Disclaimer: I am not Joe Biden. Congress did not ask me to give this year’s State of the Union address. But if I were Joe Biden, here’s what I would say about the state of K-12 education:
Our kids and our grandkids need our help.
When schools closed their doors in March of 2020, we were all scared. Keeping kids close to us and safe at home seemed like the right thing to do. Teachers and other school leaders did the best they could given the circumstances.
But we all knew that virtual schooling wasn’t the same. Kids spent too much time on screens and too little time interacting with their friends and teachers. They learned less.
And as a result, student achievement scores fell to levels they hadn’t seen in decades. Not only that, but student mental health suffered, and kids lost the positive, normal routines of attendance, behavior, and homework.
When my Administration took office, we provided an extra $122 billion in relief funds for schools to re-open their doors—safely—and to start getting kids back on track mentally and academically.
Today, our kids are still far—far—from being back to normal, but we’re making progress. Student attendance rates are starting to move in the right direction, and the latest results from researchers at Stanford and Harvard show that students made significantly faster gains in reading and math last year than they did in a normal year pre-pandemic.
We can’t stop that progress now, and we all need to do our part. For example, Alabama is the only state where math scores are above where they were pre-pandemic.
So parents: We need your help to make sure kids get to school on time, ready to learn. Ask your child’s teacher for an honest assessment of how they’re doing in reading and especially math, and what else they can still work on.
To teachers and other school leaders, I say keep doing what you’re doing. Give kids grace when they need it—we all need it sometimes—but we also need you to keep holding our kids to high expectations.
And now to my fellow politicians: We need you to step up! At the state level, we need more efforts like the “All In Virginia” plan, which provided $418 million for high-intensity tutoring programs in reading and math.
But instead of new investments, I’ve been seeing too many stories lately of school districts scaling back after-school and summer programs, contemplating layoffs, or eliminating promising intervention programs, just as those are starting to have an effect.
And I admit, part of this is our own doing. In a rush to help students recover from the pandemic, we sent the most recovery money to the highest-poverty schools, and we asked them to spend it quickly. That was the right call at the time, but it set up 2024 as the year of the “fiscal cliff.”
We can’t let that happen. So tonight, I’m calling on Congress to make a $50 billion investment in tutoring for every student in America. As one Brown University researcher put it, tutoring is, “a promising intervention not only for supporting students to access and deepen their grade-level content knowledge but also as an opportunity to facilitate meaningful school-based mentoring relationships.”
Schools can do their part if they’re given the resources to succeed, but families need help too. That’s why I’m also calling on Congress to expand the social safety net for children. Early in my presidency, we briefly—all too briefly—cut the child poverty rate by a third. Congress let that funding expire, but they should take action once again. Parents can use that money to pay for sports or other afterschool activities, to enroll their kids in music lessons or an art class, to save up for their child’s higher education, or just to pay the random bills that add up.
Together, we can make sure that the COVID-19 generation gets all the help they need, and deserve. It’s up to all of us to make it happen.
