internal competition
The analysis also found that ESSER spending creates staffing challenges within school districts. In some cases, the district’s wealthier schools were using emergency funds at higher rates, even though high-poverty schools had similar needs for additional staff.
Roza said district leaders interviewed by researchers about the issue said that staff vacancies are typically filled first in low-poverty schools, and in some cases, district employees are transferred from high-poverty schools. It has been reported that they are considering it.
This further exacerbated staffing problems in the highest-poverty schools, which were then replaced by newly created ESSER-funded jobs and staff transferred across districts. .
“If San Diego said, ‘We’re going to put a reading coach or a nurse or a parent coordinator in every school,'” Rosa said. “Quickly, those positions were filled first in the wealthiest schools. We often see teachers moving to lower-poverty schools, so they actually created new openings in high-poverty schools. It may have been possible.”
I won’t look back
When it comes to contracts for ESSER-funded services such as tutoring and educational technology, Roza and his fellow researchers found that school districts were forced to close those contracts the following year without ever considering whether they were getting value for money. He said that he noticed that it updates frequently.
According to the analysis, this was one of a series of situations in which contracted services were being performed inefficiently.
“Let’s say you run a restaurant or something. If you’re going to spend money on a vendor product, you’re definitely going to get value out of it,” Rosa says. Markets don’t work well in public education. ”
Rosa says no one in the system is to blame. An example of a contract that wastes money is when a math coordinator commissions a program for teachers that ends up being poorly used, she said. But then the coordinator leaves the position for a promotion or job outside the district, and the replacement coordinator renews the unused program without investigating whether it is needed. It was simply part of the budget they inherited.
“[Districts] With all the new money, there were certainly companies that spent more money on vendors that had better products across the board,” Roza said. “But they don’t necessarily buy the best products, get what they need, get the most out of what they buy, and see if it works. We hear this from vendors who are also unhappy about this.”
reading results
When it comes to improving reading scores, the Edunomics Lab analysis found that identifying more students with reading disabilities does not necessarily lead to improved reading comprehension.
Where have investments in reading paid off? Roza says that when the district first improved reading instruction for general education students, science of reading. By the time students immersed in this type of reading instruction are identified as needing special education services, they already have a strong foundation to continue building on, Rosa explains.
“Very few people with reading disabilities are referred to special education because it really helped them to have that good basic instruction from the beginning,” Rosa said. I say.
broken budget process
Similar to the contracting issue, the analysis found that school districts tend to continue spending ESSER funds on programs over multiple years without considering the program’s outcomes.
Part of the problem is that school districts’ budget cycles require them to finalize next year’s budget before they have the previous year’s standardized test results, leaving little or no room to adjust spending based on student performance. Not at all.
In one case, Roza said, district leaders finalized the budget a full year in advance and reported having to lock in spending that may or may not be ideal for student needs.
“In the first year that pandemic relief funds were available from the American Rescue Plan, school districts used only 14 percent of their grant funds, primarily because these funds were stuck in district budget cycles. “There was no room for a more agile and urgent response.”
Ultimately, Roza said, while data averages can help researchers explain the relationship between ESSER spending and student outcomes, it means averages reflect the reality of every school district. He said that was not the case. She says there are big differences between school districts, and some buck the trend.
“People like to talk about the ‘average school district,’ but that average includes districts that are doing great and districts that aren’t. “It’s not a good idea to try to apply it to school districts,” Roza cautions.
