President Joe Biden released the last budget of his first term this week, and it’s not enough. It’s just not ambitious enough to re-engage students, get them back in classrooms, and continue recovery efforts.
Let’s start with the looming financial storm that’s brewing. Thanks to the expiration of the federal ESSER funds later this year, the typical school district is going to have to deal with an 8-10% budget cut, solely due to the expiration of those funds. The cuts will have to be even larger in big urban areas with large concentrations of poor kids.
Now, Republicans and other budget hawks can rightly point out that the Biden Administration is responsible for this mess. That big infusion of one-time money came on his watch, and we’ve been leading up to this point ever since. Schools have had plenty of warning time.
And yet, the cuts will be harmful to students. It will be bad for kids if districts roll back summer programs, lay off teachers or social workers, or scale back their tutoring programs.
Moreover, something is working right now. According to high-quality research from Harvard, Dartmouth, and Stanford, last year was one of the best years on record in terms of student achievement gains. It’s hard to pin down precisely what is responsible for these gains, but it would be tragic if that progress came screeching to a halt, especially because many students are still far behind where they need to be.
We need federal leadership on this, and it falls on President Biden (and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona) to make the case. At his State of the Union speech last week, Biden said he wanted to, “see that every child learns to read by third grade.”
That’s a good goal, but it would have been better if Biden had acknowledged the fact that students are much further behind in math, and that we need national leadership and commitment to overcome math stereotypes. It’s not ok for students to believe they just aren’t “math people.” Maybe the President or the Secretary should participate in the March Mathness tournament we’re hosting this month, and help change the narrative around Math?
Regardless, the new Biden budget also falls short of his stated goal. He proposed to create a $1.6 billion per year program ($8 billion over 5 years) to support efforts to fight chronic absenteeism, provide high-dose tutoring, and expand summer and afterschool time. These are good bets, directionally speaking, but they don’t match his lofty rhetoric. If I were President, I would have called for a much larger investment.
In other words, it was a fairly cautious, don’t-rock-the-boat budget at a time when student needs remain high and financial storm clouds are gathering. To keep the gains going strong, students need a much more ambitious agenda.
