On this, the holiday that I loathe most, it is appropriate, I suppose, that the education reform opiners at Reason have their opinion piece, a piece of poorly informed illogic entitled "Public schools wasted COVID funds, Biden’s education budget tacitly admits" in The Hill.
None of that is true or follows, to be clear.
The argument, lest you go melting your brain looking for it, is that, since the President's proposed budget has "$8 billion grant program to further support public schools’ COVID-19 recovery efforts," the three rounds of ESSER funding didn't work!
But nearly three years after Biden signed ARP, students still aren’t caught up, despite the federal windfall.
Well, golly, people, what have we been doing out here?
I cannot roll my eyes any harder at this.
That part is quite stunning all on its own, but we can add to that the evidence of "waste" that they cite:
Researchers at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab estimate that 20 percent of ARP K-12 dollars have gone to facilities — HVAC upgrades and building repairs
Now, WHY, during a pandemic in which the contagion is transmitted via air, would schools want to do HVAC upgrades?
I have heard milder versions of this a number of places: how could schools--fill in the blank--add staff, pay staff more, add services when they knew this was short term funding?
This continues to lose sight of what the funding was for: it was to help schools deal with the pandemic. At the beginning--remember the spring and summer of 2020?--this included questions of if we would have state and local funding for schools at all, and if that would mean we'd need to lay staff off. As time went along, it became clear that students needed (among much else) mental health supports, which means either staffing or outside services (or both). They needed supplemental learning supports, which means either additional pay for the staff schools have currently, or additional staff, or both.
One time funding is enormously appropriate for facilities repair--a massively underfunded issue with American schools--and whether it is directly cleaning up the air or making it a bit more likely that schools won't crumble into pieces.
I am not going to defend every last dollar spent in ESSER. I can't. I'm not all of those places. But this nonsensical and ongoing scolding, which somehow mysteriously never appears municipal side is exhausting.
I have long since come to the conclusion that some people just don't like public entitites, even ones who are more accountable to and closer to their constituents than any other branch of government, to have money to spend on behalf of those under their care.
Gosh, I'm tired of it.
If you'd like a look at what we know of what hasn't yet gone out to districts yet (remember: there's a delay on reporting!), K-12 Dive today looks at the 6 months left report.
