling-Hammond 2019). In most states, children who live in low-income neighborhoods attend the most under-resourced schools” (see also Turner et al. 2016 for the underlying data). 11

These gaps in spending capacity touch every aspect of school functioning, including the capacity of teachers and staff to deliver effective instruction, and pose a huge barrier to the excellent school experience that each student should receive. In Pennsylvania, for example, where districts tend to rely heavily on local revenues to finance schools, per-pupil spending ranges dramatically. Indeed, in 2015, the U.S. Department of Education flagged the state as having the biggest school-spending gap of any state in the country (Behrman 2019). One illustrative example is in Allegheny County, on the western side of the state, where the suburban Wilkinsburg school district outside of Pittsburgh spent over $27,000 per student in the 2017–2018 school year, while the more rural South Allegheny school district spent just over $15,000, roughly 45% less.

With salaries being the largest line item in school budgets, these disparities substantially affect schools’ ability to hire the educators and other school personnel needed to provide effective instruction, the school leaders to guide instructional staff, and the staff needed to support administrative needs and to offer other services and extracurricular activities. As a result, these resources vary tremendously not only among states, but within them from one district, and even school, to another. 12 Overwhelming research exposes large disparities in access to counselors, librarians, and nurses, and in access to up-to-date technology and facilities. Facilities are literally crumbling in lower-resourced states and districts, painting a clear picture of the dire straits many schools face. (See, for example, Filardo, Vincent, and Sullivan 2019 regarding added consequences for low-income students and their teachers in schools that are too cold, full of dust or lead paint, and have broken windows or crumbling ceilings.)

Baker, Farrie, and Sciarra (2016) note that “increasing investments in schools is associated with greater access to resources as measured by staffing ratios, class sizes, and the competitiveness of teacher wages.” The findings presented here are backed by the extensive body of literature on the positive relationship between substantive and sustained state school finance reforms and improved student outcomes. Together, they make a strong case that state and federal policymakers can help boost outcomes and close achievement gaps by improving state finance systems to ensure equitable funding and improved access to resources for children from low-income families.

Economic downturns exacerbate the problems with our school finance system and, over time, cause cumulative damage to students and to the system

Recessions lead to depleted state and local budgets and, in turn, to cuts in education funding. Trends since the Great Recession demonstrate that it can take a long time to restore education budgets and that our practice of balancing budgets on the backs of schoolchildren is an unwise and, ultimately, costly one in terms of educational and societal outcomes. As we show in Figure H , reductions in revenue for public education often outlast the official length of the recession, lasting much longer than the point when state and local budgets have returned to pre-recession trajectories in other areas of spending. In addition, a poor allocation of resources across high- and low-poverty districts disproportionately harms students in the highest-poverty districts relative to their peers in better-off districts, compounding the existing challenges described above and impeding their recovery.

It took the United States nearly a decade to restore the national per-student revenue to its pre-recession (2007–2008) school-year levels. Figure H shows national trends in revenue per student, by source (federal, state, and local), from the onset of the Great Recession through 2017–2018. 13

Education revenues fell sharply after 2008 (and did not return to pre-recession levels for about eight years) : Change in per-student revenue relative to 2007–2008, by source (inflation adjusted)

Note: The chart shows change in revenue per student for public elementary and secondary schools compared with 2007–2008. Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars and rounded to the closest $10 using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021). The Local line is all local sources, including property tax revenues.

Per-student state revenue fell precipitously between 2007–2008 and 2012–2013—it was down nearly $900 at the low point. While revenue from property taxes did not decrease, on average, other local revenues fell by $160 by 2011–20121, only recovering to 2007–2008 levels in 2014–2015. Federal funding for schools, together with the additional recovery funds targeted to education through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), provided an initial and critical counterbalance to these reductions; in 2009–2010 and 2010–2011, districts were receiving slightly over $600 more per student from the federal government than they were before the recession.

The peak in federal revenue is also visible in Figure I , which depicts the distribution of funding by sources by year . Total federal funds accounted for 12.7% of total revenue in 2009–2010, compared with just 8.2% in 2007–2008, an increase of over 50%. (Note that this increase was made larger by the reduced total amounts of revenues, i.e., it constituted a greater share of a smaller whole).

Importance of federal funding for education increased in the aftermath of the Great Recession : Share of total education revenue by source, 2007–2008 to 2017–2018

Source: National Center for Education Statistics' Digest of Education Statistics (NCES 2020a).

While these federal investments provided a critical boost by temporarily upholding education funding, our analyses suggest an opportunity to shorten the slow recovery to pre-recession levels was lost. Just as they effectively operated during the recession, it is likely that larger and more sustained federal investments would have better assisted the students, schools, and communities that suffered major setbacks due to the Great Recession. We come back to this idea in sections below.

In keeping with the discussion on broad funding disparities by state, the road to recovery from the Great Recession also varies across states and districts, with some still lagging from the Great Recession as they struggled with the COVID-19 crisis.

Research demonstrates that well after the end of the Great Recession, a significant number of states were still funding their public schools at lower levels than before the recession. As late as 2016, for example, per-student funding in 24 states—including half of the states with over a million enrolled students—was still below pre-recession levels (Leachman and Figueroa 2019). For some of these states, the failure to return to prior funding levels was driven by the lack of recovery of the per-student state revenue (for example, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, and Oklahoma). In some of the “deepest-cutting states — including Arizona, North Carolina, and Oklahoma,” note Leachman and Figueroa, the state governments made significant cuts to income tax rates, “making it much more difficult for their school funding to recover from cuts they imposed after the last recession hit.” In other states, lack of local revenue was the culprit (as in Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, and Vermont, for example). Finally, in some of these states, this shortfall fell on top of a rapidly growing student population (i.e., even had their total revenues recovered to pre-recession levels, they would still fall far behind on a per-student basis). Exploring the various drivers of these trends and their variation across states is beyond the scope of this report but would undoubtedly be fruitful. 14

Putting aside state trends and underlying causes, a focus on school districts reveals a strong correlation between poverty rates and education funding recovery. The following figures show the trends over time in total per-student revenue and spending by school district poverty levels. As we see, high-poverty districts and their students experienced both the biggest shortfalls and the most sluggish recoveries.

Figure J shows that, as discussed above, districts with relatively small shares of low-income students (low-poverty districts) never saw revenues per student fall below pre–Great Recession levels, adjusted for inflation and state cost of living. By contrast, the one-fourth of districts with the largest share of students from poor families (high-poverty districts) stayed below their pre–Great Recession level of per-student revenues long after recovery was in full swing, through 2015–2016. In keeping with that spectrum, the medium-high poverty districts did recover to their pre-recession per-student revenue levels, but not until 2014–2015.

The drop in education revenues after 2007–2008 was greater in high-poverty districts : Change in total per-student revenue compared with 2007–2008, by district poverty level (adjusted for inflation and state cost of living)

Sources: 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey (F-33) microdata from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES-LEAFS 2021) and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Urban Institute 2021a).

Figure K tells a similar story regarding trends in per-student expenditure across school districts. As such, it took until 2017–2018, a decade after the Great Recession had first hit, for high-poverty school districts to surpass their pre-recession levels, though they still lagged far behind their wealthier counterpart districts. Moreover, though not shown in this graph, for high-poverty districts, getting back to pre-recession status means catching up to revenue and spending levels that were lower than in the wealthier districts to begin with. (Figure C earlier in the report illustrates the gaps between high- and low-poverty districts in 2017–2018.)

The drop in education expenditures after 2007–2008 was greater in high-poverty districts : Change in total per-student expenditures compared with 2007–2008, by district poverty (adjusted for inflation and state cost-of living)

Notes:  Amounts are in 2019–2020 dollars, rounded to the closest $10, and adjusted for each state's cost of living. Low-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rates (for children ages 5 through 17) are in the bottom fourth of the poverty distribution; high-poverty districts are districts whose poverty rates are in the top fourth of the poverty distribution.

Balancing budgets on the backs of children during a recession has serious consequences

Inadequate, inequitable funding relegates poor children to attend under-resourced schools even in good economic times, and to suffer disproportionately during and in the aftermath of economic downturns. We have for far too long been balancing recession-depleted budgets on the backs of schoolchildren, in particular low-income children and children of color. This not only hurts these children immediately, but severely limits their prospects as adults. As such, this practice has broader implications for the future of the country, both economically and regarding the strength of our societal fabric, given that the students of today are the workers and the citizens of tomorrow.

Indeed, these negative patterns are just the first indications of a cascade of consequences that result from funding cuts. This section describes those consequences and their flip side, which is more frequently the focus of education researchers—the positive effects of increased investment. First, we review the literature demonstrating the impacts of various levels of funding on student outcomes. Next, we point to analyses that have shown some other associated school problems (education employment, class size, and student performance, among others) that were contemporaneous with the declines in spending and revenue. Thought it is difficult to quantify the exact and independent impact of the funding cuts on these factors, the strong correlations suggest that they are related.

Substantial evidence points to the positive effects of higher spending on both short- and long- term student outcomes, as well as on schools overall and on adult outcomes (Jackson and Mackevicius 2021; Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016; Gibbons, McNally, and Viarengo 2018; Hyman 2017; Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018; Jackson 2018; Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong 2020; Baker 2018). This body of research also provides evidence that the impact of school spending differs by students’ family income (Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018; Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016). And, though less has been studied in this specific area, the evidence also shows that a misallocation of resources and/or a decrease in spending has a negative influence on student outcomes, as well as on some teacher outcomes (Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong 2020; Greaves and Sibieta 2019). 15

A recent summary of the literature provides compelling evidence of the effects of school spending on test scores and educational attainment. Based on 31 studies that provide reliable causal estimates, Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) find that, on average, a $1,000 increase in per-pupil public school spending for four years increases test scores by 0.044 percentage points, high school graduation by 2.1 percentage points, and college-going by 3.9 percentage points. Interestingly, the authors explain that “when benchmarked against other interventions, test score impacts are much smaller than those on educational attainment—suggesting that test-score impacts understate the value of school spending.” Consistent with a cumulative effect, the educational attainment impacts are larger after more years of exposure to the spending increase, and average impacts are similar across a wide range of baseline spending levels, indicating little evidence of diminishing marginal returns at current spending levels.

Other research suggests that the effect of spending is greater on disadvantaged students. Bradbury (2021) investigates “how specific state and local funding sources and allocation methods (redistributive extent, formula types) relate to students’ test scores and, especially, to test-score gaps across races and between students who are not economically disadvantaged and those who are.” Her findings suggest that statewide per-student school aid has no relationship with test-score gaps in school districts, but that the progressivity of the state’s school-aid distribution is associated with smaller test-score gaps in high-poverty districts. 16

Other studies further affirm the implications of equity-specific funding decisions. Jackson, Johnson, and Persico’s (2016) study assesses the impacts on a range of student and adult outcomes of a series of court-mandated school finance reforms that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Linking information on the reforms to administrative data about the children who attended the schools, the authors found that the increase in school funding was associated with slight increases in years of educational attainment, and with higher adult wages and reduced odds of adult poverty, as well as with improvements to schools themselves—increased teacher salaries, reduced student-to-teacher ratios, higher school quality, and even longer school years (Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016). Specifically, a 10% increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public schooling leads to 0.27 more completed years of education, 7.25% higher wages, and a 3.67 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty. As with the other studies, the benefits from increased funding are much greater for children from low-income families: 0.44 years of educational attainment and wages that are 9.5% higher.

In another study drawing on data from post-1990 school finance reforms that increased public-school funding in some states, Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2018) estimate the impact of both absolute and relative spending on achievement in low-income school districts, as measured by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data. 17 They find that the reforms increase the achievement of students in these districts, phasing in gradually over the years following the increase in spending/adequacy. While the measures employed to estimate the impact tend to be technical, the authors emphasize that this “implied effect of school resources on educational achievement is large.” 18 Similar adequacy-related reforms that resulted from court mandates, rather than state legislative decisions, prompted significant increases in graduation rates (Candelaria and Shores 2019).

Conversely, research shows that both the reallocation of resources and/or a decrease in spending have a negative influence on both teacher and student outcomes. Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong (2020) find that the cuts to per-pupil spending that occurred during the Great Recession reduced test scores and college enrollment, particularly for children in poor neighborhoods. Shores and Steinberg (2017) reaffirm these findings, noting that the Great Recession negatively affected math and English language arts (ELA) achievement of all students in grades 3–8, but that this “recessionary effect” was concentrated among school districts serving both more economically disadvantaged students and students of color. Greaves and Sibieta (2019) find that changes that required districts to pay teachers following higher salary scales, but that provided no additional funding to implement the requirements, did lead to increased pay for teachers as intended, but at the expense of cuts to other noninstructional spending of about 4%, with no net effects on student attainment. That is, reallocating resources across functions, without increasing the overall levels, did not improve outcomes.

Other studies explore disappointing trends across multiple education parameters during the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, including teacher employment, class size, aggregate student performance, and performance gaps by socioeconomic status and/or racial/ethnic background. Several analyses show that recession-led school funding cuts were contemporaneous with significant reductions of teacher employment. The number of teachers in the United States public-school system reached its highest point in 2008, and then dropped significantly between 2008 and 2010 because of the recession (Gould 2017; Gould 2019; Berry and Shields 2017). Evans, Schwab, and Wagner (2019) estimated a decrease in total employment in public schools of 294,700 from the start of the recession until January 2013. Gould (2019) estimated that, in the fall of 2019, there were still 60,000 fewer public education jobs than there had been before the recession began in 2007 and that, if the number of teachers had kept up proportionately with growing student enrollment over that period, the shortfall in public education jobs would be greater than 300,000.

Related to these challenges, in the aftermath of the Great Recession through the 2015–2016 school year, schools’ struggles to staff themselves increased sharply. García and Weiss (2019) showed that the share of schools that were trying to fill a vacancy but could not do so tripled from the 2011–2012 to the 2015–2016 school year (increasing from 3.1% to 9.4% of schools in that situation), and the share of schools that reported finding it very difficult to fill a vacancy nearly doubled (from 19.7% to 36.2%). 19

Although class size, and the closely related metric of student-to-teacher ratios, have declined over the long term, they are higher, on average, in 2020 than they were in 2005 (the closest data point prior to the Great Recession) in 29 out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia (NCES 2020d; Hussar and Bailey 2020). (See Mishel and Rothstein 2003 and Schanzenbach 2020 for a recent review of the influence of class size on achievement.)

