When federal COVID relief funds expire at the end of this year, school districts may have to scale back on promising education recovery efforts.

According to a new study, Tennessee students who “consistently” used the Zearn math platform made big gains in math. The same is true for regular users of programs like ST Math or Khan Academy.

The Biden Administration’s new “Improving Student Achievement Agenda” would have been great... if it came out in March 2021 instead of January 2024.

In the wake of the pandemic, the percentage of kids who were considered chronically absent—who missed 10% or more of the school year for any reason—nearly doubled. Those rates have come down somewhat as the immediate health crisis recedes, but they remain extraordinarily high, especially in large urban areas.

COVID-19 laid bare just how important schools are for student learning, especially in math. With student attendance rates and academic performance still far below normal, it’s a good time to reconsider how policymakers can help. I sat down with Elliot Regenstein from Foresight Law and Policy to talk through these issues.

When schools closed for in-person learning in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was math achievement scores that declined the most.

We’re now in the final year for districts to spend their share of the $190 billion in federal relief funds. By this time next year, other than some outstanding contracts, districts will have to return to their normal spending levels.

The nation is struggling to help students re-engage in school and recover lost learning time. Reformers have seized on tutoring as one promising solution. Tutoring has a strong research base, but only if done well. When implemented poorly, tutoring can even deepen equity gaps (because students who don’t necessarily need tutoring are also the most likely to use it). Opt-in programs in particular can struggle with participation, let alone quality issues.

High-quality curriculum, aligned professional learning, data collection and analysis, state support, and sustainable funding. These are all important pieces to the puzzle of strong instructional practice, and people frequently ask for examples of places where they all fit together to support student progress. While we can easily point to cases where some or even most of the puzzle is taking shape, we recently learned of one where there are no missing pieces.

Recently, K-12 funding news has been dominated by the coming “fiscal cliff.” With pandemic relief funding running dry and public school enrollment dropping in most states across the country, there is good reason for handwringing. So it’s easy to miss – we almost did – the massive investments that some states are making in K-12 education this year.

There’s a rule of thumb in improv comedy that performers are supposed to take a “Yes, and…” approach to a skit. Even if they had a different vision for how the action should play out, the comedy works better when performers accept contributions as they come in and build on them.