Families should be allowed to direct federal pandemic aid

Colleges received $75 billion in pandemic aid from the federal government, and over 40 percent of those funds were designated as grants directly to low- and moderate-income students at both public and private colleges. Students could spend these grants on “any component of the student’s cost of attendance or for emergency costs that arise due to coronavirus, such as tuition, food, housing, health care (including mental health care) or child care.”

Public K-12 schools received a total of $189.5 billion in federal pandemic aid. Unlike the grants provided to college students, none of this money was given directly to families to be used to help their children recover from the substantial learning loss that resulted from the pandemic. 

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is seeking to change that and allow families of K-12 students to have direct access to federal pandemic aid, as was the case for college students. Scott’s RECOVER Act would allow families to have the opportunity to receive grants for their children — if their states wish to use unspent K-12 pandemic aid for Child Opportunity Scholarships.

If their states allow it, families with incomes below 300 percent of the poverty line ($83,250 for a family of four) could use federal pandemic aid to combat the significant learning losses that occurred from stresses caused by the coronavirus pandemic, including schools shut down for face-to-face instruction and poorly implemented online learning. Eligible families who desire extra help for their children would receive scholarships that could be spent on “tutoring or educational classes outside the home, curriculum and curricular materials, books or instructional materials, technological education materials, online educational materials, private school tuition, testing fees, diagnostic tools, and educational therapies for students with disabilities.”

A 2020 study found that customized and small group tutoring done by teachers or paraprofessionals could lead to large learning gains for students who were behind. Customized tutoring is when students are given help in precisely the areas where they have fallen behind, which is not feasible in classroom settings — even when class sizes are very small.

Nationally, public schools spent less than half of their pandemic aid, as of May 31. Further, districts plan to spend only 25 percent of the most recent aid on academic recovery.

I am generally against federal efforts to promote choice in K-12 education because decades of experience suggest that the feds will overregulate school choice programs in the same manner they overregulate public schools. However, Scott’s RECOVER Act concerns a fixed pot of federal money that must be spent by September 2024 — so there is not enough time for the federal regulatory apparatus to overregulate.

If the RECOVER Act becomes law, governors should learn from negative experiences with the federal government’s Supplemental Education Services (SES) effort earlier this century. Under the No Child Left Behind law, SES grants to parents to purchase tutoring for their children were administered by public schools that did not want the grants to even exist, and the results were often far from ideal.   

If Scott’s RECOVER bill becomes law, I offer governors two pieces of advice:

• Administer the Child Opportunity Scholarships at the state level and outside the state department of education, whose rank-and-file educators will prefer that federal funds stay with the public schools; and
  
• Have top researchers in your state study the effect of these grants to parents, perhaps through offering the scholarships to eligible families through a lottery. Then outcomes for students who received the scholarships could be compared to students who received only remediation through public schools — and future policymakers would have a better understanding of the best way to help students who fall behind academically. 

Congress should not rely solely on public school districts, which often failed their students during the pandemic. Instead, Congress should allow thoughtful governors to use the unspent billions of dollars in federal aid to allow low- and moderate-income families to access tutoring and other services to help their children get back on grade level. If learning loss is permanent, it will be a shame given that American taxpayers have devoted so much to give students a better future.

Benjamin Scafidi is the director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University.