Understanding overall trends in student performance over this period helps to put the impacts of trends in these other metrics in context. We have cited research that links school finance trends and educational outcomes in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but it is worth describing what the trends in student performance looked like across the country. It should not be surprising that scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most reliable indicator over time of how much students are learning, show stagnant performance in math and reading for both fourth- and eighth-graders between 2009 and 2019 (NAGB 2019). As Sandy Kress, who served as President George W. Bush’s education advisor, commented, “The nation has gone nowhere in the last ten years. It’s truly been a lost decade [and] [t]he only group to experience more than marginal gains in recent years has been students in the top 10th percentile” (Chingos et al. 2019).

Gains (both absolute and relative) vary by students’ background, with multiple trends visible. Carnoy and García’s 2017 research on achievement gaps between racial/ethnic groups shows that Black–white and Hispanic–white student achievement gaps have continued to narrow over the last two decades, and also that Asian students were widening the gap ahead of white students in both math and reading achievement. At the same time, Hispanic and Asian students who are English language learners (ELLs) are falling further behind white students in mathematics and reading achievement, and gaps between higher- and lower-income students persist, with some changes that vary by subject and grade. During the decade of stagnation, however, in keeping with trends in per-pupil investments over this period, these trends widened existing inequities. As National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr soberly notes, “Compared to a decade ago, we see that lower-achieving students made score declines in all of the assessments, while higher-performing students made score gains” (Danilova 2018).

Finally, we have also seen marked changes in the student body composition that have implications for these trends going forward. The proportion of low-income students in U.S. schools has increased rapidly in recent decades, as has the share of students of color (NCES 2020e; Carnoy and García 2017). A student’s race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status also affects the student’s odds of ending up in a high-poverty school or a school with a high share of students of color. For example, Black and Hispanic students who are not poor are much more likely than white or Asian students who are low income to be enrolled in high-poverty schools (Carnoy and García 2017).

All of these changes point to the need for increased resources across the board, and especially in schools serving the highest-needs students. As we revisit education funding in the aftermath of the pandemic-induced recession, the new structure must make greater investments to ensure the equitable provision of education and associated supports not only in stable times but also in the context of substantial disruptions and crises (García and Weiss 2021). As the analysis above makes clear, neither equity not adequacy—and, thus, excellence in public education—will ever be possible as long as local revenues play such a central role, and as long as states are the primary vehicle to address those disparities. While we leave it to policymakers to design the specifics of this public-good investment, we emphasize that the benchmarks we should reach to determine that those investments are stable, sufficient, and equitable should reflect meaningful, consistent advances for the highest-poverty schools and schools serving students of color. In other words, when the impacts of recessions no longer fall on the backs of our most vulnerable children, we will know that we are moving in the right direction.

Public education funding could also be deployed quickly to boost the economy and serve as an automatic stabilizer

The practice of cutting school funding during recessions is not only bad for students and teachers but also hurts the economy overall. The education sector has the potential to help stabilize the economy during downturns, but historically, our policy responses have failed to provide the necessary investment, as discussed in this report.

Up to this point, we have shown the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the existing education funding system. We have emphasized that fixing the system’s problems and achieving an excellent, equitable, robust, and stable public education system requires more funding —not just a reshuffling of existing funding. We have presented evidence indicating the need for a significantly larger contribution to the system from the federal government on a permanent basis. We have also demonstrated that targeting additional funds to schools during the Great Recession—via ARRA funds in particular— helped offset the large cuts schools experienced due to state and local shortfalls. As stated by Evans, Schwab, and Wagner (2019), “[…] the federal government’s efforts to shield education from some of the worst effects of the recession achieved their major goal.” Based on the observed trends, we considered whether even more sustained federal investments would have better assisted the students, schools, and communities that suffered major setbacks due to the Great Recession.

There is another reason for both larger investments and a more robust federal role when state and local budgets experience shortfalls due to economic downturns: School funding can be part of the countercyclical public-spending programs that help the economy recover. While policymakers and economists have long recognized the need for, and the effectiveness of, such automatic stabilizers (programs that pump public spending into the economy just when overall spending is declining), they have not traditionally placed public education spending in this category—yet it belongs there. 20 Federal funding directed toward schools during and in the aftermath of economic downturns can further boost the economy, thereby jump-starting economic recoveries.

Stable, sufficient, and equitable education funding would give schools and districts the resources and flexibility to adapt to challenges that they need but have not had during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, automatic stabilization of public education protects students and school systems against depleted school budgets during recessions and volatile business cycles (Evans, Schwab, and Wagner 2019; Allegretto, García, and Weiss 2021). In addition to averting the harms to students and teachers described above, countercyclical investments would keep the public education workforce employed. The teachers, nurses, counselors, librarians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and others who work in public schools made up 53.2% of all state and local public-sector workers in 2019—accounting for nearly 7.0% of total U.S. employment. 21 School staff are also family and community members whose spending ripples through their local economies (known as the multiplier effect). Cuts to education revenues and employment thus also affect local communities more broadly, and retrenchment of spending acts as a type of reverse multiplier, resulting in a vicious downward cycle.

Federally provided countercyclical fiscal spending on public education set up to kick in based on defined triggers—akin to an expansion of unemployment benefits that kicks in when certain unemployment targets are reached—would have significant “bang-for-your-buck” multiplier effects. Such automatic spending constitutes smart investment that upholds public education while giving the overall economy a significant boost. Analyzing then President-elect Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which included public education spending, Zandi and Yaros (2021) reported a 1.34 fiscal multiplier for state and local government spending (the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was signed into law in March 2021).

Because the federal government already provides substantial support to state and local governments in such times, bolstering and further targeting that support in a defined and concerted manner would entail a relatively light lift. Despite some challenges, several programs of this nature have been shown to meet their goals in their given policy areas. For example, the federal unemployment insurance (UI) and food stamps (SNAP) 22 programs are often cited as having demonstrably positive outcomes when the federal government increases their funding. Both have been heavily criticized for their structural flaws and lack of sufficient resource (Bivens et al. 2021). However, through prior recessions and the pandemic, data illustrate that UI and SNAP nonetheless prevented millions of people from falling into, or deeper into, poverty, as well as averted hunger and evictions. The CARES Act’s first allotment of the Economic Impact Payments and expanded UI benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic kept 13.2 million people out of poverty (Zipperer 2020). 23 The Bureau of Economic Analysis broke out the effects of selected pandemic response programs on personal income, illustrating just how heavily Americans leaned on these benefits through the pandemic. In June 2020, UI payments accounted for 15.6% of all wages and salaries in the U.S (BEA 2020). By contrast, just prior to the pandemic UI benefits were negligible in comparison—just 0.27% of wages and salaries overall in February 2020.

We propose that policymakers create a program for funding education during downturns that is of adequate magnitude and provides immediate, sufficiently large, and sustained relief as needed.

In order to provide an immediate response, the system must have the capacity to adapt to emergencies; a key way to ensure that is to specify ahead of time the automatic triggers that prompt launching the contingency plans. 24 To clarify, we are not suggesting that public education spending be treated exactly like food stamps or unemployment insurance benefits—i.e., that states amass reserves for a “rainy day” or that reserves be built up during nonrecessionary periods. Rather, we are pointing to the economic benefits of an education system that is robustly, stably, and consistently funded throughout economic ups and downs, ensuring that it also has the resources to withstand the downturns and the flexibility to adapt. And we are recommending that Congress establish a program that kicks in when needed, rather than waiting until a crisis and coming together to pass a large, responsive bill, which requires political negotiation and can thus take a lot of time.

Sufficiently large investments imply that the spending numbers are adequate to the size of the problem. As we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, the various public programs—even with all their flaws—have been critical to preventing a much worse disaster than the one we have experienced. 25

Finally, regarding sustained assistance, it was clear that relief and recovery spending fell far short in response to the Great Recession and was cut off too soon; it took 6.2 years to recoup the jobs lost and nearly eight years for the unemployment rate to get back to its pre-recession rate of 5%. And unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic workers took much longer to return to pre-recession levels (Allegretto 2016). In education, as shown before, it was not until the 2014–2015 school year that districts’ per-student revenue, on average, recovered to 2007–2008 levels nationally—and recovery took even longer for high-poverty districts.

In sum, while the purpose of this study is not to offer guidance on how to best design a public education automatic-stabilization program, we do argue that such a program would help public education during downturns, and provide a boost to the overall economy. At later stages, proof-of-concept designs such as Medicaid and transportation grants, and some of the existing large-scale public programs already mentioned, could be a useful place to continue the discussion. Identifying best practices—in program design, financing, and implementation in the United States and elsewhere—would help to conceive a strategy.

Conclusions and next steps

For too long in this country, we have normalized the practice of underinvesting in education while expecting that schools would still function well (or at least moderately well). We have also accepted the disproportionate burden that economic recessions place on public schools and students. These norms are very costly—to individuals and to society—and they shortchange our country’s potential.

As the data and research show, this approach is backward. If we are to have a chance of providing all students in the United States with an excellent education we must  build a strong foundation—one with sufficient, adequate, and equitable funding of public schools in practice, not just in theory. Ensuring broad adequacy and equity will require increased federal investment (to more fully complement a system that relies heavily on nonfederal sources). Moreover, federal provisions that provide for automatic boosts to education spending during downturns is critical. Our education system can and should include a countercyclical designed to help stabilize the economy when it is contracting—benefiting schools and communities.

Were we to truly acknowledge the benefits, it would be hard to argue politically against making these investments a reality. Here again the data are edifying: Extensive research indicates that a stable and consistent funding system with a much higher level of investment would generate large economic and social returns. 26

An increased federal investment to ensure sufficient, adequate, and equitable funding of public schools has an additional benefit: It could serve as another tool in our toolbox for faster, broader, and more equitable recoveries from recessions. Boosting school funding during downturns could boost the wider economy—and disproportionately benefit the low-income communities that tend to be hit hardest in hard economic times.

This proposal requires jettisoning the tendency to pit public policy areas against one another for resources, and to glamorize the purportedly efficient notion of “doing more with less.” The latter, often used to justify education budget cuts, actually entails a misguided denial of the need for resources and of the inevitable damage that ensues when those resources fall short—or fail to exist at all.

We are not arguing that increased access to federal resources alone will address all the issues outlined above. Simply throwing money at the goal of providing an excellent education equitably to all children won’t achieve it; we need to make the right investments. 27

In addition, it is also important to distinguish funding from decision-making. While the federal government is best positioned to ensure broadly adequate and equitable education funding nationwide, it is not necessarily well suited to make decisions about policy, practice, and implementation. Evidence should guide how decision-making is allocated across the federal, state, and local levels. 28

Advancing this proposal also requires that we dislodge the conversation from where it has been stuck for at least the past half-century—namely on whether the resources exist. They do. What we need to ask now is how to make those resources available, and how to deploy them to ensure that all students have the opportunities to learn, develop, and achieve their full potential—and that these opportunities are available during both ordinary and recessionary times.

About the authors

Sylvia Allegretto is a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute. She worked for 15 years at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-founded the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED). She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Emma García is an economist specializing in the economics of education and education policy. She developed this study while she was at the Economic Policy Institute (2013-2021). She is now a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute. García received her Ph.D. in economics and education from Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Elaine Weiss is the Policy Director at the National Academy of Social Insurance, and former National Coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education at the Economic Policy Institute (2011-2018). She received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Maryland, J.D. from Harvard Law School, and Ph.D. in public policy from the George Washington University.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to EPI Publications Director Lora Engdahl for having edited this report and for her help shepherding it to its release. The authors benefited from Ajay Srikanth’s guidance on school finance data sources at the beginning of the project. The authors appreciate EPI’s support of this project, EPI Research Assistant Daniel Perez for his assistance with the tables and figures, EPI Editor Krista Faries for her usual thoughtful insights, and EPI’s communications staff for their assistance with the production and dissemination of this study.

Appendix: Notes on the data sources and the analyses

We construct our own district-level longitudinal data set using information from three different sources:

• the National Center for Education Statistics’s School District Finance Survey (F-33, Local Education Agency Finance Survey microdata from NCES 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 (NCES-LEAFS 2021)
• the United States’ Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program (for districts 2007–2018, from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal (Urban Institute 2021a) 29
• Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) Version 4.0 covariates file (Reardon et al. 2021).

The School District Finance Survey (F-33) is the source for revenues and expenditures for public elementary and secondary school districts in the country. The F-33 is a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD) and consists of local education agencies (LEA)-level finance data submitted annually to the U.S. Census Bureau by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The entire universe of LEAs in each school year and in each state plus D.C. are included. The F-33 report includes the following types of school district finance data: revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; revenues by source; current expenditures by function and object; and revenues and current expenditures per pupil.

We use the annual data from 12 school years from 2006–2007 until 2017–2018 (the most recent available data at the time of development of this research was the data for 2017-2018, last accessed in March 2021 (NCES-LEAFS 2021) , see https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/files.asp#Fiscal:1,LevelId:5,Page:1 for updates).

We use the following variables from NCES CCD 2020:

• Total Revenue (TOTALREV)
• Total Federal Revenue (TFEDREV)
• Total State Revenue (TSTREV)
• Local Rev – Property Taxes (T06)
• Fall Membership (V33 and MEMBERSCH if V33 is missing)
• Total Current Expenditures for Elementary/Secondary Education (TCURELSC) 30

We calculate revenues (total and by source) and current expenditures in per-student terms.

For findings expressed “in constant 2019 – 2020 dollars,” all spending and revenue data are expressed in dollars corresponding with the 2019–2020 school year (average July–June as explained by NCES 2019), using the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS-CPI 2021).

For findings involving states’ cost-of-living-adjusted (RPPs), we account for differences in the cost-of-living across states by using the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s (BEA’s) Regional Price Parities (BEA 2021). 31

For analyzing metrics and outcomes by school poverty level, we link the school finance information with the poverty information.

