As a new school year begins, parents are trying to figure out where their children stand after the dramatic learning losses of the coronavirus pandemic. School boards and lawmakers are deciding how to spend their remaining federal recovery funds — which must be designated by next fall — and where to concentrate their efforts.
Congress provided nearly $200 billion in emergency funding for schools within the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite the huge sums of money, the nation's report card found student test scores are still lower across the board compared with pre-pandemic levels. Professor Thomas Kane, economist and faculty director at Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research, joined CBS News to discuss why schools have struggled to get a handle on COVID recovery.
In education, the post-COVID “return to normal” has been anything but straightforward. In fact, striving for a pre-pandemic status quo, Harvard and Stanford experts say, will perpetuate inequality and neglect the pressing educational gaps affecting children.
This spring, the national pandemic declaration expired — but the effects of the pandemic are clearly still impacting children across all ages.
That was a key takeaway from the latest release of the Education Recovery Scorecard, a collaboration between CEPR researchers led by Thomas Kane and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project. The 12 new state reports and ...