More accountability in education, not more money

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech urged parents to hold schools accountable for large sums of federal pandemic relief to address learning losses. He was right to appeal to parents, whose God-given interest in their children’s well-being is deeper and more lasting than that of school officials. No amount of funding to schools can change those relational realities. Whether he meant it seriously or not, the president’s request implicitly acknowledges that moms and dads can make a difference where simply spending more money has not. The evidence of the last two years shows why policymakers should advance greater educational accountability to parents rather than ever-increasing school spending.

A massive surge of pandemic education funding has been building since 2020. Policymakers urgently pushed out funds, with the argument that the funds were to be used to get classrooms back open and student learning back on track. Grants for K–12 education were included in three successively larger rescue packages between March 2020 and March 2021.

Total emergency aid to schools added up to nearly $200 billion. Note this: That amount is three times the federal funding that local schools typically receive each year. This pandemic education bailout is also double the largest prior special infusion of K–12 funds: President Barack Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan responding to a recession.

Urgency may have gotten the emergency spending packages enacted during the pandemic, but it hasn’t meant that funding arrived promptly to its designated beneficiaries at the school level. By the end of 2021, available data suggested that more than $150 billion in education rescue funding remained unspent. Analysts reported that only 17 percent of the aid had been expended.

The slow uptake is due in part to an inescapable reality of any federal funding for education: Multiple layers of bureaucracy separate local public schools from Washington, D.C. The U.S. Department of Education typically transmits funds to state education agencies, which in turn relay them to local school districts, and they disburse resources to individual schools. A system that includes nearly 100,000 public schools across the country is not adept at rapid response to centralized initiatives.

In the case of COVID-19 education aid, sluggish implementation may also result from the long time frame during which the funds can be used. Most of the money is available all the way through September 2024. That makes the new resources less like “emergency” assistance—as advertised amid the chaos of school closures—and more like a big multiyear budget boost. Flexible terms allow schools to use the grants to address the pandemic’s longer-term effects on students, as they should. But the massive stockpile of existing education resources makes further calls for increased spending redundant.

Even so, the White House has announced that the president’s budget request for the coming fiscal year will propose yet another round of big increases for education. The stated rationale is to make up for learning losses and other COVID-19 effects on students.

Those effects are serious. Many students need extra help immediately. But the experience of the current school year gives no cause to believe that still more new money pumped into existing systems would make the difference these children require for their future. The public education system began the 2021-22 school year with huge amounts of new funding at its disposal. Yet it is hard to see how that funding is preventing children from being closed out of classrooms or from falling behind academically. The failure is in educational accountability, not funding. Parents are all too aware of this failure.

The public school system has not responded adequately to student needs during the pandemic, to the enormous frustration of parents. Now that omicron is receding, evidence of COVID’s harmful disruptions of students’ lives is becoming much more apparent. Parents have little reason for confidence that public schools will be able to respond effectively to the variety and complexity of student challenges that have emerged over the past two years. These students need help, and they’re not getting it.

Increased funding can’t make the system something that it is not: student-centered and ultimately accountable to parents. Changing that dynamic requires fundamental reforms so that education resources follow students based on their parents’ decisions, individualized to their specific needs.

President Biden is right when he says that parents should hold schools accountable—and not just for the current pandemic spending. But the political system is very resistant to such accountability, and the Biden approach is, at this point, mostly words in a speech. One big lesson underlined by the pandemic is that the best way to reach educational accountability is to empower parents to direct resources for their own children’s education.