Our preferred poverty data source is the United States Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program for districts for school years spanning 2007–2018, which we collect from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal (Urban Institute 2021a). Census SAIPE district poverty data are available for the period 2007–2008 through 2017–2018 (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). The variable of interest is the poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the district (ratio between poor children and total children in that age group). They are originally available as yearly data. To proxy for the school year (July–June) data, for a given school year, we take the average between the fall year-1 and the spring year.

We also use two other poverty data sources, which are linked to the F-33 data in sequential steps, for the following two purposes: (a) to offer sensitivity analyses of the results using alternative sources of data; and (b) to use the maximum number of observations possible, in cases in which some information is missing in one source but available in others.

Our second-preferred poverty data are SEDA’s shares of free and reduced price lunch eligible students in grades 3–8 in the districts (Reardon et al. 2021). This information is available in the covariates’ file, and it is available starting in school year 2008–2009 (which is least preferred because it is after the beginning of the Great Recession). 32

As an additional source checked in our sensitivity analyses, we use the county-level information from the Census, available (by year) at: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/saipe/data/datasets.html (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). The information is equivalent to the district-level information, but at the county level. For this study, we use the data in the same manner (turning the year estimates into school-year equivalent estimates, etc.).

We perform the analyses using the different sources independently, plus one more in which we combine the three sources, when one is missing but the other is not (i.e., we define a poverty-all variable that “combines” sources: If Census’s SAIPE’s district poverty data are missing, SEDA’s district poverty data are used; for districts missing on both, Census’s SAIPE’s county poverty data are used).

In each case, we calculate the poverty quartiles each year by dividing the poverty variable(s) into four quartiles. 33 Low-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the first quartile of the poverty distribution. Medium-low-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the second quartile of the poverty distribution. Medium-high-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the third quartile of the poverty distribution. High-poverty districts are districts with a poverty rate for children ages 5–17 in the fourth (top) quartile of the poverty distribution.

A note about analytic samples and weights: As the school finance variables of interest are in per-student terms, districts with nonmissing and nonzero numbers of students are kept in our sample. In our preferred sample, we also restrict the analyses to observations from districts serving elementary schools only, secondary schools only, or both, 34 and to districts with charter information nonmissing. Results using the full number of observations (unrestricted sample) are available upon request.

A note about the final sensitivity analysis: Following the nature of F33 and the weights available in the surveys, our unit of analysis is the district, and we present unweighted averages across districts. Sensitivity analyses are also available using the student population in the district to compute weighted averages across the districts, upon request.

A note about methods: The analyses presented in this report are descriptive in nature. We are interested in providing a description of the trends in revenues and expenditures over time, by state, and by district poverty level. We produce updated estimates for the main school finance indicators and we look at trends in the main variables (per-student revenue and spending) during recessions to see the potential of a solid response from the system to respond, counter, and recover from economic recessions.

We conducted multiple sensitivity analyses in our attempt to verify that the data that we provide are not sensitive to data sources or data procedures, as well as to understand possible ways to further expand this research. Each data source offers significant advantages, but there is no source that can be used for all the purposes intended. Additionally, the evidence improves if we use multiple sources. We are confident the main findings hold and are not driven by extraneous factors. We do not use regression analyses in this version of the report.

1. In addition to the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, which funds the Head Start program for young children, and the Department of Agriculture, which funds the School Lunch (meals) Program are also part of the agencies that support programs or functions in education.

2. We use current expenditures instead of total expenditures when comparing education spending between states or across districts, as suggested by the agency that provides the data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This approach recognizes that current expenditures exclude expenditures for capital outlay, “which tend to have dramatic increases and decreases from year to year.” Also, “the current expenditures commonly reported are for public elementary and secondary education only. Many school districts also support community services, adult education, private education, and other programs, which are included in total expenditures. These programs and the extent to which they are funded by school districts vary greatly both across and within states and school districts.” See NCES 2008.

3. See the New Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights backgrounder (NYSER n.d.) on Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. (CFE) v. State of New York , 8 N.Y.3d 14 (2006) and Srikanth et al. 2020. Michael A. Rebell, one of the most prominent school funding litigators in the country, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in CFE v. New Yor k , a school funding “adequacy” lawsuit that claimed that the State of New York violated the constitutional rights of New York City students by failing to adequately fund the city’s public schools (NYSER n.d.). See also Sciarra and Dingerson 2021.

4. Since 2010, the Education Law Center (ELC), housed at Rutgers University, produces report cards that ask Is School Funding Fair? (using the data collected annually, some of which we use in our analyses below). To paraphrase their response, “Generally, no.” As the authors emphasize, “The hallmark of a fair school funding system is that it delivers more funding to educate students in high-poverty districts [since] states providing equal or less funding to high-poverty districts are shortchanging the students most in need and at risk of academic failure” (Farrie and Schiarra 2021).

5. Moreover, these wealth-based disparities are mirrored in and compounded by race/ethnicity-based gaps. The Education Trust uses data to report on disparities by both income/poverty level and race/ethnicity. As the Education Trust’s report on funding gaps in 2018 reveals, “School districts serving the largest populations of Black, Latino, or American Indian students receive roughly $1,800, or 13 percent, less per student in state and local funding than those serving the fewest students of color. This may seem like an insignificant amount, but it adds up. For a school district with 5,000 students, a gap of $1,800 per student means a shortage of $9 million per year ” (Morgan and Amerikaner 2018, emphasis added).

6. Our peer Western nations view public schools as more of a national responsibility and provide resources accordingly. For example, Germany has a heavily state-based school system, France has a hybrid local–federal system in which the central government pays teachers’ salaries, and Finland’s national government takes virtually full responsibility for public education.

7. As a large study by Berry (2021) reveals, higher-income areas are taxed, on average, at just half the rate of their lower-income counterparts. Not only does this lead to structurally inequitable funding for schools, it exacts a harder toll on the residents who are least able to afford it—who pay double the taxes of their wealthier peers on much lower incomes. And, as Srikanth (2021) notes, “The study reveals structural racism at work.”

8. Funding for K–12 (21.5%) and higher education (9.4%) combined make up the largest segment of most state budgets. Spending on K–12 education alone is barely second in public budgets to public welfare spending (22.4%) (Urban Institute 2021b).

9. Bradbury (2021) explains that “the largest portion of state aid to local school districts is typically provided on a per-student basis through a ‘foundation,’ ‘power-equalizing,’ ‘flat grant,’ or ‘tiered’ program.…In addition, some states include cost adjustments in their formulas. Key attributes on which states base such cost adjustments are student poverty, English language facility, and special education or disability status.”

10. As part of his War on Poverty, which recognized the impacts of poverty on children’s well-being and the nation’s future, President Lyndon Johnson advanced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. This flagship federal legislation, which has since been reauthorized multiple times and whose current iteration is the Every Student Succeeds Act, is designed principally to channel resources to schools serving low-income students. However, Title I, the largest section of ESEA, was never enough to make up for the inequities created by the local–state funding system (see Gamson, McDermott, and Reed 2015).

11. This pattern isn’t at all “inadvertent,” but is a built-in feature that is part of a pattern of systemic racism and related classism that merits attention in itself. See, for example Sosina and Weathers 2019.

12. For example, in 2018–2019, average teacher salaries ranged from less than $46,000 in Mississippi to roughly $86,000 in New York (NEA 2020). However, within New York (according to 2017 data), they ranged from as low as $55,976 in the low-income Finger Lakes region in the northern part of the state to nearly twice as high, $110,000, in the wealthiest Long Island districts (Malatras and Simons 2019).

13. We note that the Great Recession started as the 2007–2008 school year was underway, so we are using the term “pre-recession level” flexibly and assuming school budgets do not immediately respond to the economic recession.

14. See Leachman, Masterson, and Figueroa 2017; Leachman and Figueroa 2019; Baker 2018; and Allegretto 2020 for some more examples.

15. Note that we are not distinguishing here between the source of increased or decreased funding but focusing on total revenues and expenditures. Roy (2011) examined a redistributive school finance reform initiated by the state legislature in Michigan in the mid-’90s, called Proposal A. This reform, which eliminated local discretion over school spending by increasing state aid to the lowest-spending districts and limiting it in the highest-spending districts, reduced spending disparities between districts, and increased student performance (state test scores) in the lowest-spending districts, though it also had a negative effect on student performance in the highest-spending districts. For an analysis of state school finance reforms affecting Kansas (“block grant funding” that froze district revenue regardless of enrollment and reduced funding in districts where enrollment increased), see Rauscher 2020. See Biasi 2019 for an examination of the effect of equalizing revenues across public school districts on students’ intergenerational mobility; Biasi finds that equalization has a large effect on mobility of low-income students, with no significant changes for high-income students.

16. Note that these analyses are based on cross-sectional data.

17. This post-1990 period, often referred to as the “adequacy era,” represented a time in which state-court decisions in multiple states resulted in increased public-school funding, offering an opportunity for researchers to study the overall impacts of these substantial increases and to compare them to student outcomes in states that did not experience them.

18. Their preferred estimates, based on the gradient of student achievement with respect to district income, indicate that a school funding reform raises achievement in a district with log average income one point below the state mean, relative to a district at the mean, by 0.1 standard deviations after 10 years.

19. High-poverty schools found it more difficult to fill vacancies than did low-poverty schools and schools overall, and high-poverty schools experienced higher turnover and attrition rates than did low-poverty schools (García and Weiss 2019).

20. Note that in this report, our main goal is to document the need and concept for such a program, not to discuss how best to design a public education automatic-stabilization program. These considerations, including specifically raising federal supports to education, have been discussed before (Boushey, Nunn, and Shambaugh 2019; Partelow, Yin and Sargrad 2020; Ogletree et al. 2017; Sahm 2019; Schott Foundation 2022; U.S. Department of Education 2013; Washington Center for Equitable Growth 2021; etc.).

21. Author Sylvia Allegretto’s analysis based on Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics data for 2019 (BLS-CES 2021). Education is one of the largest single components of government spending, amassing 7.3% of GDP across federal, state, and local expenditures (OECD 2013).

22. SNAP is the abbreviation for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as “food stamps.”

23. Data Household Pulse Survey (HHPS) from the U.S. Census Bureau found that 29.3% of respondents with children were food insecure in the week of April 23–July 21, 2020 (Schanzenbach and Tomeh 2020). Bauer (2020) estimates that there were almost 14 million children living in a household characterized by child food insecurity during the week of June 19–23, 2020, “5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many as during [the] peak of the Great Recession in 2008 (5.1 million).” Typically, these programs disproportionately benefit low-income communities, which are often hit the hardest, thus preventing even more damage and the exacerbation of the large existing inequities.

24. The term “contingency plans” comes from the education-in-emergencies field and is mostly applicable to international contexts, but it has also been used in the U.S. to give broader responses to crises such as Hurricane Katrina (The White House 2006). See García and Weiss 2020, 2021 for more details. The term “automatic trigger” is used to indicate what activates benefits or programs. See Mitchell and Husak 2021 and Boushey, Nunn, and Shambaugh 2019.

25. For flaws around one of those programs—unemployment insurance—see Bivens et al. 2021. Bitler, Hoynes, and Schanzenbach 2020 provide evidence for three reasons why the policy response left needs unmet: “(1) timing—relief came with a substantial delay (due to overwhelmed UI systems/need to implement new programs); (2) magnitude—payments outside UI are modest; and (3) coverage gaps—access is lower for some groups and other groups are statutorily excluded.”

26. See section summarizing the literature on the impacts of spending on education above.

27. We have discussed this point extensively in our other research on early childhood education, socio-emotional learning, and integrated student support, among others. See García 2015; García and Weiss 2017; García and Weiss 2016; Weiss and Reville 2019, among others, for guidance on smart education investments. See also Bryk et al. 2010 for a discussion on the role of context and how even after receiving funding, schools did not improve, and offering suggestions for school reform efforts.

28. California, which revamped the state’s education funding and accountability systems in the wake of the 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, offers a valuable model. See Furger, Hernández, and Darling-Hammond 2019 and Johnson and Tanner 2018.

29. For counties 2007–2019, see U.S. Census Bureau 2021.

30. As explained earlier in the report, we use current expenditures instead of total expenditures when comparing education spending between states or across districts, as suggested by the agency that provides the data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This approach recognizes that current expenditures exclude expenditures for capital outlay, “which tend to have dramatic increases and decreases from year to year.” Also, “the current expenditures commonly reported are for public elementary and secondary education only. Many school districts also support community services, adult education, private education, and other programs, which are included in total expenditures. These programs and the extent to which they are funded by school districts vary greatly both across and within states and school districts.” See NCES 2008.

31. For 2018: https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/real-personal-income-state-and-metropolitan-area-2018 , and For Time Series: https://apps.bea.gov/regional/histdata/releases/0920rpi/SARPP.zip

32. Note that we obtain the minority concentration from this source. Not used in this report.

33. Variables with the poverty quartiles are called POV_CDIST (our preferred Census SAIPE district) and povall (the one combining all sources).

34. Excluded are districts of vocational or special education system; nonoperating school system that exists for administrative purposes only and does not operate its own schools; LEAs that closed shortly before the start of the fiscal year or are scheduled to open in a future fiscal year but still reported revenue or expenditure information for the current fiscal year; and education service agency (ESA) (variable labeled schlev).

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The Many Types of Education Degrees: How to Pick Your Path

Education degrees aren't just for classroom teachers.

Education Degrees: Picking Your Path

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Though some education degree programs focus on teacher training, others concentrate on education administration, policy or technology. Some education majors explore the unique challenges faced by rural or urban schools.

One common misconception about education degrees is that they're only useful for future classroom teachers.

However, education degrees can lead to all sorts of careers: They're often held by education administrators, policymakers, researchers, technologists, curriculum designers, learning scientists, school counselors or psychologists , standardized test-makers and textbook authors. Staffers at education-oriented government agencies at the local, state and federal level – such as the U.S. Department of Education – frequently have academic degrees in education as well, and the same is true for representatives of education-related charities and nonprofit organizations.

Here's what you need to know about the hierarchy of education degrees and how to choose the right one.

How to Tell if an Education Degree Is a Good Fit

An interest in helping others learn and a desire to work with children are common and compelling reasons for studying education, says Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. Education majors tend to earn less than people who receive a comparable level of training in other fields, so a majority of people who become educators do so for non-financial reasons, he adds.

According to an August 2022 report from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that analyzes working conditions for low-income and middle-income workers in the U.S., the pay disparity between teachers and similarly educated professionals reached an all-time high in 2021, when teachers received 23.5% lower wages on average relative to other workers with comparable credentials.

However, some education occupations typically lead to six-figure salaries. For example, the median salary among U.S. school district superintendents, the majority of whom have doctorates, was $147,000 in 2022, according to a recent report from AASA.

Laura W. Perna, vice provost for faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education , says education degree recipients can use their degree to do good work and benefit society. "If we think about the important problems that need to be addressed in our world, you know, so much of the answer comes down to education," Perna says.

Stacey Ludwig Johnson, senior vice president and executive dean of the school of education at Western Governors University , an online university, emphasizes that schools and school districts aren't the only places where education degree recipients can use their skills. For instance, an educator can work as a corporate trainer, helping a business to increase the skills of its workforce, she says.

The Many Kinds of Education Majors

Among teaching degree programs, some focus on a particular level of education, such as preschool, elementary, middle or high school. Teaching degree programs may also hone in on how to teach a particular subject, or they can emphasize teaching methods that work well with a specific student population, such as adult learners, multi-lingual learners or individuals with disabilities.

When comparing education degree specializations, keep in mind that the earning potential of educators varies widely depending on which part of the education system they are trained for and what credential their job usually requires. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary among U.S. high school teachers, who typically had a bachelor's degree, was about $61,820 in May 2021. That's about twice the median salary of preschool teachers, who usually had an associate degree and earned $30,210. The median salary among principals, who usually had a master's degree, was $98,420.

Sometimes educators with the same level of education earn different amounts depending on their area of focus. For instance, BLS data reveals that though teachers who specialize in basic adult education generally had the same amount of training as high school teachers – a bachelor's degree – their 2021 median salary was roughly $2,100 lower.

Education Degree Levels and How to Find the Right Tier

Leadership roles in the education sector generally require graduate education . The more training educators have, the higher their salaries tend to be. For example, according to PayScale, a compensation data company, the average base salary for U.S. workers with a Bachelor of Education , or B.Ed. degree, was $57,000, whereas the average annual base salary among those with a Doctor of Education, or Ed.D. degree, was $80,000.

Prospective education students should analyze the resumes of people who have jobs they are interested in to figure out the highest level of education to pursue, experts say.

Associate Degrees

Many preschool teaching jobs require at least a two-year associate degree in early childhood education. Teachers' assistants or paraprofessionals usually need at least two years of college coursework or an associate degree to work in public school classrooms.

Bachelor's Degrees

A bachelor's is the minimum amount of education needed for an entry-level K-12 teaching position at a U.S. public school.

Master's Degrees

A few states require teachers to begin pursuing a master's degree within several years of beginning teaching to maintain their license. Teachers may also move up the pay scale with a master's. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 58% of U.S. public school teachers who taught during the 2017-18 school year had a more advanced degree than a bachelor's.

Instructional coordinators or curriculum specialists, the educational administrators who oversee curricula, standards, teaching materials and often assessments, usually have a master's, and their median salary was $63,740 in May 2021, BLS data shows.

College and university administrators, who earned a median annual salary of $96,910 in May 2021, also typically have master's degrees, according to the BLS. Work in education policy typically requires a master's degree as well.

Master's degrees in education usually require two years of coursework.

College faculty who research and teach about education typically have Doctor of Philosophy, or Ph.D., degrees, and they sometimes have Ed.D. degrees. According to PayScale, the average salary for a worker with a Ph.D. in education was $87,000. Doctoral programs in education usually last at least three years and often take longer to finish.

School district administration positions sometimes require doctoral education, and certain managerial roles at government agencies and nonprofit organizations are reserved for individuals with doctorates. Education researchers frequently have doctorates, and so do school psychologists.

Guidance on Figuring Out How Much Schooling You Need

When deciding how high of a degree they should aim for, education students should think about the level of expertise and the kinds of skills that their desired job requires, says Carol Basile, dean of Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College . "As you continue to move up in any education organization, there begins to be more of a requirement for a doctorate," she says.

Searching for a grad school? Get our  complete rankings of Best Graduate Schools.

Grad Degree Jobs With $100K+ Salaries

Tags: education , education policy , education graduate school , teachers , careers , students

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SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS

Elementary and secondary stem education.

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Executive Summary

Key takeaways:

• Internationally, the United States ranks higher in science (7th of 37 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] countries) and computer information literacy (5th of 14 participating education systems) than it does in mathematics literacy (25th of 37 OECD countries).
• Average scores for U.S. fourth and eighth graders on a national assessment of mathematics improved from 1990 to 2007, but there was no overall measurable improvement in mathematics scores from 2007 to 2019.
• Differences persist in U.S. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) achievement scores by socioeconomic status (SES) and race or ethnicity.
• Differences in U.S. STEM achievement scores by sex are smaller than those by SES or race or ethnicity but are present; male students slightly outscored female students on some national assessments, although female students substantially outscored male students on a computer information literacy exam.
• Less experienced STEM teachers (as measured by years of teaching) are more prevalent in schools with high-minority enrollment or high-poverty enrollment.
• Data collected on U.S. remote learning in spring 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic) revealed differences in access to technology based on household income: 57% of households with income below $25,000 always had a computer available for educational purposes, whereas 90% of households with an income of $200,000 or more did so.

Elementary and secondary education in mathematics and science is the foundation for student entry into postsecondary STEM majors as well as a wide variety of STEM-related occupations. Federal and state policymakers, legislators, and educators are working to broaden and strengthen STEM education at the K–12 level. These efforts include promoting elementary grade participation in STEM, raising overall student achievement, increasing advanced high school coursetaking, reducing performance gaps among demographic groups, and improving college and career readiness in mathematics and science.

The indicators in this report present a mixed picture of the status and progress of elementary and secondary STEM education in the United States. Internationally, the United States ranks low among OECD nations in mathematics literacy (25th out of 37) but does better in science literacy (7th out of 37). In computer and information literacy, the United States ranks 5th among the 14 education systems that participated in that assessment. Within the United States, students’ achievement in mathematics has been essentially stagnant for more than a decade after showing steady improvement in the prior two decades.

The data presented in this report show persistent performance gaps by students’ SES and race or ethnicity. For example, on an assessment with a scale of 0–500, mathematics scores for low-SES students in a national cohort of eighth graders were 30 points lower than scores for high-SES students, and Asian and White students posted scores that were up to 53 points higher than scores by Black, Hispanic, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students. Similar patterns were seen for student performance in computer and information literacy.

Differences by sex on national assessments were small on average. Male students slightly outscored female students by 3 points in fourth grade in 2019 on a national math assessment, but there was no difference in scores between males and females in eighth grade. Female students outscored male students by 23 points on an assessment of computer and information literacy.

The data also reveal that student access to well-qualified mathematics and science teachers varies. A recent national study showed that virtually all middle and high school science and mathematics teachers have a bachelor’s degree and a regular or an advanced teaching certification; however, access to highly qualified teachers varies by school demographics. Schools with higher concentrations of low-SES and minority students had comparatively fewer highly qualified teachers (i.e., those with 3 years or more of teaching experience and with a degree in the subject taught).

High school STEM achievement and coursetaking frequently facilitate STEM-related postsecondary education and employment. Students who have positive perceptions of their mathematics and science abilities in high school are more inclined to declare a postsecondary STEM major. The majority of U.S. high school students enroll in either 2-year or 4-year postsecondary institutions immediately after graduation from high school; enrollment patterns, however, differ by demographic group. For example, Black students and students from low-income families enroll at lower rates than their peers. Among students who enter the workforce directly after high school, those who take STEM-related career and technical education courses are more likely than others to enter skilled technical jobs.

Finally, the United States faced an unprecedented situation in spring 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic when most elementary and secondary schools across the country abruptly shifted to a distance-learning model. Researchers estimated that students on average suffered some mathematics learning losses as a result, with low-SES students suffering disproportionately larger losses, in part due to their lack of access to the technology required for distance learning.

Collectively, the findings in this report suggest that the United States has yet to achieve the goal of ensuring equal educational opportunities in STEM for all students regardless of socioeconomic and demographic background. As noted in the National Science Board’s Vision 2030 report (NSB 2020), K–12 STEM education and high achievement for all students plays a critical role in ensuring that the United States is meeting the needs of the modern workforce and maintaining America’s position internationally. Given these needs and the importance of K–12 STEM preparation and the opportunities available to students who excel in STEM subjects, it is important to continue to focus on efforts that will increase the number and diversity of students interested in STEM and broaden opportunities for all students to succeed and thrive in STEM.

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• Published: 18 September 2023

Elementary school teachers’ perspectives about learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

• Aymee Alvarez-Rivero   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0489-5708 1 ,
• Candice Odgers 2 , 3 &
• Daniel Ansari   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7625-618X 1  

npj Science of Learning volume  8 , Article number:  40 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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How did school closures affect student access to education and learning rates during the COVID-19 pandemic? How did teachers adapt to the new instructional contexts? To answer these questions, we distributed an online survey to Elementary School teachers ( N  = 911) in the United States and Canada at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. Around 85.8% of participants engaged in remote instruction, and nearly half had no previous experience teaching online. Overall, this transition was challenging for most teachers and more than 50% considered they were not as effective in the classroom during remote instruction and reported not being able to deliver all the curriculum expected for their grade. Despite the widespread access to digital technologies in our sample, nearly 65% of teachers observed a drop in class attendance. More than 50% of participants observed a decline in students’ academic performance, a growth in the gaps between low and high-performing students, and predicted long-term adverse effects. We also observed consistent effects of SES in teachers’ reports. The proportion of teachers reporting a drop in performance increases from 40% in classrooms with high-income students, to more than 70% in classrooms with low-income students. Students in lower-income households were almost twice less likely to have teachers with previous experience teaching online and almost twice less likely to receive support from adults with homeschooling. Overall, our data suggest the effects of the pandemic were not equally distributed.

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Introduction.

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on education worldwide 1 , 2 , with the aftermath of more than 180 countries experiencing school closures and more than 1.5 billion students left out of school 3 . Despite the efforts of governments and education institutions to provide alternative learning opportunities, the long periods that students had to spend away from the classroom have raised concerns about the potential long-term consequences on academic achievement, and the unequal effect that it will have on students from vulnerable and marginalized groups 4 , who had to navigate the challenges of at-home schooling while their families struggled with financial burdens 5 .

Empirical data about changes in students’ performance has been slow to emerge. One of the earliest pieces of evidence comes from a study in The Netherlands by Engzell, Frey, and Verhagen 6 . The authors analyzed changes in performance associated with school closures, using a uniquely rich dataset with more than 350,000 students in primary school. The data included biannual test scores collected at the middle and the end of each school year from 2017 and 2020. Critically, in 2020, the mid-year tests took place right before the first school closures in The Netherlands, providing a benchmark that authors could use to estimate learning losses. The authors identified an overall decrease in academic performance equivalent to 0.08 standard deviation units. Moreover, the effects on learning outcomes were not uniform, as students from less-educated households experienced losses 60% more pronounced than the general population.

These findings are critical since they provide evidence of the potential effects of the pandemic in a “best-case” scenario. More than 90% of students in The Netherlands had access to a computer at home, and more than 95% had access to the internet and a quiet place to study 7 . But even in this context of high levels of access to digital resources, equitable funding for elementary schools, and average-to-high performance prior to the pandemic, school closures have had tangible effects on learning outcomes, especially for children with disadvantaged backgrounds.

Similar studies comparing students’ performance before and after COVID have been conducted in other countries 8 , 9 . Most of them have found evidence of learning losses and slower rates of growth in academic abilities during the 2020–2021 school year 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , while others did not find any negative effects 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 .

Moreover, there is strong evidence suggesting that pre-existing inequalities in education have become more pronounced. Even before the pandemic, achievement gaps across socio-economic status (SES) were evident since kindergarten and persisted across education years 27 , 28 . During the pandemic, students from disadvantaged backgrounds suffered longer school closures 29 and had less access to computers and internet for schoolwork 7 , 30 , 31 , 32 . In addition, families facing financial struggles were in less favorable positions to dedicate resources and time to school activities at home 33 . As a result of these and other limitations, learning losses have been more severe for students from racial minorities 15 , 19 , 34 , with less educated parents 6 , 17 or those coming from low-income households 13 , 14 , 16 , 19 , 34 , 35 .

Recent attempts to synthesize the literature about learning losses 8 estimate that students have lost the equivalent of 35% of an academic year’s worth of learning. However, further data is necessary to assess the real extent to which the pandemic has impacted learning. On one hand, the data about changes in students’ performance is still very scarce, due to the limitations that remote learning imposed on school abilities to continue standardized assessments. Moreover, students from disadvantaged groups are more likely to be underrepresented 11 , 34 , 36 , both within countries and on a global scale 8 . Therefore, further evidence is needed to assess the real extent of the effects of the pandemic across different socio-economic conditions.

Teachers are a critical source of information that has not been considered enough. Teachers were at the front line of the education efforts during the pandemic and observed the impact on student learning and academic performance firsthand. While not free of biases, they are possibly the best-informed source of information about students’ abilities to benefit from these efforts, using their own previous experience as a comparison point. Critically, teachers’ observations are available across all school contexts and socio-economic strata. Therefore, they can provide insights into the effects of the pandemic that are representative of a wider variety of contexts than the ones included in a recent analysis of individual differences. Elementary school teachers more specifically, establish a unique relationship with their students, as they instruct them in multiple subjects, compared to higher education where students’ curriculum and interests are more heterogeneous, and students are often taught different subjects by different teachers. As a result, in the current context of data scarcity, elementary school teachers may be better prepared to aggregate individual student information into group-level estimates than can be accessed through survey methods.

Moreover, understanding teacher’s experiences throughout the pandemic is of critical importance for the future of education. Multiple studies have indicated that teachers have experienced higher levels of dissatisfaction and a lower sense of success during the pandemic 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , resulting in increased levels of attrition rates worldwide 42 .

The present study presents the results of a survey distributed to teachers in Canada and the US, right at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. Our survey obtained participants’ assessments about three overarching issues: (1) How did teachers experience the transition to emergency remote learning? (2) How were equitable opportunities to access education impacted by school closures? and (3) Have students experienced learning losses or gains during the pandemic? We also collected additional data about variables regarding the socio-economic context of students to explore the generalizability of our data to different school and classroom contexts.

Teachers’ experience transitioning from in-person to remote classes

Table 1 summarizes some of the variables that assessed teachers’ experience transitioning to remote learning. We expected that teachers’ previous experiences with online teaching and technology may have influenced how well they adapted to these changes. Overall, the observed distributions show that we recruited participants with different levels of previous preparation and training in both countries.

Notably, the proportion of teachers with no previous experience teaching online goes from 40% for high-SES students, to more than 75% for low SES students. This association was statistically significant \(({\tau }_{c}=0.22{;p}\, < \,0.001)\) . Although weak, we also found significant interactions between student’s income level and the amount of training teachers received ( X 2  = 23.44; p  = 0.024, df  = 12, Cramer ′ sV  = 0.09). We also observed higher levels of proficiency using digital technologies for educational purposes \(({\tau }_{c}=0.08{;p}=0.007)\) for teacher of higher-income students. As we expected, switching to remote education was increasingly challenging for teachers with less experience teaching online \(({\tau }_{c}=-0.18{;p}\, < \,0.001)\) , and those with poor digital skills \(({\tau }_{c}=-0.11{;p}\, < \,0.001)\) .

Equitable opportunities to access education

Multiple items throughout the survey assessed to what extent learning opportunities were offered to students and their ability to benefit from them (Table 2 ). More than 96% of participants agreed that most to all students in their classroom had access to the resources needed for online classes. The distribution of responses was slightly different between countries ( X 2  = 17.82, p  < 0.001, df  = 3, Cramer ′ sV  = 0.15). But overall, even for teachers that had low-income students, reporting that few or none of their students had access to technology was rare.

Despite having the means to access online education, more than 65% of participants indicated that attendance to class decreased during the 2020–2021 school year. Overall, there was no significant difference in teachers’ reports of attendance across countries ( X 2  = 2.97, p  < 0.227, df  = 2, Cramer ′ sV  = 0.07). However, there was a difference in the association between attendance levels and students’ income across countries. For teachers in the US, lower levels of attendance were reported more frequently when students came from low-income households \(({\tau }_{c}=-0.19{;p}\, < \,0.001)\) . For Canadian teachers, this association was not present \(({\tau }_{c}=-0.03{;p}\, < \,0.517)\) .

Knowing the limitations of this survey in terms of providing individual data about attendance, we included one additional question to explore approximately what proportion of students were missing from the classroom. We asked respondents to break down their students into three different groups: students who attended regularly, students who attended irregularly and students who were completely absent from class throughout the whole year. According to teachers’ estimations, an average of 69.98% of students were present regularly in class, 21.24% came to class only irregularly and another 8.78% were completely absent during the whole school year. The proportion of students completely absent was consistently low for all SES levels \((F(4,611)=0.46,{p}=0.764,{\eta }^{2}=0.01)\) . In contrast, the number of students attending regularly increased linearly with SES levels \((F(4,611)=2.41,{p}=0.048,{\eta }^{2}=0.02{;linear\; trend}:t=2.12,{SE}=3.16,{p}=0.034)\) . Since these proportions are complementary, the proportion of students attending irregularly also decreased across SES levels \((F(4,611)=3.34,{p}=0.010,{\eta }^{2}=0.02{;linear\; trend}:t=-2.52,{SE}=2.28,{p}=0.012)\) .

During class, most participants indicated that they covered less content during online lessons than they do in a regular school year. Moreover, around 28% of participants considered that adult assistance was needed for students to complete schoolwork. Whether the support from a parent or caregiver was imperative or not, we also asked participants to estimate, approximately, what proportion of their students received help at home. More than 70% of participants perceived that most to all students in their class had the support of an adult to some degree. But more importantly, perceived levels of support were higher for teachers of students coming from higher-income households \(({\tau }_{c}=-0.25{;p}\, < \,0.001)\) .

Changes in academic performance during the pandemic

Another important goal of our survey was to get teachers’ input on how different aspects of academic achievement may have been affected because of the interruption of in-person classes (Table 3 ). More than 50% of teachers indicated that children in their class performed worse than in previous years (Fig. 1a ). Moreover, teachers who reported having students from lower socio-economic status were more likely to report that performance was below the expectations for the grade (Fig. 1b ; \({\tau }_{c}=-0.25{;p}\, < \,0.001\) ). There were no differences across countries in these estimations of students’ average performance ( X 2  = 2.97, p  < 0.227, df  = 2, Cramer ′ sV  = 0.07).

Teachers’ perceptions of the overall performance of students, compared to a regular school year ( a ) by country and ( b ) by classroom SES. Legend: - On average, students have performed below the expectations for their grade = On average, students have performed according to the expectations for their grade + On average, students have performed above the expectations for their grade.

Previous reports have suggested that learning losses during the pandemic have not been equally severe across different learning domains 11 . Motivated by those results, we asked participants to rate students’ performance in Math, Reading/Literature, and Spelling/Writing, separately. The distribution of responses for the three domains was slightly skewed, as most teachers reported learning losses to some degree for the three areas. We wanted to know if teachers’ perceptions of academic loss for specific domains varied depending on the subject they teach. Unfortunately, around 60% of our participants did not report that information. Moreover, out of the 40% who reported the subjects they were teaching, more than half of them taught multiple subjects that covered the three topics of interest. Nonetheless, we ran an exploratory analysis including just that 40% and we did not observe significant effects. (i.e. participants who teach math-related areas do not report better or worse learning losses in math when compared to other participants).

To complement these overall ratings, we requested more detailed information about the distribution of students in their classrooms, according to their performance level. Participants were asked to classify their students into three categories: students who performed below the expectations for their grade, students who performed according to the expectations for their grade, and students who performed above the expectations for their grade. Even though our data cannot inform about individual differences in performance, with this question we expected to obtain an estimate of the proportion of students who experienced the learning losses reported in the previous questions.

Comparing the data across the three domains did not yield significant differences in the severity of learning losses that teachers report for Math, Reading, or Spelling (Fig. 2 ). However, we did find differences across countries in the proportions of low, average, or high-performance students that teachers reported across all domains. Canadian teachers reported lower percentages than their US counterparts of students performing below standards during the 2020–21 school year \((F(1,904)=7.23,{p}=0.007,{\eta }^{2}=0.01)\) . They also reported higher proportions of students performing above standards for their grades despite the pandemic \((F(1,905)=37.54,{p}\, < \,0.001,{\eta }^{2}=0.03)\) . In summary, even though teachers of both countries reported an overall decrease in students’ performance, teachers from the US report having a higher percentage of students experiencing these losses.

Average performance of students compared to a regular school year in ( a ) Math, ( b ) Reading/Literature, and ( c ) Spelling/Writing. Legend: -- Much worse- Somewhat worse = About the same + Somewhat better + + Much better.

Participants were also asked to estimate whether the gap between the students performing at the higher level, and those performing at the lowest level had increased, decreased, or stayed the same, compared to a typical school year. This question was designed to elicit teachers’ views of individual differences between students in their classrooms. About 58% of teachers indicated that differences between students had widened during the 2020–2021 school year, in contrast to around 32% who didn’t perceive any changes and another 10% who indicated that this gap decreased. Finally, we included one general question in the survey to ask teachers if they believed that the pandemic would have long lasting effects on students and, if so, whether these effects would have a positive or negative outcome. A large proportion of the participants expressed that the changes occurring during the pandemic would most likely have a negative impact on students’ learning in the long run.

We distributed a survey to primary school teachers in the US and Canada at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. Our survey was able to reach teachers from different levels of SES, who were affected by school closure at varying degrees. Their responses provided relevant insights into how education took place during the COVID-19 health crisis, especially during the 2020–2021 school year, the first to fully occur within the pandemic.

Results from our survey suggest that a large proportion of students in both countries had access to the digital resources required to access these online alternatives (such as computers, internet, etc.). This was especially true for students from advantaged homes, but even in the lower SES levels, more than 90% of students had access to digital resources. This is not surprising, considering recent statistics showing that around 93% and 88% of students in Canada and the US, respectively, have access to a computer at home and more than 95% have access to the internet in both countries 7 , 32 .

However, the availability of digital resources is necessary but not sufficient to guarantee that students have access to educational opportunities. For example, our data indicates that the amount of instruction time decreased substantially, compared to a regular school year. Instruction time requirements for primary school in both Canada 43 and the US 44 vary across states, but the average is close to 30 h per week. The average number of hours of remote instruction reported by our participants fell below the 20 h, which represents less than two thirds of these typical requirements. Consistently, most participants reported not being able to deliver all the content they typically taught during a regular school year. In addition, most participants indicated that attendance to class was lower than in a traditional year. Was this trend due to just a few, or to many students consistently missing class? On average, our respondents report that approximately 3 in every 10 students in their class were attending inconsistently or completely absent. Although small, the reported proportions of students who were completely absent from class are of critical importance, since they represent students who were not able to benefit from education opportunities at all during the last school year.

Overall, nearly 56% of our participants agreed that students performed below the expectations for their grades during the 2020–2021 school year. These reports are converging with previous studies using standardized tests to compare students’ academic achievement before and during the pandemic (Engzell et al., 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2020). Unlike previous studies, teachers’ rates of academic performance obtained during our survey do not suggest that the drop in math performance was more pronounced than in other domains (i.e., reading). It is possible that differences between learning losses experienced across domains exist in our student population, as suggested by studies analyzing individual data on standardized tests. However, those differences may not be large enough to be captured by the limited response options presented in our survey. It is also possible that presenting this question in a grid format may have increased the probability of straight-lining, or the tendency in which participants select the same answer choice to all items on the question.

More importantly, teachers’ rates of academic performance varied drastically according to the income-level of their students, and more than half of our participants agreed that differences between low and high performing students became more pronounced during the 2020–2021 school year. This learning gap between low and high performing students is fundamentally different from the overall performance trend. Assuming that teachers’ ratings are an accurate depiction of how actual performance was impacted by the school closures, the questions about overall performance should reflect perceived changes on the mean of the distribution, whereas the questions about the learning gap should reflect perceived changes on the difference between the lower and the upper tail of the distribution within their classrooms.

Like previous studies in the literature, our findings suggest that the pandemic has emphasized individual differences between students of different income levels, that are otherwise attenuated during in-person instruction. Figure 3 highlights the most noticeable differences between the lower and the top 20% of the SES distribution. The consistent pattern of interaction between teachers’ reports of the effects of the pandemic and their students’ socio-economic background suggests that students from low- and high-income households may have experienced school closures in very different ways.

We created two groups to represent the extremes of the SES distribution. To make the groups comparable in terms of size, the lower SES group included participants who reported that their students come from predominantly Low-Income households ( n  = 168), whereas the higher SES group included participants whose students predominantly come from High-Income households ( n  = 53), or a mix of Middle and High-Income ( n  = 119). Since our perceived SES measure is on a discrete scale, selecting exactly the top and bottom 20% is not possible. Instead, the lower and higher income groups represent 18.44% and 18.88% of the distribution.

First, our data suggest that teachers from classrooms with higher income levels may have been more prepared for the transition to remote alternatives, as they had more relevant experience with online instruction before the pandemic and they had better self-ratings of digital skills than teachers from lower SES classrooms. For example, 7 out of every 10 teachers of students in the lower 20% of the SES were teaching online for the first time during the pandemic, versus only 4 out of every 10 in the top 20% SES.

During the school closures, teachers from higher SES classrooms were also less likely to report a drop in overall attendance levels to online lessons, compared to a regular school year, and had higher proportions of students who consistently attended class. Moreover, they observed students receiving support from adults at home more frequently. This was one of the most striking contrasts observed in our data, which became more evident when comparing the two extremes of the distribution. Taken together, these results suggest that students in higher income levels may have been in a better position to benefit from the remote alternatives offered during the pandemic. Consistent with this prediction, teachers from higher income classrooms were also less likely to report learning losses during the pandemic.

These results have critical implications for our understanding of the long-term effect of the pandemic. Household income was already an important predictor of future academic achievement before the pandemic. With the closure of schools as a measure to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds who were already in a vulnerable position may find themselves falling further behind their peers. As a result, they may be more likely to experience dropout in the future and less likely to pursue higher levels of education, which may reinforce the already existing income inequalities into future generations.

There are limitations to our results due to the observational nature of the data. It is possible that some of the associations observed are the results of biases in teachers’ perceptions. In addition, it is important to bear in mind that teacher reports offer information that occurs at the classroom level and therefore cannot account for effects at the individual level.

Despite these limitations, teachers can provide insights into the effects that the pandemic has had on students that is unique and highly valuable. Teachers have been active observers of students’ performance before, during, and after the pandemic. They receive a constant stream of data from students and therefore may perceive trends that standardized tests taken at a single time point may not capture.

In addition, teachers can provide information that is representative of a wide range of socio-economic and classroom contexts, something that has been a limitation of previous analyses of individual data. Our survey has its own limitations when describing the effects of SES on learning during the pandemic. For instance, we cannot guarantee that the SES levels reported by teachers in the US will correspond perfectly with the same levels in Canada. In other words, what teachers consider low SES in one country may be considered middle SES in the other. But even if the levels do not overlap perfectly, what seems to be consistent across our data is that students in lower levels struggled more during the pandemic and that trend remains when analyses are conducted on each country separately.

Critically, the relevance of teacher surveys is not only limited to their role as informants of students’ achievement. Teachers have a critical role in carrying forward education efforts and understanding how they experienced the recent crisis is by itself a critical question that current research should address. The stress associated with abrupt changes in the work environment, combined with the high demands and responsibility levels puts teachers at risk of experiencing work-related burnout. In fact, previous studies have found that, during 2020, teachers were more likely to consider leaving the classroom before retirement age 39 , 45 , 46 , 47 , and at least 23% considered retiring specifically due to the pandemic 48 , which has aggravated the already existing global crisis of teacher shortages 42 . In our survey, as expected, the frequency of teachers considering leaving their profession was higher for those with more years of experience. However, even in the group of less experienced teachers, around 1 in every 4 considered retiring during the pandemic. Teachers are expected to continue to have a critical role as the pandemic continues to unfold and in future efforts to mitigate the learning losses experienced by students during this period. It is evident from these results that understanding teachers’ experiences and providing them with the necessary resources and support will be critical for the success of these efforts.

In summary, our results provide an insight into how teachers from these countries experienced remote education, and their observations about consequences for students’ academic achievement, measured right at the end of the first school year to fully occur amidst the pandemic. Our sample was diverse in terms of the geographical distribution of responses and the socio-economic background of the students. Nevertheless, our results may be specific to the higher-level socio-economic characteristics of these countries and may not be generalizable to different contexts. Our results suggest that even in the presence of widespread access to digital learning tools, consistent attendance to class and complete delivery of the curriculum could not be guaranteed. Most teachers reported observing a decline in students’ academic performance, and a growth in the gaps between low and high performing students. More importantly, our data suggest that the effects of the pandemic were not equally distributed. Students from lower SES levels had teachers who were less prepared for the transition to online activities and received less support from adults during homeschooling. Consistently, teachers from lower SES classrooms also reported drops in performance more frequently than those from the higher SES levels.

Even though the group estimations that teachers provide at the classroom level are not enough to suggest causal relationships between the variables we studied and individual differences in academic achievement, teachers contribute valuable information, based on their constant interaction with students. Their observations provide a unique perspective on the effects of the pandemic that is relevant to inform policy decisions and future research.

Participants

Teachers from public elementary schools were recruited through the Qualtrics Online Sample panel. We aimed at a sample size of 900 participants, 450 from Canada and 450 from the US. Our sample size was constrained by the availability of participants from the Qualtrics panel that fit into our inclusion criteria. We required participants to be elementary school teachers (grades 1 to 6), fluent in English, living in Canada or the US, who were actively teaching during the 2020–2021 school year. We surveyed 918 participants between June 16th and June 28th, 2021. Seven participants were removed for having a large number of missing responses. The final sample included 911 participants, 453 from Canada and 458 from the US (Fig. 4 ). The complete dataset can be accessed here: https://osf.io/3dsef .

Distribution of responses collected across Canada and the US 49 The circle size represents the amount of participants recruited, transformed to log scale.

Our sample was diverse in terms of the professional background of participants and the socioeconomic characteristics of their students (see Table 4 ). We did not consider participants’ socioeconomic status (SES) when determining inclusion. In fact, we were not able to select participants across specific SES levels since the Qualtrics Online Sample of teachers was already limited. Rather, we recruited all potential participants and subsequently described the income level of the students they teach, as reported by the participants themselves.

There were small differences between participants of both countries. For example, teachers from the US were on average more experienced than their Canadian counterparts ( X Can  = 10.05 years, X USA  = 11.82 years; t (822.63) = −2.14, p  = 0.033, d  = 0.14) and reported having students from lower-income households to a greater extent ( X 2  = 71.44, p  = 0.000, df  = 4, Cramer ′ sV  = 0.20).

More than 90% of teachers in our sample experienced school closures during the pandemic, ranging from a few days to the whole year (Table 5 ). Partial closures were, on average, larger in Canada compared to the US ( t (409.40) = 3.32, p  = 0.001, d  = 0.33). During remote instruction, participants reported spending around 18.87 h of class time per week. Furthermore, most participants received classwork from students on a weekly or daily basis and provided feedback with similar frequency. These survey items offered an estimate of the amount of information that participants received from students, which will serve as a basis for their judgments about academic performance.

Since most of the observed discrepancies between countries corresponded to small effect sizes, we considered both groups of participants to be comparable. Therefore, we report here the results corresponding to the whole sample.

The study was approved by the Non-medical Research Ethics Board of the University of Western Ontario. We administered the survey through the Qualtrics online platform. All the participants on the Qualtrics panel who potentially met our inclusion criteria received an email with a link to the survey and the estimated time commitment. Participants who accessed the link were presented with the letter of information (LOI) before starting the survey. Since the survey was administered online, participants could not provide written consent. Instead, they indicated agreement to participate by ticking a checkbox at the end of the LOI. The survey was presented only to those participants who provided this type of consent.

We asked participants to complete the survey in a single session, which should have taken approximately 10 min. To minimize the risk of missing data, we required responses for most survey items. However, all the questions with response requirements included an ‘I prefer not to answer’ option that participants could use if they didn’t feel comfortable disclosing the required information. The complete survey is available here: https://osf.io/bx63k/ .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/3dsef .

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the educators who offered their valuable time to respond to our survey. We would also like to thank Bea Goffin for assistance with research ethics and project management. This project was supported by a Catalyst Grant from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR, Grant Reference CF-0213) to CLO and DA. Danial Ansari is supported by the Jacobs Foundation through the CERES Network.

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Aymee Alvarez-Rivero & Daniel Ansari

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Social Science Research Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

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Study conception and design by all authors. Initial survey draft by A.A.R, but all authors reviewed and provided feedback that was incorporated to the final version. Data analysis and initial draft of the manuscript by A.A.R but all authors contributed and approved the final version.

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Correspondence to Aymee Alvarez-Rivero .

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Alvarez-Rivero, A., Odgers, C. & Ansari, D. Elementary school teachers’ perspectives about learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. npj Sci. Learn. 8 , 40 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-023-00191-w

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Here are the average U.S. test scores in math. Each year, they fluctuate a little.

From 2019 to 2022, test scores plunged: Students lost more than half a year of learning.

Students have now recovered about a third of what they lost in math, and even less in reading.

Students Are Making a ‘Surprising’ Rebound From Pandemic Closures. But Some May Never Catch Up.

By Claire Cain Miller ,  Sarah Mervosh and Francesca Paris

Elementary and middle-school students have made up significant ground since pandemic school closings in 2020 — but they are nowhere close to being fully caught up, according to the first detailed national study of how much U.S. students are recovering.

Listen to this article

Overall in math, a subject where learning loss has been greatest, students have made up about a third of what they lost. In reading, they have made up a quarter, according to the new analysis of standardized test score data led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard.

The findings suggest that the United States has averted a dire outcome — stagnating at pandemic lows — but that many students are not on pace to catch up before the expiration of a $122 billion federal aid package in September. That money — the single largest federal investment in public education in the country’s history — has paid for extra help, like tutoring and summer school, at schools nationwide.

Even with the federal funds, the gains were larger than researchers expected, based on prior research on extra money for schools. Recovery was not a given , judging from past unexpected school closures, like for natural disasters or teachers’ strikes.

Still, the gap between students from rich and poor communities — already huge before the pandemic — has widened.

“One of the big and surprising findings is there actually has been a substantial recovery,” said Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who conducted the new analysis with Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard; Erin Fahle, executive director of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford; and Douglas O. Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth.

“But it’s an unevenly felt recovery,” Professor Reardon said, “so the worry there is that means inequality is getting baked in.”

Some children may never catch up and could enter adulthood without the full set of skills they need to succeed in the work force and life.

The students most at risk are those in poor districts, whose test scores fell further during the pandemic. Though the new data shows that they have begun to catch up, they had much more to make up than their peers from higher-income families, who are already closer to a recovery.

The result: Students in poor communities are at a greater disadvantage today than they were five years ago.

Yet there is significant variation. Some wealthy districts have barely improved. Some poorer districts have made remarkable recoveries, offering lessons for what has worked. In places like Durham, N.C.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Delano, Calif., students are now about fully caught up.

See How Your School District Is Recovering From the Pandemic

Look up data from the first detailed national study of learning loss and academic recovery since the pandemic.

The data does not include any progress students may be making this school year, which will be measured in state tests this spring.

But the study suggests that many students will still need significant support, just as federal aid is running out.

“We seemed to have lost the urgency in this crisis,” said Karyn Lewis, who has studied pandemic learning declines for NWEA, a research and student assessment group. “It is problematic for the average kid. It is catastrophic for the kids who were hardest hit.”

Why Inequality Has Widened

The analysis looked at test score data for third- through eighth-grade students in about 30 states — representing about 60 percent of the U.S. public school population in those grades. It examined pandemic declines from 2019 to 2022 , and measured recovery as of spring 2023. It offers the first national comparison of recovery at a school district level. (It did not include high school students.)

Test scores fell most in poor districts. School closures, though not the only driver of pandemic losses , were a major factor: Schools in poor communities stayed remote for longer in the 2020-21 school year, and students suffered bigger declines when they did .

But once schools reopened, the pace of recovery was similar across districts, the analysis shows. Both the richest and poorest districts managed to teach more than in a usual school year — about 17 percent more in math, and 8 percent more in reading — as schools raced to help students recover.

Yet because poor districts had lost more ground, their progress was not nearly enough to outpace wealthier districts, widening the gulf between them. The typical rich district is about a fifth of a grade level behind where it was in 2019. The typical poor district: nearly half a grade.

Another factor is widened inequality within districts.

When looking at data available in 15 states, researchers found that in a given district — poor or rich — children across backgrounds lost similar ground, but students from richer families recovered faster.

One possible explanation: Even within districts, individual schools have become increasingly segregated by income and race in recent years, said Ann Owens, a sociologist at the University of Southern California. When this happens, she has found, achievement gaps grow , largely because students from wealthier families benefit from a concentration of resources.

Schools made up mostly of high-income families attract more experienced teachers. High-earning parents are more likely to invest in tutors or enrichment outside of school.

Even when schools offered interventions to help students catch up, lower-income families might have been less able to rearrange schedules or transportation to ensure their children attended. (This is one reason experts advise scheduling tutoring during the school day, not after.)

Racial gaps in student scores have also grown, with white students pulling further ahead.

Black students, on average, are now recovering at a faster pace than white or Hispanic students, the analysis suggests — but because they lost more ground than white students, they remain further behind. The gap between white and Hispanic students has also grown, and Hispanic students appear to have had a relatively weak recovery overall. The analysis did not include Asian students, who represent 5 percent of public school students.

Where Students Are and Are Not Recovering

Another factor in recovery: where students live.

Take Massachusetts, which has some of the nation’s best math and reading scores , but wide inequality. The recovery there was led by wealthier districts. Test scores for students in poor districts have shown little improvement, and in some cases, kept falling, leaving Massachusetts with one of the largest increases in the achievement gap. (Officials in Massachusetts hope that an increase in state funding for K-12 schools last year, as part of a plan to direct more money to poor districts, will help close gaps.)

In states like Kentucky and Tennessee that have traditionally had more middling test scores, but with less inequality, poor students have recovered remarkably well.

In Oregon, test scores appeared not to recover. State officials pointed to investments they hope will show results in the future, including permanent funding for early literacy . “We are definitely not satisfied with where we are,” said Charlene Williams, director of the Oregon Department of Education. She added, “We need every minute of instruction we can get.”

Math scores in 2019,

2022 and 2023

Some states, including Mississippi , had strong recoveries.

Some states are excluded because of lower test participation rates, lack of sufficiently detailed public data or changes to their tests between 2022 and 2023. Source: Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford

Across the country, richer districts overall saw gains. But some have made little to no recovery, including Forsyth County on the outskirts of Atlanta, and Rochester, Mich., in suburban Detroit; and Lake Oswego, Ore., near Portland.

And some poorer districts did better than expected, including large urban districts like Chicago, Nashville and Philadelphia, which saw big drops during the pandemic, but have had above-average recoveries.

In the years before the pandemic, big-city school districts often outpaced the nation in learning gains , even as they served larger shares of poor students and more students learning English as a second language.

“We have had to be more innovative,” said Raymond Hart, executive director for the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents 78 large urban school districts.

Bright Spots: What Has Worked?

Birmingham, Ala., prioritized extra time for learning over school breaks. Mark Sullivan, the superintendent, said some parents initially balked, but have come to love the program.

Bob Miller for The New York Times

When it comes to success, no one strategy appeared to lead the way.

In interviews in a sample of districts with outsize recovery, educators described multiple approaches. Some focused on spending more federal dollars on academics — and less, for instance, on renovating school buildings . Some prioritized adding instruction time — via intensive tutoring , summer school or other sessions — which research shows can produce significant gains . Many experimented, coming up with new strategies to help students, including their mental health.

“I stopped looking for these silver bullets,” said Alberto M. Carvalho, the superintendent in Los Angeles, which has seen above-average recovery compared with the rest of California, including strong recoveries for Black and Hispanic children. “More often than not, it is the compound effect of good strategies.”

The $122 billion federal aid package has helped fund this effort, especially in poor communities. The poorest districts received about $6,200 per student in aid , compared with $1,350 for the most affluent districts.

But the law required only 20 percent of the money be spent on learning loss, with no mandate to invest in the most effective strategies and little national accounting of how the money was spent. That has made it hard to evaluate the impact of federal dollars nationally.

One strategy some districts used was spending much more than 20 percent of their funds on academic recovery.

For example, Weakley County, Tenn., a lower-income and mostly white rural district, allocated more than three-fourths. ( Tennessee gave districts incentives to spend at least half of their federal dollars on academics.) Today, Weakley County’s math and reading scores are fully recovered.

Its main focus was a tutoring program — students who are behind meet with experienced tutors in groups of three, twice a week. The district also hired instructional coaches, social workers and educational assistants who teach small groups in classrooms. “If you ask a teacher and say, ‘In a perfect world, if I have $30,000, what would you like me to buy?’ every teacher would say, ‘Another person in this classroom to help,’” said Betsi Foster, assistant director of schools.

Other districts focused on adding more hours of school, including Birmingham, Ala., a majority Black district where most students qualify for free or reduced price lunch.

The superintendent, Mark Sullivan, said he first wanted to make school year-round, a dramatic solution that found little support among families and teachers. So he offered a compromise: The district would hold extra instructional sessions available to all students during fall, winter and spring breaks, in addition to summer school.

Mr. Sullivan said some parents initially balked, but have come to love the program, in part because it provides child care during school breaks. More than a quarter of students typically participate.

Combined with other tactics, like hiring local college students as tutors, Birmingham made up for its pandemic losses in math.

The pandemic also spurred educators to innovate.

Among other strategies, Durham, N.C., a racially and economically diverse district that is now fully recovered, asked its most effective teachers to teach summer school and paid $40 an hour, up from the usual $25 rate.

It is one example of setting high expectations, which the superintendent, Pascal Mubenga, said was integral to recovery. “We did not just give that opportunity to any person; we recruited the best,” he said.

In the Delano Union school district, which serves mostly poor Hispanic students in central California, employees began making daily visits to the homes of students who were frequently absent — a ballooning national problem since the pandemic. The district’s absenteeism rate has fallen under 10 percent, from 29 percent.

The district focused on student well-being as a prerequisite for academics. For example, teachers now ask students to write down how they are feeling each week, a simple and free strategy that has helped uncover obstacles to learning — a fight with a friend, money problems at home.

“If a child is not mentally OK, no matter how good my lesson is, my students will not learn,” said Maria Ceja, who teaches fourth grade.

Students in Maria Ceja’s fourth-grade class in Delano, Calif., with Rosalina Rivera, the superintendent. Since the pandemic, teachers have begun using hands-on tools during math lessons, a strategy they said is helping children after online learning.

Adam Perez for The New York Times

Despite the successes, the pace of national recovery has been “too little,” said Margaret Spellings, a former secretary of education under George W. Bush. “We’re slowly recovering, but not fast enough.”

Congress has shown little appetite to add more funding, and many districts will soon end or cut back programs.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Biden administration did not push for more federal dollars, and instead renewed its call for states to take a greater role, both in financing programs and tracking the number of students receiving intensive tutoring or summer school.

Professor Kane, one of the researchers, advised schools to notify the parents of all children who are behind, in time to sign up for summer school. Despite setbacks on standardized tests, report card grades have remained stable, and polling indicates most parents believe their children are on track .

And what if students never catch up?

While test scores are just one measure, lower achievement in eighth grade has real impact in adulthood. It is associated with lower lifetime earnings , as well as a higher risk of unemployment and incarceration, research has shown.

At this rate, the United States will have a less skilled work force in the future, leading to lower economic output, said Eric Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution.

The highest-achieving students are likely to be least affected, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University — perhaps fewer will study advanced math and science and enter rigorous professions like engineering.

Students in the vast middle — some who may otherwise have become nurses or electricians, for example — could lose opportunities to establish middle-class lives. Community college enrollment is down from 2019 .

And the lowest-achieving students may further disengage from school, making it harder to graduate from high school and hold down even low-wage jobs.

As the pandemic generation enters adulthood, they may face a lifetime of lost opportunities.

Update, Feb. 8, 2024: This article has been updated to reflect a change to the data from researchers at Stanford and Harvard. On Monday, the researchers removed Oregon from the data set because its test participation rates were slightly below their threshold of 94 percent in 2022 and 2023. This article previously said that test scores continued to decline there from 2022 to 2023. The researchers said even with the lower test score participation, the data showed that Oregon students, including in the Lake Oswego district, made a near-zero recovery. Source: The Educational Opportunity Project, Stanford University and the Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard University

Math and reading average test scores are calculated for students from third through eighth grade in about 30 states, which account for about 60 percent of the U.S. public school population in those grades.

Researchers excluded school districts in states that do not provide sufficiently detailed test data on their public websites, and in states for years where participation rates were below 94 percent. Some small districts and charter schools were also excluded due to insufficient data.

To develop a consistent scale across states and over time, researchers link test results with the results of a federal exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress . Since there was no NAEP test in 2023, researchers relied on the stability of state tests and proficiency definitions for recovery estimates; states that changed their exams between 2021-22 and 2022-23 were excluded from the 2023 data.

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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

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In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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Education: The Great Equaliser or a Divider?

How "equal opportunities for all" might be unfair from the first day of school..

Updated May 16, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

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• Children who perform better at school go on to have greater life success.
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• Socioeconomic barriers prevent children from utilising educational opportunities equally.

Horace Mann, a pioneer of American public schools in the 19th century, famously called education the “great equalizer.” What he meant was that education could be a force to even out the disparities between people. Providing high-quality free education to all children regardless of their origins was a means by which those without privilege or generational wealth could experience hope of equal footing.

In meritocratic societies, like Britain, education policy typically focuses on creating " equal learning opportunities," where all children are taught the same curriculum, at the same pace, by the same methods, regardless of their differences in ability, skills, and interests. This is different from " equity of educational outcomes" where, in theory, all children, regardless of their differing abilities, are able to achieve the same academic results. One way to achieve equity in education is by allocating greater support and resources to the children who struggle most in school.

But, if children who perform poorly at the beginning of school continue to struggle throughout school, is education really a great equaliser, or is it possibly more of a great divider?

The notion that schools increase, rather than reduce, children’s differences in life chances appears correct when we consider that children who earn better grades go on to have greater life success. For example, in a U.K. representative sample, students who excelled in their exams were much more likely to go on to university and achieve a first-class degree, whereas less than 10 percent of students who struggled to pass their exams went on to university.

Children enter school on unequal footing.

Before children even enter education, their life experiences differ substantially. Children’s family background (e.g., how educated their parents are or how much household income their family has at their disposal) is a powerful predictor of their school readiness —a combination of children’s school-entry skills, attention skills, and socioemotional skills. Children from more advantaged family backgrounds tend to be better prepared for school (they have higher school readiness) than kids from underresourced families.

We know that preschool education helps better prepare children for school, but for some families the costs of preschool are simply too high to pay. The average cost of part-time preschool (25 hours) for children under the age of 2 years in 2024 is £8,194 . In the United Kingdom, families do not gain access to any form of free childcare until children are two years old, when families receive 15 hours free, increasing to 30 hours after the age of three. This is reflected in the proportion of families who utilise preschool childcare when kids are 0 to 4 years old. Three-quarters of upper- and middle-class families send their children to preschool, compared to only half of low-income families.

According to teachers , 39 percent of children enter reception class unable to hold a pencil, 36 percent lack basic numeracy skills, and 25 percent struggle with basic language.

As children’s language develops, they begin building the foundations for literacy, reading, and writing, which are key to doing well in class. But we know children arrive at school with very different language abilities: Some show signs of developmental language disorders, some struggle with reading because they are affected by dyslexia, and some have not been much exposed within their family homes to the language that is typical in school settings . That means that some children are better prepared than others for school. These children are more likely to participate in classroom discussions and to enjoy doing their homework, thereby gaining richer learning experiences than other kids.

Performance remains unequal throughout school.

Children from advantaged family backgrounds do better in exams when they start school and continue to do so as they go through the primary and secondary school years. The differences in children’s school performance actually magnify and get larger as children grow up.

The relationship between family background and school performance has remained stable for almost a century in Britain, with children from more advantaged family backgrounds consistently performing better. This finding suggests that current policies aimed at bridging the gap between children from advantaged and disadvantaged homes have been mostly unsuccessful.

We must therefore ask ourselves whether the current education system, equal opportunities for all, is actually unfair from the very beginning.

Socioeconomic barriers prevent children from utilising opportunities equally.

Creating equal learning opportunities for all students will not produce fair education systems if students differ in their abilities to utilise these opportunities. To be fair to all, education systems need to adapt to students’ differential learning needs and backgrounds, offering additional help and support to those who need it, and acknowledging that children enter education on very different footing.

In the United Kingdom, the pupil premium reflects this idea: Schools receive additional funding to afford extra educational resources to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds overcome their disadvantages in education. Ofsted has reported that pupil premium has made a positive impact across many U.K. schools, with gaps in attainment between those pupils eligible for free school meals and those who are not slowly closing.

How do we achieve both equity and equality?

Some suggest that aiming for educational adequacy is what is most fair, whereby some inequality in opportunities is acceptable, and at-risk children should be provided with additional support and resources. In theory, this would allow all students to develop the basic competencies necessary to live rich, meaningful, and fulfilling lives. But what society deems as the " basic competencies" remains unanswered.

What we do know is that “ equal societies almost always do better ,” and ensuring all children have an equal chance to benefit from the opportunities schooling offers and achieve their full potential regardless of barriers needs to be the primary aim of educational policy.

Researchers at the Hungry Mind Lab at the University of York study the causes and consequences of individual differences in cognitive and social-emotional development across the life course.

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Florida again ranked No. 1 for education by U.S. News

• Divya Kumar Times staff

Florida is the top state for education for the second year in a row, according to U.S. News & World Report’s latest ranking announced Tuesday.

The outlet said the state’s standing is “ largely fueled by several stellar metrics in higher education, and less so by Florida’s still fairly strong performance in the prekindergarten- through-12th-grade arena.”

The recognition follows a period of controversial change in the last two legislative sessions for a system that includes 12 public universities and 28 state colleges. Gov. Ron DeSantis and lawmakers have banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campuses; approved a measure regulating campus restrooms according to gender; removed sociology from a required courses list; and weakened tenure protections for faculty, among other changes.

In a separate U.S. News ranking, Florida also landed in the No. 1 spot for higher education alone for the eighth year in a row. Students at the state’s colleges and universities had the nation’s second-highest graduation rates and paid the lowest average in-state tuition and fees, the organization said.

The state ranked No. 26 for the average amount of federal student loan debt held by young adults and No. 25 for the share of those 25 years old and above with at least an associate degree.

Many of Florida’s public universities have been climbing in the rankings in recent years. In September, the University of Florida dipped to No. 6 in the U.S. News rankings among public universities after being named a Top 5 school two years in a row. The school was recognized last week by Forbes as one of 10 public “new Ivies.”

“Governor DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have prioritized higher education and ensured our universities have the resources and support they need to focus on academic excellence and provide safe learning environments for all students,” State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said in a news release.

Rodrigues said the state increased funding to the State University System by $1 billion last year.

Meera Sitharam, chairperson of the University of Florida’s faculty union, praised the state for investments in higher education that have kept tuition low. But she said the metrics don’t capture everything, and the recent climate around higher education in the state could erode the education students receive.

“The quality of education and what exactly (students) learn, is hugely connected to the culture and the values, including academic freedom,” she said. “I would say academic freedom is the fundamental value, which is absolutely, the grounds. Without academic freedom, everything will come crashing down. Education simply doesn’t exist. Even democracy won’t exist.”

Jessica Magnani, chairperson of the St. Petersburg College Faculty union, said the ranking was a testament to the work of educators across the state, but that salaries for teachers and faculty have not kept up with either the rise in rankings or the cost of living.

At St. Petersburg College, she said, starting salaries are $39,000 for full-time faculty roles. Florida recently ranked second-to-last of all states for teacher pay.

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She also wondered if the state would maintain its rankings in years to come. “I think we’ve not yet seen the results of the legislation that recently passed,” she said.

In K-12 education, the state ranked No. 10 this year, U.S. News said.

It ranked No. 5 among states for college readiness, No. 12 for preschool enrollment and No. 19 for high school graduation rates.

Florida ranked No. 21 in reading scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “The Nation’s Report Card.” In the same assessment, the state ranked No. 32 in math.

Utah ranked No. 2 for best education state overall and Massachusetts came in at No.3.

Divya Kumar covers higher education for the Tampa Bay Times, working in partnership with Open Campus.

Divya Kumar is the higher education reporter. Reach her at [email protected].

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Seattle Schools OKs proposal that could close 20 elementary schools

The Seattle School Board unanimously approved a proposal Wednesday that could eventually close more than a quarter of the district’s nearly 70 elementary schools. 

The move, which could force thousands of students to switch schools in the 2025-26 school year, is aimed at curbing the district’s more than $100 million annual budget gap.

The district is hoping to dig itself out of a deficit caused by years of spending more money than it took in: Federal COVID relief dollars have dried up, the district has lost more than 4,000 students since pre-pandemic years, and a three-year teachers union contract inked in 2022 was projected to cost the district about $231 million over its term and add $94 million to the deficit. 

The district’s superintendent, Brent Jones, asked the board on Wednesday for permission to start drafting a school closure plan. Jones and his staff are expected to draw up a preliminary list of about 20 schools that could be shuttered or consolidated.

Such school closures would be by far the largest in Seattle in recent history.

Savings generally come from reducing spending on staff. Unless the district plans staff layoffs, it’s unlikely to see huge savings from closing individual schools. Last year, for example, 59.8% of the district’s budget went toward teaching activities. An additional 13.2% went toward teacher support.

District officials say they plan to discuss possible job cuts with union-represented employees. Some staff could transfer to schools that remain open, while others could replace workers who are retiring or leaving the district. The district would also save money on building and other maintenance costs.

The board could consider that preliminary plan and an analysis of its effects next month. It could hold a vote on a final list of affected schools in the fall, after the public has had a chance to weigh in, though the timeline isn’t set in stone.

The district anticipates looking at each school’s current and 10-year enrollment projection, the age and condition of the buildings, academic offerings and equity, district officials said. Officials say they will also examine the distances between schools and safety issues, such as traffic near schools.

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The district is using about 65% of the space at its elementary school sites to educate about 23,000 K-5 students, Jones said. At some schools, seats sit empty. Twenty-nine of the district’s elementary schools have fewer than 300 students.

It’s also spending more per student in elementary schools with low enrollment. For example, the district’s per-pupil spending at schools with 200 students or fewer is about 15% higher than the average elementary school across the district, Fred Podesta, the chief operations officer at Seattle Public Schools, said at Wednesday’s meeting. Spending is about 10% lower than the average across the system in schools with 400 students or more, Podesta said.

“That’s where we are seeing the most challenge in terms of enrollment,” Jones said. “That’s where we’re also not utilizing our space and our services in the most efficient manner.” 

There are mixed feelings about closing schools across membership of the Seattle Education Association, the union that represents 6,000 staff members working in the district’s schools, including classroom teachers.

“It’s clear Dr. Jones recognizes there’s going to be a lot of scrutiny of whatever he proposes,” Jennifer Matter, the union’s president, who stood in the crowd with more than a dozen other members, said after the vote. “I know he is professionally and personally invested in doing this right. You can hear that it’s on his mind and heart.”

Matter said the union hasn’t taken a formal position on school closures — mostly because there are a lot of unanswered questions. She said the union posed a number of questions to the district about Jones’ proposed plan, including whether closing schools would alleviate or worsen student-teacher ratios, and how racial equity would be factored into decision-making.

But it’s safe to say that many working in schools are anxious.

“My daughter loves going to her small community school. And I know it won’t always be that way,” said Uti Hawkins, the union’s former vice president. Even “being one of the most informed people in my community — I’m not sure where we’re going.”

Cutting costs

The school closure proposal is part of a larger multiyear effort to put the district on firmer financial and academic footing. 

Seattle is among many districts contemplating closing schools as education systems across the country confront the end of COVID federal aid and declining enrollment, which is the largest determining factor in the amount of taxpayer funds school districts receive from their state governments.

Enrollment had been declining in some cities before the pandemic, but the federal funds gave districts room to delay difficult budget decisions.

“It would have been really hard for districts to close schools while they were trying to get people to come back,” said Marguerite Roza, a Seattle-based researcher and the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, which focuses on school finance. 

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“They just could not have done it all at the same time. That delay probably had some important utility in the sense that [districts] could do the reopening separately from this other discussion. Now, the problem is, it’s happening all at once.”

Although the school closures aren’t expected to take effect until fall 2025, the district is also wrestling with how to shed $105 million from next school year’s estimated $1.1 billion budget.

To close its budget gap, the district is cutting staff in the central administrative office and reducing school budgets by about $5.7 million. Student-to-teacher ratios will also increase in its secondary schools from 30:1 to 31:1.  

SPS is also planning to borrow $32 million from its reserves and about $35 million from its capital fund, which is primarily used to pay for building construction, maintenance and other infrastructure. The district must repay the loan with interest by June 2026. 

The board voted unanimously to approve the loan Wednesday. Officials say they’re hoping lawmakers offer more money next legislative session to help with these loan repayments. Without legislative help, “repayment of the loan will require further reductions in expenditures at SPS,” district officials said Wednesday.

In December, the district projected that the 2025-26 budget hole would be even bigger than in the upcoming school year: about $129 million. Closing schools — which could save the district an estimated $50 million to $75 million — is one of the proposals to close that gap. 

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Jones said the proposal is in line with a plan to create “a system of well-resourced schools” — the term the district uses to describe schools that have what students need to succeed. The idea was developed from a districtwide survey and a series of meetings last year with staff, parents, students and community members. Well-resourced schools are envisioned to include social-emotional support for students, safe buildings, inclusive learning spaces, predictable budgets, multiple teachers in each grade and staff for art, music and physical education.

Jones estimated that schools with 468 students can have an adequate number of staff to support students, including three to four teachers per grade, nurses two days per week, three special education intensive service classrooms, a counselor or social worker, and full-time teachers for art, music and physical education.

While the vision for well-resourced schools includes possible closures and consolidations in elementary schools, it might look different in middle and high schools and is unlikely to include consolidation, Podesta said.

Fears about the district’s budget woes have for months led to confusion and speculation about what might be on the chopping block. 

In February, students and parents at Interagency Queen Anne, a small recovery high school, worried that the school was among those the district planned to close.

They mounted an online petition to keep the school open, prompting the district to clarify that it had no plans to close the school.

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The district has said it will hold meetings with the school communities that could be affected. After the board receives the recommendations, the public will have 30 days to provide input.

State law requires that districts hold public hearings during the 90-day period before a final decision is made to close a school. The law also requires a separate hearing for each affected school site.

A final recommendation and vote is expected in the fall.

School Board President Liza Rankin urged participation and said it would be premature to assume a school will close just because it has fewer than 300 students.

“It’s not a judgment or assessment of any individual school or performance or the students that go there. It’s a matter of our students being spread across too many buildings for the number of students we have.”

Erin MacDougall, one of the leaders of All Together for Seattle Schools, a local advocacy group with about 150 people on its distribution list, has asked the district to detail the alternatives it explored before settling on closing schools.

“Show us the thought process that went into why they chose those schools,” MacDougall said.

MacDougall is also concerned that the preliminary list of affected schools will be released near the end of the school year when parents are getting ready for end-of-year rituals and summer vacations or may not be physically in the city to attend the meetings and engage in the process.

Roza said districts that are contemplating closing schools should be transparent with their communities about their finances. The district’s plan to borrow from its capital fund, for instance, is an “alarm bell,” she said.

“I don’t think there’s a way that avoids anybody feeling upset, because no one likes to have their school close,” Roza said.

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

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Brown v. Board at 70: Students from Topeka’s all-Black schools recall how segregation shaped lives

People talk May 18, 2024, outside the front gate of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, formerly Monroe Elementary School. The site hosted a reunion of former students from Topeka's all-Black elementary schools to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. (Cuyler Dunn for Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — Former students of four all-Black Topeka schools gathered Saturday to remember the teachers, peers and families that shaped their lives — and how their schools helped shape the nation’s education system.

The Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park at the former all-Black Monroe Elementary school hosted more than a hundred people Saturday. They celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case and reunited students from Buchanan, McKinley, Monroe and Washington elementary schools.

The landmark 1954 decision unanimously declared state laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white students to be unconstitutional. The consolidated court case was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court by the NAACP on behalf of Oliver Brown, a parent whose daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to an all-white school in Topeka.

“Those are your stories. Each one of you is captured in that statement,” said park superintendent Jim Williams. “The civil rights story of struggle, perseverance and activism.”

The role Topeka played in the movement to end school segregation was critical, former students said Saturday. The quality of Topeka’s all-Black schools caught the eye of the NAACP as they took on segregation. Despite the high-quality education at Topeka’s all-Black schools, segregation itself still placed Black students as inferior.

A panel featuring former students from all four all-Black Topeka schools shared in a group discussion about their experiences.

Whether it was Ms. Williams’ loud shoes or Ms. Bradshaw’s stingy grades, people nodded and cheered as the panel mentioned their old teachers and friends.

“I love them so dearly that their names stuck with me,” said Darlene Jackson, who attended Buchanan Elementary School.

The panelists made it clear their education was not substandard. Many of them said they had a worse experience after they were moved to the formerly all-white schools. Many of them wondered why the white students didn’t come to their schools instead.

The racism and segregation they experienced didn’t end after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. But they were taught by the teachers at their all-Black schools how to deal with and keep fighting hate.

Many of those same teachers lost their jobs as the all-Black schools were closed.

“In every movement, there’s always a sacrifice, something has to be sacrificed,” said Rosetta West, who attended Buchanan Elementary School. “I am who I am today because of what I learned. And that gave me the drive to push, to go ahead and do something different. It was up to us as students to make that sacrifice worth it.”

The event’s keynote speaker was the Rev. Joseph B. Anderson, who attended Washington Elementary School. He also attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served in Vietnam.

He said his upbringing in Topeka, specifically the teachers and role models he met at Washington Elementary, helped prepare him for his future in the military.

Of his 900-member class at West Point, Anderson said only six students were Black. He had no Black teachers or officers. But growing up in Topeka helped him learn how to fight the exclusion. He said he may have been one of the first to walk through the door, but he wanted to make sure he wasn’t the last.

“Topeka is a place of racial collegiality and inclusion, as opposed to a place of animosity and exclusion,” Anderson said. “I look upon all of us here today and appreciate what these four Black grade schools have done for us, to make us who we are, making a difference in what we do. Topeka is my home.”

Marty Patterson in 2018 won the National Park Service’s Enduring Service Volunteer Award for her work at the Brown v. Board of Education site. At Saturday’s event, she was recognized for the honor. 

“This is a work of love because this is my hometown,” she said. “We had no complaint for education, but the problem was did we have equal access? And that’s what they could fight for. They needed Topeka.”

The post Brown v. Board at 70: Students from Topeka’s all-Black schools recall how segregation shaped lives appeared first on Kansas Reflector .

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Elementary students from 5 school districts to compete in San Antonio Sports’ flag football tournament

Students representing 44 elementary schools in five school districts will participate.

Ben Spicer , Digital Journalist

SAN ANTONIO – More than 850 elementary school-age children in the San Antonio Sports’ i play! after-school program will be competing in a San Antonio-area flag football tournament, according to a press release.

The games will take place on Saturday, May 18 from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Classics Elite Soccer Complex , located in the 1600 block of East Bitters Road.

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San Antonio Sports says the students are in third through fifth grade and will represent 44 area elementary schools in five separate districts.

The games are a culmination of a seven-week unit done during the 2023-2024 school year where students received skill-based instruction on multiple sports, including flag football. Parents, family and friends are invited to attend the games and cheer them on.

The San Antonio Sports’ i play! afterschool program provides children in underserved schools skill-based instruction in four sports while building confidence and self-esteem while teaching the importance of healthy habits, self-discipline, social skills, teamwork and sportsmanship.

Each participant received an i play! t-shirt, shorts, socks, shoes and a backpack as part of the program, the press release said.

Copyright 2024 by KSAT - All rights reserved.

About the Author

Ben Spicer is a digital journalist who works the early morning shift for KSAT.

Volusia school board approves rezoning more than 1,700 students next school year

The Volusia County School Board Feb. 13 approved rezoning plans that will send more than 1,700 elementary and middle school students to new schools in August .

The district's mass rezoning will accommodate overcrowding as eight district schools currently exceed capacity. 

“In late 2022, the school board directed district staff to evaluate the growth areas across Volusia County to address the over-utilization and under-utilization of schools,” said Danielle Johnson, Volusia’s director of community information, in a December email . “Staff assessed school enrollments, growth projections, demographics, permanent school capacities, specific academic programs and student travel times.” 

Additionally, by placing students in schools closer to their homes, the district hopes to decrease travel times and create a more supportive and sustainable community, according to its website . 

More than 20 schools are involved in rezoning plans: 

• Beachside Elementary.
• Citrus Grove Elementary.  
• DeBary Elementary.
• Deltona Lakes Elementary.  
• Discovery Elementary.  
• Enterprise Elementary.  
• Forest Lake Elementary.  
• Friendship Elementary.  
• Horizon Elementary.
• R.J. Longstreet Elementary. 
• Spruce Creek Elementary. 
• Sugar Mill Elementary. 
• Timbercrest Elementary.  
• Turie T. Small Elementary. 
• Woodward Elementary.  
• Campbell Middle. 
• Creekside Middle. 
• Holly Hill Middle. 
• Ormond Beach Middle. 
• Silver Sands Middle. 
• Riverview Learning Center. No decisions have been finalized regarding this property.
• Osceola Site. No decisions have been finalized regarding the former Osceola Elementary property.

Rezoning Daytona Beach, Port Orange elementary schools 

The motion to modify the attendance zones for Beachside Elementary , Horizon Elementary , R.J. Longstreet Elementary , Spruce Creek Elementary , Sugar Mill Elementary , Sweetwater Elementary , and Turie T. Small Elementary in the 2024-25 school year — made by Anita Burnette and seconded by Ruben Colón — passed unanimously. 

Turie T. Small Elementary will get a brand new school building, according to Patti Corr, the district's chief operating officer, which is fit to serve almost double the capacity of the current building.

"The SREF (Florida's State Requirements for Educational Facilities) manual says all elementary schools should be at 100% (capacity), meaning if your school is built for 800 (students), you should have 800 students," she said. "We don't always hit that mark exactly, but we try to come close to hitting that."

In order to accommodate for a larger building, Turie T. Small will receive 276 students from the following schools:

• 115 students from Horizon Elementary. 
• 77 students from Beachside Elementary. 
• 29 students from R.J. Longstreet Elementary.
• 28 students from Spruce Creek Elementary.
• 15 students from Sweetwater Elementary.
• 12 students from Sugar Mill Elementary.

Converting Holly Hill School from K-8 to K-5

The motion to convert Holly Hill School from a K-8 to a K-5 school and to modify the attendance zones for Campbell Middle , Creekside Middle , Silver Sands Middle and Ormond Beach Middle in the 2024-25 school year — made by Carl Persis and seconded by Burnette — passed unanimously. 

"The growth there has been tremendous," Corr said. "As you drive around the county, we talk about it all the time, there's a new housing development going up, there are new apartments going. Almost everywhere we look, we're seeing growth."

Holly Hill School, which was originally built as an elementary school, will again serve that demographic, therefore rezoning its middle school students.

Campbell Middle will receive 323 students from four schools. 

• 171 students from Holly Hill Middle. 
• 86 students from Ormond Beach Middle. 
• 34 students from Creekside Middle. 
• 32 students from Silver Sands Middle. 

Additionally, Ormond Beach Middle will receive 233 students from Holly Hill Middle, and Silver Sands Middle will receive 177 students from Campbell Middle. 

Rezoning Citrus Grove and Woodward elementary schools 

The motion to modify the attendance zones for Citrus Grove Elementary and Woodward Elementary in the 2024-25 school year — made by Jessie Thompson and seconded by Burnette — passed unanimously. 

Woodward Elementary will receive 106 students from Citrus Grove Elementary next school year. 

Rezoning Deltona-area elementary schools 

The motion to rezone Deltona Lakes Elementary , Friendship Elementary , and Timbercrest Elementary in the 2024-25 school year — made by Colón and seconded by Persis — passed unanimously. 

157 students will leave Timbercrest Elementary next school year. 

• 107 students will attend Deltona Lakes Elementary. 
• 50 students will attend Friendship Elementary. 

Rezoning DeBary, Deltona and Enterprise schools

The motion to rezone DeBary Elementary , Discovery Elementary , Enterprise Elementary and Forest Lake Elementary in the 2024-25 school year — made by Colón seconded by Burnette — passed unanimously. 

461 students are involved in this rezoning: 

• 169 students will leave DeBary Elementary to attend Enterprise Elementary. 
• 109 students will leave Enterprise Elementary to attend Discovery Elementary. 
• 95 students will leave Enterprise Elementary to attend Forest Lake Elementary. 
• 88 students will leave Discovery Elementary to attend Forest Lake Elementary.  

Transferring Riverview Learning Center to the Osceola Elementary Campus 

The board unanimously removed this item from the Feb. 13 meeting agenda and tabled its discussion to its Feb. 27 meeting.